The Best and the Brightest (37 page)

All in all, the Taylor-Rostow report is an extraordinary document and provides a great insight into the era. It shows a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the war (there was no discussion of the serious political problems of the war in Taylor’s cables). It was arrogant and contemptuous toward a foe who had a distinguished and impressive record against a previous Western challenger. It was written by a general who had seen the limits of air power in Korea and now said that if things went wrong, air power would handle Hanoi any time we wanted. It assumed that the people and the government of South Vietnam were the same thing; yet it also said that a people allegedly fighting for their survival, already overstocked with American aid and material, needed reassurance, that the problem was not one of political origin, but of confidence. When Ridgway in 1954 investigated the possibility of U.S. troops in Indochina, he maximized the risks and minimized the benefits; now Taylor was maximizing the benefits and minimizing the risks.

Not everyone on the tour felt the same way. The two State Department officials who had made the trip, Sterling Cottrell and William J. Jorden, were more dubious about the possibility of success. Cottrell, head of the interdepartmental Vietnam task force, was pessimistic about the efficacy of introducing U.S. combat forces. “Since it is an open question whether the government can succeed even with U.S. assistance, it would be a mistake for the U.S. to commit itself irrevocably against the Communists in the South,” he reported. He did recommend moving to the Rostow plan—presumably to punish the North by bombing it if continued U.S. efforts failed. Jorden, a former
New York Times
correspondent, reported on explosive anti-Diem political feeling and the near paralysis of the government, and warned against the United States’ becoming too closely identified “with a man or a regime.” Most State Department officials shared this skepticism, and the Taylor recommendations were relayed to Secretary Rusk, who was in Japan for a conference. Rusk cabled back his reluctance to see the American commitment enlarged without any reciprocal agreement for reform on the part of Diem. Unless his regime broadened its base and took more non-Communist nationalists into the government, Rusk doubted that a “handful” of American troops could have much effect.

On the whole, opposition to sending troops was frail. On November 8 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, reflecting the pressures from his Pentagon constituency, signed on. In an unusually personalized memo (“The Joint Chiefs, Mr. Gilpatric and I have decided . . .”) he said that the fall of South Vietnam would lead to serious deterioration throughout Southeast Asia, and he agreed that we were unlikely to prevent the fall without sending U.S. combat forces. He accepted Taylor’s judgment that anything less would fail to restore Diem’s confidence. However, he noted that even Taylor’s 8,000 men would not necessarily impress the other side with the true seriousness of American intent. Such a conviction would only come with a clear statement that we would use more force if necessary, and that if Hanoi continued to aid the Vietcong, we would take punitive action against the North. This, of course, might mean a long struggle, and looking at the darkest possibility (that Hanoi and Peking might intervene directly), we would have to consider involving six divisions (the limit of aid McNamara felt we could give without disturbing the Berlin requirements). “I believe we can safely assume the maximum U.S. forces required on the ground in Southeast Asia will not exceed six divisions, or about 205,000 men,” he wrote. The basic McNamara summary was in support of the Taylor position.

There were two important men in Washington who had strong misgivings about sending in combat troops. One was John Kennedy; the other was George Ball, Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs, who was about to be given Bowles’s job. His star was rising at the time, but it was not always thus. He had almost not made the upper level of the Kennedy team, and bearing the Stevenson taint had not helped. Earlier, in January, as the upper levels of the Kennedy Administration were being systematically filled with Republicans, it became fairly obvious that Ball was one more Democrat about to be by-passed. Then Ball heard that Kennedy and Rusk intended to appoint William C. Foster, another Republican, to the job of Undersecretary for Economic Affairs, and decided to do something about it. He enlisted the aid of Stevenson, who had more power and influence with Kennedy than did Ball. Stevenson called Fulbright, adding his own protest about turning the government over to the Republicans, and Fulbright in turn pressured Kennedy, telling him enough was enough, to ease off this particular Republican appointment.

With Foster blocked, Ball became the obvious candidate, a Democrat, a lawyer willing to defend victims of McCarthy at the height of the witch hunt, a man whose specialty was economic affairs, a protégé of Jean Monnet’s, a man who had worked long for the European Common Market. He was also a man of considerable pride and ego, the last man in Washington to write his own speeches, and a forcefully independent man. He may have entered the government with a Stevenson label, but once in office he turned out to be a classic Europeanist, in that sense at least in the Acheson tradition, though with less dependence on military force.

The suggestion to use combat troops in Vietnam disturbed him. He had worked closely with the French during the Indochina war, and he had seen it all, the false optimism of the generals, the resiliency and relentlessness of the Vietminh, their capacity to exploit nationalism and to mire down a Western nation, the poisonous domestic effect. He wanted no part of it for America. When he read the Taylor cables calling for a small, oh so small, commitment, 8,000 men only, he immediately told Bundy and McNamara that if they went ahead with the Taylor proposals, the commitment would not stay small. They would have 300,000 men in there within five years (he was slightly off; it was 500,000 men in five-plus years) because sending combat troops would change the nature of the commitment and the nature of the war, and the other side would not let us out easily. Besides, this was exactly what Diem wanted; it would stabilize his regime and we would do his fighting for him. Both Bundy and McNamara argued with Ball; they believed in the capacity of rational men to control irrational commitments, and in the end they decided that even at 300,000, a troop commitment was worth a try. Then, Ball said, they must tell the President that it was worth that much blood and resources, and Bundy and McNamara agreed. When Ball himself made exactly the same point to Kennedy—that he would have 300,000 men there in a few short years—the President laughed and said, “George, you’re crazier than hell.” But it had jarred the President, and had made him even more aware of how long and dark the tunnel might be.

