The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  Events began to move quickly. On February 2 Lyndon Johnson announced that McGeorge Bundy was going to Vietnam for a special review; as a small signal to men within the bureaucracy, John McNaughton, McNamara’s trusted aide, would go with him. On the same day, in a news event which seemed unrelated then but would seem somehow linked, years later, Martin Luther King and 770 other civil rights protesters were arrested in Selma, Alabama; 500 more were arrested the next day. On February 4 Lyndon Johnson said he was hopeful of an exchange of state visits with the Russians in the following year. “I believe such visits would reassure an anxious world that our two nations are striving towards the goal of peace.” On that day Kosygin left for Hanoi: Bundy was already en route. In Saigon, Bill Depuy, General Westmoreland’s closest adviser, briefed the press saying that eight government victories in recent battles with enemy troops in battalion strength should have discouraged the Vietcong from attempting to stand up to government forces in conventional battles. Even then, optimism still lived for the public.

  On February 7 the Vietcong struck the American barracks at Pleiku in the Central Highlands; it was a quick, efficient attack, the kind of thing that they specialized in, a mortar attack, nothing unusual really. Considerable planning in advance to be sure the distances were right; no peasants in the area sympathetic enough either to the government or the Americans to warn them. Standard for the war, except that this time it was aimed at Americans. This time they changed it; INR had been right, no one was going to push them around or threaten them. Eight Americans were killed and more than sixty were wounded. (A small footnote to it, and a tip-off to the difficulty of fighting there, would come a month later when Tom Wicker of the New York Times asked General Harold Johnson, the Army Chief of Staff, how many men it would take to protect Pleiku alone from such attacks in the future. General Johnson mentally figured the size of the perimeter, how many men were needed for static security, how many men to go out into the countryside to patrol. Then he gave Wicker his answer: “Fifteen thousand Americans.” For Pleiku alone.) It was exactly what the American mission in Saigon wanted.

  The Pleiku hit had come in the middle of the night; when the MACV operations rooms opened up, all the officials, civilian and military, filed in. Titans everywhere, Taylor, Westmoreland, Alexis Johnson. There was so much brass that Alexis Johnson, Taylor’s deputy, had so little to do that he wrote the press release, which annoyed the press officer, Barry Zorthian, because Zorthian felt it was poorly done and badly written. Incredible scenes, maps of 1:50,000 of the Pleiku area were pulled down, and there was Taylor with a magnifying glass peering closely at the map, as though looking for the mortar positions. Then a flash of excitement. In walked Mac Bundy, who was usually on the other end of the phone in Washington, sympathetic and cool, yet, they always felt, not entirely believing that it was as bad as they said. Now Mac was on their end of the phone. Striding in crisply, asking a few questions, confirming the latest details on the number of men killed. Then it was Bundy who told an aide to get the White House, not Taylor, who was nominally the President’s man, but Mac Bundy. “The White House is on the phone, sir.” Then sharply, very lucid, Mac took over, wasting no words, very much in control. Retaliation was in order. The attack had been directed specifically at Americans, and not at Vietnamese, thus we had to retaliate. Anything else would signal incorrectly. Clip. Clip. Clip. Let’s go.

  The next day Bundy left Saigon for Pleiku, where he visited the wounded; the scene made a strong impression on him. Those who worked for him and with him were surprised by the intensity of his feeling (as if he had blown his cool); since this sort of thing had been going on for some time, had not Washington realized that there would be killing? Why was he so surprised? It was and would continue to be a rare emotional response; for weeks after when someone questioned what they were doing with the bombing, the words would pour out, boys dying in their tents, we had to do something, we can’t just sit by, we had to protect our boys. Even Johnson was fascinated by Bundy’s emotional reaction; in the past Johnson had felt Bundy’s doubts about Vietnam. He was not like That Other Bundy, as the President called Bill Bundy. The one thing about That Other Bundy—he went through the CIA and his brother Mac didn’t. That Other Bundy will take it and ram it in up to the hilt. But Mac won’t. Mac spent too much time at Harvard with all those poets and intellectuals while his brother was dealing with men. But after Pleiku it was, Johnson said, like talking to a man next door to a fire who’s hollering for help. Later he told Bundy, “Well, they made a believer out of you, didn’t they. A little fire will do that.” And he went around with some of his other friends in the White House, telling how Bundy at Pleiku reminded him of the preacher’s son, very proper and priggish, who had gone to a whorehouse. Later when they asked him he would say: “It’s really good . . . I don’t know what it is, but I like it . . . It’s really good.”

