The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  The strategy was of course still Taylor’s. It was less than what the military wanted, and it seemed to go along with what the President wanted, a little more than the past, but not yet a ground war. Taylor had a feeling that he had held the line again, and again the reverse was true. Those at the conference were agreed that the war would last longer than had previously been expected. In the past they had thought of the bombing producing results within six months, and when congressional critics such as Ernest Gruening had questioned the President about it, he had asked for six months. Six months to get them to the table. Everything cooled off by Christmas. Now they were prepared for more pessimistic estimates. McNaughton’s notes on the conference said that it would take more than six months, “perhaps a year or two to demonstrate Vietcong failure in the South.” This was the old American optimism and arrogance; the French had fought there inconclusively for eight years with an enormous expeditionary force, but the Americans fighting from defensive enclaves would do it in a year, maybe a little more. The phrasing here, summing up the meeting, was quite similar to Taylor’s cable of April 17: the idea was to use the enclaves to take the initiative away from the enemy, otherwise, he had cabled, ground war might “drag into 1966 and even beyond.” (On April 24 Taylor sent an “Eyes Only” cable to McNamara, where he said he wanted to modify his position as agreed upon in Hawaii. Where it had said that it might take a year or two to affect Hanoi’s will, Taylor wanted it to read “this process will probably take months—how many is impossible to estimate . . .” He was thus, in fact, becoming a little more optimistic.) After the meeting was over, selected correspondents from both the New York Times and the Washington Post were called in and given a deliberate leak. The judgment of the military, said the official spokesman, was that it would not be a short war after all. In fact, it might last as long as six months. The North would not be able to withstand the American pressure that long.

  The conference was over, and the first major step toward combat troops had been taken. It was true that essentially the strategy was still to be enclave, and in that sense Taylor had held the line, but it was a frail line indeed. The strategy was agreed upon without direct Vietcong or North Vietnamese military ground pressure (which, when it came, given the extraordinary weakness of the ARVN, would mean even greater pressure to use the American troops as aggressively as possible). It was a “victory strategy,” in their own words. It did not call for victory in the classic military sense; it was a victory strategy because it would deny victory to the other side. The Vietcong, denied these vital enclaves, would realize that they could not win, and would thus sue for a negotiated peace. It was, in effect, brilliant planning which defied common sense. (Indeed, a few months earlier Mac Bundy had shown a member of his staff some of the planning for the escalation, particularly the bombing, and the aide had been impressed by how thorough it all was, lots of details. Bundy asked the aide what he thought, and he answered that though he didn’t know anything about the military calculations, “the thing that bothers me is that no matter what we do to them, they live there and we don’t, and they know that someday we’ll go away and thus they know they can outlast us.” Bundy considered the answer for a moment. “That’s a good point,” he said.) Now we would bring victory by fighting from enclaves. It was an extraordinary strategy because it meant that the Vietcong, having the United States pinned down in tiny enclaves, would be able to squeeze tighter and tighter on the rest of the country, take the rice and agricultural products, recruit at will, and yet somehow tire of a war with the United States, as they had not tired of a war with France. It was also a policy ill conceived for that particular President, because Lyndon Johnson, once committed, was not a man for half measures, for a stalled, drawn-out war, for a war policy that his critics could quite correctly seize on as a no-win policy. So it was one more half measure, one more item in the long list of self-delusion on Vietnam. We would once again try to do something on the cheap, and yet, even though it was at a bargain-basement price, we would be conveying to Hanoi the intensity of our will and commitment, and they would thus quickly come to their senses. Perhaps the greatest illusion was the idea that we cared more for what was going on than they did, that we would pay a higher price, that they would feel the threshold of pain before we did. It was of course an obvious lie; but the principals had, in their desire not to come to real decisions, painted themselves into a corner where lie followed lie.

