The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  Johnson reported to the President that Communism must be and could be stopped in Southeast Asia (“The battle against Communism must be joined in Southeast Asia with strength and determination to achieve success there”) and that even Vietnam could be saved (“if we move quickly and wisely. We must have a coordination of purpose in our country team, diplomatic and military. The most important thing is imaginative, creative American management of our military aid program”). It was a fine example of the hardening American view of the time, looking at Vietnam through the prism of American experience, American needs and American capacities. American purpose with Americans doing the right things could affect the destinies of these people. The Vietnamese were secondary, a small and unimportant people waiting to be told what to do by wiser, more subtle foreigners. If it was one more example of the can-do syndrome, it was similarly to stand as an example of the dangers of the game of commitment. Kennedy had sent Johnson to Vietnam as a sign of good will, as a means of reassuring a weak and unsatisfactory government of his commitment; the lasting effect, however, was not on the client state but on the proprietor, and in this case, most importantly, on the messenger himself, Lyndon Johnson; he had given our word. It not only committed the Kennedy Administration more deeply to Diem and Vietnam, attached Washington a little more firmly to the tar baby of Saigon, escalated the rhetoric, but it committed the person of Lyndon Johnson. To him, a man’s word was important. He himself was now committed both to the war and to Diem personally.

  There was a special irony to the game of commitment as it was played with South Vietnam, great verbal reassurance in lieu of real military support, for that was exactly how South Vietnam had been created, an attempt to strengthen a military-political position on the cheap. Instead of intervening directly in the French Indochina war, the United States had decided that the benefits were not worth the risks; then, later, after the Geneva Agreement in 1954, the United States had tried to get the same end result, an anti-Communist nation on the border of Asian Communism, again with others doing the real work for us.

  The Americans who were wary of the French colonial war had seen their reservations pushed aside by the fall of China in 1949 and the coming of increased domestic political pressures against any similar signs of weakness. Gradually the war had in our eyes gone from being a colonial war, to a war fought by the West against international Communism. At the same time the Americans began to underwrite it financially in 1950. But this brought little change. The Vietminh were scarcely affected by Washington’s will and dollars, and by 1954 the Americans were more committed to the cause in Indochina than an exhausted France. At that time the question arose of whether to intervene on behalf of the French—only American intervention could keep the French in. President Eisenhower decided against it, saying in effect that Vietnam was not worth the military commitment. The creation of South Vietnam, a fragile country in which few had any real hopes, followed Geneva, more as an afterthought than anything else.

  Four years of American aid, half a billion dollars a year, had had little effect on the war. It raised the level of violence, and for a time it raised the hopes of the French military, at precisely the same time that French popular support was dwindling. It had once been a centrist political war in France, but by 1954 both extremes, the left and the right, were gaining in the National Assembly. After eight years it was a dying cause; moral views of the struggle began to follow battlefield failure. The pressure from the French for overt American military aid had been growing in 1953, and it soon became more intense. The French command, frustrated by the hit-and-run engagements with an adversary who was all-too-often invisible, had in early 1954 devised a trap which it intended to spring on an unsuspecting enemy. Since the Vietnamese, as General Marcel Le Carpentier had said, did not have colonels and generals and would not understand a sophisticated war, it would be easy to fool them. The idea was to use a French garrison as bait at an outpost in the highlands, have the Vietminh seize on it for a set-piece battle and mass their forces around it. Then when the Vietminh forces were massed, the French would strike, crush the enemy who had so long eluded them, and gain a major political and psychological victory, just as peace talks were starting in Geneva. The name of the post where the trap was to be sprung was Dienbienphu.

  With the kind of arrogance that Western generals could still retain after eight years of fighting a great infantry like the Vietminh, the French built their positions in the valley and left the high ground to the Vietminh, a move which violated the first cardinal rule of warfare: always take the high ground. An American officer who visited the site just before the battle noticed this and asked what would happen if the Vietminh had artillery. Ah, he was assured by a French officer, they had no artillery, and even if they did, they would not know how to use it. But they did have artillery and they did know how to use it. On the first night of the battle the French artillery commander, shouting “It is all my fault, it is all my fault,” committed suicide by throwing himself on a grenade. Westerners always learned the hard way in Indochina; respect for the enemy always came when it was too late.

  French domestic support had been ebbing daily and this finished it; the garrison, however, was trapped, and day by day as the Vietminh pounded the French defenders, pressure grew for the Americans to enter the war and save the gallant French. Significantly, as was to happen eleven years later, the original idea was only partial intervention, not really to take over the French war and supplant the French on the ground, but simply to rescue the garrison. Use a little air power. Bombing alone would do it. The rationale was made as limited as possible, and again, as would happen later, it was given under crisis-panic conditions. Naturally, the French found allies in the American government anxious to involve this country in their war, a war which over the last three years was no longer seen in the United States as a colonial war, but now, more conveniently, as part of a global struggle against Communism.

