Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995

by James S. Olson

  Tet stirred Capitol Hill. Senator Robert Kennedy declared that it “has finally shattered the mask of official illusion with which we have concealed our true circumstances, even from ourselves.” For Senator Mike Mansfield, Tet was the disaster he had been anticipating. “From the outset,” he said, the war “was not an American responsibility, and it is not now an American responsibility, to win a victory for any particular Vietnamese group, or to defeat any particular Vietnamese group.” If Tet was supposed to have been a communist failure, observed Senator George Aiken of Vermont, “I hope the Viet Cong never have a major success.”

  Reaction in the press measures the effect of Tet. The usually conservative Wall Street Journal argued that “the American people should be getting ready to accept . . . the prospect that the whole Vietnam effort may be doomed.” Tet, observed the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, had revealed “the hollowness of the Saigon government’s pretensions to sovereignty . . . the fraud of our government’s claims of imminent victory, and the basic untenability of the American military position.” Art Buchwald parodied Westmoreland’s claims of victory, titling his column, “We Have the Enemy on the Run, Says General Custer.” The greatest defection was Walter Cronkite, the dean of American broadcast journalists and anchor of the CBS Evening News. His explosive response to the news of Tet—“What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning the war—” amounted to a news story in itself. After a few days, Cronkite went to Vietnam for his own look. When he returned he issued on the evening broadcast of February 27 his personal opinion: “We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.” There would be no military victory. Cronkite wanted peace negotiations. The president was watching the broadcast. “If I have lost Walter Cronkite,” he said, “I have lost Mr. Average Citizen.” Johnson and Westmoreland were victims of their own rhetoric. Ever since 1962 American leaders had predicted an enemy collapse and an imminent military victory. When the Tet offensive exposed the rhetoric, reporters knew they had a story, comparing the strength of the enemy with MACV’s descriptions of its weakness. In a matter of days, Tet had turned from an American victory to a political disaster.

  Johnson also had to deal with Earle Wheeler and William Westmoreland. Wheeler cabled Westmoreland on February 9 that the “United States is not prepared to accept a defeat in South Vietnam. In summary, if you need more troops, ask for them.” Westmoreland came back with a request for 206,000 troops. He also asked Johnson to mobilize the reserves, permit an invasion of Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam, and expand the air war. His new proposal was Operation Complete Victory. So Johnson found himself dealing with the old question: whether to widen the war and raise American troop levels.

  At a special meeting of his top advisers on February 9, Johnson listened to them talk about Westmoreland’s proposals. Earle Wheeler, who was playing no small part in Westmoreland’s troop requests, knew the war was stretching American military resources to the limit. He wanted a national mobilization, a call-up of reserves, and a declaration of war. Dean Rusk disagreed. Opposition to the war, which had prevented Johnson from even raising taxes a few years before, was more severe than ever.

  By this time there was a new secretary of defense, Clark Clifford. A Kansas native and a graduate of the Washington University Law School, Clifford had been special counsel to Harry Truman in 1946 and became Truman’s most trusted adviser. Tactful but tough, he headed the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in 1961, serving as the official watchdog over the CIA. He had a special ability to sniff out exaggeration, hyperbole, and bureaucratic dissembling. Clifford directed Lyndon Johnson’s election campaign in 1964 and for several years was a leading hawk. Early in 1968 Clifford replaced Robert McNamara as secretary of defense, and within weeks he heard “Blimpies” coming out of Saigon. In the middle of Earle Wheeler’s plea for more troops and fewer restrictions, Clifford voiced his concern: “There is a very strange contradiction in what we are saying . . . . I think we should give some very serious thought to how we explain saying on one hand that the enemy did not take a victory and yet [we] are in need of many more troops and possibly an emergency call-up.” Johnson was quick to see Clifford’s shrewdness. The press would have a fine time with the rhetoric of victory accompanied by a massive additional deployment of troops. The president asked Clifford to review the proposals and “give me the lesser of two evils.” Clifford insisted that Westmoreland specifically describe what he would do with the 206,000 troops, what results he would achieve, and when he would achieve them. He asked Alain Enthoven, a senior assistant and systems analyst in the Defense Department, to evaluate American strategy. A few weeks later Enthoven presented a scathing attack on Westmoreland’s notion. The troop requests would not shorten the war, and 206,000 new troops promised “no early end to the conflict, nor any success in attriting the enemy or eroding Hanoi’s will to fight.” And a troop buildup on that scale would completely Americanize the war and create a tremendous political backlash at home.