  So nothing had been solved at the Honolulu conference, but it was the last time that Max Taylor was a major player, his farewell in fact. When it was all over, Taylor, the man who had been the architect of the counterinsurgency, of the small war in 1961, and who in 1964 and 1965 had opposed the use of combat troops, had in fact played exactly the role he did not intend to play. He had, by fighting to limit the troop escalation step by step, helped them to slide into it. The gap from each step to the next step always seemed relatively small, each step that had been exacted while he held back had simply made the next step a little easier, never too great. He had been a conduit, not a brake.

  They had come to their essential agreement in Honolulu on April 20. The next morning John McCone, informed of their decision, told the NSC that it simply meant that Hanoi would increase its infiltration and step up the war. Thus more Americans. Thus more North Vietnamese. Thus a higher level of violence.

  When George Ball heard of the decisions in Honolulu, he was appalled; he sensed that they were crossing a point of no return and he was disturbed about their lack of awareness of what was happening. On that afternoon he again made a major appeal to hold the line. The request to go to 80,000 confirmed what he had always feared, the beginning of the long slide toward an American combat commitment without a real recognition or admission by the men themselves that this was so. Eighty thousand, he knew, might not long remain the ceiling. It was not a figure to frighten the President, but it was an extremely dangerous precedent. If they could go to about 80,000 without great pressure from the Vietcong, what would be next? And what were the guidelines to be, what was the strategy? At what point would they stop? That afternoon he pointed out that the figure of 80,000 represented a quantum jump of 150 percent. Nor would it, he said, induce Hanoi to quit, and cited the opinion of McCone given that morning, that Hanoi would now substantially increase the rate of infiltration into the South. It was, he said, time to pause, to wait and to look, and to try and do some political soundings. The bombing, he noted, had hardly turned out to be the decisive act predicted for it. We had been bombing the North for ten weeks, a total of 2,800 sorties, going from 122 per week to 604 in the last week, an awesome show of bombing; this had slightly improved Saigon’s morale, and probably hurt the Vietcong morale. But there was, and he was obstinate about this, no evidence that it had caused Hanoi to slow down the infiltration. Rather the reverse was becoming evident. We were, he said, at a threshold. It was time not to send more men, to rush ahead without a clear strategy, without a clear definition of what we were getting into. Instead, it was a time to pause, to re-examine Hanoi’s position. There was, he thought, much that was acceptable in Hanoi’s recently announced four points for negotiation. It was time to make a major effort to see what the possibilities of negotiation were, but it was, he realized even at the time, the wrong proposal at the wrong time. No one was interested in such a solution because we would have been negotiating from weakness (nor, of course, would there have been much interest in negotiation had we been in a strong position, then we would have wanted to win). We could not negotiate until we had committed enough of our own resources to turn the tide; at that time, however, having invested much more, the price we wanted to extract from negotiations would have risen.

  Ball found himself very much alone; in a sense McCone seemed to be arguing from the same position, but McCone wanted to use more force. Taylor seemed to be arguing from the same position, but he was unwilling to face the reality of what it meant, withdrawal. And Bill Bundy felt the same way, saw the dangers, but he, to
o, was unwilling to do the unthinkable, to cut our losses. Bill Bundy was an even more divided man than Taylor at this point. As a CIA man he had dealt with Indochina and he knew better than most the French chapter of that story; he was very uneasy about committing American troops, of what this might do to the population. At the same time he was a believer in using force, and he was a good bureaucrat and an ambitious one, and he knew which way the play was going. So at this point the idea of American troops was an unnerving one, and like Taylor he was worried about the Plimsoll line: would it come at 75,000, or 80,000, and during this debate Bill Bundy seemed to be making the case against sending combat troops, the weakness of the society, the hazards of following in the French footsteps. And Ball, who had been searching for allies, who had believed one more man would turn it, thought: Here is my man, my one ally. When they went back to State together, Ball suggested to Bundy that they work together on a major paper on how to extricate the United States from the growing quagmire. It was a crucial moment. Bundy desisted. He saw all the problems, he had all the doubts, he told Ball, but he did not go that far, he was not prepared to reverse twenty-five years of American policy. We couldn’t let Vietnam go down the drain . . . So he left Ball there and it became a Ball paper, not a Ball-Bundy paper. But Ball was far from alone in believing that the combat-troop commitment was just about to start, that it would be impossible to control and that the North Vietnamese would match our commitment and match us in endurance. Yet it was a lonely time for Ball.

