18. WATERSHED OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY
The Great Society
News of Kennedy’s murder reached Ambassador Lodge in San Francisco as he arrived from Saigon. He continued on to Washington with bad tidings of the progress of the war in Vietnam, a report he delivered on 24 November 1963 to President Johnson. Johnson had been sworn in two days earlier on the aircraft bringing JFK’s body back to Washington and he made one thing clear: ‘I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.’ This pledge became policy two days later when it was incorporated into National Security Council Action Memorandum (NSCAM) 273.1
The hostility felt towards Johnson by the Kennedyites was personal. Bobby, in particular, hated him as the usurper of the deceased legend. The feeling was entirely mutual and Johnson described Bobby as a ‘self-righteous little prick’, which he undoubtedly was. Acolytes of the dead President could only register a snobbish distaste for his successor’s crude vulgarity. The list of offences against good taste was admittedly long, but there is no correlation between good manners and ethical or even decent conduct in office.
Where Johnson grew up in the Texas hill country, everything had to be done by hand since there was no electricity. As a child he had picked cotton and shone shoes himself before discovering a talent for debate. Resembling a bull elephant, he had a far more coherent political vision than his stylish predecessor. He had been a committed New Dealer and as such FDR’s favourite son in Texas politics. He never lost that vision, even as he reached pragmatic accommodations with the big oil men and cattle ranchers of his home state. Lying and fighting dirty came as naturally to him as belching and farting in genteel company. In Washington his dominance first of the House of Representatives and then of the Senate was legendary. It was based on physical intimidation and on an encyclopaedic knowledge of the personal foibles of every colleague that rivalled J. Edgar Hoover’s. The ‘Maharajah of Texas’ and his staff occupied twenty rooms in the Capitol after he became Senate majority leader.
He had led a loyal opposition to Eisenhower, supporting his civil rights initiatives and his liberal internationalism, and shaming his fellow Southerners (many of them conservative Dixiecrats already travelling towards the Republican Party, along with much of the South) by accusing them of being obstacles on the South’s road to modernization. Even before becoming vice president, he had staffers investigate how many of his predecessors had succeeded to the top job. At Kennedy’s inaugural ball, Johnson told the wife of Time’s owner: ‘Clare [Luce], I looked it up: one out of every four Presidents has died in office. I’m a gamblin’ man, darlin’, and this is the only chance I get.’2 The chance came when, in a rented car well behind Kennedy’s Dallas motorcade, LBJ was manhandled to the floor by a secret service agent who realized what the three sharp cracks of sound signified.
As president, Johnson undertook a bold reform programme known as the Great Society, including civil rights and better medical care, which was to be achieved through a combination of budget savings, tax cuts and social programmes financed by high private sector growth.3 Although he was as conventionally anti-Communist as the next American, Johnson’s key concern was that the right should not thwart his domestic legislation because of perceived weakness in foreign policy. The last thing he wanted was a major war to drain away the money he wished to use to transform American society. The trick was to avoid another lost China, without getting stuck in a second Korea. In fact, he got Vietnam, with its own draining, gruelling identity. He vividly dramatized his dilemma. The Great Society was the woman he loved, but he was constantly being led astray by ‘that bitch of a war on the other side of the world’.4
Initially Johnson opted to do ‘more of the same and do it more efficiently’ in Vietnam, or as he put it, ‘by God, I want something for my money [military aid for South Vietnam], I want ’em to get off their butts and get out in those jungles and whip hell out of some Communists. And then I want ’em to leave me alone, because I’ve got some bigger things to do right here at home.’5 The policy of ‘maximum effect with minimum involvement was set out in NSCAM 288 in March 1964. As a supposedly temporary surge, the number of military advisers was increased from 16,300 to 23,300, with an extra $50 million in economic assistance. Recklessly optimistic General Harkins was the most visible casualty of the new efficiency drive, replaced in June by General William Westmoreland, who was a facts-and-figures man in the mould of McNamara, a corporate man in uniform, and as different from Douglas MacArthur as it was possible to be. An exponent of big-unit warfare, ‘Westy’ never mastered how to pacify an unconventional enemy with unconventional means in what was not an asymmetric fight. The following month, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Maxwell Taylor succeeded Cabot Lodge as ambassador to Saigon after Lodge had decided to return to the US to shore up the shrinking liberal internationalist strain in the Republican Party.
Major decisions to escalate US involvement in Vietnam were a year away, but the rationalization for past and present failures began to shift ominously long before. President de Gaulle’s advice in February 1963 to neutralize North and South, which would then block Chinese expansionism, was never seriously considered, and nor was the logic of falling dominoes often disputed. During another visit to South Vietnam in December, McNamara became convinced that the solution was to raise the cost of war to the North. A month later the Joint Chiefs delivered a similar message. The enemy was being allowed to dictate the course of the war, and that enemy was not so much the guerrillas in the South as their leaders in Hanoi. Rostow, now Chairman of the State Department’s Policy Planning Council, had been urging the use of graduated bombing to send signals to the North Vietnamese leadership for years.
