The Best and the Brightest (127 page)

But this did not abate the military pressure, which continued to grow. In April 1967, with support for the war fast dwindling, he brought General Westmoreland home to speak before the Congress and the Associated Press Managing Editors Convention. But the Westmoreland appearances did not ease the pressures against him; if anything, the criticism of Johnson for using Westmoreland, for bringing the military into politics, mounted. Nor did Westmoreland reassure the President in private messages. At this point Westmoreland had 470,000 Americans, and he was asking for an increase which would bring the total to 680,000 men by June 1968, or at the very least a minimum increase of about 95,000 to 565,000. But even with this increase his forecasts were not optimistic. Without the top figure, he told Johnson, the war would not be lost, but progress would be slowed down; this, he said, was not encouraging but realistic. Then Westmoreland noted that every time we took an action, the other side made a countermove. At this point the President asked him, “When we add divisions, can’t the enemy add divisions? If so, where does it all end?” Westmoreland answered that the NVA had eight divisions in the country and had the capacity to go to twelve, but if they did, the problems of support would be considerable. He did note, however, that if we added more men, so would the enemy. But we had finally reached the crossover point, Westmoreland insisted, a crucial point in his war of attrition: we were killing men more quickly than they could add them. Even so, the President was not entirely put at ease. “At what point does the enemy ask for [Chinese] volunteers?” he asked. Westmoreland answered, “That’s a good question.”

Johnson then asked his commander what would happen if we stayed at the already high figure of 470,000 men. It would be a meat-grinder war in which we could kill a large number of the enemy but in the end do little better than hold our own, Westmoreland said. The limitations of troops (this country already regarded it as too unlimited a war) meant that he could only chase after enemy main-force units in fire-brigade style. He foresaw the war then going on in the current fashion for five more years. If the American force was increased to 565,000, Westmoreland saw the war going on for three years; with the full increment of 210,000 it could go on for two years—which would take Johnson into 1970. General Wheeler was there (anxious for Westmoreland to get the troops as a means of also getting a reserve call-up) and the President asked him what would happen if Westmoreland did not get the full 210,000. Wheeler answered that the momentum the Americans had would die, and in some areas the enemy would recapture the initiative; it did not mean that we would lose the war, but it would certainly be a longer one. For Lyndon Johnson, a year away from an election, already besieged, already sensing the growing restlessness in the country, hearing these rather dark predictions of his generals, it was hardly a happy occasion.

Two years too late the civilians were finally learning how open-ended they had made the war, and how little they had determined the strategy. Ten days later John McNaughton wrote in a memo to McNamara:

I am afraid there is the fatal flaw in the strategy in the draft. It is that the strategy falls into the trap that has ensnared us for the past three years. It actually
gives
the troops while only
praying
for their proper use and for constructive diplomatic action. Limiting the present decision to an 80,000 add-on does the very important business of postponing the issue of a Reserve call-up (and all of its horrible baggage) but postpone it is all that it does—probably to a worse time, 1968. Providing the 80,000 troops is tantamount to acceding to the whole Westmoreland-Sharp request. This being the case, they will “accept” the 80,000. But six months from now, in will come messages like the “470,000570,000” messages, saying that the requirement remains at 210,000 or more. Since no pressure will have been put on anyone, the military war will have gone on as before and no diplomatic progress will have been made. It follows that the “philosophy” of the war should be fought out now so that everyone will not be proceeding on their own premises, and getting us in deeper and deeper; at the very least, the President should give General Westmoreland his limit (as President Truman did to General MacArthur). That is, if General Westmoreland is to get 550,000 men, he should be told “that will be all and we mean it.”

The government was now clearly divided, and the President was caught in the middle. The Chiefs and Westmoreland wanted an ever larger war and ever greater force, but this time McNamara was in effect able to hold the line. Westmoreland would not get the minimal 70,000 he wanted; rather, there would be a compromise and he would get about 50,000, bringing the U.S. troops to a ceiling of 525,000.

