The Best and the Brightest (112 page)

The trip of General Harold K. Johnson to Vietnam was important. He was sent specifically by Lyndon Johnson, who had given him a real dressing-down. The President had let loose, right in front of members of the general’s staff. All he heard from his generals, President Johnson said, was “Bomb, bomb, bomb. That’s all you know. Well, I want to know why there’s nothing else. You generals have all been educated at the taxpayers’ expense, and you’re not giving me any ideas and any solutions for this damn little piss-ant country. Now, I don’t need ten generals to come in here ten times and tell me to bomb. I want some solutions. I want some answers.” So General Johnson had hied himself to Vietnam, arriving there on March 5 all fired up, hot for solutions. He spent a week looking over the entire situation, conferring at length with both Westmoreland and Taylor, and found that there was a considerable difference in their estimates of future needs. Westmoreland already wanted combat troops, and he wanted to use them aggressively; Taylor was more conservative, he was wary of how well combat troops might work, and he was reluctant to take too much of the burden away from the Vietnamese. If a division were to be used, he wanted to use it more cautiously, perhaps first in enclaves along the coast, where the troops would have an easy exit to the sea, and where they would have less difficulty with lines of communication than troops stationed in the highlands. They would fight in their own defense and do some limited patrolling, thus releasing the ARVN for other duties, but they would not assume the burden of the war. The use of a division in the coastal region would mean extended lines of communication, and it might be more open-ended in terms of numbers and mission. Taylor opposed using a division for either purpose at the moment, he told both Washington and General Johnson, but if it had to come to a choice, he favored the coastal enclave theory as simpler, safer and less costly. (A year later, when Taylor’s old Airborne rival, Jim Gavin, who had opposed the war, surfaced with the idea of winding down the war by moving to an enclave strategy, the Administration chose Taylor as the weapon with which to knock Gavin down, which Taylor did, Gavin and the general public never knowing that Taylor had proposed roughly the same strategy.)

But Westmoreland insisted on troops. The situation, he said, was not quite desperate, although perilously near it. He was sure that the Vietcong had not even begun to use its full strength, that it was sitting back preparing a major campaign, and he doubted the ARVN capacity to withstand it. He needed troops, and he wanted the right to maneuver them. Since Westmoreland was the commander, he convinced General Johnson, a man who had many doubts about another land war in Asia, to go along with him, and on his return the Army Chief recommended that an entire American division be sent (and to the highlands, for a mission which would bring greater results). The Harold Johnson recommendations, which would change the nature of the commitment, were so closely held that the highest official at CIA would have to smuggle illicit copies from friends at the White House.

A division which Westmoreland might have gotten at the time, mid-March. But the Joint Chiefs, always more ambitious, always committed to greater force, had been pushing for three divisions (including one Korean division); the Chiefs wanted to be sure that if force was used, there was enough of it. The JCS recommendation stopped temporarily at McNamara, because neither he nor Lyndon Johnson wanted three divisions; but the three-division idea was not dead and had replaced Harold Johnson’s one division, thus wiping it out. The rest of the Chief of Staff’s recommendations reinforcing ARVN, doing the same things with more vigor, were passed on, leaving Westmoreland with a feeling that had the JCS held back, he would have had his one division, which made him extremely careful about how big a slice of salami he would ask for in the future.

Yet on March 17 he asked for a Marine battalion landing team for the town of Phu Bai, near Hué; Westy wanted to build a larger base to serve as helicopter field and take the burden of choppers away from the already overcrowded Danang base. Taylor gave his concurrence, but warned again that this was simply a reminder that there would be more requests for troops, that once in, it would not be easy to stop.

During March, day by day and then week by week, the play was slowly changing. The civilians became increasingly passive in their positions, the military increasingly active, the civilians no longer taking the initiative but sitting back, being overwhelmed by the requests and demands of the military, different generals demanding different things. The civilians were on the defensive, trying to weigh the accuracy and legitimacy of the requests from the military. The JCS wanted a lot of force, and an aggressive policy, three divisions, but then, they always asked for too much. Taylor was far more cautious; he was not saying no, he was casting doubts about the ability of U.S. forces to fight (doubts which his chief political superior Lyndon Johnson did not particularly share, would in fact consider a form of reverse racism, as indeed the Administration would later accuse Fulbright of racism, in believing that Asians were not as valuable as Caucasians). Taylor was trying to hold it down, and he was doing it in part in a very dangerous way; that is, he was challenging not the basic assumption of the war or the commitment but the assessment of Westmoreland of how serious the situation was; he was saying in effect it simply wasn’t that bad. This meant that if the situation deteriorated any further, he would have to sign on or have his arguments completely neutralized. Since the long-range rhythms of the country, growing Vietcong strength and steady ARVN deterioration were on the side of Westmoreland, the future, so to speak, was his. In addition to Westmoreland and the JCS, there was also CINCPAC, constantly calling for more force, more troops. The question soon, then, would be not whether or not to send combat troops, but how many and under what mission and ground rules.

Taylor returned to Washington at the end of March for a series of meetings which would ostensibly determine strategy. What was significant about these meetings was the timing. After six weeks of Operation Rolling Thunder, the massive bombing of the North, it had become obvious that the bombing was not going to bring Hanoi either to its senses or its knees, and that as a political weapon against the North it had probably failed, which meant that there would be increasing pressures from the Chiefs both to expand it into a
military
weapon and, now that they were this far in, for more ground forces. It was becoming clearer and clearer that the move which was supposed to have prevented sending troops was not going to affect Hanoi’s decision making, except perhaps to make them escalate. Since Taylor knew that Westmoreland would be submitting a major request for troops, he had already changed his position. From what was an essentially blanket opposition to the use of combat troops and a reluctant approval of even a security mission, he had continued to be eroded. He knew better than most what the military were aiming for, and that the tempo was being speeded up. Now he was arguing not against U.S. troops but for a much more restrained use, for the enclave strategy, for testing out the troops in the enclave strategy, which allowed an easy U.S. exit and which kept the U.S. troop ratio down. The Plimsoll line was very much on his mind. What was it, he asked friends, the point at which for every American you added, you in effect added nothing but simply subtracted one ARVN. Was it 75,000 or 100,000, or perhaps as high as 125,000? At which point did it become an American war? What point would signify the end of the counterinsurgency program, of which he had been the major architect?