  Enthoven proposed a new strategy. Military victory was out of the question. Westmoreland was never going to reach the crossover point. Instead Enthoven wanted to deploy American troops in areas where they could provide “population security,” stop any major communist attacks, and keep the enemy off balance with limited offensive operations. In the meantime, ARVN must take the offensive and reverse the Americanization of the conflict. The proposal became known as “Vietnamization.” It was actually little different from what the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations had tried to accomplish years before. Upon its completion, the United States would seek a negotiated political settlement and withdraw, leaving South Vietnam to its own destiny.

  Those were the choices Johnson faced, and none of them was really palatable. The sum of Westmoreland’s tactical victories between 1965 and 1968 had been zero. “If capturing a section of the American embassy and several large cities constitutes complete failure,” remarked Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, with the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire a few weeks ahead, “I suppose by this logic that if the Viet Cong captured the entire country, the administration would be claiming their total collapse.”

  Before being elected to Congress in 1948, Eugene McCarthy had been a professor of English. Ten years later he won a seat in the Senate. More mystic than politician, McCarthy seemed to belong in coffee shops discussing philosophy instead of working the halls of Congress. In the journalist Theodore White’s characterization, McCarthy might “have love in his heart—but it is an abstract love, a love for youth, a love for beauty, a love for vistas and hills and song . . . . All through the year [1968] one’s admiration of the man grew, but one’s affection lessened.” Early in 1967 McCarthy called for an end to the war. On November 30, 1967, he decided to take on Johnson in the upcoming presidential primaries. Few paid any attention until Tet. But by February thousands of college students, freshly shaved, trimmed, and dressed in shirts and ties—part of a “Get Clean for Gene” campaign—were walking door-to-door in New Hampshire garnering votes for McCarthy in the March 12 primary. The results were astonishing. McCarthy took 42 percent of the vote to 48 percent for Johnson. For the presidential incumbent and the party’s nominal leader, the narrow victory was equivalent to a defeat.

  Four days later Senator Robert Kennedy of New York declared for the nomination. McCarthy’s supporters were outraged. Kennedy seemed a rank opportunist willing to enter the fray only after the shift in the political mood. Johnson was just as outraged. He hated Robert Kennedy. The Kennedy administration had taken the first major step in escalating the conflict in Vietnam, and Robert Kennedy, having promised in 1962 that the United States “would remain there until we win,” now wanted an end to the war. McCarthy and Kennedy both opposed Lyndon Johnson on the ballot of the April 2 presidential primary in Wisconsin.

  Johnson was a larger-than-life f
igure who personalized everything around him. On one occasion when an aide tried to direct him to one of several helicopters, saying “Mr. President, that’s not your helicopter.” Johnson replied, “Son, they’re all my helicopters,” Vietnam was his war. He brooded about it all the time. One observer described Johnson’s role:

  He made appointments, approved promotions, reviewed troop requests, determined deployments, selected bombing targets, and restricted aircraft sorties. Night after night, wearing a dressing gown and carrying a flashlight, he would descend into the White House basement “situation room” to monitor the conduct of the conflict . . . . Often, too, he would doze by his bedside telephone, waiting to hear the outcome of a mission to rescue one of “my pilots” shot down over Haiphong or Vinh or Thai Nguyen. It was his war.

