For LBJ, who graduated from Southwest Texas State Teachers College at San Marcos, men like Bundy stirred up mixed feelings—awe and disdain, respect and insecurity. It wasn’t just that his own educational status paled by comparison. The president also worried about the personal loyalty of Bundy and other key staff and cabinet members from elite economic and educational backgrounds. Johnson suspected that “the Harvards” in his administration remained more loyal to the Kennedys than to him. That concern was especially galling to a president who expected his aides to be so faithful they were willing “to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses.”
So LBJ was always testing Bundy and relished opportunities to make him squirm. One time the president ordered the national security adviser into the bathroom to continue a conversation while he, the commander in chief, was sitting on the toilet. To preserve some remnant of privacy, Bundy entered the bathroom and turned his back. The president loved to tell people what happened next. With Bundy turned away, LBJ said, “Mac, I can’t hear you, get closer.” The adviser would not turn around and face the defecating president. So, with his back still turned, Bundy shuffled backward toward the toilet, “one rickety step at a time.” The president thought it was hilarious.
The stories from Pleiku gave LBJ more material. To Bundy’s face he said, “They made a believer out of you, didn’t they? A little fire will do that.” To other aides, the president was more demeaning: Did you hear about Bundy out there in Vietnam? He was like the preacher’s son who went to a whorehouse. They asked him afterward how it was and he said, “It’s really good. I don’t know what it is, but I like it.” LBJ relished the idea that his priggish Harvard security adviser had sampled the sting of battle and returned home acting a bit more like a “believer.” It was as if Bundy had lost his virginity and there was no turning back. No more mincing of words. Mac Bundy was on board. The man whom LBJ once accused of being a “sissy” for liking tennis—“a girl’s game”—somehow seemed a bit more manly. But underneath all the bullying and teasing was Johnson’s own profound insecurity, much of it now focused on the maddening war in Vietnam. He needed his advisers to assure him that his military escalations were absolutely necessary and unavoidable.
For in truth, the president was no more a true “believer” in the Vietnam War than his major advisers. He needed as much bucking up as anyone. Almost a year earlier, on May 27, 1964, Johnson got Bundy on the phone. The president sounded like a man on the way to his own funeral:
Looks like to me that we’re getting into another Korea. It just worries the hell out of me. I don’t see what we can ever hope to get out of there with once we’re committed. . . . I don’t think we can fight them 10,000 miles away from home and ever get anywhere . . . 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 . . . what in the hell am I ordering [those kids] out there for? What the hell is Vietnam worth to me? . . . What is it worth to this country? . . . It’s damned easy to get in a war, but it’s going to be awfully hard to ever extricate yourself if you get in.
But then LBJ reversed himself, as he often did when talking about Vietnam. Not worth fighting, yes, but what a disaster if you pulled out. “If you start running from the Communists, they may just chase you right into your own kitchen.” At that point, he could always count on Bundy (or Robert McNamara or Dean Rusk or Walt Rostow) to jump in and agree, echoing back the reassurance LBJ wanted and sometimes demanded. Yes, Mr. President, that would be unthinkable, a disaster indeed.
With domestic policy, Johnson had far greater confidence. With good reason. He was a legislative master. In the same years he made his tortured decisions to escalate the war, he presided with great assurance and single-mindedness over the greatest tidal wave of domestic legislation in U.S. history. His vision of the Great Society at home seemed almost limitless. He announced it by pledging “an end to poverty and racial injustice.” And that, he said, “was just the beginning.”
By contrast, Johnson’s foreign policy was guided less by a grand vision of American empire than by deep and persistent anxiety that its failures might tarnish all his achievements. The greatest failure LBJ could imagine would be to lose a country to Communism, especially one he had pledged to protect. He was sure he would be ruthlessly attacked not just by Republican hawks like Barry Goldwater, but even by Democrats like Bobby Kennedy.