  There was in the meetings occasional support from Bill Bundy, but then he would always slip away. Taylor was not really an ally; he was a doubter, but when it came down to the hard edge, he was always on the other side. Rusk was a friend, he never sprang ambushes at the meetings (as McNamara did), but he was an impenetrable man. He had few beliefs but those he had went very deep; if the world was changing, Dean Rusk was not; he had learned his lessons and learned them well. Munich. Mutual security. Containment. The necessity of a democracy to show dictatorships that it could not be bluffed. And a belief that American force could do anything that its leaders set their minds to.

  It was not Ball’s easiest time and McNamara was the problem for Ball in those days. He was the ripper. On the sidelines, Mac Bundy was the kibitzer, joining in with McNamara to cut at Ball, but it was McNamara who did the ripping. He would not have done it unless he thought it was the role the President wanted him to play, the President in a sense seeming to encourage both Ball and McNamara. So McNamara was forceful and tough, the advocate of escalation. Perhaps he did have doubts, he was certainly not euphoric (he would say years afterward that he was not without doubts, he knew it would not be easy). But his own doubts were reconciled when he was in those meetings; then they were never evident, and he was brilliant and forceful at obliterating others. In those days after Hawaii, Ball would argue that this step opened the door, that they had been, in his words, at the threshold and they were on their way to crossing it. Soon they would lose control, he said; soon we would be sending 200,000 to 250,000 men there. Then they would tear into him, McNamara the leader: It’s dirty pool; for Christ’s sake, George, we’re not talking about anything like that, no one’s talking about that many people, we’re talking about a dozen, maybe a few more maneuver battalions. McNamara was a ferocious infighter, statistics and force ratios came pouring out of him like a great uncapped faucet. He had total control of his facts and he was quick and nimble with them; there was never a man better with numbers, he could characterize enemy strength and movement and do it statistically.

  Poor George had no counterfigures; he would talk in vague doubts, lacking these figures, and leave the meetings occasionally depressed and annoyed. Why did McNamara have such good figures? Why did McNamara have such good staff work and Ball such poor staff work? The next day Ball would angrily dispatch his staff to come up with figures, to find out how McNamara had gotten them, and the staff would burrow away and occasionally find that one of the reasons that Ball did not have comparable figures was that they did not always exist. McNamara had invented them, he dissembled even within the bureaucracy, though, of course, always for a good cause. It was part of his sense of service. He believed in what he did, and thus the morality of it was assured, and everything else fell into place. It was all right to lie and dissemble for the right causes. It was part of service, loyalty to the President, not to the nation, not to colleagues, it was a very special bureaucratic-corporate definition of integrity; you could do almost anything you wanted as long as it served your superior.

  If they were at the threshold, the crossing would come sooner than any of them thought. The Vietcong had passed the winter resting, building up their forces, expanding their logistical base to go with their bigger, more formidable units. In early May the Vietcong began their spring offensive. They struck the capital of Phuoc Long province in regimental strength. It was a ferocious, audacious attack; in addition to the sheer bravery and intensity which had marked the Vietcong in the past, there was now an added element of the size of the units. In the past the Vietcong had usually been outnumbered and outgunned by the ARVN and had usually won simply because its units were better led and better motivated. Now, in addition to being better units man for man, they were turning out to have units as large and as well armed, the weapons they had captured in 1962­1964 were finally being used. The ARVN was no match for them. The Vietcong overran the town, held it for a day and then retreated. The message was ominous: if they could strike here this openly and with this force, they could do it elsewhere in the country. And they soon did.

