The Best and the Brightest (113 page)

So Taylor temporarily held the line, but he also gave up something in the process; in order to buy time, he conceded something on missions. It would no longer be a question of security of bases. The President bought that; they all agreed on it. While they would not give Westmoreland the seventeen battalions he wanted but only two more Marine battalions (and a Marine air squadron), Westmoreland could expand their mission. The Marines were no longer just to sit on the defensive and guard their perimeter; instead, they were to be more aggressive and more active, under guidelines to be worked out by McNamara and Rusk. Thus Taylor, who had been uneasy even with the idea of a security mission for American troops, had, in fending off a search-and-destroy strategy, surrendered the security mission and moved to the enclave strategy. Johnson and the others were all relieved to be able to delay the decisions, although, as in the case of the original Taylor-Rostow mission in 1961, while they had the illusion of holding the line, they had in fact opened it up even wider; they were, step by step, losing control to the military and this was one more crucial step.

This was not a particularly happy session. They were perilously near sending combat troops, with the knowledge that the bombing would not work as they had hoped, and that they were going to have to do more. It would, said Bill Bundy, take two or three months before they would hear from Hanoi on negotiations, an estimate based on Bundy’s belief that it would take that long for the United States to show clear evidence that it intended to win and had the resources to win in Vietnam (thus the contradiction: at that time they were still talking about a
minimal
use of force in a limited enclave strategy, yet they wanted maximum response from Hanoi). There was unanimous agreement that the United States had to show that it would win in the South before Hanoi would be willing to talk; Hanoi, they all thought, believed things were going its way. It would take more might, raising the bombing pressure and bringing U.S. troops there. The coming of U.S. troops would show our seriousness. The question, then, was how much pressure the United States could bring to bear on Hanoi without reaching what they called the flash point, the flash point being the point at which the Chinese Communists would enter the war with their own troops. There was a general agreement that the flash point was the destruction of the MIGs and the airfield at Phuc Yen. But, added Bill Bundy, the North would not give in unless we hit them close to the flash point. “The flash point” was an important phrase; it was the point to which they could escalate without really going to war. War was the Chinese coming in and events getting out of hand. What they were doing was below the flash point; thus it was not war. (Almost immediately after they finished the meeting McCone, who was very hawkish in person, though fair in representing the views of the more dubious experts in the Agency, argued that it was all a dark alley, that by changing the mission of U.S. troops to more offensive actions, they would simply bring more requests for more troops without changing the basic nature of the war. The war would remain, under the existing ground rules, unwinnable, since it would not change the basic balance and since Hanoi could simply send down more men.)

There was one other important thing the President and his aides decided on April 1: although they were changing the nature of the American commitment and the mission of the Marines, there was to be no announcement of it. Quite the reverse; everyone was to minimize any change, to say that the policy had not changed. The President had enough problems with his domestic programs without being hit from the other side about going to war. Let it all take its time. This was crucial. They all understood, and the word did not slip out for another two months, at a State Department briefing when a State Department briefing officer, Bob McCloskey, came upon the fact that the mission had indeed changed. Johnson was predictably furious. James Reston of the
Times
was later to write that Lyndon Johnson escalated the war by stealth; he could not have been more right.

The next day Taylor met at the State Department with Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, Bill Bundy and Leonard Unger, U.S. ambassador to Laos. Rusk began by saying he was sure that Taylor now understood the political pressures on the President from both directions. Now, as for the new strategy, Rusk said, the Marines could be used in local counterinsurgency, and they could be used as strike reaction forces. They should have an active and aggressive posture. They should carry the fight to the enemy. On the other hand, Rusk emphasized he did not want to lose the ability to describe the mission as defensive.