  In the high levels of the American government there were at least two people who wanted to go and bomb the Vietminh and rescue the garrison. The first was Admiral Arthur W. Radford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had become a zealot of air power. Radford was one of the architects, perhaps the chief architect, of the Eisenhower Administration’s New Look policies: the bigger bang for the buck, and a belief that air power, and carrier-based air power with nuclear weapons or perhaps simply the threat of nuclear weapons, would determine the global balance. A new and glistening and yet inexpensive Pax Americana—what could be better? The other Chiefs thought that it had all come about when Eisenhower made his famed campaign promise to go to Korea. He and Dulles had picked up Radford in Honolulu, where the admiral made the case for the new policies which would bring air power to its zenith at a cut-rate price and which would spare American lives; the kind of dirty war that was being fought in Korea would never have to be fought again, particularly in Asia, where the hordes and hordes of yellow people made a good old-fashioned land war untenable. Under the New Look the budget would be cut, but we would be as powerful, perhaps more powerful than ever. Dulles was of course enthusiastic, it fit in with his view of the U.S. role in the world, particularly of playing a greater role in Asia.

  So the New Look became policy; much to the chagrin of the United States Army, West Point’s most illustrious graduate was cutting back the Army’s roles and missions. Radford, a man of force, conviction and forthrightness, was then a Chief whose military policies had become Administration political policies; they were, some thought, more theoretical than realistic. Now with the garrison trapped at Dienbienphu, Radford was ready; it was his first chance to test the New Look, and he was eager to go. One good solid air strike at the attackers, and that would do it. There was, in his presentation, very little emphasis on what would happen if the air strikes did not work. Like many high Air Force supporters and converts, he believed in the invincibility of his weapon; Army officers were rarely so convinced.

  The second figure who ostensibly wanted
to go in was Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. The word “ostensibly” is used here because while there was no doubt about Radford’s real desire, there is some doubt about Dulles’; the public and the private Dulleses were not always the same thing. He was a moralist, if anything even more Wilsonian than Acheson, a true hard-liner. Despite all the campaign oratory of Democratic failures, he believed that Acheson had succeeded in Europe but that he had failed in two areas: holding the line in Asia and dealing with the Congress. In order to seek an accommodation with the Congress he would, in fact, appease it by opening the doors of his Department to the security people, offering his Asian experts to them, small concessions really, firing John Paton Davies as a minor human sacrifice, though he knew that Davies was above reproach.

  Eager to mold history to his whims, Dulles was quick to talk about the evils of Communism, particularly Asian Communism, particularly the evil Chinese Communists. Bedell Smith, his Undersecretary, would tell friends, “Dulles is still dreaming his fancy about reactivating the civil war in China.” Yet there was sometimes a degree of flexibility to him in private which contrasted with the soaring arrogant moralism of his public statements (questioned about this, he would smile and tell friends that he had not been the highest paid corporation counsel in New York for nothing; he knew how and when to deal). Just how much he wanted to go into Indochina is still in doubt; perhaps he was more interested in making the case for going in, and thus put the burden for the failure to intervene on allies and the Congress. This would be a division of responsibility (as Acheson had not shared responsibility on China). They did, after all, have to live up to their rhetoric.

  Eisenhower himself was more than ambivalent. He had been elected as a peace candidate, for one thing, and he was particularly reluctant to get into a land war in Asia; he had been elected in large part because of national fatigue with just such an enterprise. While considerable evidence exists that some members of his Administration wanted to go in, there is very little evidence that Eisenhower shared their view and used the full force of his personality and the weight of his office to convince legislative and bureaucratic doubters. If anything, the reverse is true: he activated all those around him, let them make their case (their case being destructive to the idea of intervention), and sat like a judge.

  When Eisenhower was running for President in 1952, he had moved first to consolidate his position within his newly adopted political party and establish rapport with the more conservative Republicans headed by Taft. Taft was embittered by the Korean War, not because he thought it was the wrong war, but because he felt that Truman had usurped the powers of the Congress. During the 1952 campaign Eisenhower had again and again pledged that he would consult with the legislative branch, that he would return the Congress to its proper place in decision making. In addition, he had been extremely critical of the war itself. “If there must be war,” he said during the campaign, “let it be Asians against Asians with our support on the side of freedom.” So Eisenhower was committed to genuine consultations and he was also against land wars in Asia. At the same time, he belonged to a party which had come to power exploiting the issue of anti-Communism and the failure to hold the line against the Communists, particularly in Asia. Now, with pressure mounting for intervention in Vietnam, he was caught in something of a dilemma. The party lines were already being drawn; perhaps Red-baiting would be a two-way street. (Thruston Morton, then an Assistant Secretary of State for Congressional Relations, would recall coming out of a House session at the time and overhearing Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., say to James Richards, “The damn Republicans blamed us for losing China and now we can blame them for losing Southeast Asia.”)

