The Best and the Brightest (100 page)

It also was a more political kind of pressure; it allowed more possibilities for negotiation, and this was an argument McNamara liked. The JCS position did not allow flexibility, and with its greater use of force might bring too great and too premature an international pressure for negotiation, whereas the moderate solution, McNamara believed, deflected pressure. It was more civilized, it would be easier to fend off both friends and enemies at the UN, and besides, it was more political in its aim, which was to get the North Vietnamese to the table. So even as the government seemed to be turning unanimously toward bombing, it was in fact very far from unanimous. The civilians wanted the bombing almost as a feint, a card to play; the military essentially wanted it as an instrument of war, a lever of force, an end in itself. Thus the seeming unanimity on bombing was a very thin conditional agreement of very different men who would momentarily come together for sometimes very conflicting reasons.

What was significant about the proposals the Bundy group presented to the President was that all three of them included bombing; there was really no political option at all. What was also significant was that the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs was recommending and pressing options that went markedly against the beliefs and instincts of the men below him and of the intelligence community. Thus the man in charge of political estimates for an area was going ahead even though the political expertise was largely against him, particularly since the intelligence estimates within his working group were, if anything, seemingly more oriented toward force and the success of force than they were in reality, the actual view being somewhat clouded and compromised by the presence of the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) people, who were not about to say blandly that bombing would not work. In the final recommendation to the working group, the experts forcefully challenged the Rostow thesis that Hanoi would succumb to the bombing in order to protect its new and hard-won industrial bases. It said:

We have many indications that the Hanoi leadership is acutely and nervously aware of the extent to which North Vietnam’s transportation system and industrial plant is vulnerable to attack. On the other hand North Vietnam’s economy is overwhelmingly agricultural and, to a large extent, decentralized in a myriad of more or less economically self-sufficient villages. Interdiction of imports and extensive destruction of transportation facilities and industrial plants would cripple D.R.V. [Democratic Republic of (North) Vietnam] industry. These actions would also seriously restrict D.R.V. military capabilities and would degrade, though to a lesser extent, Hanoi’s capabilities to support guerrilla warfare in South Vietnam and Laos. We do not believe that such actions would have a crucial effect on the daily lives of the overwhelming majority of the North Vietnam population. We do not believe that attacks on industrial targets would so greatly exacerbate current economic difficulties as to create unmanageable control problems. It is reasonable to infer that the D.R.V. leaders have a psychological investment in the work of reconstruction they have accomplished over a decade. Nevertheless they would probably be willing to suffer some damage to the country in the course of a test of wills with the U.S. over the course of events in South Vietnam.

Thus, even with the sweeteners thrown in for DIA—the idea that the military pressure would hurt them more than the CIA and INR people believed—it was a clear warning against bombing. Nonetheless, it had no effect, other than feeding Ball’s dissent.

If the Washington bureaucracy had decided on a course and veiled serious discord in an aura of consensus, the matching part, Taylor representing the mini-organism of American Saigon, was surprisingly similar. He again represented what seemed like a consensus for modified bombing (starting with low-level flights in Washington’s Option A and then switching after thirty days to Option C, a relatively similar conclusion), but it was a false consensus, and he was, like his counterparts in Washington, playing down the estimated North Vietnamese reaction that his own intelligence community was giving him. He was discussing possible U.S. actions, and more by silence than anything else, implying that the North Vietnamese response might be somewhat different from what he was being warned (he would soon go further and deliberately downplay pessimistic estimates of his intelligence people rather than frighten Washington off a course he wanted). But his consensus was thin; his top CIA man, Pier de Silva, thought the bombing futile; his top military aide, William C. Westmoreland, did not think the bombing would be militarily effective. He thought the real problem was in the South, and thought it would take ground troops. Yet Westmoreland was willing to go along for the political reasons specified by Taylor, who was the chief political officer. Westmoreland was also willing to go along because he wanted troops and he sensed that this was simply one last bench mark on the way to the inevitable decision to send troops, indeed the troops that would be needed to provide security for the air bases would be the beginning of an American combat commitment. So though Taylor seemed to bring unanimity, much of it was a sense of signing on despite great doubts or signing on for quite different and unexpressed reasons.

