American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (11 page)

Notice Bundy’s hedging. He does not say that withdrawal from Vietnam would doom LBJ’s political future, only that he should not “
seem to be
the first to quit.” What matters most is that people believe LBJ has done “more” to prevent a Communist victory in Vietnam than was done in China. The justice or effectiveness of the policy is secondary.

Even before Bundy saw the blood-streaked barracks at Pleiku on February 7, 1965, he and McNamara had drafted a pro-escalation memo for the president. Current policy, they argued, would only lead to a “disastrous defeat” in which the United States would have to withdraw in “humiliating circumstances. . . .
Bob and I believe
that the worst course of action is to continue in this essentially passive role.”

On the plane home from Pleiku, Bundy completed the draft of a thirteen-page memo. When he landed in Washington, he went directly to the White House and delivered it to the president at 11:00 p.m., the end of a thirty-six-hour day. “The situation in Vietnam is deteriorating and without new U.S. action defeat appears inevitable.” He referred to South Vietnam as a “patient” approaching death. The South Vietnamese government displayed a “distressing absence of positive commitment to any serious social and political purpose.” By contrast, the Viet Cong demonstrated an “energy and persistence” that was “astonishing. . . . They have accepted extraordinary losses and they come back for more.”

The United States must act quickly and do so with force. A negotiated withdrawal would only lead to “surrender on the installment plan.” Thus, the next step should be to begin the continual bombing of North Vietnam. Bundy called it “
a policy of sustained reprisal
”—a classic example of the kind of icy, sterile, technocratic euphemism that characterized so much of the language of American war-making in Vietnam. “Sustained reprisal” suggested that the systematic bombing of North Vietnam was merely a form of ongoing retaliation, as if the Vietnamese had always been, and would continue to be, the hostile provocateur, despite the fact that the United States initiated aggression against North Vietnam.

Even among themselves, in top secret memoranda like Bundy’s, policymakers used a bloodless, empty language as if they were trying to persuade each other that they were not actually engaged in war. Bundy preferred to call it a “contest” in which the United States used “air and naval action.” When Bundy quit his post a year later, he told people he was frustrated that LBJ had not been more candid with the public about the means and aims of the war. Yet in Bundy’s own major 1965 recommendation, he advised the president to “execute our reprisal policy with as low a level of public noise as possible.” LBJ followed the advice. As the massive, daily bombing of North Vietnam began—Operation Rolling Thunder—the president told the media that it did not represent a change in U.S. policy.

Remarkably, Bundy had no faith that bombing would break the will or capacity of North Vietnam to wage war. At best, it might only give a psychological boost to the South Vietnamese regime and its supporters. It might be a “stimulant” that would “encourage” southerners to build a “more effective government.” In other words, the United States was bombing the North to buck up the South.

Then Bundy concedes that even this limited goal may not be achievable. Bombing might utterly fail.

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%.

But, even more shocking, Bundy says the outcome of bombing doesn’t matter.

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.

In plain English, what is Bundy saying? Bombing may not work, but it will be good for our image. It will make us look tough and resolute. It will show that we are willing to stand by our commitments, even if we can’t fulfill them. It will be a kind of malpractice insurance policy. We can say that we were the “good doctor.” We did everything possible to keep the patient alive. The patient may die, but our reputation will survive.

Of course Bundy is not recommending extreme medical treatment to save a dying patient; he is recommending lethal violence to kill people. He is recommending a policy that will launch the United States into a major war on the grounds that it
might
give a shot of confidence to the failing South Vietnamese government and would at least allow U.S. policymakers to look tough. But we don’t hear the voice of “Field Marshal” Bundy, the true believer. We hear instead the dead language of the accountant, offering a cost-benefit analysis of America’s reputation: “Measured against the cost of defeat in Vietnam, this program [war] seems cheap. And even if it fails to turn the tide—and it may—the value of the effort seems to us to exceed its cost.” The unstated, but implicit, bottom line was this: Mr. President, you need to bomb to win the next election.