  If early in 1954 Eisenhower had any doubts about the attitude of the Congress toward American intervention, they disappeared in February 1954 when the Department of Defense announced that forty B-26 fighter-bombers and two hundred American technicians were being sent to Indochina. This was the first American aid in personnel, and if it was a trial balloon, it worked handily; the Congressional reaction was swift and ferocious. The Administration, somewhat surprised by the vehemence of the response, immediately announced that the technicians would be withdrawn by June 12. But even this was considered too late. Mike Mansfield rose in the Senate to ask whether it was true, as rumored, that the United States planned to send two combat divisions to Indochina. He was assured by Majority Leader William Knowland, speaking for the Administration, that it had no such intention. And Senator Richard Russell warned that this was a mistake which could bring us piecemeal into the war. The Administration quickly backed down, and in backing down, it showed that it realized just how war-weary the country was.

  Nevertheless, the pressure from the French continued to build. With the garrison at Dienbienphu obviously trapped, there was an emotional quality to the crisis, a desire to save the boys. Admiral Radford was sympathetic. Dulles seemed sympathetic. Vice-President Nixon was said to favor intervention. Eisenhower was reported to be ambivalent, not revealing his own feelings. On April 3, 1954, at Eisenhower’s suggestion, Dulles met with the Congressional leadership, a group which included Minority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson and the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, Richard Russell. Significantly, though the idea for the meeting was Eisenhower’s, he was not present; he did not put his own feelings and prestige on the line that day. Rather he let his Secretary of State make the case, even though Dulles had far less influence with the Democrats because of partisan statements in the past.

  As it turned out, though, Dulles was in effect putting his office on the line; he himself did not make the case. It was Admiral Radford who carried the ball, a man who neither represented a national American position, nor for that matter even an Administration position, nor necessarily the position of the American military. The purpose of the meeting soon became clear: the Administration wanted a congressional resolution to permit the President to use naval and air power in Indochina, particularly a massive air strike to save the garrison at Dienbienphu. Radford made a strong and forceful presentation: the situation was perilous. If Indochina went, then Southeast Asia would go. We would be moved back to Hawaii. The Navy, he assured the senators, was ready to go, two hundred planes were on the carriers Essex and Boxer.

  The senators began to question Radford. Would this be an act of war? Yes, we would be in the war. What would happen if the first air strike did not succeed in relieving the garrison? We would follow it up. What about ground forces? Radford gave an ambivalent answer.

  Senator Knowland told his colleagues that he was on board, which was not surprising, since he was a certified hawk, a member of the China Lobby, fond of ending meetings by giving the Nationalist toast, “Back to the mainland.” Not everyone else was so euphoric or enthusiastic. Senator Earle Clements of Kentucky asked Radford if all the other Chiefs were on board. Radford said they were not.

  “How many of them agree with you?” Radford was asked.

  “None,” he answered.

  “How do you account for that?”

  “I have spent more time in the Far East than any of them and I understand the situation better.” (Which was not true; all the other Chiefs had spent comparable time in Asia.)

  At this point Johnson took over. He had talked with Russell earlier—at this stage of his career he was still quite dependent on Russell for private leadership and advice—and had found that Russell was appalled by the whole thing. Russell had in fact been wary of the gradual expansion of the American empire since World War II. He did not think our power was limitless, and he was worried that our designs would take us beyond our reach, that we would enter places where we were not wanted. Indochina, he thought, was the symbol of it all and might turn into an enormous trap. Now Johnson was disturbed by the implications of the Radford appeal for a variety of reasons. He doubted that the necessary resources existed in a war-weary country which had just come out of Korea, and he did not want the blame for refusing to go to war placed on him and the Democr
atic leadership in Congress. If Eisenhower went for a congressional resolution, then Johnson would be right smack on the spot, which was exactly where he did not want to be—he was always uneasy about being out front. He certainly did not want the Democrats to be blamed for losing Indochina.

  The Democrats, he told Dulles, had been blamed for the Korean War and for having gone in virtually alone without significant allies. Knowland himself, Johnson pointed out, had criticized the Democrats for supplying 90 percent of the men and money in Korea. The patriotism of Democratic officials had been questioned. He was touched now to be considered so worthy and so good a patriot as to be requested to get on board. But first he had some questions, because he did not want to relive the unhappy recent past. What allies did they have who would put up sizable amounts of men for Indochina? Had Dulles consulted with any allies? No, said the Secretary, he had not.

  By the time the two-hour meeting was over, Johnson had exposed the frailty of the Administration’s position. (This may have been exactly what Eisenhower wanted, to expose his case and have the Congress itself pick apart the weaknesses. Eisenhower was a subtle man, and no fool, though in pursuit of his objectives he did not like to be thought of as brilliant; people of brilliance, he thought, were distrusted. It was not by chance that he had not been present; let Dulles make the case.) The military were far from unanimous about whether to undertake the air strike. In addition, the United States might have to go it alone if it entered a ground war. Dulles was told to sign up allies, though it was known that Anthony Eden was dubious. Thus the burden, which the Administration had ever so gently been trying to shift to the Congress, had now been ever so gently shifted back, if not to the Administration, at least to the British, who were known to be unenthusiastic.