The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  “No,” said Rostow, “you don’t understand. Victory is very near. I’ll show you the charts. The charts are very good.”

  “Walt,” said Ellsberg, “I don’t want to hear it. Victory is not near. Victory is very far away. I’ve just come back from Vietnam. I’ve been there for two years. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to see any charts . . .”

  “But, Dan, the charts are very good . . .”

  He had a great capacity not to see what he did not choose to see; in Washington at a dinner given for Everett Martin, a distinguished Newsweek reporter expelled from Vietnam for the pessimism of his reporting in late 1967, Rostow managed to pass the entire evening without ever acknowledging that Martin had been in Vietnam. Within the bureaucracy the word went out among those who briefed him that if they wanted to get his attention they had to bait their news with sugar, get the positive information in first, and then before he could turn off, quickly slip in the darker evidence. (Once in 1967 after a somewhat pessimistic briefing by John Vann, Rostow, slightly shaken, said, “But you do admit that it’ll all be over in six months.” “Oh,” said Vann somewhat airily, “I think we can hold out longer than that.”)

  With the White House under siege, with increasing evidence that the American military commitment to Vietnam had been stalemated, Rostow fought back; in the White House basements, aides culled through the reams of information coming in from Saigon and picked the items which they knew Rostow was following, particularly the good ones. They would send this up to Rostow, and he would package it and pass it on to the President, usually with covering notes which said things such as—this would give confirmation to the statement which the President had so wisely made to the congressional leadership the day before. The notes were similar—there were little touches of flattery: The record of your success indicates . . . Your place in history will bring you . . . The theme was the greatness of the cause and the immortality of Lyndon Johnson. Later, as McNamara’s doubts became more evident, there would be references to the need to stop McNamara’s wickedness, and when Clark Clifford replaced McNamara and began to fight the policy, there were verbal references to the need to “combat Cliffordism.”

  He fought evidence which was contrary. He encouraged George Carver, the CIA man who was assigned to brief the White House, to be more optimistic, and by 1967 there was a major split within the CIA. Most of the pure intelligence analysts were much more gloomy than Carver (in fact, in savvy Washington circles it was said that there were two CIAs: a George Carver CIA, which was the CIA at the top, generally optimistic in its reporting to Rostow; and the rest of the CIA, which was far more pessimistic). Rostow himself, drawing on his experience as a World War II intelligence officer, was not above reanalyzing and challenging some CIA reports and somehow making them, upon revision, more optimistic than they had been. He fought elements of the government which he considered unworthy and disloyal. When officers at State put out a weekly summary called the “Evening Reading Items,” a one-page sheet which attempted to show how American moves in Vietnam looked to Hanoi (showing in effect that we were more aggressive than we thought we were and reflecting Hanoi’s determination to keep coming), Rostow was appalled. He hated the sheet and got into bitter conflicts with State over its right even to publish it. It’s very pessimistic, he would argue, and it’s all supposition. All supposition. Nothing hard in it. But the State Department people argued back that the President had to see it, we had to know how we looked to the other side.

  He also played a form of gamesmanship with Rusk and McNamara, particularly McNamara. He would pore over the voluminous amount of incoming military information, make his selections, and come up with one or two positive pieces of news. Then he would call Rusk and McNamara, very cheerful, very upbeat: Have you seen the new captured documents? They’re terrific! Have you seen the stuff about the battle at An Xuyen? Great victory. A civil guard company stood off a VC regiment. The body count in Chau Doc is marvelous! . . . It was always minuscule stuff in a broad vast war with hundreds of other items far more pessimistic, but it kept McNamara and Rusk busy wasting long hours culling the material themselves so they would be prepared for his calls. Thus valuable time was wasted and the great men of the government went through material checking out platoon ambushes lest they be ambushed themselves. And Lyndon Johnson, already isolated because of the war and because of his office, was kept even more remote.