Bombing failed on every count. Far from weakening the will of the North and the Viet Cong in the South, it deepened their resolve and incited others to join the anti-American cause; it did not “stimulate” the Saigon regime, it made it all the more dependent on the United States; it did not protect America’s reputation or that of the administration, it led to bitter opposition to the U.S. war at home and abroad. And even in the narrowest political terms it was a colossal failure. LBJ’s war had made him so unpopular that, far from being reelected in 1968, he—the master politician—dropped out of the presidential race before it even began in earnest.

Johnson ordered Operation Rolling Thunder, even though he had as little hope as Bundy that it would break the will of Ho Chi Minh and his followers. As he said to Bundy, “
Ol’ Ho isn’t gonna give in
to any airplanes.” That same conclusion had already poured in from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) at the State Department. Bombing would not destroy either the will or the ability of the Communists to continue fighting.

So why was Bundy so sure that the “cost” of bombing was “cheap” even if it failed? The best answer comes from some personal notes he made on March 21, 1965, in which he addresses his own reservations about the U.S. interest in Vietnam. “Is our interest economic?” he asks himself. “Obviously not. . . . Is our interest military? Not really . . . even a bad result would be marginal.” He even wonders if the U.S. political interest is “real or fancied?” He does not even mention an interest in helping South Vietnam. But, as always, Bundy returns to what he regarded as
the “cardinal” principle
of U.S. policy in Vietnam: “
not
to be a Paper Tiger. Not to have it thought that when we commit ourselves we really mean no major risk.” For Bundy, “the whole game” boiled down to avoiding the perception that the United States roared like a tiger but never fought like one. “Which is better,” he asks himself, “to ‘lose’ now or to ‘lose’ after committing 100,000 men?” His “tentative answer” is that it would be better to lose
after
waging a significant war.

Just a few weeks later, Bundy was at it again, scribbling a defense of the war, this time not to himself, but in an eleven-page
letter to the editor of the
Harvard Crimson
.
As dean at Harvard in the mid-1950s he had once faced questions from
Crimson
editors David Halberstam and A. J. “Jack” Langguth, who later reported on the Vietnam War for the
New York Times
. Bundy clearly had a pressing need to justify the war to his former colleagues and students.

In his letter to the
Crimson
, Bundy did not concede that the war might fail (as he had privately to LBJ). But he did stress the importance of demonstrating American toughness. “We are not paper tigers,” he wrote, “and it would be a very great danger to the peace of all the world if we should carelessly let it be thought that we are. This is the lesson that we learned in failure and redeemed in triumph by John F. Kennedy over Cuba.”

Another history lesson? Realities within Vietnam were never enough to justify our presence, even to those who supported the war. The justification was always linked to America’s global power and prestige, and an ongoing effort to redeem perceived failures from other times and places—the failure to stand up to Hitler at Munich in 1938, the failure to prevent the loss of China in 1949, the failure of France to crush Ho Chi Minh’s forces in 1954, and the failure to overthrow Castro in 1961. A failure to fight in Vietnam, Bundy argues, would actually endanger world peace because it could tempt the Communist powers to risk a more horrific war in the future. Cold warriors routinely invoked that public specter to galvanize support for the war in Vietnam, a war that seemed, on its own terms, irrelevant to U.S. national security. If we aren’t willing to spill blood in places like Vietnam, they argued, Communist nations will judge us a paper tiger, a weak bluffer. And so they will become bolder, take greater risks, expand their power, encourage and support Communist revolution in more and more places, until eventually the United States might be faced not with a limited war in Southeast Asia but a far greater war, perhaps one that would challenge its very existence.

But how, exactly, had the United States failed and then triumphed “over” Cuba and what did that have to do with Vietnam? Bundy is referring to the
Bay of Pigs Invasion
of 1961 (a “failure”) and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 (a “triumph”). The invasion plan was hatched by the CIA shortly after Castro took power in 1959. The Agency began recruiting a small group of anti-Communist Cuban exiles, mostly living in Florida, and sent them to Guatemala for paramilitary training. Once it got presidential approval, the CIA planned to ship the fourteen hundred men to the shores of Cuba. There they would slip into the mountains and organize an uprising that would bring down Castro and reclaim Cuba as a pro-American bastion. To CIA director Allen Dulles and chief strategist Richard Bissell, it seemed a plausible plan. After all, the CIA had successfully orchestrated coups against popular leaders in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954). And in 1956, Castro himself had traveled to Cuba from Mexico in a small ship with his brother Raul, Che Guevara, and a tiny force of some eighty revolutionaries. The small band of survivors took to the mountains to organize the people and three years later they marched triumphantly into Havana. Why not use Castro’s own methods to bring him down?

