The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  But it was no wonder that Robert Kennedy liked him, that Jack and Jackie had liked him; that Lyndon Johnson felt comfortable with him, that he was one more reassuring figure in that era. He was so reasonable and so professional. The very best of the breed. The right officer for the American century. He seemed to embody the American officer of the era; he gave off vibrations of control and excellence and competence, and indeed he seemed to represent something that went even beyond him, the belief of the United States military that they were the best in the business. Wars on the plains of Europe and the jungles of the South Pacific were behind them, the struggles against the Chinese hordes in Korea loomed, in retrospect, increasingly as a victory. Now we were at the apex, the new technology added to the old valor, the average officer now the graduate of an endless series of service schools, bearing graduate degrees from America’s great universities. So Taylor had seemed to be speaking almost for the American era in June 1963 when he gave the commencement address at West Point; he had chosen as his topic “The American Soldier,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1837 had spoken on “The American Scholar.” As Emerson had declared American scholarship free from dependence upon Europe, so now Taylor said he was doing the same for the American soldier:

  I have often felt that a West Point graduation should sometime have been the occasion for a similar address dedicated to the American Soldier—and I use that term broadly this morning to mean the American man-at-arms be he soldier, sailor, airman or marine. Like other forms of American scholarship, American military thought was also once in European bondage, but likewise has become emancipated. Our Civil War marked the turning point in this trend. Drawing confidence from the experience acquired in that war, American military leadership became more and more independent of the European tradition which once controlled its thinking and limited the soar of its initiative . . .

  Yet as I said at the outset, no orator has thus far seen fit to memorialize the deeds of the American Soldier and of American arms. Even if an Emerson were here today with this purpose—and all too clearly one is not—any oration in praise of the independence of the American soldier would be largely postlude to the present fact of the ascendant role of America in military affairs.

  Abroad this ascendancy of American arms and American military concepts is accepted as a matter of course—it is imperfectly or reluctantly recognized at home. Abroad the successes of our armed forces in World War II and Korea and the visible deterrent power of our arms today as shown in the Cuban crisis have enforced this appreciation of American primacy—for in the military field as in other fields of endeavor it is success that brings conviction.

  Abroad, the success of the American military effort has led to an inquiry into its causes, into the form of its concepts, and the nature of its tactics and techniques. Hence allied and neutral representatives send their representatives to our military schools in vast numbers—last year approximately 17,000 students came to the United States to learn the American way of waging war and of keeping the peace. These same countries draw heavily on our military literature to guide their own studies. A few decades ago we in the United States learned from foreign military text books. In the Superintendent’s quarters here at West Point some of you have no doubt seen the desk of Sylvanus Thayer, the great superintendent whom we know as the Father of the Military Academy. There you have noted some of the military texts to which he turned for counsel in administering West Point at about the same time that Emerson was delivering his oration in Cambridge. Most of these books are in French, a few in the English of the mother country. Today, the library of any foreign military academy is apt to be filled with books written in the English of the military centers of the United States. Last month I stood on a hilltop in Iran and with the military representatives of the CENTO alliance watched with the Shah a military demonstration presented by the Iranian Army and Air Force. The explanation to the assembled international audience was made in English by Iranian officers in uniforms similar to the U.S. field uniform and the briefing bore the unmistakable mark of Fort Benning or Fort Sill. One sensed the influence of the American Soldier in his role as teacher of the armies of freedom.

  Yet, said Taylor, though Americans boast of all accomplishments and are not an immodest people, there were few who boasted of the accomplishments of the American soldier, great though they were,

  the lands, seas and air spaces which they have conquered and the prisoners which they have taken dwarf the deeds of the great conquerors which provided the familiar faces in the history books of our childhood. But still no orations are devoted at home to the ascendancy of the American Soldier. Why is this so?

  Our incomplete answer would be that we Americans are made uneasy by the responsibilities of military leadership. As a nation we are still the prey of clichés about men on horseback and of the dangers of the military to democracy. We still have trouble distinguishing between what is military and what is militaristic; between what is peaceful and what is pacifistic. We must perhaps progress further toward maturity before there will be wholehearted acceptance at home of the continuing need for a large and respected military profession in the United States in the same way as there is a need for a class of businessmen, professional men, scientists, clergymen, and scholars. Uncle Sam has become a world renowned soldier in spite of himself . . .