  By the nature of his office, a President is separated from his natural constituency and from the art of his profession, politics. The office restricts his movements, his access to events and reality, since few want to bring the President bad news. If a politician is a senator, a friend can sometimes tell him the honest truth in a gentle manner. If he is a President there is no such equality, no way of gently and honestly bearing bad tidings. Respect for the office demands that bad news be filtered down. At first Johnson was isolated involuntarily by the nature of the job, but then as the war progressed, the isolation became voluntary. He saw enemies everywhere. He became a figure of scorn. A scurrilous play, MacBird, was written about him and enjoyed remarkable critical success. He became a cartoonists’ delight: he bombed Vietnam and wept crocodile tears, and the tears turned out to be maps of Vietnam; he showed his famous abdominal scar and the scar turned out to be a map of Vietnam.

  The liberal intellectual community, crucial to the success of a Democratic liberal President, was turning on him. The first signs had come in 1965 when he gave a major Festival of the Arts—what he hoped would be an intellectual ratification of his great electoral triumph. Instead it turned out to be an intellectual rejection of his Vietnam policies. Some of the writers and artists invited wanted to boycott, others wanted to come and picket and read protests. “Half of those people,” Johnson said, “are trying to insult me by staying away and half of them are trying to insult me by coming.” But the art festival was the beginning: rather than crowning his legislative victories, it symbolized the intellectual community’s rejection of the war. More radical voices, fueled by the war, came to prominence, and in so doing, moved the traditional liberal intellectual center over to the left. The liberals had to move to the radical position on the war or lose influence. The Fulbright hearings came in early 1966, and further legitimized opposition; gradually opposition became increasingly centrist and respectable. Opposition mounted on the campuses; Norman Mailer in 1966 could dedicate a book of essays to Lyndon Johnson with gratitude for having made young Americans cheer at the mention of Mailer’s name.

  With liberal pressure mounting, with Robert Kennedy making the first uneasy gestures toward opposition, Johnson turned ever more inward. He dared not venture out; isolation begot isolation. When in mid-1967 he decided to defend his policies, the site and the group he chose was significant—the annual Junior Chamber of Commerce meeting. If a liberal Democratic President, needing a friendly and respectful audience, had to choose the Jaycees, then he was in trouble (as was his protégé Hubert Humphrey; Mrs. Humphrey, questioned about antagonism of American youth to her husband in 1968, answered that it was not true that the Vice-President was not keeping up with youth—the Humphreys, she said, kept in touch with many of the Jaycees). Someone like Martin Luther King, Jr., could not be a friend on civil rights and a critic on the war; he became in effect an enemy, he had to be kept away. (Of course the price for those who stayed friendly to Johnson was quite considerable, it moved them increasingly away from their own people and their own constituencies. At one Negro meeting in March 1967, Whitney Young of the Urban League defended the war and ended up in a bitter confrontation with Dr. King; Young told King that his criticism of the war was unwise, it would antagonize the President and they wouldn’t get anything from him. King, genuinely angry, told him, “Whitney, what you’re saying may get you a foundation grant, but it won’t get you into the kingdom of truth.”)

  The protests turned uglier and more personal, neoviolent, and then violent. Attitudes and passions long concealed by the two-party
system were now unleashed. More and more trusted staff people left, including some of Johnson’s own people—Reedy, Moyers and even Valenti. The departure of Moyers in 1966 was considered crucial; though he had been the White House press officer and thus a spokesman for the war, he was known on the inside as a doubter, and he had worked to make other doubters available to the President. When Moyers left, feeling himself locked in by the growing inflexibility around him, James Reston wrote that he was a casualty of the war, that he had been wounded at Credibility Gap. Johnson himself was furious when Moyers left. He hated it when anyone left him, anyway, but Moyers was special, he was the proxy son. Johnson raged after he departed—that boy had been using Johnson all this time, out there having dinner with the Kennedys, advancing his own career. Well, Lyndon Johnson wasn’t stupid, he knew what Moyers had been doing, he read the clips, and why was it that his press secretary’s image kept getting better and better, but Johnson’s image got worse and worse?

  As the temper in the country grew uglier, the White House became more of a fortress, and security arrangements became more and more stringent. Johnson, aware of the mood and the criticism of him, the highly personal nature of it, told friends, “The only difference between the Kennedy assassination and mine is that I am alive and it has been more torturous.” Inside the fortress Johnson’s aides pleaded with him to go out more, to leave the office; they wrote memos saying that even if demonstrators attacked or humiliated him, it would rebound to his credit, and that it was extremely unwise for him to stay locked up in the White House. But the Secret Service people would have none of it; it was far too dangerous, they said, they had never seen the anger and the instability in the country focused as it was on the Chief Executive. They would not permit it.

