The Best and the Brightest (2 page)

Bunker was considered one of the ablest and least conventional men in the foreign service at that moment, although his years in Vietnam did not add luster to his reputation. His was a graceful and courteous presence, and I think this last assignment, with the steadily mounting bitterness which it provoked, must have been one of diminishing pleasure for him. He listened politely to what I said (which was more than one of his predecessors had done—four years earlier an American ambassador had literally thrown me out of his office when I had expressed reservations about an extremely dubious ARVN success). He had, Bunker said, spoken with his generals—he named several of them—all fine men, and they had assured him that, contrary to what I said, everything was on schedule and that there was an inevitability to the victory we sought, given the awesome force we had mounted against the North Vietnamese army and the Vietcong.

That evening was not the place for a confrontation, and Ellsworth Bunker, with his old-fashioned, almost courtly New England manner, was certainly not a man anyone wanted to be in a confrontation with. As such, what followed was rather mild. His generals, I suggested, were like all Western generals before them, starting with the French: not so much in the wrong war, but on the wrong planet. Their ability to calibrate this war was limited, their skills were tied to other wars in other places, and with very few exceptions they, like the French before them, tended to underestimate the bravery, strength, resilience,
and the political dynamic which fed the indigenous force
they were fighting. In addition, the briefings they received from subordinates were always tied to career and promotion.

As I spoke I thought of one of my favorite generals, Bob York, a rugged, craggy-faced ex-boxer whom I had known in my earlier tour and who had always gotten things right—had gotten them right because when he went into the countryside he unpinned his stars; with his rough looks he seemed more like an enlisted man than the West Pointer he was, and people told him the truth. At the dinner Ambassador Bunker reiterated his confidence, Zorthian, having hit a wall—and not for the first time, one suspected—changed the subject and the party soon ended. I left the ambassador’s residence more depressed than ever; the embassy was isolated, it still did not understand the roots and therefore the strength of its adversary, it was once again telling Washington what Washington wanted to hear without even knowing. A few months later the Tet offensive caught the American mission, both military and civilian, largely by surprise and undermined the legitimacy of almost everything it was reporting about Vietnam, most particularly its relentless military optimism. What the American army at the highest levels lost in Vietnam, my close friend and colleague Charlie Mohr told me years later, in the best summation of that time, was its intellectual integrity.

I returned back from Vietnam to America properly depressed. A war which was not winnable was going to play itself out, with, I thought, terrible consequences for both America and Vietnam. I had little time to ruminate on this, for I spent the coming year covering the growing domestic turbulence caused by the war. Nineteen sixty-eight was one of those landmark years in which everything came to a head—or, as in this case, seemed to come apart, marked as it was by the withdrawal of the sitting President from the race, by two tragic assassinations, and by a political process which began in the snows of New Hampshire just as the Tet offensive took place and ended in violence in the streets of Chicago. That year I covered many of those events, and in addition I wrote a small book about Robert Kennedy’s campaign. When the year was over, I felt like someone who had been living for too long on the edge of events. I was exhausted, and I had no sense of what I wanted to do next. What about an article on McGeorge Bundy? suggested our executive editor at
Harper’s,
Midge Decter (not yet identifiably in her neoconservative incarnation). A light went on immediately. It was a chance to look at perhaps the most luminescent of the Kennedy people, all of whom had seemed so dazzling when they had first taken office, a chance to look at the Kennedy years themselves from a certain distance, and finally, and perhaps most important, a chance to look at the decision making on the war itself. Suddenly all my energies were fused. It was exactly what I wanted to do, and I spent the next three months working on it. The article, “The Very Expensive Education of McGeorge Bundy,” ran three times the normal magazine length and caused something of a storm. The general power of print and of a magazine like
Harper’s
was a good deal greater twenty years ago in relationship to television than it is today, and this was regarded as an important article. It marked the first time anyone in any major centrist magazine, let alone a presumably liberal one, had been so critical of a member of the Kennedy Administration; far more important, it was the first time a writer in the liberal center had suggested that the Kennedy Administration might be overrated and that its decision making on Vietnam was significantly flawed. Up to then there had been something of a gentleman’s agreement among those who might be called The Good Journalists of Washington that the Kennedy Administration was one of excellence, that it was for good things and against bad things, and that when it did lesser things it was only in self-defense, and in order that it might do other good things. The Kennedy charm and skill and ability to manipulate events was not inconsiderable. I had been viewed by some in the inner Kennedy circle as a hostile journalist because of the pessimistic quality of my early reporting from Saigon, and had angered some people even more when I had told in an earlier book of the President’s frustration with me, and his attempts to have the publisher of the
Times
transfer me from my Saigon beat.

Now with the publication of the Bundy article the stakes were about to go up. Bundy was a dual icon. He had been a dean of Harvard at an unspeakably young age, portrayed constantly in the press as the most cerebral member of the Kennedy Administration other than the President himself, and at the same time the leader of the next generation of the American Establishment. “You have begun,” my friend Tom Wicker, who still lived in Washington, told me when the article was published, “to take on most of the icons in a city that does not like to see its icons criticized.” The outcry upon publication was immediate. My clearest memory of the many attacks on me, some overt, some covert, is of that by Archibald MacLeish, the poet and former librarian of Congress, and an absolute paragon of the Establishment. MacLeish was a man with very close ties to the Bundy family, and to Dean Acheson, and to the Cowles family, which by chance then happened to own
Harper’s.
He wrote a long, very angry letter (albeit not for publication) taking great umbrage at what I had done, and wondering how I dared do it. He sent one copy to Cass Canfield, then the head of Harper Brothers publishing house who wisely simply passed it on without comment to Willie Morris our editor, and another to John Cowles, Jr., who was the overall owner of
Harper’s Magazine.
John Cowles, not by a long shot as good at this game as Cass Canfield, not only sent it on to Willie, but unwisely added his own letter, addressed not to me, but to Willie, and far more sympathetic, it seemed to me and my colleagues, to Bundy than to me. Cowles seemed to be suggesting that a considerable injustice had been done. His letter was not without its clubby overtones—he constantly referred to me as Halberstam and to Bundy as Mac. Those were edgy times. Cowles and I had a heated exchange of letters in which I suggested that if he did not like what I wrote, he could call me up, or he could write me directly.