  If the Kennedy Administration had come to power to be the rationalizers of the great new liberal Democratic empire, then they had found the perfect general; their social and academic hubris was matched by his military self-confidence. His were not the attitudes of a man about to be deterred from his path by a little peasant revolutionary Army. Not in the American century.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  But the Saigon years would not be happy ones. After all those years learning control, discipline, making those the touchstones of his life, Max Taylor was now confronted by the wild irrationality, the deviousness, the maliciousness and venality of the South Vietnamese. It was somehow unfair; people who are about to be saved from the Communists should feel some element of gratitude, and at the very least that gratitude should surface in the form of knowing they were being saved, and more important, wanting to be saved. There he was in Saigon, in mid-l964, proconsul of a great empire which had a firmer sense of its mission than its ally; the Americans more committed, more willing to die than the South Vietnamese. It was all very puzzling. No common cause. No consensus. Could there be anarchy when the Communists were at the gates of the city? Remind them, Dean Rusk, Taylor’s new chief at State, would cable him, of Ben Franklin’s statement that they would either hang together or hang separately. All those years in the military, where there were certain standards and rules; where young men treated their superiors with respect; where you gave an order and it was obeyed; where a uniform meant you were all on the same side. Now here in Saigon, all of that meant nothing, medals won on the plains of Europe against the world’s second mightiest army meant nothing; he was dealing with these boys, most had never heard a shot fired in anger. Everything went so badly; Nguyen Khanh, who had appeared so dramatically on the scene in February as the new prime minister, and whom the Americans had seized upon, the first American-style leader, had turned out to be not American style, but Vietnamese style, with Diem’s weaknesses without Diem’s strengths—neurotic, paranoiac, disliked by both older officers and younger officers, and like his predecessors, totally overwhelmed by the political problems he faced. Khanh and Taylor argued regularly, ever more bitterly, until by the end of his tour Taylor, representative of the mightiest nation in the world, was virtually persona non grata in the weakest nation in the world.

  It was always like that; Max was so organized, disciplined, trying to transfer that rationality and logic to this Alice-in-Wonderland world. When he complained to one of his civilian aides about a propaganda program they were using which the Vietnamese did not like and wanted to drop, the aide suggested it be dropped. Was it logical that it should be kept? asked Taylor. Yes, said the civili
an. Was it a sound program? asked Taylor. Yes, answered the civilian again. “Well, if it’s logical and sound, we’ll keep it,” Taylor said. And later, during a period of revolving-doors governments, when Air Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky had come to power, Taylor would take two New York Times reporters aside and tell them that if Ky got the premiership he would give up the air force, the vital power balance in any coup, since government troops, unlike the Vietcong, were not used to being strafed. Jack Langguth, one of the reporters, was somewhat startled by the suggestion and asked, “Do you really think he’ll give up the air force, which is the only power base he has?” Taylor said he did. “Why?” asked Langguth. “Because he promised me,” answered Taylor.

  The worst thing for him was of course that nothing worked. It was a roller coaster—more advisers, more gear, more threats to the South Vietnamese, more threats to the North. He was at the confluence of it now, the architect of limited war, and particularly this limited war, caught between the failure of it and the threat of a greater war, between his vanities and his beliefs that the United States would not be defeated here, that the loss of prestige for a great power in the face of a small guerrilla army would be a major catastrophe. It had all come home to him, Max Taylor, who had always been able to control things. Now control was getting away from all of them. What they had held on to, the counterinsurgency, was slipping away, and in early August 1964 he began to grasp almost desperately at solutions. Since the Vietcong could not be defeated in the South, the answers would have to be found elsewhere, and for the first time he began to change on the bombing. It now became a possibility; significantly, he did not recommend bombing for military reasons (he was, as Westmoreland also was, dubious about the military effectiveness of bombing, knowing as he did the reluctance of his kind of civilian superiors to use the kind of bombing that the real hawks, the LeMays and the Wally Greenes and the McConnells wanted. They wanted total bombing, they were ready to annihilate the opposition. Taylor was too civilized a general for that, and he served too civilized a set of superiors to believe that they would permit something like that; the whole point of the new strategy had been to get away from total force, be it nuclear or nonnuclear force).

  Taylor wanted it for political reasons. In the past he had opposed bombing because he was unwilling to commit the United States to the use of greater power against the North, which meant greater involvement; otherwise, he felt, the United States would find itself at war with the North with a very weak government in the South. Now he was changing. In his August 18 message to the President he said: “Something must be added in the coming months.” That something would be bombing; the right time for starting a campaign of reprisal, he suggested, would be January 1, 1965, a time conveniently after the election. Ideally, we should tell Khanh that we would begin to bomb for him and the South Vietnamese if he could show the United States that he was ready for it and brought a new era of stability to Saigon. Thus the bombing was a political lever, a reward; if they were good and cleaned up their house, we would bomb, and show our greater willingness to commit ourselves. Of course the one lesson the Vietnamese leaders had learned over a decade was that the United States was more desperately anti-Communist than they were, and that the more the Vietnamese failed, the more the United States was willing to put in. As if to confirm this, the same Taylor message also told Washington that perhaps January 1 would be too late, in which case the United States would go ahead anyway and simply hope that Khanh would come around.