Not that he needed that much jarring; the President had plenty of doubts of his own. He was conscious of the danger of the recommendations, of the facility with which they had been contrived. “They want a force of American troops,” he told Arthur Schlesinger at the time. “They say it’s necessary in order to restore confidence and maintain morale. But it will be just like Berlin. The troops will march in, the bands will play, the crowds will cheer, and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. It’s like taking a drink. The effect wears off and you have to take another.” Instead, he said, it was the Vietnamese’s war, it would have to be won by them. He told others that he was skeptical about the whole thing. He had been there when the French had 300,000 men and could not control the country, and he wondered aloud how we could do it any better than the French. Which angered Miss Marguerite Higgins, another hard-line columnist writing in the seemingly centrist New York
Herald Tribune,
who, hearing of the President’s doubts, wrote on November 6 that he had “jumped from a false premise to a false conclusion.” The French, she explained, had not lost Indochina, they had given it up in a truce.

Within the bureaucracy there were some inklings that a group was being formed which did not think the problem in Vietnam was primarily military (and thus could not be dealt with by military responses). Rusk remained somewhat on the sidelines, caught in his ambivalence between recurring doubts about the regime and its lack of reforms, as well as the dangers that sending troops might incur, and his conviction that the line against Asian Communism should be held and that the problem was the Chinese. If there was anyone whose job it was at this point to make the case against any military commitment, and make it forcefully, it was Rusk, but he tended to limit his dissent; he sensed that the use of a major advisory-support team was the least the President could get away with, so he acquiesced. The others at State were dubious. George Ball, of course, maintained that even sending advisers was the first step, and that the first step would fail and necessitate a second step. Averell Harriman, about to become Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, was not an expert on Vietnam, in fact he knew precious little about it; but when he heard that here was a government that lacked confidence and had a crisis of morale, he sensed that these were euphemisms for far more serious illnesses. And there was the President himself, reluctant to send combat troops and repeat the French experience, but at the same time afraid of being charged with losing a country and deserting a brave ally, and thus of the domestic implications of not giving greater aid, of not having tried.

On November 11, three days after the McNamara recommendation to introduce combat forces, there was a new McNamara paper, done jointly with Rusk, which reflected the President’s position. It was a compromise with the bureaucracy, particularly the military, and a compromise with the unstated, unwritten pressures against losing a country. Kennedy would send American support units and American advisers, but not American combat troops. We would help the South Vietnamese help themselves. If there really was something to South Vietnam as a nation and it really wanted to remain free, as we in the West defined freedom, then we would support it. We would send our best young officers to advise down to battalion level, we would ferry the ARVN into battle against the elusive Vietcong, and we would, being good egalitarians, pressure Diem to reform and broaden the base of a creaky government and modernize his whole society.

For McNamara to have switched on his recommendations was his normal procedure; his papers were always draft recommendations until the President made up his mind. Then they were tailored to the President’s decision so that there would be no record for history of any difference between the Secretary of Defense and the President. He was that loyal. And Kennedy, holding the line on combat troops, told the Joint Chiefs of Staff to go ahead with the planning for a combat commitment, which was a typical procedure: if you do not give them what they want, give them a chance to dream of it. After the Bay of Pigs he had told them to go ahead with the plans for an invasion of Cuba. A little something for everybody, a little nothing for everybody, and in this case the chance to plan would give the Chiefs more of a thrust forward on Vietnam, a chance to think of the future rather than the past. There was in the final Kennedy package a good deal of emphasis on nation-building and reform, and a belief that we could somehow trick Diem into coming round. We would do this by by-passing Diem’s government, creating strategic hamlets to protect the people from the Vietcong (on the assumption that they wanted to be protected). We would modernize the state not necessarily with Diem, but in spite of him.

This emphasis on reform and liberalization of the South Vietnamese society was in sharp contrast to the Taylor cables, which were primarily military in their view of the problem, but this was not surprising; it was somehow natural for a liberal, anti-Communist Administration to see the world through the prism of its own attitudes, and it was comforting to think in terms of reform, that liberalism and governmental change implanted from the top (the Vietcong were implementing change from the bottom up) could revive a sick society. Not only was it comforting to the Administration itself, but it was comforting to its supporters as well. It seemed a logical extension of that anti-Communism which was also liberal; it was going to do good for the people as well as stop the Communists. (Nothing came of the reforms, however, and a year and a half later when Taylor, the architect of the policy in the public’s mind—the public, reading of the commitment, thought him more an architect of reform than of war, which was totally wrong—visited Vietnam, he was asked by reporter Stanley Karnow what had happened to the much discussed and much praised reforms, since there was no visible evidence of them. Taylor answered, with no small irritation, “I don’t know. I’m no theoretician.”)

There was, of course, no publicity given to the fact that we had almost sent combat troops. The Administration’s public position was that Taylor had advised against the troops, and that he believed that the problem was primarily political and social, which, of course, enhanced his reputation in civilian circles, and again gave the impression that he was different and better than other generals. Yet once again a decision of great importance had almost slipped by the Administration. Very few people were called in to discuss it, there was no major intelligence survey on why the Vietcong were so successful and whether we could in fact halt their growth by military means. (In Saigon, Ambassador Nolting, hearing that a major military-assistance command was to be formed, was enraged and fought against it; the problem, he thought, was primarily political and he did not want to see a burgeoning American military commitment created. He thought seriously of resigning and he was disappointed that Rusk did not press his case more forcefully.)