The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  For days the State Department press corps, led in large part by Finney but with other reporters chiming in, had been asking what were essentially the same questions, again and again, doggedly, knowing somehow that something was going on, determined to keep the pressure up. “Bob,” the scenario would go, “is there a new mission for the Marines?” “Bob, does this imply a change of American policy?” “Bob, will the Marines go into combat as units if the Vietnamese request them?” Back would come the answers, sounding frailer and more tired all the time: No, they were there to protect American personnel and American property; no, there was no change of mission. The pressure, the repetition, were at the heart of it, and of course it worked. The more pressure they put on, the more McCloskey felt he had to respond honestly, so while the questions kept coming, McCloskey was very quietly trying to gather information on what the policy really was (the principals were still trying to hold the new decisions as closely as possible; and most high members of the government were as poorly informed as the American public as to what was happening). McCloskey and his superior, James Greenfield, the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, had been trying to get their superiors to announce as honestly as possible what the new policies were (Greenfield felt strongly that if American troops were going into combat, the American public should not learn about it after the fact from military spokesmen in Vietnam), but nothing had been decided at the higher level, though a contingency statement was drawn up at one point. Meanwhile McCloskey was on the phone a good deal, talking to friends at State and Defense, trying to find out exactly what the new rules of engagement were. He was, in effect, becoming a reporter.

  On June 7 he went before the daily briefing and fended off the questions in the normal way. Later that day he was able to put together the pieces in his own mind about what the new American policy was. The next day he decided to speak openly about it; he knew he was acting on his own and taking an enormous risk—in effect, putting his job on the line—and that his protection from above might be minimal. He knew exactly what was at stake, but he also felt very strongly that it was the right thing to do, that if there was any kind of right to know, it extended to decisions on how American troops were used. It was, on McCloskey’s part, a personal act of courage.

  Thus at the briefing on June 8, when the questions came, McCloskey was ready. The way in which the people of the United States found out that the policy had changed was instructive:

  q:Let me ask one other question. What you are saying means that the decision had been made in Washington as a matter of policy that if Westmoreland receives a request for U.S. forces in Viet-Nam to give combat support to Vietnamese forces he has the power to make the decision?

  a:That is correct.

  q:Could you give us any understanding, Bob, as to when Westmoreland got this additional authority?

  a:I couldn’t be specific but it is something that has developed over the past several weeks.

  q:Is this from a legal point of view, a delegation of the President’s authority or what is the formal point of view?

  a:Well, yes. The President as Commander in Chief in turn delegates authority to military commanders, and in this case, General Westmoreland.

  It was a very big story, and within minutes the wire services were carrying it. At the White House, where the AP and UPI tickers were lodged, the press corps and Lyndon Johnson saw the stories at almost the same time. Johnson went into one of his wildest rages. Perhaps in his mind he always had known this would happen, but it was as if he believed he could change things by the force of his will: if he willed them not to happen, they would not happen; if he denied that events were taking place, they would not take place. Now even that illusion had been shattered and he was shouting and screaming at Reedy, at anybody who walked near him. Who the goddamn hell leaked this? Who the hell was McCloskey? McCloskey—where the hell did he come from? Some kid at State. Well, his ass was going to be briefing people in Africa very goddamn soon. Who the hell authorized the leak? Find out if Rusk or Ball or someone at State authorized the leak, and get them over here. It was goddamn well treason. Jesus Christ, couldn’t a President of the United States make a decision in secret without some kid at State named McCloskey giving it out? Couldn’t you have secrets any more? Why had Reedy let it happen? Another White House aide, hoping to see Johnson on a domestic matter, was warned by friends: don’t bring it up today, bring it up tomorrow or next week, next month, next year, but not today, he’s murderous today.