  But if it was his war, Johnson did not want to be alone. Obsessed with consensus, he wanted agreement from everyone. Johnson was a great giver of jpgts, especially presidential gifts—lighters, tie clasps, bowls, cuff links, electric toothbrushes, waterproof watches, and silk scarves, all with the presidential seal. Anyone who traveled with Johnson aboard Air Force One or a presidential helicopter received a certificate commemorating the event. To show his appreciation for his staff, Johnson gave “CARE” boxes filled with favorite candies. He gave and gave. Some people’s jpgts come with strings attached; Johnson’s came with steel chains. In return he demanded gratitude, love, and, most of all, loyalty. If his jpgts were not paid with the proper emotional interest, he was deeply hurt. Now, with so many people turned against him, Johnson angrily asked a friend, “How is it possible that all these people could be so ungrateful to me after I have given them so much?” His need for approval translated into a need for consensus, and seeking consensus required charting a middle course between the liberals and right-wing anticommunists. That meant that in place of seeking a victory or accepting withdrawal, Johnson would end up settling for a stalemate. And for the United States, stalemate meant defeat.

  Nor did the midcourse bring any real political gain at home. On March 10 the New York Times released the news that Westmoreland wanted another 206,000 troops. Senator J. William Fulbright opened new hearings by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and 139 members of the House signed a petition asking Johnson to reevaluate Vietnam policy. On the NBC Evening News, Frank McGee told the nation that 206,000 more troops would only result in more destruction, not peace and victory. “We must decide whether it is futile,” McGee said, “to destroy Vietnam in an effort to save it.” By mid-March the public opinion polls indicated that only one-quarter of Americans supported Johnson’s conduct of the war.

  Westmoreland was not going to get the 206,000 troops, but Johnson had to decide whether to endorse the strategic proposals of Alain Enthoven and Clark Clifford. Once again he turned to the Wise Men. Just four months before, back in November 1967, all of them except George Ball had told him to stay with it and force North Vietnam to the negotiating table while turning more of the war over to ARVN. Johnson now hoped simply that they could see a way out of the quagmire, a “peace with honor.” State Department officials had used the phrase for years, referring to “peace with honor” as the “number of days between the departure of the last Marine and the rape of the first nun.”

  On March 25, 1968, the Wise Men gathered at the State Department. It was essentially the same group that had supported Johnson back in November: Dean Acheson, Clark Clifford, Abe Fortas, McGeorge Bundy, Maxwell Taylor, Omar Bradley, Robert Murphy, Henry Cabot Lodge, Douglas Dillon, and George Ball. The retired army general Matthew Ridgway was there, as was Cyrus Vance, a former deputy secretary of defense and adviser to Johnson. The event was the Wise Men’s swan song. The elaborate network of military bases, regional alliances, and global commitments they had created after World War II was stretched to the breaking point. Perhaps the United States was just not capable of stopping aggression everywhere in the world. The North Koreans had helped prove that point. On January 23, 1968, while Johnson and Westmoreland watched Khe Sanh, North Korean naval forces seized the USS Pueblo, a highly sophisticated intelligence-gathering ship plying the waters off the coast of North Korea. In the attack one American died and the ship and crew were taken captive. Johnson sent 350 aircraft to bases in South Korea as a show of force, but Vietnam had drawn his resources too thin. The Pueblo crew would languish in a North Korean prison for nearly a year. There were limits to American power, and the Wise Men were called to evaluate them.

  In the first day’s session, Dean Rusk, Walt Rostow, United Nations Ambassador Arthur Goldberg, and CIA director Richard Helms listened to Generals Earle Wheeler and William DePuy, together with Philip Habib of the State Department. To DePuy’s announcement that 80,000 Vietcong had died during Tet, Goldberg raised his eyebrows. He wanted to know how many Vietcong were still left in the field, and DuPuy put the estimate at 230,000. Goldberg started doing a little arithmetic. “I am not a great mathematician,” he responded, “but with 80,000 killed and with a wounded ratio of three to one, or 240,000, for a total of 320,000, who the hell are we fighting?” When General Wheeler argued that the United States should not seek a negotiated settlement, for “this is the worst time to negotiate,” Henry Cabot Lodge leaned over to Dean Acheson and observed, “Yes, because we are in worse shape militarily than we have ever been.” When Wheeler said that it might take five to ten years to win the war, Douglas Dillon thought, according to his later reconstruction: “In November, we were told that it would take us a year to win. Now it looked like five or ten years, if that. I knew the country wouldn’t stand for it.”

