The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  The strategy of attrition would prove politically deadly for Lyndon Johnson, and yet he had slipped into it. He and the men around him did not spend weeks of painful debate measuring both our and the enemy’s resources, deciding on the best way to commit American troops, how to get the most for our men. There was in fact remarkably little discussion of the strategy. It had begun as security, had gone to enclave, and then, without the enclave ever being tested, under the pressure of events, they had gone to what would be search and destroy. It was again an almost blind decision to go with the man on the spot, Westmoreland. It was what he wanted, it was what he would get and so to an extraordinary degree Westmoreland received in-country (as opposed to hitting Cambodian sanctuaries) freedom to maneuver his troops. They were his, to do with whatever he wanted. And out of this came search and destroy, as well as the policy of attrition, a policy which would become one of the most controversial and fiercely debated decisions of the war, a decision that was virtually not even a decision; it was, like so much of the war, simply something that had happened. It was Westmoreland’s instincts for the use of power, to use it massively and conventionally, and this with Depuy’s aid had produced the policy of search and destroy. Westmoreland was after all a conventional man; his background was conventional war, and both his instincts and responses were conventional. Here, almost within sight—his intelligence was getting better and better—were these very big enemy units. The ideal way to shorten this war, to finish it off quickly, was to go after the big units, this enormous prize just within reach. Just smash their big units, teach them it was all over, and they would have to go to the peace table. Westmoreland knew all about the political infrastructure, how the enemy operated through a very clever and complicated political mechanism, and that this was the root of the war; it gave the other side its most precious asset, its capacity to replenish losses, but the conventional instinct, the temptation to go after the big units, was too much. It was, he thought, the best thing he could do for Vietnam, handle this burden for them which they clearly were not able to handle themselves. The U.S. forces would be fighting away from the population, and this would lessen racial tension. It was a strategy which appealed to the American military mind, the use of large force and large units, quicker, less frustrating. He was always particularly optimistic about the results of the operations in the base-camp areas, Cedar Falls and Junction City; to him they presaged victory, and it was the sad truth that he, like those before him, underestimated the capacity of the enemy to replenish (indeed, when the Tet offensive came, the troops came from those very base camps which Westmoreland thought he had cleaned out).

  So instead of a limited shield philosophy, we would take over the war. And out of this, the search-and-destroy policy, came the policy of attrition which would prove so costly to Lyndon Johnson. The political implications of such a policy were immense, but he did not think them out, nor did his Secretary of State Dean Rusk nor his Special Assistant for National Security, Mac Bundy. It was perhaps the worst possible policy for the United States of America: it meant inflicting attrition upon the North, which had merely to send 100,000 soldiers south each year to neutralize the American fighting machine. Since the birth rate for the North was particularly high, with between 200,000 young men coming into the draft-age group each year, it was very easy for them to replenish their own manpower (the attrition strategy might have made sense if you could have gone for the whole package, applied total military pressure to the entire country, but the American strategy was filled with limitations as far as that went). So even on the birth rate, the strategy of attrition (which always was based on the belief that the other side had a lower threshold of pain) was fallacious. Add to it the fact that one side was a nation with the nationalist element of unity, and the Communist element of control, that the bombing helped unite its people, that its leadership was able and popular, that its people were lean and tough and believed in their mission, which was to unify the country and drive the foreigners out, that there were no free newspapers, no television sets, no congressional dissent, and that this war was not only the top priority, it was the only priority they had.

  Against this was a democracy fighting a dubious war some 12,000 miles away from home. The democracy had long-overdue social and political programs at home, and there was such uneasiness about a war in Asia that its political leader felt obliged to sneak the country into the war, rather than confronting the Congress and the press openly with his decision. The Congress and the press would continue to be free, and doubts about so complicated a war would not subside, they would grow. Television would certainly bring the war home for the first time. The country was undergoing vast economic and political and social changes which would be accelerated by the war itself.

  It was, in retrospect, an unlikely match for a war of attrition, and reflecting upon it, one high civilian said later that he longed to take the two men most involved in the strategy, who had such vastly different and conflicting problems and demands, and introduce them to each other: General Westmoreland, meet President Johnson. It was, finally, the problem of limited war which had been so fashionable in the early Kennedy days, the difficulty being that you might be a great power of 200 million people fighting limited war against a very small Asian nation of 17 million, except that unlike you, they decided, as happened in this case, to fight total war.

  Yet the number of men for whom all these factors had real meaning was very small; the Administration’s policy of hiding the extent of the war, and the extent of its forthcoming commitments, was still successful in early 1966. It was not, as far as the general public was concerned, going to be a large war. The troop figure was consistently hedged so that opponents of the war did not have a firm target. The burden was still seen as being on Hanoi; we were only trying to get them to a conference table. By the time the general public realized the extent of the war, the depth and totality of it all, then the rationale in Washington would change, it would become Support of our boys out there. At first the critics were told that they should not be critics because it was not really going to be a war and it would be brief, anyway; then, when it became clear that it was a war, they were told not to be critics because it hurt our boys and helped the other side.