  At almost the same time that Bundy in Saigon was on the phone to Cyrus Vance in Washington getting Bundy’s recommendations to go ahead with a retaliatory raid, Johnson was meeting with the National Security Council, and there it became very clear which way the Administration was headed. Though the subject was not really a prolonged bombing campaign but a one-shot retaliation, there was no doubt that larger issues were also being determined, that it was all coming together and that the great decisions had in effect been made. Johnson, after all, did not use the NSC to determine policy, he considered it too large and bulky and thus too leaky, too many people who talked too much. He used it more as a forum, to inform the rest of the government on which way things were going and signing doubters on (though it had been noted that in the past Adlai Stevenson, who was kept on short rations by both the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, tended to break the rules by pretending that it was a real meeting and thus arguing too long and too often. Significantly, neither he nor Bill Fulbright was invited to the crucial NSC meetings on the Vietnam escalation in 1965).

  Now everyone seemed to agree on a retaliatory strike except Mike Mansfield, who had been invited to the meeting. The Senate Majority Leader had been increasingly unhappy about the prospect of escalation, and now he thought we were edging closer and closer to following in the French footsteps. Did we have to bomb the North, particularly when Kosygin was there? Did we really have to retaliate? Might this not lead to a larger war, possibly a war with China? It might, Mansfield argued, draw China and Russia closer together and heal their growing split. It was certainly going to get us deeper into a war that we all wanted to avoid. Wasn’t there something else we could do? Wasn’t there some alternative, some negotiation? Even as he finished, the others at the meeting could tell that Johnson had welcomed his dissent; it was a desired part of the scenario because it permitted Johnson to do his performance, which he now did. No, there was no alternative. We had tried to be peaceful, we had tried to disregard provocation in the past, but now it had gone too far. Lyndon Johnson, he said, was not going to be the President of the United States who let Munich happen. Who stood by while aggressors picked on their little neighbors. And he was not going to let these people kill American boys who were out there, boys who were dying in their tents. What would happen to me if I didn’t defend our boys; what would the American people think of me, with those boys out there dying in their sleep? It was all flag, and as he spoke the others nodded, and Mansfield nodded, as if he too knew, involuntarily or not, that he had somehow just played the role Johnson had prescribed for him, and that in a sense a curtain was coming down. The decisions had been made, all the questions had been asked, and now the answers were given.

  There was one area expert who was present at the last few meetings—Llewellyn Thompson, former ambassador to the Soviet Union and an expert on Russia, and to a far lesser degree on China. He had particularly good credentials with the policy makers because he had given quite accurate advice during the Cuban missile crisis, but he was in no way an expert on Asia or on Vietnam; there was no man with expertise on Hanoi present (an expert on the Sov
iet Union was tough; but there was no one because of the McCarthy period who was a real expert on Asia—they had been too soft). Thompson himself was wary of the bombing; he had assisted George Ball on some of his memos against such a policy, in particular warning that it might drive the Soviet Union together with the Chinese, and that it was a very dangerous game. Now at the meeting he again expressed his doubts about bombing, but he did say that if we bombed within certain limits, the Soviets would not move against us. Which was all they needed to hear. He also warned against bombing in certain areas which might bring in the Chinese, and along with Ball, he was effective in setting some of the bombing limits. But he did not talk at length about what the North Vietnamese reaction to bombing would be, which was not considered by the White House to be a particularly important question. War meant Russia or China, not North Vietnam. Thompson’s advice, which was based on the global balance but not on the particular country involved, would not deter his superiors, and years later he would have a haunting feeling that he should have opposed it more forcefully at the time, somehow weighed in more.

  So retaliatory tit-for-tat raids were authorized against the North. The President said that it was a limited strike, but the doors were closing and closing fast. In the New York Times, Charles Mohr, the White House correspondent who knew Vietnam well—his honest reporting in the past had precipitated his resignation as a Time correspondent in Vietnam—pointed out that the attack was not that unusual. It was not particularly large, a company or less of Vietcong, and there was no noticeable evidence that it was Hanoi and not the Vietcong who had engineered it. Other attacks in the past, Mohr noted, had been just as intense. But his was a lonely voice. Naturally, McNamara carried the ball for the Administration in a press conference:

  q:Mr. Secretary, do you regard this latest incident as perhaps even more serious than the Gulf of Tonkin episode?

  a:I think it is quite clear that this was a test of will, a clear challenge of the political purpose of both the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments. It was a test and a challenge, therefore which we couldn’t fail to respond to—which neither the South Vietnamese government nor the U.S. government could fail to respond to without misleading the North Vietnamese as to our intent and the strength of our purpose to carry out that intent.

  q:Mr. McNamara, the fact that we struck at South—Southern bases in North Vietnam, are you saying that we know definitely that North Vietnam instigated or participated in this attack on these three places?

  a:Captured documents which we have obtained from individuals who have been infiltrated through this corridor plus prisoner-of-war reports that we have obtained in recent months lead us to believe that the volume of infiltration has expanded substantially. The number of men infiltrated in 1964, for example, was twice the number in 1963. This plus other evidence leads us to believe that Hanoi has consciously and purposely stepped up the pressure against the South Vietnamese. And we have every reason to believe, based on our intelligence sources, that the attacks on Pleiku, Tuy Hoa, and Nha Trang was ordered and directed and masterminded directly from Hanoi.