The concept was powerfully appealing to the air force and navy, for it would enable them to underline their ongoing (budgetary) relevance to a conflict that had hitherto largely been an army affair. After he returned from yet another depressing trip to Saigon in mid-March 1964, McNamara ordered the Joint Chiefs to plan alternative bombing scenarios. The first would be a limited seventy-two-hour blitz in response to major guerrilla provocations. The second version would be a major strategic bombing campaign, designed to smash the North’s entire military and industrial infrastructure. This would force Ho Chi Minh to the negotiating table, for otherwise he would see his attempts to build a socialist society in ruins.
The Pentagon conducted two sets of war games in April and September 1964: SIGMA I-64 and SIGMA II-64, with National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy representing the President. The Red Team (representing Hanoi) included the Far Eastern expert Marshall Green of State and General Earle Wheeler, Taylor’s replacement as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Blue Team had Curtis LeMay, William Bundy and John McNaughton, the academic recently appointed assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. Honestly conducted, the war games made it apparent that bombing had little or no deterrent effect on Red Team’s ability to escalate infiltration of South Vietnam, while every Red Team counter-move exposed new US vulnerabilities. LeMay found it all too much to bear, and in an aside to McGeorge Bundy snarled, ‘We should bomb them back to the Stone Age.’ ‘Maybe they’re already there,’ replied Bundy.
The games continued with the dice loaded to produce the desired outcome. Even so, the chimera of victory could be achieved only by switching the more able players and raising the levels of what the US was prepared to do, up to and including use of tactical nuclear weapons. ‘Mac’ Bundy was not impressed, and resolved that if a bombing campaign were unleashed, it would have to be subject to stringent limits.6
Getting with the Programme
Planning activity went ahead despite countervailing opinion regarding its assumptions. McNamara believed that the fall of South Vietnam would result in dominoes toppling throughout the rest of South-east Asia, affecting not only Cambodia and Laos, but also Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, India and even Australia and New Zeala
nd, not to speak of the Philippines, Korea and Japan. The CIA, which understood what was unique about the Vietnamese Communists, contradicted that view, not least by pointing to the thousand years of antipathy between Vietnamese and Chinese. A report drawn up by the State Department’s Policy Planning Council also concluded that bombing the North would have very little impact on its support for the South. Indeed, it might escalate its activities by reconstituting North Vietnamese Army (NVA) forces for deployment in the southern campaign. It would also frustrate, rather than encourage, any will to negotiate in Hanoi. Rostow suppressed the report, on the grounds that State had no business meddling in military affairs. Similar warnings from the Pentagon’s internal Defense Intelligence Agency were also ignored.
Unfortunately Secretary of State Rusk did not fight his corner and endorsed McNamara’s views, claiming that US credibility in Europe or elsewhere would be undermined if a stand were not taken in Vietnam. That was a lie. Britain and France opposed escalating the war, and de Gaulle was a firm advocate of Vietnam’s neutralization. In a growing atmosphere of ‘getting with the programme’, any dissenting voices found themselves shut out of decisions being taken by fewer and fewer principals. Only George Ball, who had opposed American involvement in Vietnam from the time Kennedy first sent 16,000 ‘advisers’, was left as a licensed devil’s advocate, a designation indicating that he was not to be taken too seriously, like Adlai Stevenson over Cuba. Earlier lobbying to oust Diem undermined the authority of State Department dissenters such as Ball.7
Johnson was torn between competing pressures, hoping that all the bright, can-do men he had inherited from Kennedy would get him off the hook of his own private agonies. He feared that inaction in Vietnam would result in his political opponents (especially in the Southern states) derailing his ambitious domestic programmes. It would be like Truman and China all over again. ‘If I don’t go in now and they show later I should have gone, then they’ll be all over me in Congress. They won’t be talking about my civil rights bill, or education or beautification. No sir, they’ll push Vietnam up my ass every time. Vietnam. Vietnam. Vietnam. Right up my ass.’8 Johnson could not grasp how what he called ‘a piss-ant’ or ‘raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country’ could defy the will of a technologically advanced superpower. To negotiate or withdraw would represent a massive loss of face, a concept whose importance to Asians was sneered at by Americans deeply concerned about prestige. In pushing on with the war, Johnson was powerfully supported by America’s union bosses, men like AFL-CIO president George Meany who said: ‘I would rather fight the Communists in South Vietnam than fight them down here in Chesapeake Bay.’9
Contrary to the image of brutality projected on to him by the Kennedyites, Johnson agonized over the human tragedy of war in a way alien to the man he had replaced. Unlike Kennedy he had no schoolboy enthusiasms for special ops or covert warfare. Among the half-million photos of LBJ taken by the White House photographers – he was very vain – there are some with his head slumped down on his desk. In a recorded telephone conversation with McGeorge Bundy in May he said:
I’ll tell you . . . I just stayed awake last night thinking about this thing. The more I think of it, I don’t know what in the hell it looks to me like we’re getting into another Korea. It just worries the hell out of me . . . I don’t think it’s worth fighting for and I don’t think we can get out. And it’s just the biggest damn mess that I ever saw . . . I was looking at this sergeant of mine [his valet] this morning. Got six little old kids over there and he’s getting out my things and bringing in my night reading . . . and I just thought about ordering his kids in there and what in the hell am I ordering him out there for? What the hell is Vietnam worth to me? What is Laos worth to me? What is it worth to the country?
