The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  What happened to his successor was even more revealing. By early 1964 the players were still at a point where they hoped to get something for nothing, that they could stave off messy decisions by sending the right Americans to influence the right Vietnamese to get with the right programs. Since personnel was the easiest thing to deal with, the principals went at the choice of a new Deputy Chief of Mission as if it were one of the crucial moves on Vietnam, perhaps a decision to turn the tide. Everyone was involved, the search was intense, and the names of the five best young officers in the foreign service were turned up, including the name of an officer named David Nes. Since Lodge was considered somewhat difficult to get along with, his approval was necessary, and the names of all five were sent to him. Lodge remembered Nes, who had several years earlier been Deputy Chief of Mission in Libya. When Lodge arrived in Tripoli late at night on a tour, Nes had won points by meeting Lodge at the airport, and instead of taxing his by then travel-fatigued mind by throwing him in with the right Libyan people or briefing him on the possibilities of Libya going Communist, Nes recommended that Lodge drive out to Sabratha if he wanted to see the most beautiful sunset in the world. Lodge did just that, finding it a rare sunset indeed, and marking Nes down as a young man of style and sensitivity. So of the five people suggested to replace Trueheart, Lodge chose Nes, he of the Libyan sunsets, and Washington, paying due attention to Lodge’s choice, took a serious look at Nes. Everyone got to look at Nes. First Roger Hilsman, Assistant Secretary for the Far East; then George Ball, the Undersecretary of State. Well and good. Then Dean Rusk himself, a bit unexpected, but then, Vietnam was no ordinary assignment; the Secretary probably wanted to give a few words of warning on the complexities of working with Lodge. Then word came that McGeorge Bundy at the White House wanted to see him, which was a little unusual, but of course, Bundy liked to keep a finger in things. He asked Nes a lot of questions, and when Nes was about to leave, Bundy said, “Now I think the President would like to see you,” which made Nes a little nervous and wondering what was up, a potential DCM being appraised by the President of the United States. He was ushered in for a surrealistic session with Lyndon B. Johnson, who asked many questions, none about sunsets. He talked about Vietnam, and then he turned from Nes to talk to Bundy, though the conversation was obviously orchestrated for Nes’s benefit: Well, it was tough out there and there were a lot of people who were ready to run and ready to give up, but they better forget that, because Lyndon Johnson did not intend to lose Vietnam. Truman may have lost China, and that had been a mistake, but Lyndon was not going to go down as a President who lost Vietnam. The words were very strong and they seemed to punctuate the meeting; the President then rose and Nes rose, ready to save Vietnam and Lyndon Johnson. The President came over to Nes, and suddenly the treatment was very physical, giant arms and hands bearing down on Nes’s slim arms and shoulders, flesh squeezed, physical and psychic messages imparted. What messages? Nes thought. Then the President turned to Bundy and said, “I hope Nes here is the kind of guy who goes for the jugular because that’s what we need out there.”

  Thus branded with the Pedernales approval, Nes sped to Vietnam in search of jugulars, though the only jugular that would finally be cut was his own, for having soon found that the war was going poorly, that the military optimism was a fraud, he clashed openly, and unsuccessfully, with General Harkins. Deputy Chiefs of Mission who clash with four-star generals almost always lose, no matter how good their case. A few months after his arrival Nes was headed back to Washington, where he found very little interest in debriefing him. Hilsman was gone by then, and Bill Bundy, who seemed distinctly uncomfortable when they met, gave Nes the feeling that he was locked in, there was no give, no flexibility, no desire to learn. Rusk did not see him, nor anyone at the White House. Of the people in the government, only George Ball seemed genuinely interested in talking with him and trying to find things out. But Nes had a strong feeling that no one wanted to touch anyone who had angered the military, that if the military had turned on you, you were dead. He found that the real outlet for his dissent and disenchantment was not within the bureaucracy but on the Hill with Senator Fulbright. In the fall of 1964 he wrote a long and prophetic memo saying that trying a little harder, feeding more American officers, more programs, would have no effect, would only “hasten the day of total Vietnamese military and administrative collapse. We will then be in virtually the same position as the French in 1954—except that they had several hundred thousand veteran troops on the ground at their disposal.”

