The Best and the Brightest (131 page)

In late September the polls showed Nixon leading Humphrey 45 to 30; if he was concerned about anything it was the strength of Wallace, and he was wary of seeming too liberal, too dovish, and thus losing his Southern support. So the campaign was in one sense a repeat of the Tom Dewey campaign, though with far greater technological skill. If Nixon avoided confrontation with the public and with reporters, he nonetheless seemed, by means of carefully controlled televised confrontations with his own supporters, to be meeting people, he seemed to be candid. Meanwhile Humphrey, despite the efforts of his staff to separate him from Johnson, was unable to make the break; he was able to take draft copies of a plan for a new and more independent Vietnam to the President and then unable to show them to the President. “Hubert,” said Larry O’Brien, head of the Democratic party, in August, “paid a high price for being a good boy.” But then, very late in the campaign, and under constant prodding by his staff and his audiences, Humphrey began slowly, painfully, timidly to dissociate himself from Johnson and the war. Suddenly his campaign came alive, money came in. The final vote in November was extremely close: a 15 percent edge in the polls had dwindled to less than 1 percent, Nixon winning 31.77 million to 31.27 million. In part because of his silence and his failure to come to terms with such an awesome issue, Nixon had helped turn a potential landslide into a cliffhanger.

So he was President and he had enjoyed a free ride on Vietnam. He had not announced what his thoughts were on the subject, nor would he be in any hurry to. To Republican doves who had supported him during the campaign he had appeared optimistic about the chances for an end. He had told some of them during the campaign that if he was elected he would end the war within six months. After his election that still seemed to be the timetable; in April 1969 Representative Pete McCloskey of California, who would later challenge Nixon on the war, and Representative Don Riegle of Michigan, who would aid McCloskey in the campaign, went to see Henry Kissinger to plead that the Administration keep its promise and end the war shortly. Kissinger replied that a breakthrough was imminent. “Be patient,” he said. “Give us another sixty to ninety days. Please stay silent for the time being.” But the first signs of what the Administration’s policy would be had already come from Kissinger himself. Even before Nixon took office, Kissinger, who was the vital national security assistant, had gone around Washington telling friends that the most serious mistake the Johnson Administration had made was the public criticism by Clifford and Harriman of Saigon. In contrast, said Kissinger, the Nixon Administration would move to strengthen the Thieu regime. To many dovish Washington officials who viewed Clifford’s attempt to separate Washington from Saigon as the wisest thing the Johnson Administration had done, and felt that it had, if anything, not gone far enough, what Kissinger was saying was ominous. If Nixon was going to strengthen Saigon, then there would be no real change forthcoming in the political objective of the United States and in what the Administration was offering Hanoi. We might lower our troop level there, but the war would continue the same. Though we would probably cut back on American troops in Vietnam (not out of fondness for the other side, but because American political realities demanded it), we were not offering the other side anything new politically.

The answer on the Nixon policies came in November. With antiwar sentiment mounting again, with larger and larger antiwar moratoriums being held, Nixon finally moved. He did not speak to the protesters, he spoke beyond them, to what had become known as Middle America or Silent America, telling them that they were the good Americans who loved their country and their flag, and he summoned them now to support him. He wanted peace, but peace with honor; all Americans would want him to honor the commitment to a great ally. In the speech he seemed to be debating Ho. What was important about the speech was its tone. The rhetoric was harsh and rigid, and there was talk about their atrocities (just a few days earlier Seymour Hersh, a free-lance writer, had uncovered the first evidence of the massive American massacre of women and children at My Lai). The rhetoric seemed more like that of the previous Administration than an Administration which intended to end the war; indeed, a few days later Dean Rusk said at a Washington dinner that he was a member of the loyal opposition, but after Nixon’s speech he was more loyal than opposed.

