The Chairman

by Kai Bird

  It was these kinds of questions that concerned McCloy when he met his colleagues at the Council on Foreign Relations to discuss Vietnam. Many Council events in 1967–68 began to focus on Vietnam; men like Henry Cabot Lodge, the former ambassador to Saigon; Herman Kahn, the Rand Corporation war-games strategist; Robert G. K. Thompson, the British counterinsurgency specialist; Chester Cooper, a former CIA analyst and an aide to Averell Harriman; and Major General William G. DuPuy—all of whom in one way or another had been involved in the war—gave the Council off-the-record briefings that year. These discussions culminated in early December, when George Ball and William Bundy were invited to present their opposing views in two successive meetings. Ball belittled Vietnam’s strategic importance to the United States in a talk entitled “Viet-Nam from the Perspective of U.S. Global Responsibilities.” Bundy followed two days later with a speech emphasizing the “progress” made in achieving U.S. objectives in Vietnam. These sessions were well attended, and the questioning afterward was lively and pointed.141

  Out of these Council discussions, McCloy began, finally, to come to a few conclusions about Vietnam’s lessons for the rest of U.S. foreign policy. In early January 1968, he gave a speech in Chicago in which he cautiously criticized Washington’s “preoccupation with the frustrations of Vietnam.” Significantly, he chose to speak out publicly at a meeting of the Table Ronde, an elite group of some ninety European government officials, businessmen, and intellectuals: “I am prepared to admit that we seem to be overcommitted at the present time and perhaps in view of the uncertain and complicated world we face in the next decade, we should take a more modest view of our individual ability to shape the world. I am not prepared to debate the point as to where we should draw the line—certainly not to go into the problem of Vietnam. I have no doubt, however, that the line should include Western Europe.” The crisis in NATO, the withdrawal of France from the military alliance, the resurgence of “hoary” nationalisms—all these trends were undermining the West’s “sense of community in all of our international affairs.” If NATO should disappear, he warned, “The tensions which could, and probably would, arise under such circumstances might make the present tribulations in respect to Vietnam appear trivial.”142

  As cautious as these words may seem in retrospect, for McCloy to state publicly that the United States seemed “to be overcommitted” was a major signal that the war was finally causing the foreign-policy community to question the administration. Publications across the country, from The New York Times to the Los Angeles Times, noted the speech. In an editorial headlined “Disaffected Establishment,” the liberal Nation observed, “. . . McCloy is troubled by the overshadowing effect of the Vietnamese War on our role in Europe. . . . With no dovelike sentiments in their [the foreign-policy establishment’s] make-up, they see the United States overextended and would like us to revert to prudent policy in the Pacific.”143

  Harriman, impatient with his efforts to nudge Johnson toward a negotiated settlement, wrote McCloy to applaud him for putting in a plug for NATO: “It’s well that people realize where the center of power in the world resides and our fundamental interests.”144 Two weeks later, on the very eve of the Tet holidays in Vietnam, Harriman complained to his old friend, “I wish you would take a hand in settling Vietnam. It’s a frustrating business.”145

  On January 30, 1968, Johnson was sitting in on his regular Tuesday luncheon meeting with his closest advisers when the phone rang at 2:33 P.M. Walt Rostow took the call on the kitchen phone and listened quietly to an urgent dispatch from Saigon. When he got off the phone, he turned to the president and reported, “We are being mortared heavily in Saigon. The Presidential Palace and BOQ’s [bachelor officers’ quarters] are being hit.”146 The Viet Cong had brought the war to the doors of the U.S. Embassy. Just minutes earlier, a team of nineteen Viet Cong sappers had blown a hole in the wall surrounding the embassy compound in Saigon. After rushing inside, they took up positions inside the courtyard in front of the chancellory and for the next six hours pounded the building with rockets and machine-gun fire. The suicide attack ended at 9:15 A.M., when all nineteen men were killed or wounded. But that was only the beginning. Within twenty-four hours, the Viet Cong had struck thirty-six of forty-four provincial capitals and five out of six of the country’s largest cities. They actually seized the ancient city of Hue and occupied it for the next three weeks. Altogether, the Tet Offensive cost the United States eleven hundred killed. The South Vietnamese lost twenty-three hundred soldiers and an estimated 12,500 civilians. One million new refugees were created, and for a time the country appeared on the verge of collapse. The Viet Cong had hoped that their attacks would precipitate a civilian uprising. This did not happen. Instead, the enemy suffered as many as forty thousand battle deaths; the Viet Cong regular units were so decimated that in the future the North Vietnamese would have to bear the brunt of the war.