Those fears may have been based on a distorted view of America’s rapidly changing political culture. Perhaps, after his landslide victory in 1964, Johnson could have pulled out of Vietnam and successfully defended the decision. Perhaps, as George Kennan testified to the Fulbright committee in 1966, withdrawal would have created a mere “six months’ sensation” and then be forgotten. Perhaps, if LBJ had withdrawn from Vietnam, he might have maintained enough popular support to gain reelection in 1968. All of that is unknowable. What we do know is that he was not about to “lose” South Vietnam.
Down to his bones, Johnson remembered the political blows Democrats had suffered with the “loss” of China to Communism in 1949. When Mao Tse-tung’s revolutionary forces took control of that massive country and drove Chiang Kai-shek clear off the mainland, Republicans held President Harry Truman and the Democrats accountable. It did no good to say that China was not ours to “lose,” or that Chiang was too unpopular, dictatorial, and corrupt to be “saved.” Republicans kept banging the drum: “Who lost China?” Much of the media banged away as well. Henry Luce, a crucial member of the “China Lobby,” had championed the anti-Communist Chiang since the 1920s. Before the 1949 revolution, Chiang Kai-shek had appeared on the cover of Luce’s Time magazine nine times.
When Mao triumphed, the “loss of China” became a major focal point of McCarthyite witch hunters. Surely, they claimed, Americans must have been responsible for the Communist victory, Americans in high government positions who not only stood passively by as China fell—damning enough—but actively aided and abetted the Communists. These charges were unproven, but they nonetheless caused a major purge within the State Department’s Office of Far Eastern Affairs. Many of the government’s most informed experts on Asia were fired, reassigned, or forced to resign—men like John Carter Vincent (reassigned to Switzerland and Tangier, then forced to resign), John Paton Davies (sent to Peru and then fired), O. Edmund Clubb (fired as a loyalty risk, rehired after a successful appeal, and then reassigned to such an obscure historical division he quit), and John Stewart Service (fired, reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1957, but assigned to Liverpool and denied promotion, leading him to resign). All of these “China hands,” and many other Asia experts whose careers were damaged or destroyed by the Red Scare purges of the 1950s, might well have pushed for alternative policies in Southeast Asia in the years ahead. They understood the power and appeal of anticolonial, revolutionary nationalism and the risks of allying with unpopular forces that had collaborated with Western powers.
By the early 1960s, one lesson that might have been drawn from the fallout over the loss of China was that many valuable experts had been unjustly scapegoated and that now, more than ever, it was time to draw upon just such people to help formulate policies in Southeast Asia—time to listen to people who had lived in the region and understood its languages, history, and culture. But LBJ and his advisers drew an entirely different lesson. For them, the loss of China meant one thing only: Any sign of weakness in the Cold War struggle with Communism would be politically fatal.
Johnson did not need reminding, but Mac Bundy did his best to reinforce the lesson. “Most Americans,” he advised LBJ in 1964, believed we “could and should have done more” to prevent “the fall of China” in 1949. Vietnam, he added, was ripe for a repeat. “That is exactly what would happen now if we should seem to be the first to quit in Saigon.”
Notice Bundy’s hedging. He does not say that withdrawal from Vietnam would doom LBJ’s political future, onl
y that he should not “seem to be the first to quit.” What matters most is that people believe LBJ has done “more” to prevent a Communist victory in Vietnam than was done in China. The justice or effectiveness of the policy is secondary.
Even before Bundy saw the blood-streaked barracks at Pleiku on February 7, 1965, he and McNamara had drafted a pro-escalation memo for the president. Current policy, they argued, would only lead to a “disastrous defeat” in which the United States would have to withdraw in “humiliating circumstances. . . . Bob and I believe that the worst course of action is to continue in this essentially passive role.”
On the plane home from Pleiku, Bundy completed the draft of a thirteen-page memo. When he landed in Washington, he went directly to the White House and delivered it to the president at 11:00 p.m., the end of a thirty-six-hour day. “The situation in Vietnam is deteriorating and without new U.S. action defeat appears inevitable.” He referred to South Vietnam as a “patient” approaching death. The South Vietnamese government displayed a “distressing absence of positive commitment to any serious social and political purpose.” By contrast, the Viet Cong demonstrated an “energy and persistence” that was “astonishing. . . . They have accepted extraordinary losses and they come back for more.”