In April 1961, JFK agreed. But he insisted that American involvement be as secret as possible. To reduce U.S. “fingerprints,” the landing site was moved to a remote beach. The invading force of Cuban exiles came ashore at the Bay of Pigs, an exposed and swampy flatland, far from the mountains. They were given only minimal air support.

The invasion could not have failed more completely. Within three days, the entire exile force was killed or captured. As the rout unfolded, Kennedy rejected advice to order further bombing strikes in support of his invasion. With the operation all but doomed, the president hoped to keep his sponsorship hidden. But the covert operation not only failed to achieve its objective, it failed to remain secret. JFK had to pay Cuba ransom to get back the captured Cubans. He took criticism from every direction. Much of the world saw the invasion as a flagrant violation of international law and the UN Charter. At home, right-wing critics attributed the failure to Kennedy’s weakness and ineptitude.

JFK was humiliated and angry. Though he regretted giving approval to such a harebrained scheme, Kennedy did not back away from his goal of ending Castro’s rule. On behalf of the president, Robert Kennedy told the CIA that bringing down Castro was “the top priority in the U.S. government—all else is secondary.” The agency came up with a long list of plans, ranging from the lethal to the absurd. If it couldn’t assassinate Castro, somehow it would destroy his ability to govern by slipping him LSD to make him incoherent and suicidal, or depilatories to make his charismatic beard fall out. Some of the plans sound as if they were written for
MAD
magazine
. The military also began contingency plans to invade Cuba again, this time openly with regular American troops.
The CIA even brainstormed a sinister plan
to create a pretext for invasion by killing American citizens and blaming the violence on Cuban “terrorists.”

The American public was not aware of its government’s ongoing efforts to topple Castro, but the Cubans and Russians were. Khrushchev believed putting nuclear missiles on the island might deter U.S. aggression, a move equivalent to the U.S. installation of nukes in Turkey. An open declaration of that intention would have provided the Soviets with a stronger case in international law. But the Soviets acted in secret, an undeniably provocative action, especially since Kennedy had openly declared that he would regard any such weapons in Cuba as intolerable.

When Kennedy went on television in October 1962 to tell the American people about what came to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, he described the nuclear weapons sites under construction in Cuba as a new and unacceptable military threat. But that is not what he believed. In the secret Executive Committee (ExComm) meetings convened to handle the crisis, JFK agreed with Defense Secretary McNamara and Mac Bundy that the
Cuban missiles represented a “domestic political problem
,” not a “military problem.” None of them thought Soviet missiles in Cuba posed a significantly greater danger to the American people than they already faced. But because the president had already publicly stated that he would not tolerate nuclear weapons in Cuba, he felt obliged to act. JFK told his advisers that he wished he had never issued the warning. Had he not spoken out, they would not have had to insist that the missiles be removed at once. Now he was boxed in.

According to Kennedy’s own reasoning, what brought the world to the brink of nuclear war was not the presence of nuclear missiles in Cuba, but his insistence that they be removed. JFK felt compelled to demonstrate his steely resolve to stand tough against the Communists. Otherwise, he might be viewed as a paper tiger, as much by his own people as by Khrushchev and the world. JFK’s fear of appearing weak skyrocketed early in his presidency with the Bay of Pigs fiasco. A few months later, Khrushchev verbally bullied Kennedy at a meeting in Vienna, leaving the president with the sick feeling that he had not shown enough toughness in response. Right-wingers also attacked Kennedy for his handling of the 1961 Soviet threats to take over West Berlin and for then “allowing” the Soviet Union to build the Berlin Wall. JFK had responded to these Cold War tensions by raising defense spending, enlarging active-duty forces, warning the public to build bomb shelters, and sending nine thousand troops to Vietnam as part of Project Beefup. As he told a journalist, “Now we have a problem in
making our power credible
and Vietnam looks like the place.” But nothing he did seemed to dispel the right’s charge that he was losing the Cold War.