by Max Hastings
Max Taylor once observed that Americans knew little about the communist leadership, and less about its intentions. The British consulate in Hanoi, which was chiefly its Secret Intelligence Service station, reported with notable prescience after this first round of bombing that North Vietnam’s leaders ‘will not be intimidated. Nor will they be deflected. Roads will be rebuilt, bridges replaced by simpler bamboo structures, and supply dumps resupplied … [air attack would] only strengthen their resolution.’ The politburo was indeed much less dismayed by the bombing than by private expressions of anger from Moscow and Beijing about the attack on Maddox. Ho Chi Minh emerged from semi-retirement, chairing a session at which he demanded sternly, ‘Who gave the order?’ Giap demanded disciplinary action against those responsible, notably Senior Colonel Tran Quy Hai. Hai said that before unleashing the boats he had consulted a member of the politburo; he refused to identify the responsible comrade, but they all assumed that he meant Le Duan. Though Hai was formally reprimanded, chief of staff Dung dismissed talk of regrets or recriminations, shrugging, ‘Even if we don’t attack them, they will attack us. That is their nature as imperialists.’ A distinguished NVA officer who defected in 1990 confirmed that the 2 August attack was authorised by Le Duan, who had mocked Giap’s anxiety to avert a showdown with the Americans, saying, ‘He’s as timid as a rabbit.’
Since the US had fabricated the 4 August clash to justify bombing the North, Hanoi saw no merit in further military restraint on its own side. This was where Washington paid the heaviest price for the post-Tonkin Gulf air strikes: by translating the threat of bombing into reality, it played a card that was most potent while retained in the hand. Following a 25–29 September Party central committee meeting, Nguyen Chi Thanh was appointed chief of COSVN, and a warning order was issued for the first regular North Vietnamese Army formation to prepare to march south. Elements of the 325th Division set forth in November, after a delay imposed partly by the need to square Moscow and Beijing, partly by equipment shortages.
China, which on 16 October raised East–West tensions by testing a nuclear weapon, dramatically increased its deliveries of arms. The NVA began to receive AK-47 assault rifles, 7.62mm machine-guns, 82mm mortars, rocket-propelled grenade-launchers and recoilless rifles. For the North’s home defence, Beijing supplied thirty-four MiG-17 fighters, for which Vietnamese pilots had been training in China for two years: their Chinese adviser remained with the unit through its early combat sorties. In Hanoi, flak guns were deployed on rooftops; half the civilian population was set to digging trenches.
On the evening of 5 October in Beijing, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai discussed the war with a Hanoi delegation. Mao said he was confident that Johnson had no desire to invade North Vietnam, though he opposed wantonly provoking the Americans. Pham Van Dong concurred, telling the Chinese leaders, ‘We should try to restrict the conflict to the sphere of “special war” and to defeat the enemy within [this] context.’ He added, however: ‘If the US dares to [commit troops], we shall fight, and we shall win.’ They discussed possible negotiations through the United Nations, which secretary-general U Thant had proposed. Though Mao changed his mind a few months later, that evening he said: ‘It is no bad thing to negotiate. You have already established a [good] bargaining position. It is another matter whether the negotiations succeed.’ Le Duan had travelled to Beijing immediately following the Tonkin Gulf Incident, to inform Mao of his intention to send a regular division south: now the Chinese leader urged the North Vietnamese to consider carefully the timing of this deployment before the formation marched.
As for Lyndon Johnson, in the months following the August drama, it remained his preferred option to hold down the temperature in South-East Asia until polling day. There was no further bombing of the North: the president used the hot line to soothe Moscow. The Tonkin Gulf clash and subsequent Resolution came to loom large in history only much later, when the administration’s deceits were revealed. Soon after the event, journalist-historian Theodore White could write respectfully in The Making of the President 1964: ‘The deft response of American planes to the jabbing of North Vietnam’s torpedo boats … had been carried off with the nicest balance between boldness and precision.’ The country was vastly more interested and impressed by the 2 July enactment of the Civil Rights Act; the Mass Transit Act four days later; the Civilian Pay Act and Anti-Poverty Act – the first wave of Great Society legislation. Johnson took justified pride in his forty-five major proposals that passed the second session of the Eighty-Eighth Congress, a far higher strike rate than Kennedy had contrived.
