The Best and the Brightest (103 page)

Up until now McGeorge Bundy had never played a major role on Vietnam, either in the early days, in the Diem period, or during the early debates on bombing. He was not particularly interested in Asia (indeed he would finally give as a major reason for his conversion the need to keep our reputation to back an ally credible with our European friends), and the messiness of Saigon did not appeal to his orderly mind. As the debate on bombing and escalation raged, he had been more of an adjudicator, trying to keep himself out of it to a large degree, trying to present to the President as honestly and coldly as he could the various alternatives and possibilities, and above all, trying to keep the flow going, trying to let the President know when he had to make a decision, when the buffer zone of time was running out, being very operational and functional and not really looking down the long road.

His relationship with Johnson had been improving steadily for about a year. When Johnson first came in, their mix had not been very good at all. Johnson had regarded the White House staff as something of a hostile area, not without cause, since the Bundy group
had
felt a certain contempt, the attitude being: How do you keep him at bay, how do you placate him without telling him anything and without violating the Constitution? The tension from those days had existed after Johnson took over, though in the eyes of the Kennedy people Bundy tried quite hard, in fact a little too hard, to make the transition to Johnson, a transition which demanded extraordinary tests of loyalty, which Johnson took no small pleasure in submitting Bundy to. It was not easy, but Bundy and Johnson had worked out their relationship, Johnson occasionally taking great pleasure in having Bundy work for
him,
delighting in Mac’s sheer style. “My intellectual,” he called him. And they had both, each needing the other, put aside their distaste for the other’s style, Bundy for the rages of Johnson toward subordinates, including occasionally even him, for his making Bundy deliver papers while in an open-door bathroom (“Mac, I can’t hear you . . . Mac, get closer . . . Mac, get in here”), and Johnson for his part put aside, although he never forgot, that Bundy epitomized a breed and tradition which had long felt itself superior to the Lyndon Johnsons of the world.

Now in late January decisions were coming up on Vietnam and time was running out. McNamara and Bundy talked it over and decided it was time to move the President off the dime, and they came up with the idea of a trip to Vietnam by Bundy as the eyes and ears of Johnson. Though the memo suggesting the trip was a Bundy memo, the two of them had worked it out together, both so committed to activism. The memo, which went to Johnson on January 27, 1965 (significantly, right after the inauguration), said that decisions could not be delayed any longer, that the present course could only bring “disastrous defeat.” We had to move all-out to negotiations or use more force, and they recommended the latter:

Both of us recognize that the ultimate responsibility is not ours. Both of us have fully supported your unwillingness, in earlier months, to move out of the middle course. We both agree that every effort should still be made to improve our operations on the ground and to prop up the authorities in South Vietnam as best we can. But we are both convinced that none of this is enough and that the time has come for harder choices.

The memo also noted that Rusk did not agree:

What he does say is that the consequences of both escalation and withdrawal are so bad that we simply must find a way of making our present policy work. This would be good if it was possible. Bob and I do not think it is.

So there it was, the activism, the can-do, the instinct to go forward, and the alliance of Mac Bundy and McNamara, operating in tandem to increase their bureaucratic power; two were better than one, they were not alone, and it put the pressure on
Rusk,
who did not like being alone, to accommodate. Their position was thus noticeably strengthened. (Later, as the war progressed, aides to the three men would be appalled by the way the three stayed in touch with each other by phone every afternoon to be sure that each was in the same position, that no one had changed, that they were all still lined up; and in fact, later, after Bundy left and Rostow took his place, Rostow used this as a form of brilliant gamesmanship to keep McNamara on board, to keep him off balance, dangling little bits of new Vietnam information in front of him, the latest body counts, so that McNamara and Rusk both became overwhelmed with Vietnam trivia.) Now he, Bundy, should go out there and take a look. Vietnam doubters who knew Bundy and his instinct to be operational, to use force, and his closeness to McNamara, were not optimistic about the outcome of the trip. Yet it was an important moment within the bureaucracy, for Mac was not considered to have signed on, and it was known that the President was wavering, that Ball was making his stand; perhaps there might be a chance of changing it, what with Mac going there, a man of force but a man of a great intellectual tradition, the dean of Harvard College. He was then still ambitious, and though he would later point out that it had been obvious from the very start that no one could separate Rusk from Johnson, the consensus of those around him was that he believed that he had a chance to be Secretary of State and that it was one of the prime motives in his actions in those days.