  At State the storm was beginning to erupt, and it looked as if McCloskey would have to go. But one man protected him: he was called upstairs by Dean Rusk, who was very gentle with him. Rusk thought it was very unfortunate that McCloskey found himself in the situation that he did, but Rusk could understand it. Anyway, Rusk would try to straighten it out. And so Rusk went over to the White House, which was of course pouring out the most vehement of denials of the story, and offered his protection to McCloskey, and the next day he called McCloskey in and told him not to worry about it, that it would all take care of itself. So McCloskey remained at his job, but within the month George Reedy was replaced by Bill Moyers as White House press secretary.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Lyndon Johnson had been frenetic and irascible in the previous months, as if he had found himself suspended between his ambitions and his desires and the grim promise of Vietnam; and the more there seemed to be a possibility of a choice, the more difficult and touchy he had been. Now as he slowly made his decisions he seemed to take strength from them and from the people around him. He became quieter, less frenetic, more deliberate in his decisions. If he took sustenance from those around him who urged escalation, then similarly, as if almost by chance, he just managed to see less of those who had doubts or seemed to have doubts; he gave signals of what he wanted to hear and what he did not. (One reason why he did not seem to like McCone—they did not get on very well and McCone would make a quick exit—was that McCone, even though he was more hawkish than Johnson, more hard-line in his attitudes, had insisted in those days in February, March and April on telling the President the very blunt truth.) It was not just the very top men, McNamara, Bundy, Rusk, Wheeler, McNaughton, who reassured him, it was his other friends as well who were telling him to go ahead. These men were all liberals, committed to the good things in life, to decency and humane values. They were for civil rights and for peace; they did not talk about keeping the niggers in their place, or lobbing grenades into the Kremlin men’s room; they were good men, urbane, modern, if they were for a war, it would be a good war. So Johnson saw around him confirmation of the soundness, the wisdom and the decency of what he was doing, even among his most trusted friends, like Abe Fortas. Particularly Abe Fortas. He was a private adviser, unusually close to Johnson, making the transition from enormously successful attorney to Supreme Court Justice in those very months that Johnson was making the transition from peacetime President to wartime President. Few people were as influential with Johnson as Fortas, who was loyal to no other politician in Washington; he had been the lawyer who helped turn Congressman Johnson into Senator Johnson. If there were those on Johnson’s staff who did not think that Fortas was a man of any real political sensitivity, nonetheless he was the kind of man Johnson admired: he was a liberal without being a do-gooder, a man of force who got things done without showing softness. Johnson had autographed a photo to Fortas: “To Abe, who makes the most of the horsepower God gave him.” Which was very Johnsonian. And now during the crucial months before he went to the Supreme Court and even after, Fortas was in constant contact with the President, Johnson phoning him almost every night and replaying the day’s events, listening to Fortas’ wisdom. Fortas was a tower of strength, a pillar of hawkishness, a man of few doubts about the wisdom of going forward, and Fortas would remind Johnson that no President had ever lost a war, that the political consequences of withdrawal were terrible. Fortas was the classic hard-line liberal, though of course he knew little of S
outheast Asia and little of this country as well, but that did not bother him, he was a hawk and proud of it. (When the final decisions were in and Max Frankel of the New York Times wrote a long summary story of the decision making, he would describe the fact that Justice Fortas had played a role, and the phrase he would use was that Johnson had also consulted with “Justice Fortas, who is not a dove.” Proofreaders being what they are, the story came out as “Justice Fortas, who is a dove.” The next day Fortas called Frankel to tell him the story was very good and to mention that he was a hawk, not a dove, just for future reference.)