At the same time that Nixon invoked the support of Middle America he also unleashed his Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, to attack the media and war critics, Agnew in effect becoming Nixon’s Nixon. The idea was simple: to freeze critics of the war and the President, to put them on the defensive. Support of the President was patriotic; criticism of him and his policies was not. Eventually Agnew’s role became even clearer—to purge the Congress of dissident doves, that is, to remove from the Congress those men most opposed to a war that Nixon was supposed to be ending. By this time Nixon’s policy became clear: it would be Vietnamization, we would pull back American troops, probably to 250,000 by 1970, and perhaps to as few as 75,000 by 1972. There would be fewer and fewer Americans on the ground, and greater and greater reliance on American air power. What could be more tempting than to cut back on American troops and casualties and still get the same end result which Lyndon Johnson had sent more than 500,000 men in quest of? So he was dealing with the war without really coming to terms with it; it was the compromise of a by now embattled President who knew he had to get American troops out but who still believed in their essential mission. So now he sought peace with honor. “What President Nixon means by peace,” wrote Don Oberdorfer in the Washington
Post,
“is what other people mean by victory.”

About the same time Henry Kissinger, who had emerged as the top foreign policy adviser of the Administration (in part because he, like Nixon, was hard-line on Vietnam, whereas both William Rogers, the Secretary of State, and Mel Laird, the Secretary of Defense, had been ready to liquidate the war in the early months of the Administration), was asked by a group of visiting Asians if the Nixon Administration was going to repeat the mistakes of the Johnson Administration in Vietnam. “No,” answered Kissinger, who was noted in Washington for having the best sense of humor in the Administration, “we will not repeat their mistakes. We will not send 500,000 men.” He paused. “We will make our own mistakes and they will be completely our own.” There was appreciative laughter and much enjoyment of the movement. One thing though—Kissinger was wrong. To an extraordinary degree the Nixon men repeated the mistakes and miscalculations of the Johnson Administration, which prompted Russell Baker to describe it all as “the reign of President Lyndon B. Nixonger.” For step by step, they repeated the mistakes of the past.

They soon became believers in their policy, and thus began to listen only to others who were believers (they began to believe, in addition, that only they were privy to the truth in reports from Saigon, that the secret messages from the Saigon embassy, rather than being the words of committed, embattled men, were the words of cool, objective observers). Doubters were soon filtered out; the Kissinger staff soon lost most of the talented Asian experts that had come in with him at the start of the Administration. Optimistic assessments of American goals, of what the incursion into Cambodia would do, of what the invasion of Laos would do—always speeding the timetable of withdrawal and victory—were passed on to the public, always to be mocked by ARVN failure and NVA resilience. More important, Nixon saw South Vietnam as a real country with a real President and a real army, rich in political legitimacy, and most important, capable of performing the role demanded of it by American aims and rhetoric. So there was no tempering of rhetoric to the reality of failure and miscalculation in the South; Nixon himself spoke of the fact that America had never lost a war, precisely the kind of speech a President needed to avoid if he wanted to disengage. Similarly, if there was an overestimation of the South Vietnamese, there was a comparable underestimation of the capacity, resilience, determination and toughness of the other side. Even in 1972, when Hanoi launched a major offensive, Kissinger called in favored Washington correspondents to be sure that they downplayed the importance of the offensive; like so many French and American spokesmen before him he saw it as the last gasp—“One last throw of the dice,” Kissinger called it.