  Roger Hilsman had been a marked man from the day of the Kennedy assassination. He had probably made more enemies than anyone else in the upper levels of government, partly because of the viewpoints he represented, partly because of the brashness with which he presented them, partly because of his constant inclination to challenge the military. He had angered Johnson because of his role in the pressures against Diem, and he had angered Rusk for two reasons: first, he had repeatedly gone out of channels, by-passing the Secretary. Hilsman’s ebullience had not bothered the Secretary when Hilsman was at INR because then it was his job to have a lot of ideas, but it had bothered him ever since Hilsman became operative at FE. Second, he was an irritant with the military and Rusk hated people who caused any friction with the military. McNamara and the Chiefs had been after Hilsman because for more than a year he had been one of the main thorns in their side. He consistently challenged their estimates and their honesty, which they were not about to forget, and now he was operating with the same enemies, minus some powerful friends, in particular John Kennedy, who had both encouraged his dissent and feistiness, and protected him and his protectors.

  The loss of Hilsman would be a crucial one because as the fulcrum of the pessimistic group, he had linked the younger and less important players and political estimators with the top-level players such as Harriman. When Kattenburg was being pushed aside, Hilsman had tried to protect him. He had known that the knives were out for Trueheart, so he organized a group to write letters for Trueheart’s personnel file, countermanding the charge of betrayal entered by Nolting. Though in early 1964 Johnson was making an all-out effort to keep Kennedy people of all sizes, shapes and persuasions, Hilsman himself was an exception. Johnson did not like him, did not like his bumptiousness, the policies he had followed and the enemies he had made, among them of course Lyndon Johnson. He simply had to go. Later, after he resigned, he would say that he had resigned in protest of the policies, and some friends of his were furious with him; he was opposed to the bombing and to combat troops, but at the time he was eased out these were not yet the central issues and Hilsman, who gloried in bureaucratic infighting, would have been quite willing to weigh in. When he knew he was leaving the government, he did talk with his friend Averell Harriman about it, and he forecast a dark view of the future on Vietnam, telling Harriman that his group was being disassembled and that it was all going to be very tough. At first Harriman argued with him and then did something which was very rare for him, admit to pessimism about policies and about the future. He said yes, it was very bad, and if he were Hilsman’s age he would get out too, and they both knew what that meant, that Harriman felt if he was not operative in government he would soon die. This view was confirmed to Hilsman a few weeks later by Marie Harriman, who, still bitter about Johnson’s treatment of her husband, said that he would endure some of the humiliations because if he left the government now, it would all be over.

  So Hilsman left, though Johnson—not wanting him to resign, no one quit Lyndon Johnson—knowing every man’s price, knowing that Hilsman’s father had once been Commandant of Cadets at the Philippine Military Academy, and that Hilsman had grown up there and had an enormous attachment to the Islands, offered him the ambassadorship to the Philippines, a job Hilsman regretfully turned down.

  After Hilsman, it was Harriman’s turn. He had been an increasingly open, almost defiant critic of Rusk in the last couple of months of the Kennedy Administration, scarcely ab
le to conceal his scorn for a man who did not seize power, did not use it and exploit it thoroughly, who seemed to withdraw from it at the last minute. Harriman was not a man to hide his scorn or his feelings, and what with his other qualities, his forcefulness and ruthlessness, no one could ever accuse him of subtlety. He had created deep-seated hostilities in Rusk, hostilities which now surfaced; and it turned out that enemies of Rusk’s were also enemies of Johnson’s, so Harriman, no matter how hard he tried, could not make it with Johnson. He had gotten along with all these other Presidents, the supreme courtier to them, and he was a great Democratic party loyalist, but here was a Democratic President who would not bite.

  First Bill Sullivan, whom Harriman had promoted and used as his man in the apparatus, was removed. Sullivan had traveled with Taylor and McNamara to Vietnam, as Harriman’s eyes and ears. He had reported back to Harriman the nuances of the trips, who was moving which way, and he had cut Harriman in on cable traffic that he might have missed. Now he was put in charge of the Vietnam Working Group directly under Rusk and McNamara. Then eventually Harriman himself was moved aside. He did not lose his title at first, simply his influence; but by 1965 he was a roving ambassador again. In 1964, however, he was moved off Vietnam and given Africa, put in charge of running rescue operations there in the Congo, stopping the left-wing Congolese troops, the Simbas.