Later, when he had returned to Saigon, Taylor summed up for himself his impressions of the Washington meetings. He had gone back to Washington to clarify three problems: the tempo of the bombing campaign, Rolling Thunder; the introduction of combat troops to close the manpower gap; and finally, in his own words, “the political trap on how do we end the war.” Taylor felt he had received clear guidance on the first two questions. On the third he was not so sure. “We had,” he dictated to his secretary, “two cards to play. The first was to stop the bombing. The second was to withdraw our forces from the South. There was some inclination to play the two cards separately, but the ambassador [Taylor] did not agree with this idea, and he thought the President also did not. We had thought of ways to permit the Communists a way out without abject surrender . . .”

But Taylor’s confidence that he had been able to hold the line with the enclave theory (he believed there would be two months to experiment with the four Marine battalions, operating within a fifty-mile radius, all nicely laid out) was soon shattered. Disappointed over the loss of his two divisions, Westmoreland renewed an old request about something which had always bothered him, the area around Bien Hoa and Saigon, where two major airfields stood as vulnerable to Vietcong attacks as Danang. In addition, he was anxious to have maneuver forces as mobile as the Airborne around Saigon, and he was anxious to have the precedent of a major elite Army unit brought into the country. So he renewed his request, asking for a brigade to Bien Hoa, and an Army brigade to Qui Nhon. Again the rationale was security, but again the visions went far beyond that. The request went in on April 10; almost immediately the JCS approved it and passed it on to McNamara; on April 13 McNamara approved the brigade for the Bien Hoa area (but not for Qui Nhon, again the illusion of holding the line).

On April 15 Taylor learned of the move and was shocked; it was clear now that his influence was waning and the pressure was too great (the decision to send the brigade, he cabled back to Rusk, “shows a far greater willingness to get into a ground war than I had discerned in Washington during my recent trip”). Now there would always be too many needs, too many generals demanding troops, pushing contingency plans. The line would be harder and harder to hold, the President more and more uneasy in what was becoming his new and as yet unannounced role, war President, more and more having to meet the demands of his generals, dealing with their requirements, rather than those of his civilians. The generals would have his ear more, simply because he would be more and more responsible to the boys out there. For the military pressures were mounting, and mounting quickly. Taylor thought that he had held the line against the three divisions during his visit to Washington, but not everyone thought so. One of the decisions had called for an increase in the deployment of logistical troops for Westmoreland’s command. Taylor had interpreted this as a beefing up of the logistical base for the troops
already
in the country. But the Chiefs were shrewder; when they did not get the three-division force, they had been told by McNamara to go ahead and start the planning for three divisions, and now they decided to use the increase in logistical troops as a way of initiating the three-division force. The logistical troops, by their interpretation, were to be the advance party of the three-division force. They asked McNamara if they were correct in this interpretation of the logistical troops. He answered that they were, and told them to go ahead with the planning. Thus on April 6 Admiral Sharp was informed by the JCS that after meeting with McNamara they had received the following directive: “This will confirm my understanding that the Joint Staff is preparing a detailed plan and time schedule for the actions necessary to introduce a two-to-three division force into South Vietnam at the earliest practicable date.” This was the first signal of what was to come soon; Admiral Sharp, already anxious to get moving and get troops into the country, responded quickly. He called a meeting in Honolulu for April 9 and 10 to do the definitive planning for the logistical troops which would soon form the base for the three divisions at Qui Nhon and Nha Trang. Taylor cabled back that it was not his understanding that the logistical troops were an advance guard for the three divisions, but no one was paying much attention to him; he was in fact already complaining to Washington about being cut out of important cable traffic. So even here Taylor’s ability to hold the line was only partial.

There was a momentum to the military and it was carrying everything along with it; Admiral Sharp was becoming increasingly irritated with Taylor’s hesitance, and was beginning to push harder in his own cables to undermine Taylor. Taylor, for instance, had been very uneasy about the Marines coming ashore. He had been reporting back the Saigon government’s sensitivity to a greater American presence, and he now centered his reservations on the question of how much armament the Marines would bring with them. He mentioned specifically the 8-inch howitzers; the government of Saigon did not like them, and there was, he reported, the danger that these howitzers could deliver an atomic warhead. This was too much for the already irritated Sharp, and on April 14 he cabled Westmoreland:

How anyone can get excited about an eight inch howitzer delivering an atomic warhead I fail to understand. The F-100 can deliver an atomic warhead, the B-57, the F-4 can deliver them . . . All these have been in the country for a long time. So it is really rather ludicrous to make anything of an eight inch howitzer being able to deliver an atomic warhead.