  To Westmoreland and Depuy, who were already convinced of the basic weakness of the ARVN and of the Vietcong capacity, it was clear that the ARVN would not be able to hold the line. The big beefed-up Vietcong battalions and regiments were a formidable infantry force, fighting on their terrain, in a type of war they had virtually invented, and in which they set the rules. (Years later Westmoreland would describe this particular time as the point at which the Vietcong had won the war, but neither side realized it.) Now they were knocking off ARVN battalions with lightning speed, and the results were always the same, the destruction of the ARVN units. What was more ominous for Westmoreland was that this systematic destruction of the ARVN was taking place without the Vietcong using anywhere near its full potential (in early June, after a series of major ARVN defeats, the Vietcong had used only two of its nine regiments in any serious form). What was perhaps even more dangerous was that elements of one North Vietnamese division, the 325th, had clearly entered the country and were poised (but still unused) in the Kontum area, while elements of the 304th were also suspected of being in the northern regions of the South. It looked as if the enemy was moving in for the kill.

  In May, Westmoreland’s cables became increasingly forceful and pessimistic, warning that the situation was very bad, that the ARVN simply could not hold the line, and warning of the danger of the Vietcong cutting the country in half, something that had long worried the American command, though it was, in fact, a fairly thin threat, since the Vietcong did not hold terrain. No single cable from Westmoreland jarred Washington; rather it was like a gathering cloud, warning Washington that things were going poorly, that Saigon’s worst fears were being confirmed. Then at the end of May the Vietcong ambushed an ARVN regiment near Quang Ngai; the ARVN rushed reinforcements to the scene, and these were, in the tradition of this war, also ambushed, a favorite tactic of the other side. The battle lasted for several days; the ARVN force was badly mauled, two battalions completely destroyed, and ARVN commanders showed fear in the face of the enemy.

  A few days later, on June 7, Westmoreland asked for a major American troop commitment, and for freedom to use the troops as he saw fit. He was asking for immediate U.S. reinforcements totaling thirty-five battalions; in addition, he named nine other battalions that he might soon want. This became known within the bureaucracy as Westmoreland’s forty-four-battalion request. His request was endorsed by Admiral Sharp at CINCPAC,
and the feeling in Washington appeared to be immediately favorable. Four days after he made the request, Westmoreland was told by the Chiefs that the President was close to approving most of what he wanted. Then on June 17 Taylor also signed on; he told Washington that the situation in Saigon was every bit as serious as Westmoreland was claiming, which removed the last real restraint. Only tactical reservations had held them back, in particular Taylor’s feeling that things weren’t that bad, but now there was a consensus. Everyone was lining up behind the U.S. troops, including the most influential civilian-military official. They had in fact made decision after decision in the last few months slipping into the combat troop commitment; they had closed off the only real alternative, which was negotiation from a position of weakness. Now they were crossing the Rubicon. The Westmoreland package would take them to 200,000, and it would be open-ended. There was of course some hope that the 200,000 might do it. The President hoped so.

  On June 22 General Wheeler, at the President’s request, cabled Westmoreland asking him if the forty-four battalions would be enough to convince the other side that it could not win. Westmoreland, always a good deal more cautious about the job ahead than the civilians, said that he did not think anything would affect the Hanoi-Vietcong position in the next six months, but that this would establish a favorable balance of power by the end of the year, and thus reverse the then favorable Vietcong balance. For the United States to take the initiative, he added, further forces would be needed in 1966, and beyond that. What he was saying was not that different from what George Ball was saying: it was getting big and it might get bigger. For almost immediately after Westmoreland’s request, Ball made his last pitch. He knew now that he had in effect lost: he was now trying to fight a delaying action. Instead of our going to 200,000 as recommended, he wanted to hold the line at 100,000, with an understanding that this was the ceiling, and to use the troops for a three-month trial period. But he knew he was on the defensive, that he was taking what were by now compromised positions. Nonetheless, he again warned that we were underestimating the enemy and his endurance. A half-million Americans would not do the job, he warned; rather, the enemy would simply match our level of violence. As for optimism by generals, the French generals had always exuded optimism, and it had done them no good. But it was all getting out of control now, and Ball knew it.