It was a special irony that the burden of making the case against the war now fell to the civilians at Defense. Nominally the reaction should have come from the White House, from aides to the President anxious to protect their man from false estimates from the military; or from State, a place supposedly sensitive to the political dilemmas of the war. But Rostow made the White House staff supportive, a hotbed of cheerleaders, and at State, Rusk kept his people from analyzing failures (thus the erratic behavior of Bill Bundy in all those years; he jumped around from position to position, he seemed to be saying that we were doing the right things, but we weren’t doing them well enough; he was never able to use his intelligence and that of his staff on the real issues. His intelligence went in one direction, but his responsibility to his superior, Rusk, turned him in another. As a result he became increasingly irritable and harsh to those under him).

By mid-1967 McNamara was moving to try and cap the war, particularly the bombing. In October 1966, for the first time, he had let Systems Analysis loose on the issue of the war, asking them to check on projected increases the Chiefs wanted for bombing in 1967. The willingness to bring in Systems Analysis was significant not so much as an attempt to prove that the war was not working, but as a willingness to surface more and more as a critic. He knew that the use of Systems Analysis would anger the military and cause him political problems, that it would be evidence of his own pessimism, but at this point he was willing to take additional heat in order to get the facts. The Systems Analysis people of course recommended against the bombing. They reported that the bombing did not cause Hanoi great problems, that these losses were readily made up by the Soviet Union and that thus an increase in bombing placed a greater burden not on North Vietnam, but on the United States. For example, CINCPAC’s expanded bombing requirements would generate 230 aircraft losses in 1967 and cost us $1.1 billion while doing only negligible damage to the other side. (At the end of 1967 Systems Analysis would do another estimate on the war and find that despite the bombing, the GNP of North Vietnam had managed to go up in 1965 and 1966, and had fallen off only in 1967, and that North Vietnam’s allies had given Hanoi over the war years $1.6 billion in economic and military aid—that is, four times what it had lost through bombing. “If economic criteria were the only consideration, NVN would show a substantial net gain from the bombing, primarily in military equipment,” it reported.)

But by 1967 McNamara had not yet made the case against the bombing. He had made an early appeal for limiting the bombing, and his appeal, pressed at a very high level in the government, had resulted in a ferocious argument—sharp and furious. Word of it did not leak out, because it had been held at such a high level, and because McNamara himself was so closemouthed about it and operated so close to his vest. But John McNaughton later told friends that had it gone through, there would have been at least two senior military resignations.

McNamara lost that first round, but he had decided to continue fighting. He wanted to win within the bureaucracy because that was the battlefield he knew best. He wanted above all to make the case that the bombing could not win the war, that it was a subsidiary part of it at best, and that the limits were greater than the effectiveness. He thought of using the material in a press conference but decided that was too limited a forum; he thought of giving a single speech but decided that the complexity of his points might be lost; it was too much for a one-shot presentation. So while he was looking for a forum, he prepared his case. He pushed the CIA very hard for judgments on how effective the bombing had been and received in return what were considered some of the best reports ever done by the Agency. In August, when the Stennis committee, primed by frustrated and unhappy generals, was holding hearings on the air war, McNamara was asked to testify. It was exactly what he wanted. He knew about committee hearings by now, and how to make points and make news. He worked mostly by himself with very few aides right up until the last minute, deliberately not clearing his presentation with the White House, knowing that clearance would not come through.

In testifying, he recognized the impact of what he was doing and saying. He did not attack previous bombing; rather, what he sought was to remove bombing as a means of attaining victory. He knew it would infuriate the President, and it did; afterward he was summoned to the White House to receive a full blast of presidential anger. It was a rare moment for McNamara; he, the compleat corporate man, had broken the corporate rules, and he had acted as an individual, as a man with his own rights and privileges. In a way he lost; eventually the fifty-seven targets which the JCS wanted and which the Stennis committee had criticized him for not authorizing were cleared by the President with, of course, no appreciable change in the war. But he had written into the record a powerful official argument against the bombing and this would have greater effect in the coming year. In doing this, he paid the price; he separated himself from the military publicly, and he undermined his long-range usefulness. From then on the President made sure that Earle Wheeler was at the Tuesday lunches. A few months later the President, wanting to make some minor point on the war to a senator, suggested that the senator go by and see Bob McNamara. And then he caught himself: “No, don’t go see Bob—he’s gone dovish on me.”

