The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  Despite this the President gave the okay, and on June 29 the strikes were launched. At first it appeared that the raids were extraordinarily successful, with all of the Hanoi storage and 80 percent of the Haiphong facility destroyed. McNamara had gone along with the POL raids; it was the last major escalation that he recommended. What became clear in the months that followed was that the air campaign against POL, although seemingly successful, had, like the previous bombing campaigns, failed. The North Vietnamese had learned to adjust to American power, and dispersed their reserves to areas invulnerable to American attack. So at an extremely high cost in American men and planes, we destroyed the surface storage while the North Vietnamese were able to pressure the Soviets into larger and larger petroleum commitments. For McNamara, it helped seal his doubts; he later criticized the Air Force and the Navy for the gap between the optimistic estimates of what the raids could do and what the actual results were. It meant that he would push harder and harder for the barrier, and that he would begin to work to limit bombing. In effect from then on, and particularly in the fall of 1966, he was something of a dissenter, but a dissenter operating under considerable limits. For one thing, Rusk was not given to the same doubts, and thus the Secretary of State was to the right of him. In addition, if he was fighting from within, he was accepting the assumptions of his opponents, fighting them on a tactical level, not on a deeper one; this made him particularly vulnerable to the counterproposals of Westmoreland and the Chiefs. He began to give up combat troops to hold down on the bombings, dissembling to a degree within the bureaucracy so it would not be too obvious within the government that he was a dove. As such, his half measures always failed.

  In October 1966, with the military asking for troop increases which would bring the American commitment to a minimum of 570,000, McNamara went to Saigon again. This time his sense of pessimism was very real; he was convinced that the other side would match us, that in effect Hanoi was now waging its own special kind of attrition, psychological attrition, against us, slowing down the pace of the war slightly, believing that time was on their side. He was affected considerably by reports by one of his own people there, Daniel Ellsberg, whose own gloom was growing and who told McNamara that most of the official optimism was false. On the way back to Washington McNamara talked with aides about the developments, and he seemed very down: things were, he said, worse than a year before. With him was Robert Komer, once the White House aide who had been sent to Vietnam by Johnson to head pacification, a man constantly enthusiastic and upbeat (Komer was liked by journalists, who were amused by his constant optimism. “Do you really believe all that stuff you put out and send back to Washington?” one reporter asked him. “The difference between you and me,” he explained, a lovely insight into the semantics of Saigon, “is that I was sent out here to report on the progress in the war”). Komer disagreed with McNamara and insisted that the war was certainly no worse than a year before. McNamara asked Ellsberg whether it was better or worse than a year before. “Pretty much the same,” Ellsberg answered.

  “You see,” said Komer, “at least it’s no worse.”

  “But it is worse,” insisted McNamara, “because if things are the same, then they’re worse, because we’ve invested so much more of our resources.” (On that same plane ride McNamara asked Ellsberg for an extra copy of his report, entitled “Visit to an Insecure Province,” and then asked him, in the interests of not straining civilian-military relationships, if he would mind not showing it to General Earle Wheeler.)

  McNamara began to be increasingly appalled by the war itself, what we were doing with our power, the pain inflicted on the civilians. He paid particular attention to stories about the destruction caused by the bombing. When Harrison Salisbury of the Times visited Hanoi at the end of 1966, his articles were violently attacked by the Administration, particularly Defense Department spokesmen, but McNamara was fascinated by them and followed them closely. He and Robert Kennedy had remained close friends and in 1966 they began to feed each other’s dissent, McNamara confirming to Kennedy that the war was not going well, Kennedy confirming McNamara’s impressions of what the war was doing to this country. He was an intriguing man in this period; almost as if there were a split personality caught between two loyalties, and more, caught between two eras. In those days he could still be part of the planning of the bombing, but be a very different man in the evening, going to dinner parties, raising a glass to someone like Moyers with the toast “Bless the doves—we need more of them.” He was able to head the war machine, give the Montreal speech, and then regret giving it. It was as if there were a Kennedy-McNamara who said one thing to Kennedy-type people, and a Johnson-McNamara who said another to Johnson-type people. He was able to come back in October 1966 and report to Johnson that things did not look good in Vietnam (“I see no reasonable way to bring the war to an end soon”), commenting on how tough and resilient the enemy was, and then conclude that the United States should press on harder militarily and get into a better military position which would make a war of long duration less attractive to the enemy. The word swept through Washington about his unhappiness; some thought he was being disloyal to Johnson, others began to think he was coming apart. In late 1966 he ran into Emmet Hughes of Newsweek, who had just written a hand-wringing piece on Vietnam, and McNamara was very sympathetic about the piece, it certainly wasn’t a good situation, was it? “I never thought it would go on like this. I didn’t think these people had the capacity to fight this way. If I had thought they could take this punishment and fight this well, could enjoy fighting like this, I would have thought differently at the start . . .” Washington watched his dilemma, the split personality, with fascination. A brilliant Defense Secretary, went the Washington line, but no taste for being a War Secretary. His whole ethical and moral structure made him at ease in the job at Defense, but when he became a War Secretary his values were threatened and he could not come to terms with his new role. It was, he sometimes said, the system which had produced the war; yet he was one of the men who was supposed to control the system.