  There was of course a special irony in this because Fortas had gone to the Court, where he was not supposed to be involved in politics or consult with the executive branch at all, and he had by means of a classic Johnsonian maneuver replaced Arthur Goldberg, who had left the Court precisely because he was somewhat restless with the judiciary and the lack of political action there. Goldberg had been making noises about his own restlessness just before the death of Stevenson, and after Stevenson’s death, John Kenneth Galbraith would return to his home to find a message to call the President. Galbraith, shrewd in the ways of both power and Lyndon Johnson, realized immediately what Johnson was after, a good Kennedy liberal name for window dressing to succeed Stevenson at the UN; it was not an assignment Galbraith sought, a forum of limitless debate where everyone else tended to speak almost as much as Galbraith, but he realized that if he turned it down, he had better have another name for the President. Thus Galbraith thought of the itchy Goldberg and passed on the name to Johnson, noting that Goldberg seemed to want more action. The President was delighted, it was even better than Galbraith, it cleared Goldberg from the Jewish seat of the Court and opened it up for Fortas, and at the same time, by sending Goldberg to New York, created a potential rival to Senator Robert Kennedy. Within minutes Goldberg was summoned to the White House. Arthur, the President said, the next man who sits in this seat is the man who brings peace in Vietnam. Goldberg nodded. It’s the most important job there is, it demands the best man available and I want you to help your President. I want you to go to the UN and make peace. Which was followed with a long and full enunciation of Goldberg’s unique qualifications to bring peace, with Goldberg still nodding.

  So he left the Court to go to the United Nations, where he did not bring peace, where he found that he had effectively pulled himself out of the action and the decision making, where he was being used to make the case for a policy about which he had constantly mounting doubts, where he would destroy much of his hard-earned and justly deserved reputation as a humane liberal, and where, most galling of all, he would watch the man who replaced him on the Court play a genuine role on the decision making in Vietnam. (However, in July, Goldberg would argue vehemently against calling up the reserves, and when Johnson decided against doing it, against going on a real wartime footing, Goldberg would take some satisfaction that he had played a role here. Probably the reverse is true, that Johnson never intended to call up the reserves, and was delighted to have the case made against the obvious signs of war, such as a reserve call-up.)

  So Johnson made his decision; it was, he thought, a personal challenge from Ho. If Ho wanted a challenge, a test of will, then he had come to the right man. Lyndon Johnson of Texas would not be pushed around, he would not try to negotiate with Ho and those others, as he said, walking in the streets of Saigon. He was a man to stand tall when the pressure was there. To be counted. He would show Ho his mettle, show the toughness of this country, and then they could talk. Rusk agreed; this was one democracy that was not going to show itself weak, it had the right leader (later during the Glassboro meetings with the Soviet leadership, Karl Mundt, as conservative a senator as could be found, was appalled to find that the Soviet Union’s Kosygin did not have the kind of power to go to war that Johnson seemed to have). Johnson would not shirk from this test of wills. Besides, it was above all a political decision and a domestic one at that; it was a question of how he read the country, and when he found doubters on his own staff, some of the younger people, he would tell them, You boys don’t understand, you don’t know the relationship between the Congress and Asia. It was an emotional thing; they had never seen it because during their political lifetime it had been bottled up, but it was still there. He would lose his presidential possibilities, he said, if Ho were running through the streets of Saigon. Listen, he added, Truman and Acheson had never been effective from the time of the fall of China. Lyndon Johnson had a mandate for the moment. But this way if he failed on Vietnam it would be done quickly. McNamara and Bundy seemed to be saying it could be done quickly, perhaps in six months, perhaps a little more. And the test cases were also quick. The Cuban missile crisis had gone quickly and that was a dry run for it, and the Dominican Republic, hell, he had sent a few troops in there and he had put out the fire in a few days. Hardly a shot fired. Look what had happened in the Dominican, when American boys had gone ashore. So this one would be quick too. Just give him six months. Of course, six months later he would be unmovable, too deeply involved in something that was going badly to talk rationally. It was one more sad aspect of Lyndon Johnson that there was the quality of the bully, and the reverse quality as well; he was, at his best, most open, most candid, most easy to reach, most accessible when things were going well, but when things went poorly, as they were bound to on Vietnam, he became impossible to reach and talk to. His greatest flexibility and rationality on the subject came before he had dispatched the first bombers and the first troops; from then on it would all be downhill. Doubters would no longer be friendly doubters, they would be critics and soon enemies; and worse, soon after that, traitors. There was no way to reach him, to enter his chamber, to gain his ear, other than to pledge total loyalty. Only one man would be able to change him, to dissent and retain his respect—and even that was a tenuous balancing act which virtually destroyed one of his oldest friendships, and that was Clark Clifford in 1968.