Sharp was also telling Westmoreland, still somewhat uncertain what his instructions were regarding the troops he was getting, that as far as Sharp could determine from the JCS, Westy’s job was to get on “with killing Cong.”

At almost the same time the President began to meet with some members of the Congress to explain his problems and let them know that he might have to send some American boys to Vietnam. A small number, it seemed. At one meeting the figure sounded like 40,000 or 50,000, but for Gaylord Nelson, one of the senators present, it was nonetheless disquieting. He had not liked the drift at all, and that night as he drove home with his old friend Hubert Humphrey, he told Humphrey that it looked bad, the nation was being pulled into a big war.

“You know, Gaylord,” said Humphrey, “there are people at State and the Pentagon who want to send
three hundred thousand
men out there.” Humphrey paused. “But the President will never get sucked into anything like that.”

The forces pushing against Lyndon Johnson as he came closer and closer to a decision seemed terribly imbalanced. On the one side were the Chiefs and the Saigon generals, wanting troops, sure of themselves, speaking for the Cold War, for patriotism, and joined with them were his principal national security advisers, all believers in the use of force. Those committed to peace were not as well organized, not as impressive, and seemingly not as potent politically; if anything, in making their case to him, they seemed to unveil their weaknesses more than their strengths. One incident revealed how frail the peace people seemed to Johnson. On the first weekend in April the Americans for Democratic Action were holding their annual convention, and a group of the leadership asked to see the President, specifically to protest the bombing. The meeting was granted and about a dozen ADA officials went over to see the President. Some of the ADA people were quite impassioned; the bombing of the North, they said, simply had to stop. It was wrong, it was against everything America stood for. Johnson himself tried as best he could to deflect the criticism. He was under great pressure from the military to use more force, he said; he had tried to negotiate, but Hanoi continued to be the aggressor. He read at great length from a speech that he intended to give on the Mekong River development project; he was, he said, trying to do there what he was doing here at home. But he was not able to assuage their feeling. It was a sharp and tough exchange. The ADA people were particularly worried about McNamara’s role, and several of them criticized the growing power of the Secretary of Defense, whom they visualized as being a major hawk. Johnson moved to set them at ease. “Why are you people always complaining about McNamara?” he asked. “Why, Mac Bundy here”—pointing to Bundy—“is a much bigger hawk than McNamara.” But even the ADA people did not seem to be particularly unified; there were divisions within the group, and John Roche, a Brandeis professor who was the outgoing chairman, seemed quite sympathetic to the Johnson position. As the group was leaving, it passed through the White House press room, and Joe Rauh, one of the ADA officials, told the waiting reporters that the exchanges had been sharp ones, that the ADA had expressed its opposition to the bombing in very strong terms. At that point Roche tried to soften Rauh’s statement, and the two clashed over the wording, Roche wanting a more subdued description.

The whole incident immediately convinced Johnson that he could handle the liberals, that they had no real muscle, that they were divided among themselves. Even as he said good-bye to the ADA representatives, he showed in the Joint Chiefs, plus McNamara and Rusk, for one of the pressing meetings on the use of ground troops. Because he liked to begin each meeting by referring to the one which preceded it, the President now reached into the wastebasket and scooped up the notes which the ADA people had brought to the meeting and written to each other during it. Then, mimicking his previous guests to perfection, he began to read the notes to the assembled Chiefs, pausing, showing great relish in ridiculing each, adjusting his voice as necessary, taking particular pleasure in one that Rauh had written: “Why doesn’t he take the issue of Vietnam to the United Nations?” That one in particular broke them up. Then, the liberals dispensed with, they got down to more serious things, such as the forthcoming decisions on ground troops.