  If he had once again fallen from grace, it was not for lack of trying to maintain position, this old expert on the care and feeding of Presidents. He had gladly humbled himself in the immediate pursuit of gaining the affection of Lyndon Johnson. Through small, deferential, sometimes blatant acts he had shown Lyndon that he was his man, handwritten notes fragrant with flattery of Johnson, but it had not worked (he would, in late 1965, finding that some of his liberal Administration friends were becoming critical of the policy, accuse them of biting the hand that fed them). Johnson was unbending. Why they did not connect is difficult to determine—were there too many scars inflicted in the past in Democratic party struggles? Not likely, really, because they had never been that far apart. Was it too strong a connection to the Kennedys at the end without, to the general public, Harriman’s having the Kennedy-style stamp the way McNamara and Taylor bore it, thus bearing the onus of Kennedyism without the benefits of it? Was it that Marie Harriman, sharp-tongued and outspoken, had made too many tart remarks about Johnson during his depression days as Vice-President? Or was it Harriman himself, too single-minded, too ruthlessly seeking power, too much the outsider wanting to enter the Administration in the early days to bother with the second tier of government, concentrating his affection on the top-level people only, the President, his brother, Mac Bundy, McNamara, and showing his rude and brusque side to the others, such as Johnson, forgetting that most basic rule of politics: always stay in with the outs. Probably more the last than anything else, but a combination of the forces.

  However, when the war was escalated in 1965, Harriman quickly moved to make himself the unofficial minister in charge of peace, knowing that though they were not yet ready for it, when the policies failed, they would need to negotiate, and they would need the help of the Russians, and then they would have to turn to him. Which they did. And he would be the best of all possible things, an important player again.

  And then Michael Forrestal. He had been a vital part of the Harriman group, the link between Washington and Saigon, traveling back and forth frequently, his own doubts increasing at almost the same time that President Kennedy’s doubts were growing. His position in the Administration had been more personal and social than professional. In addition to his long-standing friendship with Harriman, he was linked to the President by a newer friendship (though of course Joe Kennedy and Jim Forrestal had been friends). He was part of Kennedy’s professional as well as social life. For Jackie liked Mike Forrestal, and later, after the assassination, he was one of the people who would be an escort for her.

  He was not by nature a driving, ambitious figure or particularly interested in becoming a professional bureaucrat. Although he had been weaned on the Cold War (and bore the name of the first Secretary of Defense, the classic Cold Warrior), he had a sense that something was coming to an end in Saigon; what and how he did not yet perceive. At thirty-six, he was young enough to see that the commitment was not working and would not work but old enough to be tied to the past, to believe in it, in the necessity of stopping Communism, the belief that we were better than the Communists everywhere in the world, and in addition, that it would be a terrible thing if a large part of Asia were closed off to us. Now, in 1964, with John Kennedy dead and the problems in Vietnam mounting, he felt himself less and less able to operate. Robert Kennedy seemed dazed and lost; Harriman, upon whom Forrestal depended for toughness, was functioning less and less; Mac Bundy no longer seemed to encourage his access to the President, nor to be terribly interested in sharing doubts. By mid-1964 the whole thing was getting tighter, with Johnson being aware that Vietnam was something that would not be swept under the rug, and wanting only his closest and most senior people to work on it, not junior people linked to Bob Kennedy. It became harder and harder for a known doubter like Forrestal to find senior players interested in talking about the long-range problems of Vietnam. Perhaps they did not want to hear his doubts because they had doubts enough of their own.

  In July 1964 Johnson switched Forrestal’s job, moving him out of the White House to a line job at State on Vietnam where he could work on nuts and bolts, integrating the military and the civilians in the pacification program—perhaps the gravitational thrust of Vietnam would carry him along and end his doubts and he would become a team player, the way a comparable switch had changed Bill Sullivan. He spent much of the rest of 1964 working on daily minutiae on Vietnam, losing his taste for the whole thing, and losing his sense of being able to function. He worked in the late fall with Sullivan, on a plan which became known as the Sullivan-Forrestal Plan, which was a doomed attempt to buy off the military on bombing. It would give them a few things but not everything, the tempo was slower, the targets fewer, and hopefully, far from population centers. It was to be covert, and it would, hopefully, bring negotiations. It was, he realized somewhat in retrospect, aimed more at the American military than at the North Vietnamese, and not surprisingly, it did not fool the Pentagon for a minute. In late November, as part of the Bill Bundy Working Group, he wrote a paper on how we could negotiate our way out. No one seemed terribly interested. In January 1965, depressed personally and professionally, he quietly left the government.

