The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  All of which would work for a while. Johnson had successfully co-opted the Congress and to a large degree the press. Time was working against him, but this would only be clear later. In the spring of 1965 the protests against Vietnam had begun on the campuses. In the beginning the Administration was not particularly worried about the challenge; Johnson controlled the vital center, and the campuses were not considered major centers of political activity. Yet these questions should be answered, so Mac Bundy was sent off to a televised teach-in to debate the professors, and the Administration was supremely confident about the outcome. Bundy was at the height of his reputation, the unchallenged political-intellectual of Washington, and no one there dared challenge him, for the response would be swift and sharp. But the capital was not the country; what was admired, respected and feared in Washington was not necessarily what was admired, respected and feared in the country, so the teach-in was an omen. In a surprisingly brittle performance he debated Hans Morgenthau, and Edmund Clubb, one of the exiled China scholars. Clubb quoted Lord Salisbury on the dangers of adding to a failed policy. Bundy finally seemed to be saying: We are we, we are here, we hold power and we know more about it than you do. It was not a convincing performance; rather than easing doubts, it seemed to reveal the frailty of the Administration’s policy. The teach-in did not end debate, it encouraged it. It also marked the beginning of the turn in Bundy’s reputation; up until then, serious laymen in the country had heard how bright he was, but in this rare public appearance he struck them as merely arrogant and shallow.

  In the fall of 1965 Rusk, who had been less than eager for the commitment than most of the others, began to show signs of the toughness, and indeed rigidity, which would later, as the months and years passed, distinguish him from some of the other architects. He was not eager to seek negotiations, and he was uneasy with those on our side who seemed too anxious to talk, afraid they would send the wrong signal, show the Communists our eagerness and our weakness. He felt that the danger in a democracy was that people were spoiled and expected pleasures and were unused to sacrifice; one had to guard against that and he of course would be the guardian. When Adlai Stevenson in 1964 had made his first tentative approach about negotiating with Hanoi to U Thant, it was Rusk who helped keep the discussion of the peace move extremely limited (so limited that his deputy for Asia, Bill Bundy, did not learn of it until the very last moment and was extremely upset). Then, in December 1965, when McNamara began to push for a bombing pause, it was Rusk who was dubious. We should not, he thought, seem too eager for peace; since we had gone to war, we should use our force of arms properly and the other side would have to come to terms with us. A nation as great and as powerful as the United States did not seek war, did not go to war readily, but if it did, then it must be careful not to give away its goals, undermine its own military. There was a consistency to Rusk: he had been the least eager to get in because he had never seen the task as easy, and had few illusions about air power and the quick use of force. In fact, his positions from start to finish, right through to Tet, were remarkably similar to those of the Army generals. His view of the war was a serious one; if we went in we had to be prepared for a long haul, and we had better be ready for it; we had better not flash the wrong signals as soon as we started. Perhaps Rusk, more than any other man around the President, understood Lyndon Johnson, knew that once committed, Johnson would see it through, and that he would want allies, not doubters.

  Rusk believed in mutual security, that this was the way to peace; South Vietnam was now linked to mutual security. Thus it must stand; Vietnam had an importance far beyond its own existence. The doubts of the men under him in State did not penetrate his confidence; he was sure of what Americans had to do and sure that they could do it. More than anyone else, more than the military people themselves, he believed what the military said they could do; he took their reports and their estimates perilously close to face value. He told the men under him at State that their job was to wait and watch for the signals from Hanoi, which would give the signal, not the United States. When the signals came, it would be a sign that they were ready to begin; then and only then State’s job would begin. “You look for that signal and you tell me when they give it,” he told aides. His fault, a deputy thought, was not insincerity, it was the totality of his sincerity. He still believed that the world was the way he had found it as a young man in the thirties, and that good was on our side. Automatically. Because we were a democracy.

  His job and State’s, then, was to wait. If you were in, you were in. What was it he had told McNamara at the time of the B-52 raids? In for a dime, in for a dollar. So we were in for more than a dollar. And he was different from those around him because they were such rationalists and such optimists, whereas Rusk was always less optimistic, less the rationalist; the others believed that if things did not pan out, they could always turn them around, since they were in control. This was one other reason Rusk was different—he knew his man better.

