The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  So, cornered, he would go ahead. He was not just reading their country, which was small, Asian, fourth-rate, bereft of bombers and helicopters; he was above all a political animal and he was reading his own country and in that he may have misread it; he read the politics of the past rather than the potential politics of the country, which his very victory of 1964 illuminated. (He had won as a peace candidate, and it is likely that had a new China policy been openly debated, with Johnson in favor of it and Goldwater opposing, it might have enlarged his margin; at the least it would have had little negative effect, probably would not have cut into his margin in any appreciable sense, and would have liberated him from one of the dominating myths of the past. But as the issue had been dormant by both liberal and conservative consent for a decade—the liberals giving consent, the conservatives owning the policy—there was no desire to change it.) The Democrats, who had been hurt by the issue in the past, were quite content to keep it bottled up. As was Johnson, a good and traditional liberal who was also a man of the fifties and of Texas in the fifties, where McCarthyism had been particularly virulent, an era of potentially monolithic Communism, where the fewer questions about how monolithic it was, the better.

  Those fears and suspicions of the Communists had never entirely left him; he was capable of wanting conciliation with the Soviet Union and holding the most basic kind of distrust of the Russians. The fact that the Vietcong attack took place while Kosygin was in Hanoi had a particularly negative effect on Lyndon Johnson. The Russians were not to be trusted, he would repeat to aides, they broke treaties and lied. Andrei Gromyko had come right in and lied to Jack Kennedy during the missile crisis; that had made a deep impression on Johnson. He would kid the White House people, particularly Bundy, about their friendships with Ambassador Dobrynin, teasing Bundy, “He’s trying to slip Dobrynin in here just like he slipped Gromyko in here,” and then adding, quite seriously, “You can never know about a man like Dobrynin.” You had to watch those Russians. The Kosygin visit to Hanoi was, in his view, somehow quite sinister, despite the warnings at State that it might be the North Vietnamese’s way of showing the Soviets that they would not be controlled. It played on his darker vision of the Russians and convinced him that Kosygin was out there stirring up something.

  The forces at work in the fifties were very real to him. If Jack Kennedy was a man who knew more about where the sixties were headed but whose intellect preceded his courage, who stepped forward gingerly, then Johnson was far more a man of the past. He reacted to what he thought the country was; the country which had twice defeated Stevenson for the Presidency, where the powerful people on the Hill seemed primarily to be hawks, where the dominant figures of journalism were proud survivors of the worst of the Cold War, and where American universities had also given willingly, too willingly, in fact, of their talents and support to the Cold War. He did not see the new generation coming up, that the changing demography would become a major political factor, that there were new forces coming up quickly which were right below the surface, forces loosed by change, media change, economic change, demographic change, birth control and sexual change, change wrought here by change in the Communist world, the self-evident split between the Russians and the Chinese. All of this would challenge the existing order in politics, journalism, the universities. The new forces would coalesce with forces which had been around since the Stevenson days and which would have a major political impact. It would turn out that the Cold War generation’s control was very shaky indeed, and that the entry of the new forces into American political life would be very much accelerated by Johnson’s own entry into the war. They would never, even under the best and sunniest days of the Great Society, be people and forces much at ease with him, it was all moving too quickly for that, but his very entry into the Vietnam war would catalyze them and give them muscle previously missing. The forces of peace in 1965 were thin and scattered, timid in challenging the accepted Cold War attitudes; three years later they were massive and audacious, powerful enough to unseat one President, to bring a tie vote in the Senate on a weapons system (the ABM), an unheard-of thing, and powerful enough to make military spending a major domestic issue.

  That would all come later; perhaps another politician might have sensed it, if not clearly identifying the change. But Lyndon Johnson did not sense it, rather he sensed he had position on everybody else, he had control of the center, he had moved all opponents to the extreme. He had handled the Congress, signed it on without really signing it on; he had handled the press by slicing the salami in pieces so thin that they were never able to pin him down, and he had handled Ho by making it seem as if Ho were attacking him at Tonkin. He was using force but using it discreetly, and he was also handling the military. They were moving toward war, but in such imperceptible degrees that neither the Congress nor the press could ever show a quantum jump. All the decisions were being cleverly hidden; he was cutting it thin to hold off opposition.