  In despair and frustration over the war, in 1967 he ordered a massive study of all the papers on Vietnam, going back to the 1940s, a study which became known as the Pentagon Papers. When it was handed in he read parts of it. “You know,” he told a friend, “they could hang people for what’s in there.” His own behavior seemed increasingly erratic as the pressures on him mounted, and close friends worried about his health. In 1967 when there was a possibility of peace negotiations being worked out through the British, Kosygin was in London and a bombing pause had gone into effect. Acting on his talks with the British, Ambassador David Bruce recommended strongly that we not resume the bombing until Kosygin had left London. Bruce pleaded to State that if it valued the alliance at all, it must observe the British request. Rusk, a great chain-of-command man, accepted the Bruce thesis and pushed it. McNamara argued forcefully against it and tore into it at the meetings, but Bruce and Rusk held the day. A few minutes after the last discussion, McNamara was on the phone to Bruce, congratulating him on his victory, how well he had presented his case, and how proud McNamara was of him. At first Bruce was touched by McNamara’s warmth and courtesy, but later he was appalled when he learned that McNamara had been his principal adversary, and the story spread through both American and British diplomatic circles in London.

  If by 1966, and increasingly in 1967, McNamara was beginning to move away from the policy, then Rusk was, if anything, more steadfast than ever. He not only believed in the policy, he had a sense of profound constitutional consequences if the President, already at loggerheads with one of his chief advisers, was separated from the other. If Rusk too dissented, if that gossipy town even thought he was a critic, then in Rusk’s opinion the country would be in a constitutional crisis. There must be no blue sky between the President and the Secretary of State, he told aides. Besides, he believed the war could and should be won. So he became a rock, unflinching and unchanging, and
absorbing, as deliberately as he could, as much of the reaction to the war as possible. The abuse he took was enormous; he who had been the least anxious of the principal advisers to become involved but who had never argued against it, now became the public symbol of it, a target of public scorn, his statements mocked, so that he would once say in exasperation that he was not the village idiot; he knew that Ho was not Hitler, but nonetheless, there was an obligation to stand. In a pay phone booth in his own State Department someone in 1967 scratched the graffito: “Dean Rusk is a recorded announcement.” As he became a rock, so his own Department was immobilized; the best people in State, increasingly unhappy about the policy, felt they could make no challenge to it, and that they had become parrots, that and nothing more, and departmental morale sank to a new low.

  For Rusk, the job of the Secretary of State seemed to be to absorb pain. That and nothing more. Though there was much to challenge the military on—particularly the political mindlessness of the attrition strategy—State’s challenges were few, infrequent, mild and usually on minor matters. Occasionally there would be quick flashes of the hurt, as when he talked about the journalists who covered the war—which side were they on, were they for their country or against it? Years later, when the ordeal was over, he would tell friends that he did not know how he had lasted through it—if he had not been able to have that drink at the end of the day he could not have survived. There were moments when he did not conceal the anger and the rage, though they were few. Tom Wicker of the Times was at a dinner party with Rusk at the Algerian embassy one night in 1966 at a time when there had been a Buddhist crisis in Hué, when suddenly Rusk turned to him and started screaming—there was no other word for it: Why can’t the New York Times get things right? Why does it always print lies? Which side is it on? Wicker, whose own relations with Rusk had always been pleasant, was stunned by the anger and ferocity of the attack, and it was minutes before he could even understand what Rusk was talking about—a report in the Times that day saying that Buddhist dissidents had taken over the Hué radio station. Rusk had read the story and had been so upset by it that he had personally called the American consulate in Hué, where of course the American officials had denied the report, and on the basis of this he had proceeded to lecture Wicker on the perfidy of American journalism. The entire episode, particularly the sudden savagery of Rusk’s attack—after all, it is not fun to be assaulted by the Secretary of State of the United States of America over coffee and cognac—stayed with Wicker, and six months later when he was in Vietnam he dropped by the American consulate in Hué and asked a young man on the staff there about the Buddhist crisis. Oh yes, said the young man, the Buddhists had captured the radio station, and Wicker, thinking of Rusk and his obvious sincerity, had decided then that the real problem was that they had created an elaborate machine to lie to them, only to become prisoners of their own lies.