  Eventually Taylor and George Ball would be on opposite sides of the same great question, whether to bomb or not, while presenting identical evidence, the almost total weakness and instability of Saigon. There was another reason, which would move the others, the idea that bombing was a card, you played it, it was not necessarily a final act. Everyone else seemed to think that Hanoi valued its industrial base so much that it would do almost anything to protect it, including calling off the war in the South. Why not try it and find out? At the very least it would punish Hanoi, which was something; there was a feeling that Hanoi deserved it, it had been punishing them and Saigon without paying any price. The change in Taylor was that of a key man in the key slot—a strong ambassador in a divided or uncertain bureaucracy has enormous power—something that symbolized the gradual transformation of the other players: it was not so much that Taylor was stupid or inept, though he was far from brilliant; he was, and this was symbolic of all of them, a desperate man in a desperate situation, unable to turn back, having come this far.

  Events in the fall would turn him completely toward the bombing. Just as the pre-Tonkin covert operations had led to the Tonkin incident and the sense in this country and among many of the principals that the other side had provoked us, the principals triggered the situation at Bien Hoa which, when it exploded, filled them with righteousness against the enemy. On November 1 the squadron of obsolete B-57 bombers which had been moved from the Philippines to the air base at Bien Hoa (over State’s objections) was hit by the Vietcong; five Americans were killed, seventy-six wounded and six of the bombers destroyed. Thus the Vietcong had matched their symbols against our symbols; anyone wanting to know what their attitude toward the bombing would be in the future had his answer right there. They would meet our air power with increased pressure against targets in the South.

  What was most important about the Bien Hoa attack, however, was not the fact that the United States had left the planes there, or that the VC had hit them, or that the ARVN security was predictably inept. What was remarkable was the reaction of Max Taylor. The attack infuriated him, and his cables back to Washington, which had always in the past been restrained and almost conservative in tone, were now strikingly different, angry, reflecting almost outrage that they could do this to the symbols of the United States of America, of which he himself, as ambassador, was the great symbol. A sign of arrogance on the part of the other side, tinkering with the giant. He wanted to retaliate and retaliate immediately, and he was surprised and a little angry when Johnson, facing an election in two days, did not respond, and he complained openly to friends in the mission and to journalists. But this, as much as anything else, pushed him over on the bombing. From then on he was committed. He was angry at Hanoi and eager to punish, and he wanted not just tit for tat but the major bombing program as well, using as his argument that it would improve morale and give us more influence in the South, since the South would now have to prepare for greater pressure from the North. So with Taylor, as with some of the others who advocated bombing, the attitude was not particularly one of belief but rather one of why-not. This would after all buy time for Saigon; we would not take over the war.

  But as he switched in the late fall of 1964, it was a decision which had a powerful effect on the principals within the bureaucracy; if Max was getting on board, then there was little else holding them back and it was more evidence than ever that this was the way they would have to go. Besides Taylor’s protégé William C. Westmoreland there was, however, one key member of the top mission staff who had grave doubts about the bombing: the CIA station chief, Pier de Silva, a West Point graduate himself, and a man who, friends thought, had an almost pathological distrust of the military. He accurately forecast that the bombing would have virtually no effect other than provoke Hanoi into sending more troops down the trails; it would not invade in the classic military sense. This was somewhat unusual, since the military assumption in 1964 was still that if the North came down, it would come down in traditional division formation, making a good target for American power. When Robert Kleiman of the New York Times interviewed generals in February 1965 about what Hanoi would do, he was told by a member of the Joint Chiefs that if they came down, it would take “eight U.S. divisions, just like in Korea” to stop them and we did not need to worry about getting the U.S. troops in advance because we could fly them there faster than the North Vietnamese could march. A civilian with military experience in Saigon estimated that it would take four divisions; another high-ranking m
ember of the Saigon command said two divisions; and one of Saigon’s top planners said one U.S. division, then added prophetically, “I don’t think they’re going to do it that way. As a matter of fact, we just picked up a broadcast report on how they took a division, broke it down into smaller component parts, and then practiced infiltrating it and reassembling it in the South. I don’t think they’re coming down Korean style, the country’s just not right, the narrow coastal plain, no good routes—they just couldn’t conduct a conventional advance in force.”