The Best and the Brightest (104 page)

There was one area expert who was present at the last few meetings—Llewellyn Thompson, former ambassador to the Soviet Union and an expert on Russia, and to a far lesser degree on China. He had particularly good credentials with the policy makers because he had given quite accurate advice during the Cuban missile crisis, but he was in no way an expert on Asia or on Vietnam; there was no man with expertise on Hanoi present (an expert on the Soviet Union was tough; but there was no one because of the McCarthy period who was a real expert on Asia—they had been too soft). Thompson himself was wary of the bombing; he had assisted George Ball on some of his memos against such a policy, in particular warning that it might drive the Soviet Union together with the Chinese, and that it was a very dangerous game. Now at the meeting he again expressed his doubts about bombing, but he did say that if we bombed within certain limits, the Soviets would not move against us. Which was all they needed to hear. He also warned against bombing in certain areas which might bring in the Chinese, and along with Ball, he was effective in setting some of the bombing limits. But he did not talk at length about what the North Vietnamese reaction to bombing would be, which was not considered by the White House to be a particularly important question. War meant Russia or China, not North Vietnam. Thompson’s advice, which was based on the global balance but not on the particular country involved, would not deter his superiors, and years later he would have a haunting feeling that he should have opposed it more forcefully at the time, somehow weighed in more.

So retaliatory tit-for-tat raids were authorized against the North. The President said that it was a limited strike, but the doors were closing and closing fast. In the
New York Times,
Charles Mohr, the White House correspondent who knew Vietnam well—his honest reporting in the past had precipitated his resignation as a
Time
correspondent in Vietnam—pointed out that the attack was not that unusual. It was not particularly large, a company or less of Vietcong, and there was no noticeable evidence that it was Hanoi and not the Vietcong who had engineered it. Other attacks in the past, Mohr noted, had been just as intense. But his was a lonely voice. Naturally, McNamara carried the ball for the Administration in a press conference:

q: Mr. Secretary, do you regard this latest incident as perhaps even more serious than the Gulf of Tonkin episode?

a: I think it is quite clear that this was a test of will, a clear challenge of the political purpose of both the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments. It was a test and a challenge, therefore which we couldn’t fail to respond to—which neither the South Vietnamese government nor the U.S. government could fail to respond to without misleading the North Vietnamese as to our intent and the strength of our purpose to carry out that intent.

q: Mr. McNamara, the fact that we struck at South—Southern bases in North Vietnam, are you saying that we know definitely that North Vietnam instigated or participated in this attack on these three places?

a: Captured documents which we have obtained from individuals who have been infiltrated through this corridor plus prisoner-of-war reports that we have obtained in recent months lead us to believe that the volume of infiltration has expanded substantially. The number of men infiltrated in 1964, for example, was twice the number in 1963. This plus other evidence leads us to believe that Hanoi has consciously and purposely stepped up the pressure against the South Vietnamese. And we have every reason to believe, based on our intelligence sources, that the attacks on Pleiku, Tuy Hoa, and Nha Trang was ordered and directed and masterminded directly from Hanoi.

That night the President also spoke. Using what appeared to be imitation Kennedy rhetoric, he said: “We love peace. We shall do all we can in order to preserve it for ourselves and all mankind. But we love liberty the more and we shall take up any challenge, we shall answer any threat. We shall pay any price to make certain that freedom shall not perish from this earth.” Which was pretty strong and heady stuff for an attack which was basically little different from any other Vietcong attack over the last four years of the war. As for the increased infiltration, that was all peripheral, the discussions in recent months had not centered on infiltration, rather it had centered on diminishing ARVN and South Vietnamese capacity and will to resist (they had been aware of one North Vietnamese regiment which had crossed over from the North into the South and which sat poised in the mountains just waiting, but which had not gone into any action).

Even as Johnson and McNamara were speaking, Bundy was winging home from Saigon with his report. It was an important moment; he had been uncommitted in a fluctuating bureaucracy and now the anticipation among the top people was that he was signing on, not just for retaliatory bombing but for a real program. If so, the doors were closing for good. On the way back he worked on the memo with McNaughton. There are, in the annals of Vietnam, thousands and thousands of memos and documents, as the Pentagon Papers would later show. But in an Administration where business was done by phone, they were at best small markers of a long and complicated and sad trail; very few of them had any meaning themselves or were influential at the time they were written—perhaps Nassam 288, which was the only statement of U.S. purposes and objectives, perhaps the Taylor-Rostow report. And the McGeorge Bundy memo from Pleiku. It had effect, it moved people, it changed people at the time. It was by itself a landmark showing how far a bad policy had gone. Starting with the false premise of an irrational China policy, all the brilliant rationalists had built on that, made all the great rational judgments based on one major false original assumption. It was as if someone had ordered the greatest house in the world, using the finest architect, the best stonemasons in the world, marble shipped from Italy, choicest redwood for the walls, the best interior decorator, but had by mistake overlooked one little thing: the site chosen was in a bog.