  Most Americans could not believe what had happened. Walter Cron-kite exclaimed, “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning the war.”147 McCloy was not so much shocked as depressed by this turn of events. Five days into the Tet Offensive, he called up his old friend Lewis L. Strauss and said he was so “blue” that he needed to commiserate with a “kindred spirit.” The moral fiber of his fellow Americans, he complained, seemed to have deteriorated, a trend he blamed on the media. The war was bad enough, but the film clips of the war shown on television “day after day placed the worst possible complexion on our troops and their conduct in that country.” He and Strauss agreed that the worst part of the whole mess was not the war itself but the “loss of prestige” at home and abroad.148 America’s credibility as a global power seemed to be evaporating.

  Lyndon Johnson was determined to avoid a collapse in Saigon. He immediately ordered an additional 10,500 men to Vietnam and instructed Westmoreland that if he needed more troops he should ask for them. This led quickly to a Wheeler-Westmoreland request for an additional 206,000 troops. Wheeler reported that Tet had been a “very near thing,” and that without a major escalation on the ground the war might be lost.149

  This request shocked the president’s closest advisers and precipitated a full-scale review of the administration’s war plans. In early March 1968, Clark Clifford, who had replaced McNamara, persuaded Johnson that he had to reject Westmoreland’s request for another major escalation. Events then moved very quickly. On March 12, Senator Eugene McCarthy rocked the country by unexpectedly winning 42 percent of the New Hampshire Democratic primary for president. Four days later, an even more formidable challenger, Senator Robert Kennedy, declared his own candidacy for the presidency. The mood of the country had dramatically changed.

  Some of the president’s advisers—Walt Rostow and Dean Rusk in particular—still urged him to “hang in there.”150 But by the third week of March, Clifford was arguing for a methodical de-escalation of the war. Johnson was still undecided when Clifford suggested that the “Wise Men” be brought in for yet another consultation. Johnson agreed, and so another series of briefings were held for a group of the “elder statesmen” on the war. McCloy was again not invited for this session on March 26, 1968—even though he had been in Washington the previous day to see Harriman.151

  Johnson already knew that McCloy—and Lovett, for that matter—were tired of the war and would only complain that it had distracted the administration from the much more serious problems of Europe and NATO.152 But he also knew that McCloy and Lovett had no idea how to end the war. Besides, the president stubbornly refused to abandon his ultimate goal, telling a group of businessmen on March 17, “We shall and we are going to win.”153 He fully expected the other “Wise Men”— including such hawks as Acheson, Arthur Dean, Cabot Lodge, and Omar Bradley—to reject Clifford’s arguments for a de-escalation. He was wrong. To his surprise, a majority announced that they favored an immediate de-escalation of the conflict. Mac Bundy told the president that he had expected slow and steady progress from their briefings the previous N
ovember.154 Instead, the CIA’s George Carver had given them a gloomy assessment of the post-Tet situation. Despite their heavy losses, the North Vietnamese were prepared to match whatever force levels the United States committed to the war.155 Acheson bluntly concluded that the United States could “no longer do the job we set out to do in the time we have left and we must begin to take steps to disengage.”156 Only a few of the standard hard-liners favored another escalation. General Maxwell Taylor couldn’t explain why his colleagues had changed their minds, except perhaps that “my Council on Foreign Relations friends were living in the cloud of The New York Times.”157