  There were many Lyndon Johnsons, this complicated, difficult, sensitive man, and among them were a Johnson when things were going well and a Johnson when things were going poorly. Most of the Kennedy men, new to him, working with him since Dallas, had only seen Johnson at his best. Moving into the postassassination vacuum with a certain majesty, he had behaved with sensitivity and subtlety, and that challenge had evoked from him the very best of his qualities. Similarly, during the planning on Vietnam, during the time he had been, as a new President, faced with this most terrible dilemma, he had been cautious and reflective. If there was bluster it was largely bluster on the outside; on the inside he was careful, thoughtful, did his homework and could under certain conditions be reasoned with.

  But when things went badly, he did not respond that well, and he did not, to the men around him, seem so reasonable. There would be a steady exodus from the White House during 1966 and 1967 of many of the men, both hawks and doves, who had tried to reason with him and tried to affect him on Vietnam (in May 1967 McNaughton, noting this phenomenon, wrote in a memo to McNamara: “I fear that 'natural selection’ in this environment will lead the Administration itself to become more and more homogenized—Mac Bundy, George Ball, Bill Moyers are gone. Who next?” The answer, of course, was McNamara himself). In the late fall of 1965 Johnson learned the hard way that the slide rules and the computers did not work, that the projections were all wrong, that Vietnam was in fact a tar baby and that he was in for a long difficult haul—his commander and Secretary of Defense were projecting 400,000 men by the end of 1966, and 600,000 by the end of 1967, and even so, as 1968 rolled around, no guarantees. At that time Lyndon Johnson began to change. He began to sulk, he was not so open, not so accessible, and it was not so easy to talk with him about the problems and difficulties involved in Vietnam. McNamara’s access was in direct proportion to his optimism; as he became more pessimistic, the President became reluctant to see him alone. Johnson did not need other people’s problems and their murky forecasts; he had enough of those himself. What he needed was their support and their loyalty. He was, sadly, open-minded when things went well, and increasingly close-minded when things went poorly, as they now were about to do. In the past, during all those long agonizing hours in 1964 and 1965 when they discussed the problems of Vietnam, they had all been reasonable men discussing reasonable solutions, and in their assumptions was the idea that Ho Chi Minh was reasonable too. But now it would turn out that Ho was not reasonable, not by American terms, anyway, and the war was not reasonable, and suddenly Lyndon Johnson was not very reasonable either. He was a good enough politician to know what had gone wrong and what he was in for and what it meant to his dreams, but he could not turn back, he could not admit that he had made a mistake. He could not lose and thus he had to plunge forward. It was a terrible thing, he was caught and he knew it, and he knew he could juggle the figures only so long before the things he knew became obvious to the public at large. The more he realized this, the more he had to keep it in,
keep it hidden, knowing that if he ever evinced doubts himself, if he admitted the truth to himself, it would somehow become reality and those around him would also know, and then he would have to follow through on his convictions. So he fought the truth, there were very rarely moments when he would admit that it was a miscalculation, that he had forgotten, when they had brought him the slide rules and the computers which said that two plus two equals four, that the most basic rule of politics is that human beings never react the way you expect them to. Then he would talk with some fatalism about the trap he had built for himself, with an almost plaintive cry for some sort of help. But these moments were rare indeed, very private, and more often than not they would soon be replaced by wild rages against any critic who might voice the most gentle doubt of the policy and the direction in which it was taking the country.