That article, however, gave me not merely a book idea, but a sense of purpose. I would do a book about how and why we had gone to war in Vietnam, and about the men who were the architects of the war. The basic question behind the book was why men who were said to be the ablest to serve in government in this century had been the architects of what struck me as likely to be the worst tragedy since the Civil War. In another time I might have hesitated before setting out on a task so ambitious. It was a major jump in terms of what I had attempted in the past—my previous books were an extension of the daily and monthly journalism I had already completed, and this was a book more likely to fall into the category of contemporary history. But from the moment I thought of extending the magazine article into a book, I had no doubts. Done properly, it would take four years, and if I gave roughly two and a half years to the legwork and a year and a half to the writing, I could do it. In fact that proved to be a surprisingly close approximation of what was required. Looking back, I think of myself as working on it in a kind of prolonged fever. If there was a formula to doing the book, I thought, it would be one of input. If I went out and did two interviews each day, I was sure I would not fail. I did the two a day with ease. Sometimes I did three. If I found someone who was helpful, I would see him not once, but two or three or four or five times. There was, I found, always more to learn.

My years at
Harper’s,
after I had gone there in 1967 after twelve years of working for daily newspapers, had been eye-opening: In the past, the greatest limitations placed on a daily journalist were those of space (the average story in those days ran about 800 words) and time: a reporter usually had only one day to work on a story. By contrast, at
Harper’s
I had some six to eight weeks to do a piece, and virtually as much space as I wanted. That had been a quantum leap not merely in terms of time and space, but, more important, in terms of freedom. Now I intended to take another leap from the
Harper’s
freedom, and expand it even more, from eight weeks to 200 weeks, from 10,000 words to as many words as I needed. The only failings would be my own. So it was that I signed a contract with Jim Silberman at Random House. If I could stick with my schedule, I was sure I could come up with a portrait of the time, of the men, the era, and the process which had led to this war.

I was thirty-five years old when I started; I had left the
Times
two years earlier to become a contract writer for Willie Morris at
Harper’s
and he had treated me and my colleagues with the greatest of care; now, though I retained my connection to
Harper’s,
I cut my base salary, which had been all of about $20,000, to a much smaller retainer. My financial dilemma was fairly typical of that of many a young writer trying to branch out from magazines while doing a major project: how to devote some 80 percent of my energy to one all-consuming project, while making only about 25 or 30 percent of my income from it. Though I did have the retainer from
Harper’s,
in truth for the first time in my life I was effectively self-employed. The advance from Random House was hardly grand even for those days of more limited advances, and reflected the somewhat limited view of the commercial possibilities inherent in my topic. A book on the origins of the Vietnam War was not considered a hot topic. The total, after commissions, was $41,000, and it was to cover the four projected years of work. It was not a bad sum in those pre-inflation days, but if amortized over four years, it was less than a news clerk at the
Times
was making. Whatever else I had in mind when I took on the book, it was not money.

The hardest thing I had to do at the start was to take leave of my byline for the next four years. Ours is a profession built upon the immediacy of reward: We graduate from college, and our peers go off to law school and graduate school and medical school. They have barely started their first-year classes, and our names are bannered across the front pages of the nation’s leading newspapers. They get their medical or law degrees, and start out in their residencies or as the lowest hirelings in a law office, and we are old-timers, covering the statehouse, or on our way to Washington, by now, we believe, the possessors of a well-known brand name. The byline is a replacement for many other things, not the least of them money. If someone ever does a great psychological profile of journalism as a profession, what will be apparent will be the need for gratification—if not instant, then certainly relatively immediate. Reporters take sustenance from their bylines; they are a reflection of who you are, what you do, and why, to an uncommon degree, you exist. It was hard enough to give so much of it up when I went to
Harper’s,
where I would get only five or six bylines a year. But to go from the world of easy recognition, from the world of the
Times
and
Harper’s,
to a world where I might get only one byline in four years, was a great risk. A journalist always wonders: If my byline disappears, have I disappeared as well? My friends, knowing my compulsions, my innate impatience, wondered if I could do it. Would I be able to resist assignments and stay with my project? It was, as much to my surprise as theirs, the easiest thing I had ever done. I had replaced the need for immediacy with something far more powerful, an obsession. Teddy White had been absolutely correct about the drive that the right book topic would create in me. I never regretted the deadlines, never missed the office. In a way I simply disappeared from journalism. When I was at parties and people asked what I was doing, I would talk about the book, but it seemed so vague an idea for most people that I would notice their eyes glaze over.

It was in some ways an opportune time to be doing a book like this. The failure of a major policy—and Vietnam, no matter what the highest officials were saying, was a failed policy—is, if nothing else, a marvelous lever with which to open a debate. At the time I began the book, no larger debate on the origins of Vietnam was going on in Congress, but in 1969 and 1970 and 1971 how and why it had all happened was very much in the minds of many of the people who had been a part of it. Therefore I was interviewing people of all ranks at precisely the same moment many of them were examining not merely the failure of so tragic a policy, but their own participation in it. Thus, as I interviewed them, they were able to air their own doubts about what had happened in a way that often struck me as oddly cathartic.