  Thus, without attracting much attention, without anyone commenting on it, the men who had been the greatest doubters on Vietnam, who were more politically oriented in their view of the war than militarily, were moved out, and the bureaucracy was moved back to a position where it had been in 1961, more the old Dulles policies on Asia than anyone realized. Those men had surfaced too quickly on Vietnam and fought on what turned out to be a peripheral issue, namely, whether or not to go with Diem, not whether to stay in Vietnam or get out. They had spent all of their force on it, and they won the battle but in a real sense lost the war, for in the struggle almost all of the doubters had become marked men; they would not be major players again on Vietnam because they had antagonized Lyndon Johnson with their opposition. It was as if an orange crop had bloomed too quickly during an unseasonal hot spell in Florida, only to be quickly killed off by a devastating frost that soon followed. Significantly, the only important doubter who stayed in the inner circle was George Ball, the Undersecretary of State. One of the reasons why he remained a player in 1964 and 1965 was that he had not interested himself in Vietnam very much in 1963 and had not been an important player during the Diem struggle of that year. He had been preoccupied with Europe and had allowed Harriman and his group to carry the Vietnam fight. Thus, unscarred by earlier skirmishes, he was still around to fight in 1964. Similarly, the systematic removal of the players from 1963 meant that though there was dissent and debate, some of it serious and
forceful, in late 1964 and 1965 over whether to bomb, and whether to send combat troops to Vietnam, it never reached the ferocity of the preliminary struggle of 1963, when the real divisions within the Kennedy Administration emerged and when men fought on Vietnam with absolutely everything they had, not as gentlemen, but as players who intended to win and to destroy their opposition in the process. By 1964 the political side had been disassembled, the players changed, so that the balance was uneven, the odds were hopelessly on the side of force, and there was, despite Ball’s eloquence, a sense of doom about what he was doing. Though the most important question of Vietnam was whether to go all the way in or all the way out, it did not in any way provoke the greatest bureaucratic struggles of the period; rather, the first of these had taken place in 1963 over the issue of Diem. In the aftermath State’s doubters were so depleted that State easily acquiesced in the 1965 escalation; and the second great bureaucratic struggle took place in 1968, when Defense, not State, had changed, and when new and antibureaucratic civilians at the Pentagon were finally able to force another debate over the limits of escalation. Thus by late 1964 the possibilities of great debates were ebbing, and they had diminished the selection of the various players. Nowhere would the difference show more markedly than in the choice of the new Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs.

  In February 1964 one of the most important changes of players took place with Hilsman’s resignation. His successor was William Putnam Bundy, who came over from a similar position at Defense, bringing his attitudes with him, above all both a man of force and a man of the bureaucracy. He had served in three quite different capacities under three very different Presidents, and he had risen under all three. The job of Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs is a crucial one, perhaps on the subject of Vietnam the most crucial one. If there were doubts on Vietnam, they should have been voiced first of all by State. And in the case of Vietnam the position of the Assistant Secretary for FE was particularly vital, for the skepticism, the expertise, an empathy for the origins of the insurgency, all that knowledge which dated back to the French Indochina war and which came from the various lower-level experts in the Department, would have to filter through the Assistant Secretary and Undersecretary. He was the pivot, the man who had contact with the Secretary and Undersecretary, while at the same time the lower-level men, the experts, had 90 percent of their contact with him. So if it was the Assistant Secretary’s job to implement the policies of his superiors, it was also his job to fight for the judgments of his subordinates. Thus, if the doubts and pessimism of the lower-level State people did not filter through to the principals in Vietnam (and they did not), it was primarily the fault of the Assistant Secretary. If anyone should have made the principals uncomfortable in their determination to go ahead and use force, it was a strong and uncompromising Assistant Secretary. For it was not American arms and American bravery or even American determination that failed in Vietnam, it was American political estimates, both of this country and of the enemy, and that was the job of State, and in particular of the Assistant Secretary. If, perhaps, there had been no McCarthy period, no ravaging of the precious-little expertise, the Assistant Secretary might have been someone very different.