Bundy replied: ‘It is. It’s an awful mess.’ ‘Of course, if you start running from the Communists, they may just chase you right into your own kitchen,’ Johnson continued. ‘But this is a terrible thing that we’re getting ready to do.’ ‘Yeah, that’s the trouble,’ Bundy replied, ‘and that is what the rest of that half of the world is going to think if this thing comes apart on us . . . That’s exactly the dilemma.’10 Despite all the doubts, Bundy pressed ahead by commissioning target folders, for the magic bullet of bombing had its own momentum. And the ‘thing’ did indeed come apart.11
In Your Guts You Know He’s Nuts
Vietnam had a domestic political context, not exhausted by oppositional babyboomer students who by now were listening to ‘California Girls’, ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’, and ‘Stop! In the Name of Love’ by respectively the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones and the Supremes, should one care to remember. In reality, those most disillusioned with the war were the poor whites and poor blacks who had to fight it, not draft-dodging students. Johnson also faced threats from the Republican right and hawkish Democrats. Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate for the presidential election of 1964, answered the question what he would do in South-east Asia with: ‘I’d drop a low-yield atomic bomb on the Chinese supply lines in North Vietnam or maybe shell ’em with the Seventh Fleet.’ Democrat strategy was to depict him as a maniac, countering Goldwater’s slogan ‘In Your Heart You Know He’s Right’ with ‘In Your Guts You Know He’s Nuts.’12 But Johnson also simultaneously feared that the Kennedy clan would use weakness in Vietnam to launch a challenge within the Democrat Party. Against that backdrop came the Tonkin Gulf Incident.
On 2 August 1964, two covert US missions got their wires fatally crossed in the Gulf of Tonkin. The first was a raid by South Vietnamese commandos on islands off the North Vietnamese coast (OPLAN 34A, authorized by McNamara in December 1963). The second was a ‘DeSoto’ electronic-warfare operation involving the destroyer USS Maddox, whose tasks included identifying the positions of North Vietnamese radars as they lit up in response to the South Vietnamese raids. North Vietnamese torpedo boats, chasing the South Vietnamese intruders, naturally assumed that the Maddox – lurking ten miles from shore – was part and parcel of the same operation. When they attacked, Maddox returned fire, with planes from the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga joining in to cripple two enemy boats and sink a third. Washington ordered the Maddox to resume operations accompanied by the destroyer USS Turner Joy.
On 4 August initial reports from the two ships claimed they were under attack from North Vietnamese torpedo boats, having mistaken disturbances on sonar and radar screens on a stormy night for enemy ships. Even as the administration resolved on retaliatory air strikes against the torpedo-boat bases, urgent messages from the Maddox spoke of ‘freak weather effects’ and excitable radar and sonar operators. At the same time McNamara received decrypted North Vietnamese reports of an attack on US ships, but either failed or chose not to note that they referred to the attacks on 2 August rather than two days later.
The President knew instinctively what was going on: ‘It reminds me of the movies in Texas. You’re sitting next to a pretty girl and you have your hand on her ankle and nothing happens. And you move it up to her knee and nothing happens. You move it up further and you’re thinking about moving a bit more and all of a sudden you get slapped. I think we got slapped.’13 Nonetheless he authorized Operation Pierce Arrow, involving air strikes on the torpedo-boat bases and neighbouring oil-storage facilities at Vinh, which were deemed highly successful.14
Johnson seized the opportunity to secure a Congressional resolution authorizing him ‘to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attacks against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression’. This involved lying about what the Maddox was doing, and failing to mention the initial South Vietnamese commando raids to which the North Vietnamese were responding. Since a leak ensured that the press had already reported a second attack, there was no turning back. But that was judged a small price worth paying in what was a successful attempt to neutralize Goldwater, whose robust call to do what the administration was secretly planning to do was unfavourably contra
sted with Johnson’s apparently moderate and proportionate response to Communist aggression in international waters. After Johnson had won the greatest electoral landslide of modern times, domestic constraints on him were fewer, especially since stopping Communism in South Vietnam was massively popular with the public. Eight months after the incident, Johnson wryly conceded, ‘For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.’
At this point, the Chinese took a much keener interest in Vietnam, beyond the huge quantities of weapons they had supplied to Hanoi in the previous seven years. After the 1954 Geneva Accords they had advised North Vietnam to focus on socialist reconstruction rather than revolution in the South. This agenda changed because Mao saw the utility of miring the US in a conflict in South-east Asia, to distract it from the South China Seas and specifically what Mao was doing at Lop Nor in the Gobi Desert, where his technicians were developing a Chinese atomic bomb. Since Kennedy had vainly consulted Khrushchev about whether they could jointly destroy the site, Mao had good reasons to divert the Americans elsewhere. Vietnam was ideal for this purpose. Ostentatious support for North Vietnam would also promote China’s claims to be leading global revolution and draw attention away from the disastrous Great Leap Forward.
Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965 Page 57