  If there were no decisions which were crystallized and hard, then they could not leak, and if they could not leak, then the opposition could not point to them. Which was why he was not about to call up the reserves, because the use of the reserves would blow it all. It would be self-evident that we were really going to war, and that we would in fact have to pay a price. Which went against all the Administration planning: this would be a war without a price, a silent, politically invisible war. The military wanted to call up the reserves, and their planning always included a reserve call-up, usually in the nature of 200,000 men (certain specialized units such as engineer battalions and prisoner-of-war specialty units), and Johnson did not discourage them. He seemed to be telling them that yes, they would get the reserves, that this beautiful military machine which Bob McNamara had put together would not be raped for that little fourth-rate country. And he seemed to encourage McNamara to think that there would be a reserve call-up, encouraging him to fight for them and ask for them, so that in the final climactic week in July, McNamara went before one of the larger NSC meetings arguing for the reserves, and then at the end Johnson said no, there would not be a reserve call-up, he would not go that far. But having held the line against McNamara, having let him build the case so strongly in front of his peers, he realized he had set an ambush, and as they walked out of the room Johnson turned to one of his aides, winked, pointed to McNamara and asked, “Think we’ll get a resignation out of him?” But then, because he realized he might have hurt McNamara, that he might have felt that he had been misled, he sent a helicopter by and the McNamaras were taken to Camp David for dinner. A social evening, after all. No one left with hurt feelings. Knock them down and then pick them up.

  He was against a call-up of the reserves for other reasons as well. It would, he thought, telegraph the wrong signals to the adversaries, particularly China and the Soviet Union (frighten them into the idea that this was a real war) and Hanoi, which might decide that it was going to be a long war (he did not intend to go into a long war, and he felt if you called up the reserves you had to be prepared to go the distance and you might force your adversary to do the same). He also felt that it would frighten the country, and he had just run as a peace candidate; similarly, he felt it would be too much of a sign that the military were in charge and that the civilians would turn over too much responsibility to the military. Finally, and above all, he feared that it would cost him the Great Society, that his enemies in Congress would seize on the war as a means of denying him his social legislation. It was his oft-repeated theme, that his enemies were lying in wait to steal his Great Society. Oh no, they wouldn’t confront it directly, they were afraid of being against the poor, but they would seize on the war as a means of crippling him. He was always a man who could believe in two very sharply conflicting sides of a question, and he could, right in the middle of a hard-line discussion, change and say that he, Lyndon Johnson, had the most to lose if we went to war. He would interrupt his pro-war monologue and switch sides, saying that they might throw him ou
t of office, he might lose the Great Society. Those people out there, he would say, don’t want to go to war. They don’t want war in Vietnam, they want the good things in life. And then, mercurially, he was back, planning for the war, talking about slipping his hand up Ho Chi Minh’s leg before Ho even knew it.

  But the decision against the reserves was convenient, it postponed the sense of reality of war, and it perpetuated both the illusion of control and of centrism within the bureaucracy. Of moderation, of Lyndon in the center, being pushed by the military but carefully weighing the alternatives, of not giving in to the military. It also meant a delay on the realization of the scope of the war, and that was crucial.

  For in all those weeks of debating about what to do, looking at options, of trying to decide what the necessary level of force was, of trying at first to stave off the inevitable, the use of combat troops, and then giving in to it, the principals never defined either the mission or the number of troops. It seems incredible in retrospect, but it is true. There was never a clear figure and clear definition of what the strategy would be. There was eventually grandiose talk of giving Westmoreland everything he needed—and Westy was told by McNamara that he could have whatever he needed; this was, after all, the richest country in the world—but even Westmoreland knew there were restraints, he had to negotiate for the troops, slice by slice with McNamara, he knew that if he asked for too much too quickly he might not get it (just as later McNamara would reluctantly give increments that he didn’t want because otherwise he would be denying a commander his necessary troops; each finally would have a deterrent against the other). The Joint Chiefs talked of a million men, but it was never really defined. And in the chambers of the President, in the days through July, it was a figure which was never defined, though there was a certain gentleman’s agreement that it would be, at a maximum, about 300,000. Anything above that was out of the question, and it was unfair on the part of Ball, for instance, to claim, as he did in June and July, that it would go higher, to half a million. There was of course a dual advantage in not defining the number of men and the mission: first, it permitted the principals themselves to keep the illusion that they were not going to war, and it permitted them not to come to terms with budget needs and the political needs. Thus, if the mission was not defined it did not exist, and if the number of troops was not set it could always be controlled. Second, if the figure was not decided upon and crystallized within the inner circle, it could not leak out to the press and to the Congress, where all kinds of enemies lurked and would seize upon it to beat him and to beat his Great Society program. If you carried the figure in your own mind, no one could pry it out; all they had were those thin, and sometimes not so thin, slices of increments that slipped out, and even those you could and would dissemble about.