  That night the President also spoke. Using what appeared to be imitation Kennedy rhetoric, he said: “We love peace. We shall do all we can in order to preserve it for ourselves and all mankind. But we love liberty the more and we shall take up any challenge, we shall answer any threat. We shall pay any price to make certain that freedom shall not perish from this earth.” Which was pretty strong and heady stuff for an attack which was basically little different from any other Vietcong attack over the last four years of the war. As for the increased infiltration, that was all peripheral, the discussions in recent months had not centered on infiltration, rather it had centered on diminishing ARVN and South Vietnamese capacity and will to resist (they had been aware of one North Vietnamese regiment which had crossed over from the North into the South and which sat poised in the mountains just waiting, but which had not gone into any action).

  Even as Johnson and McNamara were speaking, Bundy was winging home from Saigon with his report. It was an important moment; he had been uncommitted in a fluctuating bureaucracy and now the anticipation among the top people was that he was signing on, not just for retaliatory bombing but for a real program. If so, the doors were closing for good. On the way back he worked on the memo with McNaughton. There are, in the annals of Vietnam, thousands and thousands of memos and documents, as the Pentagon Papers would later show. But in an Administration where business was done by phone, they were at best small markers of a long and complicated and sad trail; very few of them had any meaning themselves or were influential at the time they were written—perhaps Nassam 288, which was the only statement of U.S. purposes and objectives, perhaps the Taylor-Rostow report. And the McGeorge Bundy memo from Pleiku. It had effect, it moved people, it changed people at the time. It was by itself a landmark showing how far a bad policy had gone. Starting with the false premise of an irrational China policy, all the brilliant rationalists had built on that, made all the great rational judgments based on one major false original assumption. It was as if someone had ordered the greatest house in the world, using the finest architect, the best stonemasons in the world, marble shipped from Italy, choicest redwood for the walls, the best interior decorator, but had by mistake overlooked one little thing: the site chosen was in a bog.

  So it was with Vietnam; they had come all the way down the pike, and now with Bundy, the definitive rationalist, signing on, it would show more clearly than anything in the aborted quality of his arguments. That was one part of it, but more important at the moment was its political impact within the bureaucracy; here was a man with a brilliant sense of which way power was moving and a great capacity to move along with it. So it was a crucial holdout signing on, and in addition, a man who himself was regarded as something of a weather vane. There was one other factor as well: the intensity, almost passion, of the document, the force of it, so unusual in paper work in general and for Mac Bundy in particular. As the Xeroxes of the Bundy memo went to the top level and second level of players, particularly in the Ball group, there was a sinking feeling that it was all over, that the Bundy memo told it all, Mac had come down with the hawks and had come down very hard. Mac Bundy, so quick and facile, so superior, so quick to put down illogic in others, seemed in his Pleiku memo to be a mockery of himself. It was filled with judgments he had little background to make. But most of all was his estimate of the chances for the success of what he was advocating, and the reasons for doing it:

  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%. 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 [italics added]. Beyond that, a reprisal policy—to the extent that it demonstrates U.S. willingness to employ this new norm in counter-insurgency—will set a higher price for the future upon all adventures of guerrilla warfare, and it should therefore somewhat increase our ability to deter such adventures. We must recognize, however, that that ability will be gravely weakened if there is failure for any reason in Vietnam.

  In a way the Bundy memo reflected one of the problems of the people in the Kennedy-Johnson Administrations; they always thought that no one else was quite as smart as they were, that they could play games, and that no one else knew the score. They were, it was a failing of the group, too smart by half; for example, the idea that by bombing they would refute the charge that they had not done everything possible for Vietnam; clearly, by bombing and not sending troops they would be doing far less than the maximum, and the military and the Vietnamese knew it; of course there would be cries to do more, to go a little further.

  The memo began:

  The situation in Vietnam is deteriorating, and with
out new U.S. action defeat appears inevitable—probably not in a matter of weeks, or perhaps even months, but within the next year or so. There is still time to turn it around, but not much.