The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  The VC/PAVN build-up rate is predicated to be double that of U.S. Phase II forces [these were essentially his 1966 forces]. Whereas we will add an average of 7 maneuver battalions per quarter, the enemy will add 15. This development has already reduced the November battalion-equivalent ratio from an anticipated 3.2 to 1, to 2.8 to 1, and it will be further reduced to 2.5 to 1 by the end of the year. If the trend continues, the December 1966 battalion-equivalent ratio, even with the addition of Phase II (300,000 men) will be 2.1 to 1.

  In the past all the estimates and predictions that the other side would meet force with force had deliberately been filtered out or diluted; at best the enemy’s response was said to be unpredictable, and if anything, the use of American force would bring not counterforce, but negotiations. Now that illusion was gone; the real world was tougher than the world of doctored war games and high-level meetings. At the time that Westmoreland made his assessment, McNamara was in Paris for a NATO meeting; he immediately flew to Saigon, met with Westmoreland, and negotiated troop levels with the commander. At the end of November, when McNamara returned to Washington, he recommended to the President that projected force levels be increased to the point where the American build-up would reach 400,000 by the end of 1965, and possibly 600,000 by the end of 1967. It was clearly not going to be a short, limited war any more.

  This counterescalation did not bother Westmoreland. He was not euphoric but he was confident: American force would do it. It would not be easy, but if we set our mind to it, then it could be done. We would have to pay the price. (His views throughout were quite similar to Rusk’s.) He thought he had a totality of Washington’s backing and he prepared for a long war. His MACV planners in very late 1965 and early 1966 were absolutely confident that the troop commitment would go to either 640,000 or 648,000 and there was, in addition, a contingency plan by which it could go as high as 750,000, a figure that MACV called the balloon and considered very much in the ballpark. MACV was confident; there had been tentative agreement, it thought, from Defense, and the President had never said no to any request. Westmoreland was indeed the favored child. In Saigon, Frank McCulloch, the bureau chief of Time, was repeatedly filing that MACV felt that it would get a minimum of 640,000; in Washington, his colleagues working for the same magazine and covering Defense, not privy to the kind of informal atmosphere which existed in Saigon, working through weaker sources, kept knocking the figure down, saying nothing like that was in the works. It was in the works, all right, but it was not a figure which Washington wished to give out; only four or five men knew of it in Washington and they weren’t talking. Similarly, four or five men knew of it in Saigon and a few of them were talking. Saigon, Lyndon Johnson would always find to his annoyance, was always leakier than Washington.

  If MACV was candid with Time magazine, which supported the war, it was somewhat less so with Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, who arrived in Saigon in November 1965. Mansfield was traveling with his specialist on Vietnam, Frank Vallejo, and both were extremely uneasy about the policy, and in particular the open-ended quality of it. The sky was the limit, they feared, and Westmoreland was not, Mansfield felt, particularly helpful. Mansfield asked Westmoreland what kind of troop figure he was going for, and Westmoreland kept hedging, no answer was really forthcoming, he kept talking about the fact that he couldn’t handle what he already had, he had ships backed up in the harbor. The more Mansfield pushed, the less he found out, and he went back with Vallejo, convinced that if it had been a small number, Westmoreland would have been more candid. This, plus his own uneasiness about the style of open-ended policy, prompted him to write a report predicting that we would end up with 500,000 troops there. All his worst fears about American involvement in Indochina were being realized, step by step.

  There were, of course, some indications that the war was changing, that it was sliding from a small combat-troop war to a big one. In late November in Saigon, after a meeting of the mission council, Barry Zorthian, the embassy public affairs officer, told a few select reporters that the strategy had gone from holding the country and preventing the other side from winning, to winning ourselves. Victory. Westmoreland, he said, had a schedule which went as high as 750,000 men. “The name of the game has changed,” Zorthian said. “Now we’re going to win.” One of the reporters he spoke to was Stanley Karnow of the Washington Post, who had an uneasy feeling that they had changed policies and objectives in midstream, that this was akin to crossing the 38th parallel in Korea, and that it might have consequences. Of course, there was a certain inevitability to it; a man like Lyndon Johnson would not invest that much for a tie game; Johnson always liked to talk in poker terms and analogies; the more you put into the pot, the more you had to take out as a winner.

  If McNamara had learned some of the bitter truth during the November visit, he managed to conceal it admirably. During the trip he had gone to Danang to inspect what the Marines were doing there. While at Danang he had been given a very thorough briefing by a Marine colonel on the situation. The Marines were doing very well in pacification, it seemed. Wherever they appeared and fought, the Vietcong immediately moved back. There was, however, a problem. Once the Marines seemed to have pacified an area, they moved on, and there was a tendency of the Vietcong to come back, and do just as well as before. The result was a danger of spreading the American troops too thin.