  So, cornered, he would go ahead. He was not just reading their country, which was small, Asian, fourth-rate, bereft of bombers and helicopters; he was above all a political animal and he was reading his own country and in that he may have misread it; he read the politics of the past rather than the potential politics of the country, which his very victory of 1964 illuminated. (He had won as a peace candidate, and it is likely that had a new China policy been openly debated, with Johnson in favor of it and Goldwater opposing, it might have enlarged his margin; at the least it would have had little negative effect, probably would not have cut into his margin in any appreciable sense, and would have liberated him from one of the dominating myths of the past. But as the issue had been dormant by both liberal and conservative consent for a decade—the liberals giving consent, the conservatives owning the policy—there was no desire to change it.) The Democrats, who had been hurt by the issue in the past, were quite content to keep it bottled up. As was Johnson, a good and traditional liberal who was also a man of the fifties and of Texas in the fifties, where McCarthyism had been particularly virulent, an era of potentially monolithic Communism, where the fewer questions about how monolithic it was, the better.

  Those fears and suspicions of the Communists had never entirely left him; he was capable of wanting conciliation with the Soviet Union and holding the most basic kind of distrust of the Russians. The fact that the Vietcong attack took place while Kosygin was in Hanoi had a particularly negative effect on Lyndon Johnson. The Russians were not to be trusted, he would repeat to aides, they broke treaties and lied. Andrei Gromyko had come right in and lied to Jack Kennedy during the missile crisis; that had made a deep impression on Johnson. He would kid the White House people, particularly Bundy, about their friendships with Ambassador Dobrynin, teasing Bundy, “He’s trying to slip Dobrynin in here just like he slipped Gromyko in here,” and then adding, quite seriously, “You can never know about a man like Dobrynin.” You had to watch those Russians. The Kosygin visit to Hanoi was, in his view, somehow quite sin
ister, despite the warnings at State that it might be the North Vietnamese’s way of showing the Soviets that they would not be controlled. It played on his darker vision of the Russians and convinced him that Kosygin was out there stirring up something.

  The forces at work in the fifties were very real to him. If Jack Kennedy was a man who knew more about where the sixties were headed but whose intellect preceded his courage, who stepped forward gingerly, then Johnson was far more a man of the past. He reacted to what he thought the country was; the country which had twice defeated Stevenson for the Presidency, where the powerful people on the Hill seemed primarily to be hawks, where the dominant figures of journalism were proud survivors of the worst of the Cold War, and where American universities had also given willingly, too willingly, in fact, of their talents and support to the Cold War. He did not see the new generation coming up, that the changing demography would become a major political factor, that there were new forces coming up quickly which were right below the surface, forces loosed by change, media change, economic change, demographic change, birth control and sexual change, change wrought here by change in the Communist world, the self-evident split between the Russians and the Chinese. All of this would challenge the existing order in politics, journalism, the universities. The new forces would coalesce with forces which had been around since the Stevenson days and which would have a major political impact. It would turn out that the Cold War generation’s control was very shaky indeed, and that the entry of the new forces into American political life would be very much accelerated by Johnson’s own entry into the war. They would never, even under the best and sunniest days of the Great Society, be people and forces much at ease with him, it was all moving too quickly for that, but his very entry into the Vietnam war would catalyze them and give them muscle previously missing. The forces of peace in 1965 were thin and scattered, timid in challenging the accepted Cold War attitudes; three years later they were massive and audacious, powerful enough to unseat one President, to bring a tie vote in the Senate on a weapons system (the ABM), an unheard-of thing, and powerful enough to make military spending a major domestic issue.