The two sides were supposed to mesh in the late-November meetings. They did not. Lyndon Johnson was still not satisfied that bombing was the answer. Rusk did not doubt the necessity of holding South Vietnam and denying it to the Chinese and Hanoi (which was his view of the origins of the pressure), but he was not sure bombing was the answer, nor did he think it would be easy to turn it on and off as the proponents argued. Johnson was on the fence, and Rusk, uneasy in his own right about the bombing, was waiting to see which way the President wanted to go. Johnson’s own fairly strong political instincts had been stirred by Ball’s dissent, and he was discovering that despite the seeming unanimity of his principals, their belief and confidence in what they were proposing were not exactly convincing. Under questioning it developed that they were proposing it more because they did not have anything else to offer. So it was not entirely reassuring. Of the principals, McNamara and Taylor seemed the most confident, and McNamara, who had a remarkable ability to present answers in terms a superior wanted, was arguing that bombing was not final, it was political, and finally, at a relatively low cost; at the very least it would buy time. There, that was reassuring: it was not final, not irreversible and it bought time (for a President who clearly did not want to make decisions and who wanted to buy time). The President, who had earlier seemed ready to go on Vietnam once the election was over, was now becoming skittish again; he told associates that the war was in the South. Ball was making him nervous, and the turmoil in Saigon was making him uneasy. How could he bomb the North when some colonel or corporal in a tank might take Saigon the next day? he asked. Couldn’t Taylor make it clear to those people that the President wanted to help them, the United States was prepared to play its role, but not unless they got together? Why couldn’t they get together? he asked.

So the Taylor mission to Washington, which was supposed to sew everything up, did not; the decisions were still open. Events were closing them down, but the President was unhappy about the trap he found himself in. He was still looking for a way out; if Ball was not changing the direction of the play he was slowing it down. And there would be moments, when after a particular dissent by Ball, the President would turn to him and say, “All right, George, if you can pull me a rabbit out of a hat, go ahead,” meaning trying to settle it without losing.

As it got darker, the play became more tightly held in Washington, with the bottom-ranking players being Bill Bundy and McNaughton. There were little signs that it was getting tougher: Bill Bundy went to the Council on Foreign Relations and gave a talk on Vietnam; he seemed to say that there would not be a wider war, and then, when the Council sent the notes on his speech back down to Washington to be cleared, they had to be rather heavily edited. The line was hardening, the winds were blowing in a different way, it was clearer and clearer that they were going to go North. Little signs. A high State Department official who was working on one policy paper and trying to get a drift of the play was by chance invited to the White House in December. He found the President surprisingly relaxed; stories of his boyhood came flashing out, stories of the Senate, slipping it by them, all punctuated by colorful language, and then suddenly, knowing why the State Department man was there, slipping in the phrase very quickly, as though it were almost unimportant, “Well, I guess we have to touch up those North Vietnamese a little,” and then he was back again regaling his audience, all in the vernacular.

Allies were being summoned to sympathize with, if not join, the American commitment to Vietnam. The least sympathetic of all was Charles De Gaulle, who was opposed to American policy for a vast variety of reasons, the first being that it would not work, and the second, that he saw a chance, as America moved back from Saigon, for a greater role for France in linking up with underdeveloped countries, an alternative for the underdeveloped world between the American, the Soviet and the Chinese possibilities. De Gaulle, who had been through the whole bitter thing before, had seen what it had done to France; and if he was not the fondest American friend in the world, he was nevertheless wary of seeing a Western power once more mired down in a guerrilla war. As early as 1963 he had begun to advocate neutralism for South Vietnam, and he had also discussed an American withdrawal. It was a suggestion which Washington regarded as being distinctly unfriendly and representing, rather than French good will toward the United States, French designs to re-establish primacy in this area. Rusk had been particularly uneasy about the specter of neutralism, and with the support of the mission in Saigon, believed that it would tend to weaken the resolve of the Vietnamese government. So in December 1964, Johnson dispatched George Ball to talk with De Gaulle, to try and win him over on our side, and failing that, to make him at least a little more sympathetic to the U.S. mission in Saigon, and to give him a sense of which way the play was going.