  The next morning the Wise Men met alone with Johnson. Wheeler was there at the beginning of the meeting, claiming that the Pentagon was not seeking a “classic military victory in Vietnam,” which prompted an incredulous Dean Acheson to ask, “Then what in the name of God do we have five hundred thousand troops out there for? Chasing girls?” Johnson waved Wheeler out of the meeting and went around the table. He received a lot of counsel but no reassurance. McGeorge Bundy then presented the collective wisdom of the group: “The majority feeling is that we can no longer do the job we set out to do in the time we have left . . . . We must begin to take steps to disengage. When we last met we saw reasons for hope. We hoped then there would be slow but steady progress. Last night and today the picture is not so hopeful.” Walt Rostow “smelled a rat . . . a put-up job . . . . I thought to myself that what began in the spring of 1940 when Henry Stimson came to Washington ended tonight. The American Establishment is dead.” So was Operation Complete Victory. Westmoreland would get neither his 206,000 new troops nor his invasions of Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam. When the meeting was over, Johnson concluded that “The establishment bastards have bailed out.”

  Dean Rusk had also wavered, although he would never do it publicly. His sense of loyalty ran too deep. He had pushed the war for seven years, always with the conviction that it was necessary to save the world from “a billion Chinese armed with nuclear weapons.” Johnson had a deep-seated trust for Rusk, a trust born of shared rural beginnings. When Rusk urged Johnson to consider a partial bombing halt over North Vietnam as a start to a new peace initiative, Johnson listened, even though he remained skeptical. But in case there was even a glimmer of hope that Ho Chi Minh would respond, he wanted to try. “Even a blind hog,” the president said, “sometimes finds the chestnut.”

  Lyndon Johnson was a broken man. His memoirs register that moment: “They were intelligent, experienced men. I had always regarded the majority of them as very steady and balanced. If they had been so deeply influenced by the reports of the Tet offensive, what must the average citizen be thinking?” Suddenly a president who lived to achieve consensus saw himself as a hated man. The near defeat at the hands of Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire, the entrance of Senator Robert Kennedy into the presidential race, and his own private polls indicating defeat in the upcoming Wisconsin primary convinced him that he had to take another look at Vietnam as well as his own pol
itical career. Johnson was feeling old in the spring of 1968, tired and finished.

  Johnson’s health was a recurring anxiety. It was not uncommon for him to undergo physical examinations every week or call in a physician to look at him every day. His heart attack thirteen years earlier still frightened him. He had abdominal and throat surgery in 1965 and 1966, and during the course of his presidency more than forty precancerous lesions and one small malignant tumor were removed from his skin. Johnson was convinced he would not live out a second term. He even had a secret actuarial study predict his longevity: “The men in the Johnson family,” he said, “have a history of dying young . . . . I figure with my history of heart trouble I’d never live . . . another four years. The American people have had enough of presidents dying in office.”

  Long before the Tet offensive, Johnson was giving serious consideration to retiring. Tet confirmed what his own body told him. The war was a cancer consuming his health, his political career, and his beloved Great Society. The idea of running again for president, of facing a full year of hostile crowds shouting obscenities, was unthinkable. Like few other presidents in American history, Johnson always had his nose to the political winds, and the spreading stink was undeniable. To avoid a divisive political campaign and prove his sincerity in seeking an end to the war, Johnson delivered a speech on the evening of March 31, 1968, that stunned the whole country. He told the American people that he was “reducing . . . the present level of hostilities . . . . I have concluded that I should not permit the Presidency to become involved in partisan divisions that are developing . . . . Accordingly, I will not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for . . . President.”