  Nor could Johnson plead effectively for his war. Wars are supposed to unite nations, to rally divided spirits, and Johnson had counted on this in his private political estimates. But this war was different; rather than concealing or healing normal divisions in the society, it widened them, and gaps became chasms. Presidential aides, looking for comforting precedents, had gone back to the World War II speeches of Franklin Roosevelt and were startled by how bloodthirsty it all seemed; the Jap was to be smashed like the animal he really was. In contrast, Johnson had to be restrained, he had to announce every few minutes that he did not intend to overthrow Hanoi. Nor could he bring a Medal of Honor winner to the White House for a speech without acerbic editorial reaction. He was boxed in. He could not unleash the dogs of war without creating dreams of winning; it was impossible to unleash them partway. The pressures now seemed to come from both sides, Westmoreland and CINCPAC asking for more troops and greater bombing targets, the civilians asking for greater controls. Limited war was not limited in the pain and dilemmas it brought to a President. In late 1966 the military began to build up pressure for the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong, blocking the harbor, taking apart the industrial capacity of both cities. The military brought with it evidence that this way the war would be won quicker; that, though drastic, in the long run this would save lives. Doing the hard thing was often doing the right thing. As a way of dramatizing this last point, one of the senior officers brought along projections for what the invasion of the Japanese mainland might have cost the Americans in lives had we not used the atomic bomb. They even had the figure: 750,000 lives saved. Johnson was fascinated and asked the senior military how they had arrived at the figure. The answer was quite simple, they said: some of their bright young men at the Pentagon had fed the right information from previous landings and battles into a computer, and thus come up with the figure. The President seemed duly impressed and asked to meet the young men who had made the projection. When they were eventually ushered into his office, the President feigned interest in their methodology for a while and then told them, “I have one more problem for your computer—will you feed into it how long it will take five hundred thousand angry Americans to climb that White House wall out there and lynch their President if he does something like that?” Which ended for a time the plan to bomb Hanoi and Haiphong.

  But this did not abate the military pressure, which continued to grow. In April 1967, with support for the war fast dwindling, he brought General Westmoreland home to speak before the Congress and the Associated Press Managing Editors Convention. But the Westmoreland appearances did not ease the pressures against him; if anything, the criticism of Johnson for using Westmoreland, for bringing the military into politics, mounted. Nor did Westmoreland reassure the President in private messages. At this point Westmoreland had 470,000 Americans, and he was asking for an increase which would bring the total to 680,000 men by June 1968, or at the very least a minimum increase of about 95,000 to 565,000. But even with this increase his forecasts were not optimistic. Without the top figure, he told Johnson, the war would not be lost, but progress would be slowed down; this, he said, was not encouraging but realistic. Then Westmoreland noted that every time we took an action, the other side made a countermove. At this point the President asked him, “When we add divisions, can’t the enemy add divisions? If so, where does it all end?” Westmoreland answered that the NVA had eight divisions in the country and had the capacity to go to twelve, but if they did, the problems of support would be considerable. He did note, however, that if we added more men, so would the enemy. But we had finally reached the crossover point, Westmoreland insisted, a crucial point in his war of attrition: we were killing men more quickly than they could add them. Even so, the President was not entirely put at ease. “At what point does the enemy ask for [Chinese] volunteers?” he asked. Westmoreland answered, “That’s a good question.”