But the Nixon Administration, like the Johnson Administration before it, did not control events, and did not control the rate of the war; and though it could give Thieu air power, it could not give him what he really needed, which was a genuine, indigenous political legitimacy. While Thieu’s regime was as thin and frail as ever, the North Vietnamese were imbued with a total sense of confidence. Time was on their side, they were the legitimate heirs of a revolution, nothing confirmed their legitimacy more than American bombs falling on the country. Eventually, they knew, the Americans would have to leave. What was it a fully confident Pham Van Dong had told Harrison Salisbury of the
New York Times
in December 1966 in Hanoi: “And how long do you Americans want to fight, Mr. Salisbury . . . one year? Two years? Three years? Five years? Ten years? Twenty years? We will be glad to accommodate you.” And the war went on. American air power served its limited purpose; it could, at great cost, keep the South Vietnamese from being routed. Administration sources praised progress in pacification, but there was no real pacification; the 1972 NVA offensive ravaged any frail gains, and Nixon, in frustration, approved an even fiercer bombing campaign against the North, lifting many of the restraints which had marked the Johnson years. In world eyes the bombing, in the name of a losing cause, made the United States look, if anything, even crueler. Peace seemed nowhere near in the summer of 1972, unless the President abruptly changed his policies, and so the American dilemma remained. Time was on the side of the enemy, and we were in a position of not being able to win, not being able to get out, not being able to get our prisoners home, only being able to lash out and bomb. The inability of the Americans to impose their will on Vietnam had been answered in 1968, yet the leadership of this country had not been able to adjust our goals to that failure. And so the war went on, tearing at this country; a sense of numbness seemed to replace an earlier anger. There was, Americans were finding, no light at the end of the tunnel, only greater darkness.

Author’s Note

I began work on this book in January 1969. I had just come from covering the domestic turbulence created by the war during the 1968 campaign and I had seen the Johnson Administration and its legatee defeated largely because of the one issue. At that point I was looking for a new assignment, and my colleague at
Harper’s,
Midge Decter, suggested that I do a piece on McGeorge Bundy, who was after all the most glistening of the Kennedy-Johnson intellectuals. It would be a way not only of looking at him—very little was known about what he really did and stood for—but also of looking at that entire era. I thought it was a good idea, since the Kennedy intellectuals had been praised as the best and the brightest men of a generation and yet they were the architects of a war which I and many others thought the worst tragedy to befall this country since the Civil War; indeed I felt then and still feel that the real consequences of the war have not even begun to be felt. So I began the piece on Bundy, which turned out to be much broader than a profile of a man, in effect the embryonic profile of an era. The Bundy article took me three months of legwork. The subject himself was not noticeably cooperative while doing it, nor particularly enthusiastic about the final product. When the article was finished I had a feeling of having just started, though it was very long for a magazine piece, 20,000 words. I realized I had only begun to scratch the surface and I wanted to find out the full reasons why it had all happened, I wanted to know the full context of the decisions, as well as how they were made. Why had they crossed the Rubicon? They were intelligent men, rational men, and seemingly intelligent, rational men would have known the obvious, how unlikely bombing was to work, and how dangerous it was to send combat troops, and that if we sent American units we would be following the French. (When I began work on the book I did not realize how pessimistic the intelligence people both at State and CIA had been about the proposed venture. At key points in 1964 and 1965 when journalistic reporting from Saigon had been particularly pessimistic, it was the argument of those in government, like Bill Bundy, that if outsiders could only see the secret cable traffic they would know how well things were going and how well they were likely to go. Quite the reverse was true; if the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the press and the public had known of the extent of the intelligence community’s doubts, there would have been a genuine uproar about going to war.)

So I set out to study the men and their decisions. What was it about the men, their attitudes, the country, its institutions and above all the era which had allowed this tragedy to take place? The question which intrigued me the most was
why,
why had it happened. So it became very quickly not a book about Vietnam, but a book about America, and in particular about power and success in America, what the country was, who the leadership was, how they got ahead, what their perceptions were about themselves, about the country and about their mission. The men intrigued me because they were fascinating; they had been heralded as the ablest men to serve this country in this century—certainly their biographies seemed to confirm that judgment—and yet very little had been written about them; the existing journalistic definition of them and what they represented was strikingly similar to their own definition of themselves. So I felt that if I could learn something about them, I would learn something about the country, the era and about power in America. (When I began my legwork, friends of some of the principals told me that it was a mistake to dwell too much on individuals, that the thrust of something like the pressure for this war went beyond individual men. Perhaps, perhaps, but in 1961 no group of men would have argued more vehemently against that very conception, the inability of able, rational men to control irrational events, than the group of men taking power.)