The United States must act quickly and do so with force. A negotiated withdrawal would only lead to “surrender on the installment plan.” Thus, the next step should be to begin the continual bombing of North Vietnam. Bundy called it “a policy of sustained reprisal”—a classic example of the kind of icy, sterile, technocratic euphemism that characterized so much of the language of American war-making in Vietnam. “Sustained reprisal” suggested that the systematic bombing of North Vietnam was merely a form of ongoing retaliation, as if the Vietnamese had always been, and would continue to be, the hostile provocateur, despite the fact that the United States initiated aggression against North Vietnam.
Even among themselves, in top secret memoranda like Bundy’s, policymakers used a bloodless, empty language as if they were trying to persuade each other that they were not actually engaged in war. Bundy preferred to call it a “contest” in which the United States used “air and naval action.” When Bundy quit his post a year later, he told people he was frustrated that LBJ had not been more candid with the public about the means and aims of the war. Yet in Bundy’s own major 1965 recommendation, he advised the president to “execute our reprisal policy with as low a level of public noise as possible.” LBJ followed the advice. As the massive, daily bombing of North Vietnam began—Operation Rolling Thunder—the president told the media that it did not represent a change in U.S. policy.
Remarkably, Bundy had no faith that bombing would break the will or capacity of North Vietnam to wage war. At best, it might only give a psychological boost to the South Vietnamese regime and its supporters. It might be a “stimulant” that would “encourage” southerners to build a “more effective government.” In other words, the United States was bombing the North to buck up the South.
Then Bundy concedes that even this limited goal may not be achievable. Bombing might utterly fail.
We cannot assert that a policy of sustained reprisal will succeed in changing the course of the contest in Vietnam. It may fail, and we cannot estimate the odds of success with any accuracy—they may be somewhere between 25% and 75%.
But, even more shocking, Bundy says the outcome of bombing doesn’t matter.
What we can say is that even if it fails, the policy will be worth it. At a minimum it will damp down the charge that we did not do all that we could have done, and this charge will be important in many countries, including our own.
In plain English, what is Bundy saying? Bombing may not work, but it will be good for our image. It will make us look tough and resolute. It will show that we are willing to stand by our commitments, even if we can’t fulfill them. It will be a kind of malpractice insurance policy. We can say that we were the “good doctor.” We did everything possible to keep the patient alive. The patient may die, but our reputation will survive.
Of course Bundy is not recommending extreme medical treatment to save a dying patient; he is recommending lethal violence to kill people. He is recommending a policy that will launch the United States into a major war on the grounds that it might give a shot of confidence to the failing South Vietnamese government and would at least allow U.S. policymakers to look tough. But we don’t hear the voice of “Field Marshal” Bundy, the true believer. We hear instead the dead language of the accountant, offering a cost-benefit analysis of America’s reputation: “Measured against the cost of defeat in Vietnam, this program [war] seems cheap. And even if it fails to turn the tide—and it may—the value of the effort seems to us to exceed its cost.” The unstated, but implicit, bottom line was this: Mr. President, you need to bomb to win the next election.
Bombing failed on every count. Far from weakening the will of the North and the Viet Cong in the South, it deepened their resolve and incited others to join the anti-American cause; it did not “stimulate” the Saigon regime, it made it all the more dependent on the United States; it did not protect America’s reputation or that of the administration, it led to bitter opposition to the U.S. war at home and abroad. And even in the narrowest political terms it was a colossal failure. LBJ’s war had made him so unpopular that, far from being reelected in 1968, he—the master politician—dropped out of the presidential race before it even began in earnest.