  Johnson then asked his commander what would happen if we stayed at the already high figure of 470,000 men. It would be a meat-grinder war in which we could kill a large number of the enemy but in the end do little better than hold our own, Westmoreland said. The limitations of troops (this country already regarded it as too unlimited a war) meant that he could only chase after enemy main-force units in fire-brigade style. He foresaw the war then going on in the current fashion for five more years. If the American force was increased to 565,000, Westmoreland saw the war going on for three years; with the full increment of 210,000 it could go on for two years—which would take Johnson into 1970. General Wheeler was there (anxious for Westmoreland to get the troops as a means of also getting a reserve call-up) and the President asked him what would happen if Westmoreland did not get the full 210,000. Wheeler answered that the momentum the Americans had would die, and in some areas the enemy would recapture the initiative; it did not mean that we would lose the war, but it would certainly be a longer one. For Lyndon Johnson, a year away from an election, already besieged, already sensing the growing restlessness in the country, hearing these rather dark predictions of his generals, it was hardly a happy occasion.

  Two years too late the civilians were finally learning how open-ended they had made the war, and how little they had determined the strategy. Ten days later John McNaughton wrote in a memo to McNamara:

  I am afraid there is the fatal flaw in the strategy in the draft. It is that the strategy falls into the trap that has ensnared us for the past three years. It actually gives the troops while only praying for their proper use and for constructive diplomatic action. Limiting the present decision to an 80,000 add-on does the very important business of postponing the issue of a Reserve call-up (and all of its horrible baggage) but postpone it is all that it does—probably to a worse time, 1968. Providing the 80,000 troops is tantamount to acceding to the whole Westmoreland-Sharp request. This being the case, they will “accept” the 80,000. But six months from now, in will come messages like the “470,000­570,000” messages, saying that the requirement remains at 210,000 or more. Since no pressure will have been put on anyone, the military war will have gone on as before and no diplomatic progress will have been made. It follows that the “philosophy” of the war should be fought out now so that everyone will not be proceeding on their own pr
emises, and getting us in deeper and deeper; at the very least, the President should give General Westmoreland his limit (as President Truman did to General MacArthur). That is, if General Westmoreland is to get 550,000 men, he should be told “that will be all and we mean it.”

  The government was now clearly divided, and the President was caught in the middle. The Chiefs and Westmoreland wanted an ever larger war and ever greater force, but this time McNamara was in effect able to hold the line. Westmoreland would not get the minimal 70,000 he wanted; rather, there would be a compromise and he would get about 50,000, bringing the U.S. troops to a ceiling of 525,000.

  It was a special irony that the burden of making the case against the war now fell to the civilians at Defense. Nominally the reaction should have come from the White House, from aides to the President anxious to protect their man from false estimates from the military; or from State, a place supposedly sensitive to the political dilemmas of the war. But Rostow made the White House staff supportive, a hotbed of cheerleaders, and at State, Rusk kept his people from analyzing failures (thus the erratic behavior of Bill Bundy in all those years; he jumped around from position to position, he seemed to be saying that we were doing the right things, but we weren’t doing them well enough; he was never able to use his intelligence and that of his staff on the real issues. His intelligence went in one direction, but his responsibility to his superior, Rusk, turned him in another. As a result he became increasingly irritable and harsh to those under him).

  By mid-1967 McNamara was moving to try and cap the war, particularly the bombing. In October 1966, for the first time, he had let Systems Analysis loose on the issue of the war, asking them to check on projected increases the Chiefs wanted for bombing in 1967. The willingness to bring in Systems Analysis was significant not so much as an attempt to prove that the war was not working, but as a willingness to surface more and more as a critic. He knew that the use of Systems Analysis would anger the military and cause him political problems, that it would be evidence of his own pessimism, but at this point he was willing to take additional heat in order to get the facts. The Systems Analysis people of course recommended against the bombing. They reported that the bombing did not cause Hanoi great problems, that these losses were readily made up by the Soviet Union and that thus an increase in bombing placed a greater burden not on North Vietnam, but on the United States. For example, CINCPAC’s expanded bombing requirements would generate 230 aircraft losses in 1967 and cost us $1.1 billion while doing only negligible damage to the other side. (At the end of 1967 Systems Analysis would do another estimate on the war and find that despite the bombing, the GNP of North Vietnam had managed to go up in 1965 and 1966, and had fallen off only in 1967, and that North Vietnam’s allies had given Hanoi over the war years $1.6 billion in economic and military aid—that is, four times what it had lost through bombing. “If economic criteria were the only consideration, NVN would show a substantial net gain from the bombing, primarily in military equipment,” it reported.)