  But generally Rusk bore the brunt of it well. He did not complain. He was a proud man and at times it seemed as if he took sustenance from the criticism. In the great clubs of New York and Washington his old friends, his sponsors, men like Lovett and McCloy, were worried about Dean being the target of all the nation’s anger. One day McCloy stopped Lovett and said that he wished Dean would fight back, answer his critics or yell for help—they would like to get in the fight and help him. But Lovett, who knew Rusk well, said that Dean would never do that, he was too proud. Yet proud or not, at the end the taste, which should have been so good—eight years at the job that he and every other serious young man coveted—was sour, and he was exhausted financially, physically and spiritually. At the small farewell party for him given by some State Department reporters, the atmosphere was suitably pleasant; these men who had covered Rusk for that long recognized in him qualities of grace, decency and modesty which were not always obvious from a distance. And Rusk, who had always held together so well, finally broke. He went over to British correspondent Louis Heren and asked why the British had not sent any troops to Vietnam. Rusk knew of course well enough, as they had all known from the start, that this was a war that no one else had wanted, that except for a genuine effort by the Australians and a semimercenary effort by the Koreans, it was virtually a unilateral war. As gently as possible, Heren began to stumble through the usual rationalizations when Rusk, whose own allegiance, whose own lessons of mutual security were derived from England, suddenly cut him off. “All we needed was one regiment. The Black Watch would have done. Just one regiment, but you wouldn’t. Well, don’t expect us to save you again. They can invade Sussex and we wouldn’t do a damn thing about it.”

  Many of the people around Lyndon Johnson and many of the people at State had been relatively pleased when Walt Rostow replaced McGeorge Bundy. In contrast to Bundy’s cold, haughty style, Rostow was warm, pleasant, humble, almost angelic, eager to share his enthusiasm, his optimism, with all around. He had time for everyone, he was polite to everyone, there was no element of put-down to him. The real Johnson loyalists were particularly pleased because they had not liked the Bundy-Johnson relationship, and here was Rostow, bearing the same credentials as Bundy, with far more serious books to his credit, a man far more pleasant to work with, and who was joyously, unabashedly pro-Johnson. It was not fake enthusiasm, it was genuine; Johnson had rescued Rostow from the Siberia of Policy Planning, and Rostow was properly grateful, but more important, Rostow genuinely admired Lyndon Johnson. They saw eye to eye on both domestic and foreign affairs, and Rostow thought Johnson the smartest, toughest man he had ever dealt with. As for Johnson, if he had liked about Bill Bundy his willingness to run it in up to the hilt, then Rostow was a man after his own heart.

  But the enthusiasm of others for Rostow soon floundered on Rostow’s own enthusiasm. He became the President’s national security adviser at a time when criticism and opposition to the war were beginning to crystallize, and he eventually served the purpose of shielding the President from criticism and from reality. He deflected others’ pessimism and rewarded those who were optimistic. It was not contrived, it was the way he was. Perhaps, too, it was a symptom of the war: a President in a hopeless war did not need, could not accept a chief adviser wringing his hands, an adviser who seemed to reflect the gathering doubts. Maybe the job required a positive thinker. There was no more positive thinker in Washington than Walt Whitman Rostow.

  His optimism was almost a physiological thing, organically part of him. He always believed in the war and in particular in the bombing. He believed early in what the bombing would do, that it was something quick and dramatic and that the other side would have to give in. Year after year, as the failure of the bombing became apparent, it did not faze him; just a little more bombing. And enthusiastic himself, he was anxious to pass on his enthusiasm. He headed the Psychological Strategy Committee, which met at the White House to think of psy war, a strategy which, it turned out, would be largely aimed at the American people. If any of the incoming reports indicated any kind of progress, Rostow immediately authorized a leak. Business Week got computer data charts of attacks by Vietcong (if they were down); the Christian Science Monitor got computerized population-control data from the Hamlet Evaluation Survey; the Los Angeles Times received data on the searches of junks and hamlets secured. He could always see the bright side of any situation, and in that sense he became legend. In the thousands of items flooding in from Saigon as part of the information glut he could find the few positive ones, pounce on them and bring them to his boss, as for instance one morning in 1967 when he told the President that never had the Boy Scouts of Vietnam gone out to clean up the rubble as they had just done in Danang. He made his predictions and nothing bothered him. He could grab Dan Ellsberg in July 1965 and excitedly pass on the news about the bombing (which to most experts in the CIA had already proven itself a failure): “Dan, it looks very good. The Vietcong are going to collapse within weeks. Not months but weeks. What we hear is that they’re already coming apart under the bombing.” They did not come apart in a few weeks
, but neither did Rostow, and Ellsberg went off to Vietnam, where for two years he became something of an authority on the failure of the Vietcong to collapse. Two years later, tired, depressed, and thoroughly pessimistic about the lost cause in Vietnam, he returned to Washington, where he found Rostow just as upbeat as ever.

  “Dan,” said Rostow, “it looks very good. The other side is near collapse. In my opinion, victory is very near.”

  Ellsberg, sick at heart with this very kind of high-level optimism which contrasted with everything he had seen in the field, turned away from Rostow, saying he just did not want to talk about it.