Johnson ordered Operation Rolling Thunder, even though he had as little hope as Bundy that it would break the will of Ho Chi Minh and his followers. As he said to Bundy, “Ol’ Ho isn’t gonna give in to any airplanes.” That same conclusion had already poured in from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) at the State Department. Bombing would not destroy either the will or the ability of the Communists to continue fighting.
So why was Bundy so sure that the “cost” of bombing was “cheap” even if it failed? The best answer comes from some personal notes he made on March 21, 1965, in which he addresses his own reservations about the U.S. interest in Vietnam. “Is our interest economic?” he asks himself. “Obviously not. . . . Is our interest military? Not really . . . even a bad result would be marginal.” He even wonders if the U.S. political interest is “real or fancied?” He does not even mention an interest in helping South Vietnam. But, as always, Bundy returns to what he regarded as the “cardinal” principle of U.S. policy in Vietnam: “not to be a Paper Tiger. Not to have it thought that when we commit ourselves we really mean no major risk.” For Bundy, “the whole game” boiled down to avoiding the perception that the United States roared like a tiger but never fought like one. “Which is better,” he asks himself, “to ‘lose’ now or to ‘lose’ after committing 100,000 men?” His “tentative answer” is that it would be better to lose after waging a significant war.
Just a few weeks later, Bundy was at it again, scribbling a defense of the war, this time not to himself, but in an eleven-page letter to the editor of the Harvard Crimson. As dean at Harvard in the mid-1950s he had once faced questions from Crimson editors David Halberstam and A. J. “Jack” Langguth, who later reported on the Vietnam War for the New York Times. Bundy clearly had a pressing need to justify the war to his former colleagues and students.
In his letter to the Crimson, Bundy did not concede that the war might fail (as he had privately to LBJ). But he did stress the importance of demonstrating American toughness. “We are not paper tigers,” he wrote, “and it would be a very great danger to the peace of all the world if we should carelessly let it be thought that we are. This is the lesson that we learned in failure and redeemed in triumph by John F. Kennedy over Cuba.”
Another history lesson? Realities within Vietnam were never enough to justify our presence, even to those who supported the war. The justification was always linked to America’s global power and prestige, and an ongo
ing effort to redeem perceived failures from other times and places—the failure to stand up to Hitler at Munich in 1938, the failure to prevent the loss of China in 1949, the failure of France to crush Ho Chi Minh’s forces in 1954, and the failure to overthrow Castro in 1961. A failure to fight in Vietnam, Bundy argues, would actually endanger world peace because it could tempt the Communist powers to risk a more horrific war in the future. Cold warriors routinely invoked that public specter to galvanize support for the war in Vietnam, a war that seemed, on its own terms, irrelevant to U.S. national security. If we aren’t willing to spill blood in places like Vietnam, they argued, Communist nations will judge us a paper tiger, a weak bluffer. And so they will become bolder, take greater risks, expand their power, encourage and support Communist revolution in more and more places, until eventually the United States might be faced not with a limited war in Southeast Asia but a far greater war, perhaps one that would challenge its very existence.
But how, exactly, had the United States failed and then triumphed “over” Cuba and what did that have to do with Vietnam? Bundy is referring to the Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961 (a “failure”) and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 (a “triumph”). The invasion plan was hatched by the CIA shortly after Castro took power in 1959. The Agency began recruiting a small group of anti-Communist Cuban exiles, mostly living in Florida, and sent them to Guatemala for paramilitary training. Once it got presidential approval, the CIA planned to ship the fourteen hundred men to the shores of Cuba. There they would slip into the mountains and organize an uprising that would bring down Castro and reclaim Cuba as a pro-American bastion. To CIA director Allen Dulles and chief strategist Richard Bissell, it seemed a plausible plan. After all, the CIA had successfully orchestrated coups against popular leaders in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954). And in 1956, Castro himself had traveled to Cuba from Mexico in a small ship with his brother Raul, Che Guevara, and a tiny force of some eighty revolutionaries. The small band of survivors took to the mountains to organize the people and three years later they marched triumphantly into Havana. Why not use Castro’s own methods to bring him down?
American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity Page 10