In sending Ball, the President had of course chosen the foremost dissenter within his government, thus following a familiar formula of using a dissenter to speak for the policy. It would tie Ball more to the policy, even if his dissent failed, and it would lessen the unlikely possibility for Johnson that Ball might stomp out of the government in anger over the policy. So as far as Johnson was concerned, he was the ideal man to make the representations to De Gaulle, which he did, reflecting the Rusk and to a lesser degree the Johnson view of the reasons for going ahead.

Ball told De Gaulle that in the past both the United States and France had wanted a viable South Vietnam, but since it was becoming increasingly difficult to sustain the government in the South “within a reasonable time,” the United States might have to take action against the North, even though this might entail the risk of involving the Chinese in the war. The United States did not want to do that, Ball said, but Hanoi would have to learn that we were serious. Though some people talked about a diplomatic solution, the United States had grave reservations. Perhaps some other time, but not now; it was all too fragile in the South, and even talk of negotiation might undermine the South Vietnamese government and lead to its collapse and a quick Vietcong victory. As for negotiating with the North Vietnamese and the Chinese, there were limits there, and they were not known for keeping their word. The United States believed in talking with the Communists, but only when it had some balance of force there, enough to make them want to talk. Right now the U.S. position was too weak. Thus the United States would have to make a stand, it had to teach the Chinese Communists to stop pushing their neighbors around; the United States considered China to be similar to the Soviet Union in 1917, primitive, and aggressive toward its neighbors. With this Ball finished; he had given the pure Rusk line, a view that he could not in his own heart disagree with more.

De Gaulle, in turn, told Ball he did not agree with anything he had said. China was in no way comparable to the Soviet Union as a power, even the Soviet Union of 1917. It was a nation without real power; it lacked the real base for it, the military, industrial and intellectual resources which even 1917 Russia had. It would have to consolidate its own power and would not be aggressive for a long time. As for Vietnam, he said he understood the problem; France had once held the same illusion and it had been very painful. It would be nice if the U.S. position was correct, but he felt that he knew something about Vietnam; it was a hopeless place. He was obliged to say that he did not believe the United States could win, that the more it put in militarily, the more the population would turn against it. The United States could not force its position by power; rather, it must negotiate. Ball said that this would not be understood in South Vietnam, that if the United States approved a cease-fire, Ho Chi Minh would exploit it. But De Gaulle interrupted him: it was hopeless, and France would not be part of any escalation; the United States would fight alone. Vietnam was a filthy place to fight, France knew only too well. But, he added, as the meeting broke up, France would be glad to serve as a friend any time the United States was looking for negotiations. (In a blunter sequel to this, in June 1966, the Administration sent Arthur Goldberg, once again the dissenter within the government, to France, giving Goldberg strict instructions to tell De Gaulle the American position, but he was under no circumstances to ask De Gaulle’s opinion, instructions which fazed neither Goldberg nor, of course, De Gaulle. So Goldberg gave once more the complicated and fragile rationale for American policy, and when he was through, De Gaulle smiled and said, “Are you finished?” “Yes,” answered Goldberg. “No one has asked me my opinion, but there are some things I would like to say. First of all, you must pull out,” the French leader said. “But won’t it go Communist?” Goldberg asked, playing his part. “Yes, it will go Communist,” answered De Gaulle. “But isn’t that against us?” said Goldberg. “Yes,” answered De Gaulle. “But it will be a messy kind of Communism.” A hint of racism, Goldberg thought. “Not a Russian or even a Chinese kind of Communism. An Asian kind. It will be more of a problem for them than for us.”)