Vietnam proved a marginal election issue. Turmoil in Saigon had come to be accepted as the city’s default condition. Yet as Gen. Nguyen Khanh assumed ever more authoritarian powers, these were challenged on the streets by Buddhists and student demonstrators. Khanh made matters worse by promising that he would discuss their demands with Max Taylor, an admission of his own vassal status. On 25 August the general supposedly agreed to share power with two other familiar military figures, Tran Thien Khiem and Duong Van Minh. Then troops fired on a protest, killing six people. The capital descended into new chaos, while the Vietcong continued to create mayhem in the countryside. Through the autumn there was a constant stream of bad news about both terrorism and political protests.
The Americans convinced themselves that the Buddhist demonstrators were tools of the communists. Veteran British correspondent Gavin Young took a more nuanced view. He saw the Buddhists as ‘convinced that communism was barbaric and malign, just as they considered the Americanization of their country degrading. Strangely enough … they merely desired the means to wage a more successful war against the communists. For they believed that the American-sponsored generals who ruled the country were hopelessly corrupt and incompetent … They [themselves] were pure Vietnamese nationalists, proud of their history and their culture. They feared and mistrusted foreign influences of any kind.’ The Buddhists were certainly naïve – but no more than were the generals who presided in Saigon.
An ARVN officer, Lt. Nam, described his unit’s experience of a Saigon street demonstration: ‘A yellow-robed monk held in his hand a small flag which he raised high, spreading his arms in a V, like a boxer climbing into the ring and greeting the audience. Most of the young male demonstrators were wearing Japanese sandals and tight trousers with their shirt-tails hanging out. There were a few young girls hugging book-bags, like they were going to school. The two most active and animated, however, were older women wearing black trousers and flowered blouses. They carried staves, and one would scream curses for a while; run over to a water fountain and take a long drink; then run back and resume screaming.’
The soldiers stood back while riot police charged the demonstrators, firing tear gas until the street stood empty, littered with abandoned wooden clogs, book-bags, coolie hats and sandals. Under the blazing sun, troops lined a wired barricade across the street. Then, wrote Lt. Nam, ‘One guy, with a sharp rat face, pointed at me and screamed “You mother-fucker! How much are the Americans paying you? When you die there is no hell hot enough to punish you for your crimes” … A rock flew out of the crowd and hit Corporal Long in the chest. He shouted in pain, then smashed his rifle butt into the face of a kid cavorting in front of him. I tossed a CS gas grenade, and my bottled-up rage exploded. I swung my own rifle-butt, prompting a scream of pain. I heard bones cracking under the impact of the stock. My platoon burst forth, surging into the crowd in a wild fit of anger and hatred.’ When his men pulled back, gratefully dragging off their gas masks, Nam felt a stab of wretchedness that the high military calling he thought he had embraced was reduced to a sordid street squabble. This was how many South Vietnamese people felt: bewildered and trapped between rival malign forces. An American adviser asked a province chief, ‘If you were twenty years old, had no family responsibilities and no record of support for the Saigon government, which side would you be on?’ The man sat mute, leaving his visitor in no doubt of the answer.
At a 9 September White House meeting Max Taylor said, ‘Eventually we must go North because we cannot afford to lose this war.’ Johnson responded that there must be a stable Saigon government before anything big was attempted elsewhere – which meant further delaying strategic decisions, deplored by JCS members. The Marines’ Gen. Greene denounced as ‘a gigantic gamble’ the president’s refusal to make any big commitment before the election. He instead urged that the administration should give Khanh 100 per cent support, declare martial law, suppress all riots and demonstrations, authorise the ARVN to attack the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and Cambodia with American air support – and assault North Vietnam ‘for the purposes of either forcing the North Vietnam[ese] to cease support of the Viet Cong or establishing a base for bargaining and withdrawal of US forces’. In September MACV estimated that sixty-six thousand Vietcong had been killed in the previous three years – but admitted even to those who swallowed this statistic that half South Vietnam’s population was now paying communist taxes.