  That night when McNamara was back in Saigon, he asked Sander Vanocur of NBC, who had hitched a ride with him, what he thought of the day. Vanocur replied that he was very depressed. McNamara, surprised, asked why, and Vanocur answered that we were going to be spread too thin, that it seemed to him a bottomless pit. “Every pit has its bottom, Mr. Vanocur,” said the Secretary.

  For those who had expected the other side to oblige by folding quickly, the contrary evidence was now in. For McNamara, who had already been primed by McNaughton for some time on the dangers of counterescalation, the new implications were quite obvious. Since he knew there was no easy way out, he had become a frustrated and divided man. As a weapon of interdiction the bombing had failed, and as a weapon to push Hanoi to the table it had failed; yet he had no other answers and had to recommend a steadily ascending rate of bombing—the rate of sorties went up from 2,500 a month to 10,000 a month in the next year, all of it futile. So by the end of 1965 he was already trapped. While he was negotiating with Westmoreland for more and more troops, though he sensed the hopelessness of the troop escalation, he was at the same time becoming a leading advocate of negotiations within the government. But even now he could not speak openly about what he really felt, how dark he thought it might all be; he could not lose credibility and say that he had miscalculated, that all his forecasts were wrong. That would cost him his credibility, and his effectiveness; he would be known as a dove and he would soon be out. So when he pushed for negotiations at the tail end of 1965, he sold it in a particularly disingenuous way—we could have a bombing pause and try to negotiate, and then, after we had shown that the other side was unwilling to be conciliatory, we would have far greater national support. Worse, because he was committed to force and to the war, he could only offer Hanoi what amounted to surrender. So he was pushing negotiations, but they were doomed negotiations on hopeless terms, and yet in the very effort to bring about negotiations, he was diminishing his credibility with the President.

  Some of the particular dilemma of his and the American position, however, had already been seen by his trusted deputy John McNaughton. McNaughton had long feared that the North Vietnamese would respond the way they had, and along with George Ball, he was probably the least surprised member of the upper level of the government. In addition he was picking up other sounds, which bothered him, and this was the changing rationale of the military. At a dinner party in January 1966 he told Henry Brandon that in August 1965 General Wheeler had said that the American aim was victory, and therefore we were putting more men into Vietnam. Now, McNaughton said, Wheeler was using a different rationale—he was sayi
ng that unless more men were sent, then American casualties would rise. Thus McNaughton realized that the Americans were in a special kind of trap. In mid-January 1966 he wrote a memo for McNamara:

  . . . The dilemma. We are in a dilemma. It is that the situation may be “polar.” That is, it may be that while going for victory we have the strength for compromise, but if we go for compromise, we have the strength only for defeat—this because a revealed lowering of sights from victory to compromise (a) will unhinge the GVN and (b) will give the DRV the “smell of blood.” . . .

  McNaughton was clearly influencing McNamara, as were events. When McNamara first came back from meeting with Westy he had rather positively recommended the boost to 400,000 Americans. But two months later, in late January 1966, discussing the same subject, he was more cautious, and seemingly more pessimistic. He wrote:

  . . . Our intelligence estimate is that the present Communist policy is to continue to prosecute the war vigorously in the South. They continue to believe that the war will be a long one, that time is their ally, and that their own staying power is superior to ours. They recognize that the U.S. reinforcements of 1965 signify a determination to avoid defeat, and that more U.S. troops can be expected. Even though the Communists will continue to suffer heavily from GVN and U.S. ground and air action, we expect them, upon learning of any U.S. intentions to augment its forces, to boost their own commitment and to test U.S. capabilities and will to persevere at a higher level of conflict and casualties . . .

  If the U.S. were willing to commit enough forces—perhaps 600,000 men or more—we could ultimately prevent the DRV/VC from sustaining the conflict at a significant level. When this point was reached, however, the question of Chinese intervention would become critical. . . .

  It follows, therefore, that the odds are about even that, even with the recommended deployments, we will be faced in early 1967 with a military standoff at a much higher level, with pacification hardly under way, and with requirements for the deployment of still more U.S. forces.

  So McNamara was boxed in, seeing the darkness, recommending more troops as a means of bringing negotiations which were, given the U.S. attitude, hopeless. The real point of it all was that the civilians in Washington, those men who above all else felt they controlled events, had, by the end of 1965, completely lost control. They no longer determined policies, and they did not even know it. One set of reins belonged to Hanoi, the other set to Westmoreland. The future increments were now being determined in Hanoi by the Politburo there, and in Saigon by Westmoreland and his staff. If Westmoreland had enough troops, then Hanoi would send more; if Hanoi sent more, then Westmoreland would want more. The cycle was out of their hands; nor had they set any real limits on Westmoreland as far as his use of troops in-country was concerned (that is, inside South Vietnam as opposed to attacking neighboring sanctuaries). He was the General, he would use them as he saw fit. His projections were for a long war, larger and larger units fighting, a higher and higher rate of combat, the enemy eventually becoming exhausted. But the Commander in Chief of the enemy forces did not have to run for re-election in 1968.