  All of which would work for a while. Johnson had successfully co-opted the Congress and to a large degree the press. Time was working against him, but this would only be clear later. In the spring of 1965 the protests against Vietnam had begun on the campuses. In the beginning the Administration was not particularly worried about the challenge; Johnson controlled the vital center, and the campuses were not considered major centers of political activity. Yet these questions should be answered, so Mac Bundy was sent off to a televised teach-in to debate the professors, and the Administration was supremely confident about the outcome. Bundy was at the height of his reputation, the unchallenged political-intellectual of Washington, and no one there dared challenge him, for the response would be swift and sharp. But the capital was not the country; what was admired, respected and feared in Washington was not necessarily what was admired, respected and feared in the country, so the teach-in was an omen. In a surprisingly brittle performance he debated Hans Morgenthau, and Edmund Clubb, one of the exiled China scholars. Clubb quoted Lord Salisbury on the dangers of adding to a failed policy. Bundy finally seemed to be saying: We are we, we are here, we hold power and we know more about it than you do. It was not a convincing performance; rather than easing doubts, it seemed to reveal the frailty of the Administration’s policy. The teach-in did not end debate, it encouraged it. It also marked the beginning of the turn in Bundy’s reputation; up until then, serious laymen in the country had heard how bright he was, but in this rare public appearance he struck them as merely arrogant and shallow.

  In the fall of 1965 Rusk, who had been less than eager for the commitment than most of the others, began to show signs of the toughness, and indeed rigidity, which would later, as the months and years passed, distinguish him
from some of the other architects. He was not eager to seek negotiations, and he was uneasy with those on our side who seemed too anxious to talk, afraid they would send the wrong signal, show the Communists our eagerness and our weakness. He felt that the danger in a democracy was that people were spoiled and expected pleasures and were unused to sacrifice; one had to guard against that and he of course would be the guardian. When Adlai Stevenson in 1964 had made his first tentative approach about negotiating with Hanoi to U Thant, it was Rusk who helped keep the discussion of the peace move extremely limited (so limited that his deputy for Asia, Bill Bundy, did not learn of it until the very last moment and was extremely upset). Then, in December 1965, when McNamara began to push for a bombing pause, it was Rusk who was dubious. We should not, he thought, seem too eager for peace; since we had gone to war, we should use our force of arms properly and the other side would have to come to terms with us. A nation as great and as powerful as the United States did not seek war, did not go to war readily, but if it did, then it must be careful not to give away its goals, undermine its own military. There was a consistency to Rusk: he had been the least eager to get in because he had never seen the task as easy, and had few illusions about air power and the quick use of force. In fact, his positions from start to finish, right through to Tet, were remarkably similar to those of the Army generals. His view of the war was a serious one; if we went in we had to be prepared for a long haul, and we had better be ready for it; we had better not flash the wrong signals as soon as we started. Perhaps Rusk, more than any other man around the President, understood Lyndon Johnson, knew that once committed, Johnson would see it through, and that he would want allies, not doubters.

  Rusk believed in mutual security, that this was the way to peace; South Vietnam was now linked to mutual security. Thus it must stand; Vietnam had an importance far beyond its own existence. The doubts of the men under him in State did not penetrate his confidence; he was sure of what Americans had to do and sure that they could do it. More than anyone else, more than the military people themselves, he believed what the military said they could do; he took their reports and their estimates perilously close to face value. He told the men under him at State that their job was to wait and watch for the signals from Hanoi, which would give the signal, not the United States. When the signals came, it would be a sign that they were ready to begin; then and only then State’s job would begin. “You look for that signal and you tell me when they give it,” he told aides. His fault, a deputy thought, was not insincerity, it was the totality of his sincerity. He still believed that the world was the way he had found it as a young man in the thirties, and that good was on our side. Automatically. Because we were a democracy.

  His job and State’s, then, was to wait. If you were in, you were in. What was it he had told McNamara at the time of the B-52 raids? In for a dime, in for a dollar. So we were in for more than a dollar. And he was different from those around him because they were such rationalists and such optimists, whereas Rusk was always less optimistic, less the rationalist; the others believed that if things did not pan out, they could always turn them around, since they were in control. This was one other reason Rusk was different—he knew his man better.

  There were many Lyndon Johnsons, this complicated, difficult, sensitive man, and among them were a Johnson when things were going well and a Johnson when things were going poorly. Most of the Kennedy men, new to him, working with him since Dallas, had only seen Johnson at his best. Moving into the postassassination vacuum with a certain majesty, he had behaved with sensitivity and subtlety, and that challenge had evoked from him the very best of his qualities. Similarly, during the planning on Vietnam, during the time he had been, as a new President, faced with this most terrible dilemma, he had been cautious and reflective. If there was bluster it was largely bluster on the outside; on the inside he was careful, thoughtful, did his homework and could under certain conditions be reasoned with.