USIA chief Ev Bumgardner told Frank Scotton that Nguyen Khanh’s brief stint as regime leader was drawing to a close: ‘Americans are all over him, like flies, and his sun is setting.’ Bumgardner advised Scotton to meet 5th Division commander Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu, who was the coming man. Scotton expressed surprise – surely Thieu was just a lightweight. Bumgardner laughed, ‘Maybe he is, but that might allow for floating to the top. None of the others feel threatened by him, and when they do, it just might be too late.’ Sure enough, when the military rulers shuffled their deck yet again, for the first time the thirty-four-year-old Air Vice-Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky, together with Thieu, emerged as important players on a so-called Armed Forces Council. On 20 October a civilian government was announced, led by Tran Van Huong; nobody expected this to survive long, however, and it did not.
Meanwhile the Vietcong battered relentlessly at everything appertaining to the Americans and the government. Compared with what came later, ARVN losses were relatively low – less than six thousand killed in 1963, and not many more in the succeeding year. But Washington hawks were dismayed by a spectacular 31 October attack on the B-57 flightline at Bien Hoa, in which eight Americans were killed, and by Washington’s refusal to respond with another air strike on the North. On 1 November Earle Wheeler formally reported to McNamara the JCS view, that the US should either make a major military commitment, or withdraw.
Next day the defense secretary described the situation as ‘damn serious … critical’. Yet still he felt that strikes against the North, as recommended by the Chiefs, ‘will not bring any major change in the attitude of the “Viet Cong” in South Vietnam’. He reaffirmed his concern that the Chinese might come in, and said that the president wanted to move, ‘but he wants to be goddamned sure of himself before he does so’. Most Americans who went to the polls next day believed that by endorsing Lyndon Johnson rather than Barry Goldwater, they were voting to escape an escalation of the Vietnam war: the Democratic candidate was royally cheered when he told crowds that he would not send ‘American boys to fight a war Asian boys should fight for themselves’.
On 3 November the election was finally over. Johnson got his landslide victory, the largest plurality in American history. This huge mandate offered what was probably the last, best chance to order a withdrawal from Vietnam. Yet for weeks, within the administration it had been assumed that domestic political success would be followed by escalation. Only an effective North Vietnamese capitulation could have prevented a troop commitment. It was taken for granted by McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara and the rest that if the enemy remained unyielding, he must be addressed with appropriately increased force.
Johnson’s determination to assist the people of South Vietnam in spite of themselves was strengthened by the rise in his Louis Harris poll ratings after the August air strikes. Americans responded positively to a perceived display of strength, purpose, decision. The president managed Congress with his accustomed skill. While its key arbiters of foreign policy – Senators William Fulbright, Mike Mansfield and Richard Russell – were privately sceptical about the administration’s Vietnam policy, Johnson persuaded them to keep their doubts to themselves until the big decisions were history. It was an extraordinary aspect of the war, that the American people and their legislature acquiesced with little remark in a vast military commitment to a faraway country, heedless of the fact that the rest of the world, including Britain, France, Japan, Canada – almost every developed democracy except Australia – thought US policy foolhardy in the extreme.