  So instead of leading, he was immobilized, surrounded, seeing critics everywhere. Critics became enemies; enemies became traitors; and the press, which a year earlier had been so friendly, was now filled with enemies baying at his heels. The Senate was beginning to rise up; he knew that and he knew why—it was that damn Fulbright. He knew what Fulbright was up to, he said; even a blind hog can find an acorn once in a while. So by early 1966, attitudes in the White House had become frozen. One could stay viable only by proclaiming faith and swallowing doubts. The price was high; it was very hard to bring doubts and reality to Johnson without losing access. The reasonable had become unreasonable; the rational, irrational. The deeper we were in, the more the outcry in the country, in the Senate and in the press, the more Johnson hunkered down, isolated himself from reality. What had begun as a credibility gap became something far more perilous, a reality gap. He had a sense that everything he had wanted for his domestic program, his offering to history, was slipping away, and the knowledge of this made him angrier and touchier than ever; if you could not control events, you could at least try and control the version of them. Thus the press as an enemy. Critics of the war became his critics; since he was patriotic, clearly they were not. He had FBI dossiers on war critics, congressmen and journalists, and he would launch into long, irrational tirades against them: he knew what was behind their doubts, the Communists were behind them—yes, the Communists, the Russians; he kept an eye on who was going to social receptions at the Soviet embassy and he knew that a flurry of social activity at the Communist embassies always resulted in a flurry of dovish speeches in the Senate. Why, some of the children of those dove senators were dating children of Russian embassy officials. And he knew which ones. In fact, he would say, some of those dovish Senate speeches were being written at the Russian embassy; he knew all about it, he knew which ones, he often saw these speeches before the senators themselves did.

  Yet if he had a sense of the darkness ahead in the ground war, he also took a negative view of negotiations; negotiations meant defeat. He had not been particularly eager for the first bombing pause in late 1965, and the results, in his mind, had justified his doubts (one reason he would turn to Clark Clifford to replace the doubting and disintegrating McNamara in late 1967 was that Clifford had seemingly shown his hawkish credentials by opposing the bombing halt in 1965). Nothing but a propaganda benefit for the other side, nothing but more pressure against him, making it harder and harder to renew the bombing. So in the future when there was talk of other bombing halts, he would react with anger and irritation. Oh yes, a bombing halt, he would say, I’ll tell you what happens when there’s a bombing halt: I halt and then Ho Chi Minh shoves his trucks right up my ass. That’s your bombing halt.

  So he was entrapped. By early 1966 he was into the war and he knew it; if there was anything particularly frustrating, it was the inequity of it all. Ho did not have enemies nipping at his heels the way Lyndon Johnson did. It was an unfair fight. Yet he was locked into it, and of course it became his war, he personalized it, his boys flying his bombers, his boys getting killed in their sleep. His entire public career, more than thirty years of remarkable service, had all come down to this one issue, a war, of all things, this one roll of the dice, and everything was an extension of him. Westmoreland was an extension of him and his ego, his general. In the past, Dean Acheson had warned him that the one thing a President should never do is let his ego get between him and his office. By 1966 Lyndon Johnson had let this happen, and Vietnam was the issue which had made it happen.

  If he was not the same man, then the men around him were not the same men either. In early 1966 Bundy was very uneasy with Johnson. Their relationship, which had never been a natural one, had deteriorated. Bundy was upset by Johnson’s disorderly way of running things, by his tendency—when Kennedy would have let Bundy lock up an issue—to turn, after all the normal players had made their case, to people like Fortas and Clifford for last-minute consultation, and though Bundy had been an advocate of escalation, he was enough of a rationalist to understand immediately that Hanoi’s counterescalation meant that events were likely to be messy and irrational. And he knew that with Rusk there, the chance of State was now slim. On Johnson’s part there was a feeling that Bundy was somehow, no matter how hard he tried to control it, supercilious (“A smart kid, that’s all,” Johnson later said of him), plus a gnawing belief that when things went well in foreign affairs the credit would be given to Bundy, and when things went poorly they would be blamed on Johnson. In March 1966, when Bundy was offered the job as president of the Ford Foundation, James Reston at the Times found out about it. Bundy, knowing Johnson and fearing his response if there was a story in the Times, pleaded with Reston not to run it. The news item was printed and soon there was a story out of Austin, leaked there, that Bundy was indeed accepting, going to Ford. (A few weeks later, at a reception in the White House for young White House fellows, Lady Bird Johnson approached a young man and asked him to tell her what his job was.

  “Well, I don’t really know,” he said. “I used to work for McGeorge Bundy, but now I don’t know.”

  “Oh,” said Lady Bird, “Lyndon and I are so sorry about Mac’s going. We’re going to miss Mac like a big front tooth.”)