But a dovish Secretary of Defense in control of a military empire was a political problem for Johnson. It meant that his own house was divided, almost openly so after the Stennis hearings. McNamara annoyed the Chiefs, caused problems on the Hill, and was a constant reminder to Johnson himself that perhaps it did not work, that it was all lies. By mid-1967 Johnson had turned on McNamara (it was not enough that McNamara’s earlier 1965 projections had been wrong; what was worse was that he was now trying to act on a new set of calculations); the President still described his Defense Secretary as brilliant, but there was a new sarcastic touch to it. In mid-1967, when McNamara proposed limiting the bombing, gradually reducing it in scale as a means of getting negotiations started, Johnson took the proposals, handed them to an aide, and said, “You’ve never seen such a lot of shit.” Clearly, McNamara was no longer an asset; he was a man caught between conflicting loyalties, and Johnson was aware of his very close relationship with Robert Kennedy. Nineteen sixty-eight being a political year, Lyndon Johnson was not about to enter a campaign with a vital member of his official family publicly dissenting on the most important issue. Without checking with McNamara, Johnson announced in November 1967 that his Secretary of Defense was going to the World Bank. The move came as a surprise to the Secretary and he did not know whether or not he had been fired. The answer was that he had been.

But not everyone had gone dovish on the President, neither General Westmoreland nor another important member of the team in Saigon, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker. When this kindly, gentle New England patriarch with perhaps the most enviable and least assailable reputation in American government—everyone spoke well of Ellsworth Bunker—had arrived there in 1967, the doves had all felt a surge of optimism. Bunker’s record for sensitivity and integrity were impeccable; at State a certain excitement had been kindled by Bunker’s appointment. But Bunker, who had been so open-minded in the Dominican crisis, was very different in Saigon; the American flag was planted now, American boys were dying, and though he was freed of the mistakes of the past, he felt the need to justify the past American investment. So he bought all the military estimates and assumptions; he was the bane of some of the younger men on his staff who worked desperately to bring him together with doubters, to tell him that the whole thing was hopeless and that we were stalemated. But Bunker was confident, and in the next five years he became one of the two or three most important and resilient players, in particular standing behind Thieu and Ky at the time of Tet, when most people were ready to write them off. So in 1967 if the military were optimistic, Bunker was optimistic. When members of his staff and journalists brought him unfavorable estimates, he turned away. He could not understand why they were so pessimistic, he said, when generals as able as Bruce Palmer were optimistic. Why, Bruce Palmer was one of the finest and most intelligent officers in the U.S. Army, they had worked together in the Dominican crisis, and General Palmer had assured him that things were going well in Vietnam. So how dare these young reporters be pessimistic? It was something he simply could not understand. Indeed, at one dinner party for journalists in late October 1967, Bunker began to talk confidently about how well things were going, and how bright the immediate future looked; what he really wanted was to set the ARVN free in Laos, a plan close to the hearts of the American military. When he answered that, a reporter sitting next to him began to laugh. “Why are you laughing?” Bunker asked. “Because if you send them into Laos they’ll get their asses whipped, sir,” the reporter answered. Bunker looked somewhat offended and said that this was not what he understood from his talks with our generals; some four years later he finally got his chance and sent the ARVN into Laos, and sure enough, they got their asses whipped. But even that did not faze Ellsworth Bunker, and he continued as the most consistent, influential and rigid hawk in the country, and he would continue to stay on in Vietnam, a friendly and gentle visage on a deteriorating policy.