  Johnson was shocked and embittered by this betrayal. “The establishment bastards have bailed out,” he muttered after the “Wise Men” had filed out.158 Still, he knew these to be “steady and balanced” men. “If they had been so deeply influenced by the reports of the Tet offensive,” he later wrote in his memoirs, “what must the average citizen in the country be thinking?”159 So, five days later, he went on television to make the dramatic announcement that he would not seek a second term in office. He said he wished to avoid “the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year” and concentrate on bringing peace to Vietnam. The bombing of North Vietnam would stop above the 20th parallel. Averell Harriman was designated his personal representative in any future peace talks. In retrospect, one sees that Johnson’s speech signaled not a change of strategy but a change in tactics. All he had abandoned was the tactic of gradual escalation, not the goal of an independent South Vietnam. As Hanoi’s representatives to the Paris peace talks soon learned, unless they negotiated a cease-fire in place, leaving the Thieu-Ky regime intact, the war would continue. Only from now on, the South Vietnamese would be forced to shoulder a larger and larger share of the combat. “Vietnamization” had begun.160

  This was a solution to which McCloy had no objection. As long as the conflict did not continue to escalate and drain resources and attention away from Europe, he remained publicly silent. In the years to come, McCloy would have nothing to do with the war. Nor, however, did he do anything to stop what Lew Douglas called “one of the craziest, maddest adventures this country has ever embarked upon.”161 Indeed, in contrast to Douglas and many of his other friends, including Walter Lippmann, his attitude was cool and unemotional. Lippmann had come to the conclusion that “decent people could no longer support the war.”162 But whereas the elderly columnist wrote impassioned pieces on the immorality of the war, McCloy confined his reservations to geopolitical arguments.

  It has become commonplace to observe that Vietnam destroyed the Establishment. This judgment is too easy. The influence of men like McCloy continued unabated. The war polarized the nation, and the bipartisan consensus on foreign-policy issues broke down for a time. But this was a temporary phenomenon; in any case, the Establishment itself had been first ambivalent, then divided over the war. The commitment to Vietnam was never important to the Establishment except as a symbol of America’s willingness to fight the Cold War anywhere and everywhere.

  McCloy had refused Johnson’s pleadings to be his “proconsul” in Saigon, and yet, when asked to approve the major intervention of 1965, had gone along with the policy. In the crucial two years that followed, the “Wise Men” never seriously questioned Johnson’s gradual escalation of the American commitment into a major ground war. Should they have known better? McCloy, Lovett, Ball, Acheson, Clifford, and others repeatedly demonstrated that they were aware of the folly of fighting a war on the Asian mainland. But that was an abstract notion. In practice, they could not condone a defeat to an American commitment of military strength. They deferred too easily to the assessments of the military professionals. And with few exceptions, the generals kept saying that this war of attrition was being won. In the words of Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann, who had arrived in Vietnam in 1962, it was all a “bright, shining lie.”163

  McCloy insisted for a long time that there could be no turning back. In the end, he brought himself to question the war publicly only when it threatened America’s standing in Europe. He did not openly question the administration’s war goals, only the country’s capacity for waging this war. Johnson was poorly served by such ambivalent counsel.

  In McCloy’s view, there were more strategic regions of the world than Vietnam, and one of them was the oil-rich Middle East. Throughout the 1960s, he had regularly brought his oil-company clients down to Washington to exchange information with the government. In the spring of 1967, shortly after concluding his negotiations with the Germans over NATO’s troubles, he turned his attention to a growing crisis between Egypt and Israel. Relations with Egypt had soured since his 1964 trip. In response to the lobbying efforts of McCloy, Harriman, and others, Congress had agreed to resume shipments of foreign aid food grains to Egypt, stipulating that Nasser would have to renegotiate the wheat deal every six months. Not surprisingly, Nasser resented this calculated effort to keep him on a short leash. In an effort to counter this pressure from the West, he resumed negotiations with the Kremlin for shipments of Soviet arms and wheat, and simultaneously allowed Palestinian resistance fighters greater freedom to launch guerrilla attacks on Israel from Egyptian-occupied Gaza. Similar border raids from the Syrian Golan Heights had led to Israeli retaliation.