  If Bundy had doubts about Vietnam, and friends thought that in 1966 and 1967 increasingly he did, then they remained interior ones. Johnson, letting Bundy go, knew that he would not become a critic, that he would be available for any and all errands, that he was anxious enough to return and serve, to play by the rules. Which he did; his doubts were very pragmatic ones, whether Vietnam was worth the time and resources it was absorbing and the division it was creating. Yet they remained closely guarded doubts. There was that quality to him—ferocious pride, belief in self, inability to admit mistakes that kept him from being able to react to the war in a human sense. It was as if the greater his doubts and reservations, the more he had to show that he did not have doubts and reservations, and the more confident and arrogant he seemed (debating at Harvard during the 1968 post-Tet meetings, sessions at which he had been an important force to limit the escalation, he would begin by announcing that he would not defend those policies “because I have a brother who is paid to do that,” a statement which appalled most of his audience). In the months after he left office he seemed at his worst—glib, smug, insensitive. In March of 1966, right after he left office, he went on the Today show, a rare public appearance, and as he walked into the NBC studio early in the morning he was met by a young staff aide named Robert Cunniff, who showed him the make-up room, asked him how he wanted his coffee, and told Bundy he would be on in about fifteen minutes. Then, further trying to put Bundy at his ease, realizing that many people, even the famous and powerful, are often nervous in television studios, Cunniff tried to make small talk. In some ways it must be a great relief to be out of Washington, Cunniff said, to be away from the terrible decisions involved with Bundy’s last job.

  “Just what do you mean?” asked Bundy, and there was a small tightening of the mouth.

  “Oh,” said Cunniff, not realizing what he was getting into, “you know, you must be relieved, get
ting away from the terrible pressures of the war, making decisions on it.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Bundy, “you people up here in New York take that all very seriously, don’t you?”

  And Cunniff, who was stunned by the answer, looked quickly to see if it was a put-on, but the face was very cold and Cunniff realized that McGeorge Bundy was not joking.

  There was no dearth of applicants for the Bundy job. Robert Komer, a Bundy assistant, deemed himself available and qualified and moved his things into Bundy’s office. Bill Moyers, anxious to have experience in foreign affairs, was a quiet candidate, knowing the President well, and knowing that you did not necessarily get what you pushed for with Lyndon Johnson. Carl Kaysen, another Bundy deputy, was an insider’s choice. And then there was the possibility of Walt Rostow, Bundy’s former deputy and now the head of Policy Planning. Komer had his problems; he was an Easterner, and the kind of Easterner that Johnson reacted to, bouncy, ebullient, almost preppy, one had somehow a sense of Komer in white bucks on his way to a fraternity meeting, and he was linked to the Georgetown boys that Johnson disliked. Moyers had his problems; he was young and from Texas and the only degree he possessed was in divinity, and in a White House already sensitive to the charge of too many Texans in high places, the idea of a young biblical Texan handling foreign policy did not go over well. Besides, Moyers had shown a lack of enthusiasm for the war in the past and that did not help him. Kaysen was too reserved, too cerebral.

  Gradually the emphasis began to shift to Rostow. The key link here was Jack Valenti, the self-conscious, self-made intellectual, feverishly loyal to Johnson, desperately anxious to improve Johnson’s public image (and naturally, with his sycophancy, detracting from it). Valenti, with his desire to improve Johnson’s intellectual reputation, was impressed by Rostow, with his enthusiasm, his endless number of theories for almost any subject and situation, his capacity to bring the past into the present with a historical footnote, to make his points thus seem more valid, more historical. (Typically, in April 1966, during one of the periodic Buddhist crises, he wrote that “right now with the latest Buddhist communiqué, we are faced with a classic revolutionary situation—like Paris in 1789 and St. Petersburg in 1917 . . . If I rightly remember, the Russian Constituent Assembly gathered in June 1917; in July, Lenin’s first coup aborted; in the face of defeat in the field and Kerensky’s weakness, Lenin took over in November. This is about what would happen in Saigon if we were not there; but we are there. And right now we have to try to find the ways to make that fact count.”) Comforting words for a President, but even more comforting was his upbeat spirit, his sheer enthusiasm for the President and his policies, particularly the war policies. Rostow had started giving memos for the President to Valenti; Johnson was impressed and encouraged them, and the two got on well together.