Back in the United States, Taylor met with McNamara and the Joint Chiefs on March 29. The Chiefs were pushing the three-division plan, which would send a Marine division to Danang and an Army division to the highlands, with the third (Korean) division to go to an as yet undetermined place. The Chiefs had already decided on that, and they seemed to have McNamara’s tentative approval. But Taylor said no, he thought it was open-ended and felt uneasy about sending troops into the far reaches of the country. That would mean letting the ARVN sign off; besides, that much force was not yet necessary. McNamara, always more at ease with Taylor than with the other generals, was visibly impressed; the other Chiefs, who had always been dubious about which side Taylor was on and had not wanted him to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs because they felt that he was not one of them, were particularly uneasy about the possibility of getting into Vietnam and using too little force, another Korea, another crippling war. They saw in Taylor the kind of general who would allow the civilians to get away with it.

Taylor further told McNamara and the Chiefs that he was worried about the political effects of combat troops. Anti-Americanism was just beneath the surface and could be used by the enemy against us. In addition, he was worried about the absorptive capacity of the country—how many Americans could it take, and also the logistical limitations. McNamara said he could understand that, but he was concerned about the force ratios, which were getting worse and worse (the Chiefs, who had alerted Westmoreland on the effectiveness of this on McNamara’s thinking, had done their work well). As Taylor argued, trying to hold the line and slow down the entire process, General Wheeler was making the exact opposite case, that it was quite bad, and saying that it was important to start making decisions so that they could go with logistical planning, otherwise events might move outside their control. At that point McNamara said that he still thought we should go ahead with troops, but we should be very wary of the political problems caused by the troops, and the absorptive capacity of the country. Taylor had slightly held the line, and after the meeting some of the generals were particularly bitter because they felt that Taylor was no longer in the chain of command at all, he was a civilian (only an ambassador, and ambassadors had never outweighed generals), but he was having it both ways, he was still being counted as a general. They sensed in the meeting with McNamara that they were losing it again, they had worked hard to get him to move and accept their position. That goddamn Taylor, one of them thought, as he walked out of the meeting, he can really get away with it, he really knows how to talk. Like a damn politician. Max always
looks
so good, he thought.

At the same time Westmoreland had dispatched his own man, General Bill Depuy, with his own plan to Washington. His mission, Westmoreland stated, was to keep South Vietnam from going to the Communists. It was clear that while the bombing might bring some results, it would take a long time, and it would not affect many aspects of the war in the South. With the ARVN continuing to deteriorate, the military situation was critical. Westmoreland wanted seventeen maneuver battalions, and he wanted them for the Central Highlands, where he feared the Vietcong might cut the country in half, or at the least capture a provincial capital and hold it, using it for propaganda benefits. Having been told by the Chiefs that force ratios were effective with McNamara, Westmoreland dwelled on them. The ratio, because of the decline in ARVN, was now down to 1.7-1. If events went as predicted they would soon be down to 1.6-1; however, using his projections, that decline could be turned around (an American Marine battalion with its heavy gear and air support Westmoreland estimated as the equal to three ARVN battalions, and an American airborne battalion, lighter in equipment, as the equal of two ARVN battalions). Westmoreland wanted the equivalent of two full divisions, and he wanted to use them in the Highlands: a full division in the PleikuQui Nhon axis, and a brigade each at An Khe, Pleiku and Kontum. The seventeen battalions would magically become thirty-eight ARVN battalions and this would mean that the force ratio in II Corps, which he considered critical, would go from a dangerous 1.9-1 to a healthy 2.9-1. Nor did he want his troops in enclaves; it was, he thought, too negative a military philosophy to bring in
American
units with the idea of a Dunkirk uppermost in everyone’s mind. The idea that they were only there to prevent defeat seemed negative. If the Americans were to come and to have effect, they must fight. If the Americans, better equipped, trained tougher than the ARVN, came and did not fight, this would not help the war effort, it might lower ARVN morale. In addition, the enclave theory put the Americans into too much contact with the population. He wanted to send the troops to the highlands and to engage them and get the maximum benefit from their presence.

On April 1 Taylor made the case against a wide-open search-and-destroy strategy and against the highlands, and for the enclave, and essentially against sending any more troops immediately. There was no desperate crisis in Saigon, he said, and they were not on a crisis footing. Rather there was time to take the American units which had already arrived and experiment with them, see how well they fought, see what the other side’s reaction was. Taylor reminded everyone that to go ahead with the larger force requests was to change a long-standing policy against the use of American troops. And perhaps it wasn’t necessary. There was time to find out. There could be more experimentation with the missions of the Marines already in the country. He himself did not feel it necessary to repeat his doubts about American combat troops in Asia. They would control the land they stood on, nothing more. Those words would be remembered by other civilians long afterward. And he carried the day; the President was not eager for more troops; if there was a chance to slow it down, then he was willing. Rusk too was uneasy about the whole thing, uneasy about getting involved in a ground war, though similarly, being a great chain-of-command man, a great one to go with the man on the spot, a respecter of military expertise, very uneasy about not giving a commander what he wanted. McNamara was willing to wait, telling the JCS to go ahead with the planning of the three-division force.