  By the spring of 1967, tensions had so escalated that the region seemed headed for war. Challenged by the Syrians to support them against the Israeli retaliations in the Golan, Nasser ordered Egyptian Army units into the Sinai desert and closed the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping. The Israelis then ordered a general mobilization. Late in May 1967, McCloy called Harriman to say that he was “worried.” What was Washington doing to prevent a war that could jeopardize U.S. access to Arab oil? Harriman confessed that the administration hadn’t been able to give this “vital” region the attention it deserved.164 Two weeks later, McCloy’s fears were realized when the Israelis launched a surprise attack against Egypt. Syria and Jordan soon joined in the war, but within six days the Israelis had conquered the entire Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and a good portion of the Golan Heights.

  This humiliating defeat led Egypt, Syria, and most other Arab states to break off diplomatic relations with Washington. In the weeks following the war, some twenty-four thousand American expatriates—businessmen, diplomats, and their dependents—were thrown out of the Middle East.165 Anti-American demonstrations swept the Arab world, and brief strikes occurred in the Arabian oil fields. American interests in the region had never been in such jeopardy. Believing it important to maintain some informal channels of communication, the Johnson administration decided to encourage a number of American businessmen with corporate ties to the Arab world to visit the region from time to time. Soon after the war, Assistant Secretary of State for Near-Eastern Affairs Lucius “Luke” Battle persuaded David Rockefeller, Robert B. Anderson (Eisenhower’s Treasury secretary), James Linen (a Time-Life officer), and McCloy to make periodic visits to the region.

  McCloy already had business reasons to go to the Middle East. Both Chase Manhattan Bank and the Allied Chemical Co., of which McCloy was a board director, had significant investments in Iran. Chase had made an investment in a local development corporation, and Allied had recently signed a $ 173-million contract to build five chemical plants. But in the winter of 1968, McCloy learned from Allied’s president, John Connor, that the project was in trouble. Cost overruns of $20–25 million might force Allied to eliminate two of the five projected plants. The Iranians were beginning to level “accusations of bad faith. . . .”166 In addition, the American oil consortium in Iran, which included a number of McCloy’s clients, was facing increasing pressures from the shah to raise its offtake of oil in order to finance the regime’s ambitious development budget.

  So, in March 1968, he flew out to the region, accompanied by George Ballou, the head of Standard Oil of California (SOCAL). They allotted three weeks to visit Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt.167 So, on the day Lyn
don Johnson announced his decision not to run for a second term, McCloy was being driven from Teheran to the shah’s palace on the Caspian Sea. He arrived at noon and found the shah dismayed by the news. The Iranian monarch said he hoped the president’s decision did not foreshadow a “shirking” of Washington’s “key responsibilities in Vietnam” and elsewhere. This, he warned McCloy, eould lead to a “loss of faith in U.S. commitments. . . .”168

  McCloy nodded his agreement and then listened patiently as the monarch went through a familiar litany of complaints about British misbehavior in the Persian Gulf, the Saudis and the Arab Emirates on the Trucial Coast. When the lecture was done, McCloy got down to business. He urged him to demonstrate a bit of statesmanship himself. Iran was a “big progressive country” and the shah a “respected leader who could afford to be big in dealing with his neighbors.” As such, he should “collaborate” with the Saudis. McCloy warned that it was “particularly important to Iran that there be no rupture with the West, meaning the oil companies.” This point was critical. In this and further conversations with the shah’s prime minister, McCloy explicitly identified the oil companies with Western interests. There could be no relationship with Washington if the shah failed to maintain his deal with the oil companies.169

  The oil companies, of course, did not wish to increase Iran’s royalties or production quota; either measure would harm their relationship with other producing countries and disrupt markets. But McCloy could see that the Iranian ruler’s dream of turning his country into a modern military and economic power would someday require greatly increased oil revenues. His assignment from the oil companies was to postpone any such reckoning. The companies’ argument against a unilateral attempt by the producers to alter oil production rates and pricing was the threat of a withdrawal of political support from Washington.