George Ball, Rusk’s under-secretary, became in 1964–65 the most eloquent in-house opponent of escalation. He expressed his views in a sixty-seven-page memorandum of 5 October 1964, which was read by the president only five months later. This was because McNamara, its initial recipient, regarded the paper with repugnance – in Ball’s words ‘like a poisonous snake … next to treason’. The under-secretary argued that withdrawal, far from weakening US prestige, would enhance it, since all her allies opposed the war. Instead of relentlessly debating military options, he urged, the same energy should be deployed to find a political exit. He found it grotesque that when ‘what we had charitably referred to as the government in Saigon was falling apart, yet we had to bomb the North as a form of political therapy’. He cited the 1962 Sigma II Pentagon war game, which highlighted the unlikelihood that the North would buckle under air attack, and later dismissed bombing as ‘a pain-killing exercise that saved my colleagues from having to face the hard decision to withdraw’. Ball hereafter became the administration’s licensed dissenter, granted respectful hearings even from the president himself – while changing nothing.
Why was there so little argument? Americans have never been much impressed by the views of foreigners or East Coast intellectuals about their affairs. In 1964–65 the conservatism of middle America was still manifested in its willingness to trust the national leadership, to believe what its presidents said, even across a party divide. Patriotism helped to stifle debate when American boys were already dying. Though the New York Times and Washington Post had become critical of the commitment, relatively few people got their news from the liberal press. Meanwhile, the foremost reason for public passivity was surely that no gunfire was being heard, no shells or bombs were falling on their own continent. There was an urgency, even desperation, in the attitude of Vietnamese to their own predicament, because they paid a daily blood price. Americans did not. Nothing concentrates minds – not always rationally, but certainly powerfully – so much as the spectacle of death and destruction in one’s own streets and fields. The Johnson administration, by contrast, could make its decisions confident that, whatever the consequences for South-East Asia, no material damage would befall the continental United States. In 1964–65 the highest stakes appeared to be relatively small sums of money, together with the egos of the president and those around him, which they so deftly enfolded in the flag that personal reputations seemed, in that season, inseparable from the nation’s global prestige. If the rubble on the streets of Saigon, the tears of peasants in the paddies of the Mekong delta, had lain instead on Pennsylvania Avenue or fallen on North Carolina tobacco fields, Americans might already have been demonstrating as vigorously as were Vietnam’s Buddhists. The course of events after Lyndon Johnson’s election triumph might have been very different.
The president chose to deny himself choices, determining that the only acceptable outcome was a military victory for which South Vietnamese will was conspicuously lacking. On 21 November William Bundy submitted a memorandum proposing alternative degrees of escalation. Ten days later, Johnson authorised Operation Barrel Roll – secret bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail inside neutral Laos. This was deemed politically safe, because far from prying eyes, and indeed did not leak until Christmas. The president explicitly asked Taylor in Saigon if he wanted US ground troops, and may have been disappointed that the ambassador continued to oppose a deployment.
By 1 December 1964, though t
he world supposed the big decisions about Vietnam to lie in the future, the only serious argument within the administration was about whether to launch a major air campaign against the North, to send ground troops, or to do both. The president was convinced that to fight to the end, almost heedless of cost, was the courageous course, the honourable course, the only course worthy of Time’s Man of the Year. David Halberstam described Johnson as ‘the elemental man, a man of endless, restless ambition, a politician the likes of which we shall not see again in this country … of stunning force, drive and intelligence, and of equally stunning insecurity’.
From December onwards the Vietcong launched a series of devastating attacks close to Saigon, and almost a thousand lesser acts of terrorism within a fortnight. At a meeting of the US chiefs of staff attended by Westmoreland an exasperated general demanded, ‘Why is it that the North Vietnamese appear to be so well-disciplined and the South Vietnamese appear to be an undisciplined rabble?’ MACV’s boss said the NLF had a very strong leadership. What was to be done about the generals’ relentless dogfighting? Westmoreland thought ‘the Vietnamese – at least in Saigon – are coming more and more to feel that they can count on the [US Army] to worry about the commies, while they put their own efforts into jockeying for political power’. The army’s deputy chief of staff said contemptuously after the meeting broke up: ‘If we add up everything Westy has said so far, it amounts to one, MACV is doing a fine job; two, he is not optimistic, but on the other hand he is not pessimistic; three, he has little to recommend; and four, he is a smug young politician but not as smart as he thinks.’