So it was with Vietnam; they had come all the way down the pike, and now with Bundy, the definitive rationalist, signing on, it would show more clearly than anything in the aborted quality of his arguments. That was one part of it, but more important at the moment was its political impact within the bureaucracy; here was a man with a brilliant sense of which way power was moving and a great capacity to move along with it. So it was a crucial holdout signing on, and in addition, a man who himself was regarded as something of a weather vane. There was one other factor as well: the intensity, almost passion, of the document, the force of it, so unusual in paper work in general and for Mac Bundy in particular. As the Xeroxes of the Bundy memo went to the top level and second level of players, particularly in the Ball group, there was a sinking feeling that it was all over, that the Bundy memo told it all, Mac had come down with the hawks and had come down very hard. Mac Bundy, so quick and facile, so superior, so quick to put down illogic in others, seemed in his Pleiku memo to be a mockery of himself. It was filled with judgments he had little background to make. But most of all was his estimate of the chances for the success of what he was advocating, and the reasons for doing it:

8. 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%. 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
[italics added]. Beyond that, a reprisal policy—to the extent that it demonstrates U.S. willingness to employ this new norm in counter-insurgency—will set a higher price for the future upon all adventures of guerrilla warfare, and it should therefore somewhat increase our ability to deter such adventures. We must recognize, however, that that ability will be gravely weakened if there is failure for any reason in Vietnam.

In a way the Bundy memo reflected one of the problems of the people in the Kennedy-Johnson Administrations; they always thought that no one else was quite as smart as they were, that they could play games, and that no one else knew the score. They were, it was a failing of the group, too smart by half; for example, the idea that by bombing they would refute the charge that they had not done everything possible for Vietnam; clearly, by bombing and not sending troops they would be doing far less than the maximum, and the military and the Vietnamese knew it; of course there would be cries to do more, to go a little further.

The memo began:

The situation in Vietnam is deteriorating, and without new U.S. action defeat appears inevitable—probably not in a matter of weeks, or perhaps even months, but within the next year or so. There is still time to turn it around, but not much.

The stakes in Vietnam are extremely high. The American investment is very large, and American responsibility is a fact of life which is palpable in the atmosphere of Asia, and even elsewhere. The international prestige of the U.S. and a substantial part of our influence are directly at risk in Vietnam. There is no way of unloading the burden on the Vietnamese themselves, and there is no way of negotiating ourselves out of Vietnam, which offers any serious promise at present. It is possible that at some future time a neutral non-Communist force may emerge, perhaps under Buddhist leadership, but no such force currently exists, and any negotiated U.S. withdrawal today would mean surrender on the instalment plan.

The policy of graduated and continuing reprisal outlined in Annex A is the most promising course available, in my judgment. That judgment is shared by all who accompanied me from Washington, and I think by all members of the Country Team.

The events of the last twenty-four hours have produced a practicable point of departure for this policy of reprisal, and for removal of U.S. dependents. They may also have catalyzed the formation of a new Vietnamese government. If so the situation may be at a turning point.

The prospect in Vietnam is grim. The energy and persistence of the Vietcong are astonishing. They can appear anywhere—and at almost any time. They have accepted extraordinary losses and they come back for more. They show skill in their sneak attacks and ferocity when cornered. Yet this weary country does not want them to win. . . .

One final word. At its very best the struggle in Vietnam will be long. It seems to us important that the fundamental fact be made clear to our people and to the people of Vietnam. Too often in the past we have conveyed the impression that we expect an early solution when those who live with this war know that no early solution is possible. It is our belief that the people of the U.S. have the necessary will to accept and to execute a policy that rests upon the reality that there is no short cut to success in South Vietnam.

What followed then was the Annex, the recommendations for a sustained bombing campaign,

a policy in which air and naval action against the North is justified by and related to the whole Vietcong campaign of violence and terror in the South. . . . [This would be retaliation] against
any
[italics his] VC act of violence to persons or property.

2. In practice, we may wish at the outset to relate our reprisals to those acts of relatively high visibility such as the Pleiku incident. Later, we might retaliate against the assassination of a province chief, but not necessarily the murder of a hamlet official; we might retaliate against a grenade thrown into a crowded café in Saigon, but not necessarily to a shot fired into a small shop in the countryside. . . .

The reprisal policy, he said, should begin at a low level and be increased only gradually, to be decreased if the Vietcong behaved. It foresaw a visible rise in morale in the South if we undertook a sustained bombing campaign, which came to be true. Thus Bundy alone among the bombing advocates actually realized what he had anticipated, though it was an enormous price for a very limited objective.

He had weighed in. He was, above all, the operational functional man, more interested in functions and role than long-range examination and reflection, a doer rather than a thinker; his instinct was to do the nearest and most rational thing as quickly as possible. If anyone was the exact opposite of Chester Bowles (by now ambassador to India), it was Mac Bundy, a marvelous bureaucrat, brilliant at technique, at moving things. They make a move, we make a move. Perhaps he might have gone the other way, and had he opposed the use of force, which would have gone against all his instincts, he might, with Ball, have turned it around. But it would have been a bitter and bloody battle, and it would have been out of character, for he was not, like Ball, a loner, not a man to lay his body down on the railroad tracks for something like this, an almost lost cause, and an almost lost cause in Asia, a land which existed largely not to interfere with the more serious business of Europe. He was a man with a great instinct for power, and he loved it; he responded to where power was moving, trying at the same time to get people to do intelligent, restrained things in an intelligent, restrained manner.