  So the failure to define the figure was an aid against the press and the Congress, but it was also eventually to prove a problem within, because both the size and the strategy were never defined. Westmoreland would start the war believing it was an open-ended commitment, never accurately filled in on the extent of the reservations of some of his civilian superiors; the civilians would start knowing that the military wanted big things, but believing first that the military always exaggerated its requests for manpower and for more money and that it was a bloated figure. They never came to a real agreement, and they deliberately fuzzed their mission and their objective and the price. Six years later McGeorge Bundy, whose job it was to ask questions for a President who could not always ask the right questions himself, would go before the Council on Foreign Relations and make a startling admission about the mission and the lack of precise objectives. The Administration, Bundy recounted, did not tell the military what to do and how to do it; there was in his words a “premium put on imprecision,” and the political and military leaders did not speak candidly to each other. In fact, if the military and political leaders had been totally candid with each other in 1965 about the length and cost of the war instead of coming to a consensus, as Johnson wanted, there would have been vast and perhaps unbridgeable differences, Bundy said. It was a startling admission, because it was specifically Bundy’s job to make sure that differences like these did not exist. They existed, of course, not because they could not be uncovered but because it was a deliberate policy not to surface with real figures and real estimates which might show that they were headed toward a real war. The men around Johnson served him poorly, but they served him poorly because he wanted them to.

  There were brief moments when the reality seemed to flash through. Once during the early-June discussions the President turned to General Wheeler and said, “Bus, what do you think it will take to do the job?” And Wheeler answered, “It all depends on what your definition of the job is, Mr. President. If you intend to drive the last Vietcong out of Vietnam it will take seven hundred, eight hundred thousand, a million men and about seven years.” He paused to see if anyone picked him up. “But if your definition of the job is to prevent the Communists from taking over the country, that is, stopping them from doing it, then you’re talking about different gradations and different levels. So tell us what the job is and we’ll answer it.” But no one said anything; it was not the kind of thing they picked people up on, and so the conversation slipped over to the other subjects, vague discussions of strategy, the difference between an enclave strategy and a security mission, and they did not define the mission.

  Later during the June discussions, again a figure came up. Clark Clifford, who sat in both as a friend of the President’s and as a member of the intelligence advisory board, and who was neither hawkish nor dovish in those days (mostly being a shrewd old lawyer, dubious; his reputation as hawk would come, when once we were committed and he opposed a bombing halt), was present at a meeting when he heard General Wheeler mention a figure and then add that with six or seven years at that figure, we could win. The figure sounded like 750,000 to Clifford, so when it was his turn to speak, he got up and began: “The way I understand it, we’re talking about a figure of seven hundred and fifty thousand troops and a war that will go on for five or six years and I’d like to ask General Wheeler a question.”

  The President immediately interrupted him: “No one’s using a figure like that.”

  Clifford turned to Wheeler, and Wheeler nodded his head and said yes, he had indeed used a figure like that.

  Johnson, irritated, said it was ridiculous. No one envisioned a figure like that.

  At which point Clifford asked to continue and said, “Even if it is the figure and it works, my question is, What then?”

  Wheeler looked a little puzzled. “I don’t understand the question.”

  So Clifford repeated it: if we won, after all that time, with all that investment, “What do we do? Are we still involved? Do we still have to stay there?”

  And Wheeler answered yes, we would have to keep a major force there, for perhaps as long as twenty or thirty years. Whereupon the conversation again went in different directions and the question of the figure was dropped.

  In July, during the final ten days of decision, Clifford remained dubious, and once during the final session at Camp David before the President made his decision, they went around the table one by one signing on to the inevitable. Finally they came to Clifford. It was not just his words but his manner which surprised the others there. He leaned back, thought and then seemed to pound the table as he spoke, speaking so forcefully that later one witness was not able to remember whether he had or had not hit the table. “They won’t let us do it,” he said. “Whatever you do, they will match it. The North Vietnamese and then the Chinese will not let us do it. If we send men, the North Vietnamese will send men. And then the Chinese.” He said we should negotiate with the other side if possible. And then Clifford, an old-style man who delights in almost purple oratory, paused and said, almost melodramatically, “I see catastrophe ahead for my country.”