At the State Department there was some rancor about the trip, based on the view that if the President wanted his own look he had the entire State Department there to look for him, and on the belief that no one going to Vietnam cold could make any kind of assessment in that hothouse atmosphere, everyone in Saigon lined up to give as intensely as possible the case for escalation. (“Brainwashing,” George Romney would call it in 1968, and be immediately jumped on by all sorts of people, like Robert Kennedy, who had been brainwashed themselves and never known it or admitted it.) In addition, the Intelligence and Research people at State were opposed to the trip for reasons of their own; Hanoi, they pointed out in a memo, knew that a bombing campaign was being considered by the Americans and that the Bundy trip was related to it. Thus Hanoi would view the Bundy trip as a real fact-finding trip and would try to influence Bundy’s decision by showing that it did not fear bombing, and the way it would do this was by provoking some kind of incident while Bundy was in Vietnam. The same memo noted that of the three places which housed planes, Tan Son Nhut, Bien Hoa and Pleiku, Tan Son Nhut was the most likely to be attacked because it was the most open, and, being in Saigon, would be connected with the Bundy trip. In addition, the memo said, the fact that Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin would be in Hanoi at the time was enormously important, since the Russians, in the immediate post-Cuban missile crisis atmosphere, were almost sure to tell Hanoi not to push forward, that it was all too dangerous and they might do well to cool it a little. So an incident would show that Hanoi was not dependent upon Soviet aid, that the Soviets could not dictate to them, particularly since, if the Americans went ahead the way Hanoi sensed they would, and bombed, the Russians would be forced to support Hanoi, anyway.

Events began to move quickly. On February 2 Lyndon Johnson announced that McGeorge Bundy was going to Vietnam for a special review; as a small signal to men within the bureaucracy, John McNaughton, McNamara’s trusted aide, would go with him. On the same day, in a news event which seemed unrelated then but would seem somehow linked, years later, Martin Luther King and 770 other civil rights protesters were arrested in Selma, Alabama; 500 more were arrested the next day. On February 4 Lyndon Johnson said he was hopeful of an exchange of state visits with the Russians in the following year. “I believe such visits would reassure an anxious world that our two nations are striving towards the goal of peace.” On that day Kosygin left for Hanoi: Bundy was already en route. In Saigon, Bill Depuy, General Westmoreland’s closest adviser, briefed the press saying that eight government victories in recent battles with enemy troops in battalion strength should have discouraged the Vietcong from attempting to stand up to government forces in conventional battles. Even then, optimism still lived for the public.

On February 7 the Vietcong struck the American barracks at Pleiku in the Central Highlands; it was a quick, efficient attack, the kind of thing that they specialized in, a mortar attack, nothing unusual really. Considerable planning in advance to be sure the distances were right; no peasants in the area sympathetic enough either to the government or the Americans to warn them. Standard for the war, except that this time it was aimed at Americans. This time they changed it; INR had been right, no one was going to push them around or threaten them. Eight Americans were killed and more than sixty were wounded. (A small footnote to it, and a tip-off to the difficulty of fighting there, would come a month later when Tom Wicker of the
New York Times
asked General Harold Johnson, the Army Chief of Staff, how many men it would take to protect Pleiku
alone
from such attacks in the future. General Johnson mentally figured the size of the perimeter, how many men were needed for static security, how many men to go out into the countryside to patrol. Then he gave Wicker his answer: “Fifteen thousand Americans.” For Pleiku alone.) It was exactly what the American mission in Saigon wanted.

The Pleiku hit had come in the middle of the night; when the MACV operations rooms opened up, all the officials, civilian and military, filed in. Titans everywhere, Taylor, Westmoreland, Alexis Johnson. There was so much brass that Alexis Johnson, Taylor’s deputy, had so little to do that he wrote the press release, which annoyed the press officer, Barry Zorthian, because Zorthian felt it was poorly done and badly written. Incredible scenes, maps of 1:50,000 of the Pleiku area were pulled down, and there was Taylor with a magnifying glass peering closely at the map, as though looking for the mortar positions. Then a flash of excitement. In walked Mac Bundy, who was usually on the
other
end of the phone in Washington, sympathetic and cool, yet, they always felt, not entirely believing that it was as bad as they said. Now Mac was on their end of the phone. Striding in crisply, asking a few questions, confirming the latest details on the number of men killed. Then it was Bundy who told an aide to get the White House, not Taylor, who was nominally the President’s man, but Mac Bundy. “The White House is on the phone, sir.” Then sharply, very lucid, Mac took over, wasting no words, very much in control. Retaliation was in order. The attack had been directed specifically at Americans, and not at Vietnamese, thus we had to retaliate. Anything else would signal incorrectly. Clip. Clip. Clip. Let’s go.