  The strategy of attrition would prove politically deadly for Lyndon Johnson, and yet he had slipped into it. He and the men around him did not spend weeks of painful debate measuring both our and the enemy’s resources, deciding on the best way to commit American troops, how to get the most for our men. There was in fact remarkably little discussion of the strategy. It had begun as security, had gone to enclave, and then, without the enclave ever being tested, under the pressure of events, they had gone to what would be search and destroy. It was again an almost blind decision to go with the man on the spot, Westmoreland. It was what he wanted, it was what he would get and so to an extraordinary degree Westmoreland received in-country (as opposed to hitting Cambodian sanctuaries) freedom to maneuver his troops. They were his, to do with whatever he wanted. And out of this came search and destroy, as well as the policy of attrition, a policy which would become one of the most controversial and fiercely debated decisions of the war, a decision that was virtually not even a decision; it was, like so much of the war, simply something that had happened. It was Westmoreland’s instincts for the use of power, to use it massively and conventionally, and this with Depuy’s aid had produced the policy of search and destroy. Westmoreland was after all a conventional man; his background was conventional war, and both his instincts and responses were conventional. Here, almost within sight—his intelligence was getting better and better—were these very big enemy units. The ideal way to shorten this war, to finish it off quickly, was to go after the big units, this enormous prize just within reach. Just smash their big units, teach them it was all over, and they would have to go to the peace table. Westmoreland knew all about the political infrastructure, how the enemy operated through a very clever and complicated political mechanism, and that this was the root of the war; it gave the other side its most precious asset, its capacity to replenish losses, but the conventional instinct, the temptation to go after the big units, was too much. It was, he thought, the best thing he could do for Vietnam, handle this burden for them which they clearly were not able to handle themselves. The U.S. forces would be fighting away from the population, and this would lessen racial tension. It was a strategy which appealed to the American military mind, the use of large force and large units, quicker, less frustrating. He was always particularly optimistic about the results of the operations in the base-camp areas, Cedar Falls and Junction City; to him they presaged victory, and it was the sad truth that he, like those before him, underestimated the capacity of the enemy to replenish (indeed, when the Tet offensive came, the troops came from those very base camps which Westmoreland thought he had cleaned out).

  So instead of a limited shield philosophy, we would take over the war. And out of this, the search-and-destroy policy, came the policy of attrition which would prove so costly to Lyndon Johnson. The political implications of such a policy were immense, but he did not think them out, nor did his Secretary of State Dean Rusk nor his Special Assistant for National Security, Mac Bundy. It was perhaps the worst possible policy for the United States of America: it meant inflicting attrition upon the North, which had merely to send 100,000 soldiers south each year to neutralize the American fighting machine. Since the birth rate for the North was particularly high, with between 200,000 young men coming into the draft-age group each year, it was very easy for them to replenish their own manpower (the attrition strategy might have made sense if you could have gone for the whole package, applied total military pressure to the entire country, but the American strategy was filled with limitations as far as that went). So even on the birth rate, the strategy of attrition (which always was based on the belief that the other side had a lower threshold of pain) was fallacious. Add to it the fact that one side was a nation with the nationalist element of unity, and the Communist element of control, that the bombing helped unite its people, that its leadership was able and popular, that its people were lean and tough and believed in their mission, which was to unify the country and drive the foreigners out, that there were no free newspapers, no television sets, no congressional dissent, and that this war was not only the top priority, it was the only priority they had.

  Against this was a democracy fighting a dubious war some 12,000 miles away from home. The democracy had long-overdue social and political programs at home, and there was such uneasiness about a war in Asia that its political leader felt obliged to sneak the country into the war, rather than confronting the Congress and the press openly with his decision. The Congress and the press would continue to be free, and doubts about so complicated a war would not subside, they would grow. Television would certainly bring the war home for the first time. The country was undergoing vast economic and political and social changes which would be accelerated by the war itself.

  It was, in retrospect, an unlikely match for a war of attrition, and reflecting upon it, one high civilian said later that
he longed to take the two men most involved in the strategy, who had such vastly different and conflicting problems and demands, and introduce them to each other: General Westmoreland, meet President Johnson. It was, finally, the problem of limited war which had been so fashionable in the early Kennedy days, the difficulty being that you might be a great power of 200 million people fighting limited war against a very small Asian nation of 17 million, except that unlike you, they decided, as happened in this case, to fight total war.

  Yet the number of men for whom all these factors had real meaning was very small; the Administration’s policy of hiding the extent of the war, and the extent of its forthcoming commitments, was still successful in early 1966. It was not, as far as the general public was concerned, going to be a large war. The troop figure was consistently hedged so that opponents of the war did not have a firm target. The burden was still seen as being on Hanoi; we were only trying to get them to a conference table. By the time the general public realized the extent of the war, the depth and totality of it all, then the rationale in Washington would change, it would become Support of our boys out there. At first the critics were told that they should not be critics because it was not really going to be a war and it would be brief, anyway; then, when it became clear that it was a war, they were told not to be critics because it hurt our boys and helped the other side.