  But when things went badly, he did not respond that well, and he did not, to the men around him, seem so reasonable. There would be a steady exodus from the White House during 1966 and 1967 of many of the men, both hawks and doves, who had tried to reason with him and tried to affect him on Vietnam (in May 1967 McNaughton, noting this phenomenon, wrote in a memo to McNamara: “I fear that 'natural selection’ in this environment will lead the Administration itself to become more and more homogenized—Mac Bundy, George Ball, Bill Moyers are gone. Who next?” The answer, of course, was McNamara himself). In the late fall of 1965 Johnson learned the hard way that the slide rules and the computers did not work, that the projections were all wrong, that Vietnam was in fact a tar baby and that he was in for a long difficult haul—his commander and Secretary of Defense were projecting 400,000 men by the end of 1966, and 600,000 by the end of 1967, and even so, as 1968 rolled around, no guarantees. At that time Lyndon Johnson began to change. He began to sulk, he was not so open, not so accessible, and it was not so easy to talk with him about the problems and difficulties involved in Vietnam. McNamara’s access was in direct proportion to his optimism; as he became more pessimistic, the President became reluctant to see him alone. Johnson did not need other people’s problems and their murky forecasts; he had enough of those himself. What he needed was their support and their loyalty. He was, sadly, open-minded when things went well, and increasingly close-minded when things went poorly, as they now were about to do. In the past, during all those long agonizing hours in 1964 and 1965 when they discussed the problems of Vietnam, they had all been reasonable men discussing reasonable solutions, and in their assumptions was the idea that Ho Chi Minh was reasonable too. But now it would turn out that Ho was not reasonable, not by American terms, anyway, and the war was not reasonable, and suddenly Lyndon Johnson was not very reasonable either. He was a good enough politician to know what had gone wrong and what he was in for and what it meant to his dreams, but he could not turn back, he could not admit that he had made a mistake. He could not lose and thus he had to plunge forward. It was a terrible thing, he was caught and he knew it, and he knew he could juggle the figures only so long before the things he knew became obvious to the public at large. The more he realized this, the more he had to keep it in, keep it hidden, knowing that if he ever evinced doubts himself, if he admitted the truth to himself, it would somehow become reality and those around him would also know, and then he would have to follow through on his convictions. So he fought the truth, there were very rarely moments when he would admit that it was a miscalculation, that he had forgotten, when they had brought him the slide rules and the computers which said that two plus two equals four, that the most basic rule of politics is that human beings never react the way you expect them to. Then he would talk with some fatalism about the trap he had built for himself, with an almost plaintive cry for some sort of help. But these moments were rare indeed, very private, and more often than not they would soon be replaced by wild rages against any critic who might voice the most gentle doubt of the policy and the direction in which it was taking the country.

  So instead of leading, he was immobilized, surrounded, seeing critics everywhere. Critics became enemies; enemies became traitors; and the press, which a year earlier had been so friendly, was now filled with enemies baying at his heels. The Senate was beginning to rise up; he knew that and he knew why—it was that damn Fulbright. He knew what Fulbright was up to, he said; even a blind hog can find an acorn once in a while. So by early 1966, attitudes in the White House had become frozen. One could stay viable only by proclaiming faith and swallowing doubts. The price was high; it was very hard to bring doubts and reality to Johnson without losing access. The reasonable had become unreasonable; the rational, irrational. The deeper we were in, the more the outcry in the country, in the Senate and in the press, the more Johnson hunkered down, isolated himself from reality. What had begun as a credibility gap became something far more perilous, a reality gap. He had a sense that everything he had wanted for his domest
ic program, his offering to history, was slipping away, and the knowledge of this made him angrier and touchier than ever; if you could not control events, you could at least try and control the version of them. Thus the press as an enemy. Critics of the war became his critics; since he was patriotic, clearly they were not. He had FBI dossiers on war critics, congressmen and journalists, and he would launch into long, irrational tirades against them: he knew what was behind their doubts, the Communists were behind them—yes, the Communists, the Russians; he kept an eye on who was going to social receptions at the Soviet embassy and he knew that a flurry of social activity at the Communist embassies always resulted in a flurry of dovish speeches in the Senate. Why, some of the children of those dove senators were dating children of Russian embassy officials. And he knew which ones. In fact, he would say, some of those dovish Senate speeches were being written at the Russian embassy; he knew all about it, he knew which ones, he often saw these speeches before the senators themselves did.

  Yet if he had a sense of the darkness ahead in the ground war, he also took a negative view of negotiations; negotiations meant defeat. He had not been particularly eager for the first bombing pause in late 1965, and the results, in his mind, had justified his doubts (one reason he would turn to Clark Clifford to replace the doubting and disintegrating McNamara in late 1967 was that Clifford had seemingly shown his hawkish credentials by opposing the bombing halt in 1965). Nothing but a propaganda benefit for the other side, nothing but more pressure against him, making it harder and harder to renew the bombing. So in the future when there was talk of other bombing halts, he would react with anger and irritation. Oh yes, a bombing halt, he would say, I’ll tell you what happens when there’s a bombing halt: I halt and then Ho Chi Minh shoves his trucks right up my ass. That’s your bombing halt.