The next day Bundy left Saigon for Pleiku, where he visited the wounded; the scene made a strong impression on him. Those who worked for him and with him were surprised by the intensity of his feeling (as if he had blown his cool); since this sort of thing had been going on for some time, had not Washington realized that there would be killing? Why was he so surprised? It was and would continue to be a rare emotional response; for weeks after when someone questioned what they were doing with the bombing, the words would pour out, boys dying in their tents, we had to do something, we can’t just sit by, we had to protect our boys. Even Johnson was fascinated by Bundy’s emotional reaction; in the past Johnson had felt Bundy’s doubts about Vietnam. He was not like That Other Bundy, as the President called Bill Bundy. The one thing about That Other Bundy—he went through the CIA and his brother Mac didn’t. That Other Bundy will take it and ram it in up to the hilt. But Mac won’t. Mac spent too much time at Harvard with all those poets and intellectuals while his brother was dealing with men. But after Pleiku it was, Johnson said, like talking to a man next door to a fire who’s hollering for help. Later he told Bundy, “Well, they made a believer out of you, didn’t they. A little fire will do that.” And he went around with some of his other friends in the White House, telling how Bundy at Pleiku reminded him of the preacher’s son, very proper and priggish, who had gone to a whorehouse. Later when they asked him he would say: “It’s really good . . . I don’t know what it is, but I like it . . . It’s really good.”

At almost the same time that Bundy in Saigon was on the phone to Cyrus Vance in Washington getting Bundy’s recommendations to go ahead with a retaliatory raid, Johnson was meeting with the National Security Council, and there it became very clear which way the Administration was headed. Though the subject was not really a prolonged bombing campaign but a one-shot retaliation, there was no doubt that larger issues were also being determined, that it was all coming together and that the great decisions had in effect been made. Johnson, after all, did not use the NSC to determine policy, he considered it too large and bulky and thus too leaky, too many people who talked too much. He used it more as a forum, to inform the rest of the government on which way things were going and signing doubters on (though it had been noted that in the past Adlai Stevenson, who was kept on short rations by both the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, tended to break the rules by pretending that it was a real meeting and thus arguing too long and too often. Significantly, neither he nor Bill Fulbright was invited to the crucial NSC meetings on the Vietnam escalation in 1965).

Now everyone seemed to agree on a retaliatory strike except Mike Mansfield, who had been invited to the meeting. The Senate Majority Leader had been increasingly unhappy about the prospect of escalation, and now he thought we were edging closer and closer to following in the French footsteps. Did we have to bomb the North, particularly when Kosygin was there? Did we really have to retaliate? Might this not lead to a larger war, possibly a war with China? It might, Mansfield argued, draw China and Russia closer together and heal their growing split. It was certainly going to get us deeper into a war that we all wanted to avoid. Wasn’t there something else we could do? Wasn’t there some alternative, some negotiation? Even as he finished, the others at the meeting could tell that Johnson had welcomed his dissent; it was a desired part of the scenario because it permitted Johnson to do his performance, which he now did. No, there was no alternative. We had tried to be peaceful, we had tried to disregard provocation in the past, but now it had gone too far. Lyndon Johnson, he said, was not going to be the President of the United States who let Munich happen. Who stood by while aggressors picked on their little neighbors. And he was not going to let these people kill American boys who were out there, boys who were dying in their tents. What would happen to me if I didn’t defend our boys; what would the American people think of me, with those boys out there dying in their sleep? It was all flag, and as he spoke the others nodded, and Mansfield nodded, as if he too knew, involuntarily or not, that he had somehow just played the role Johnson had prescribed for him, and that in a sense a curtain was coming down. The decisions had been made, all the questions had been asked, and now the answers were given.