The Best and the Brightest (61 page)

So the men around him set out almost immediately to hold the line, to protect the President, to delay decisions on Vietnam as long as possible, to keep it, if at all possible, off the front pages, to make as few decisions for as long as possible. Vietnam, however, was his, and a few days later he walked over to the State Department, assembled the gentlemen of that vast house of employment, and reminded them that he was the only President they had (just to make sure that they got the message, he had taken Speaker of the House John McCormack with him, that trembling, frail old man who was next in line in succession, a graphic illustration of the truth of Johnson’s words). He gave them a pep talk, emphasizing the importance of what they did, the difficulty under which they did it, the lack of recognition, saying he understood all this (which was not true. Of the many departments of the government, they constituted the one he was least sympathetic to; his view was not unlike that of Joe Kennedy. He believed them sissies, snobs, lightweights who sacrificed too little and thought themselves better than their country). He closed with one statement which sent cold chills into a few of the doubters who had been working on Vietnam under Harriman: “And before you go to bed at night I want you to do one thing for me: ask yourself this one question . . .” Pause. Then slowly, for emphasis, each word is a sentence:
“What have I done for Vietnam today?”
Then he left. Almost three years earlier, Douglas MacArthur had told John Kennedy, in a discussion about the coming problems of Asia, that the chickens were coming home to roost for Kennedy. But instead they would come home for Lyndon Johnson.

John Kennedy was dead. His legacy was a mixed one. He had come in at the latter part of the Cold War; at the beginning he had not challenged it, though he had, in the last part of his Administration, begun to temper it. On Vietnam his record was more than cloudy. More than any other member of his Administration, he knew the dangers of a deep U.S. involvement, the limits of what Caucasian troops could achieve on Vietnamese soil, and yet he had significantly deepened that involvement. He had escalated the number of Americans there to 16,900 at the time of his death, with more than 70 dead (each dead American became one more rationale for more dead Americans); more important, he had markedly escalated the rhetoric and the rationale for being there. Although he seriously questioned the wisdom of a combat commitment, and at the end had grave doubts about the viability of the counterinsurgency program, whether we should be there at all, he had never shown those doubts in public, from the rostrum of the bully pulpit. The only thing he had expressed doubts about was the Diem regime, that and little more. His successor had to deal not so much with Kennedy’s inner doubts so carefully and cautiously expressed, but with his public statements, all supportive of the importance and significance of Vietnam. In addition, his speeches and programs had raised the importance of Vietnam in American minds; his commitment had, by the publicity his Administration gave it, become that much more vital, and had led to that many more speeches, that many more newspaper stories, that many more television stories on the Huntley-Brinkley show.

Kennedy had of course in the last couple of months privately expressed a nagging doubt: Could it be done? Was it worth doing? He had always feared the combat-troop idea; the French, he said repeatedly, had not been able to deal with the Vietnamese with 300,000 men, how could we? This was a political war; one could not produce military answers. He was increasingly dubious about the whole thing, about just how effective any Western presence which required force could be in Asia. It seemed to do more harm than good in order to survive. Just before he died he took Michael Forrestal aside and told him that he wanted Forrestal to make a special trip to Cambodia to see Prince Sihanouk. Forrestal’s specific mission would be to convey Kennedy’s personal and political warmth, Kennedy’s belief in the kind of neutralism Sihanouk followed, that we felt we understood him better now, and that we wished him great success. That in itself marked a change from the more hostile attitude of the past, when Washington had been forced to accept the essentially anti-Cambodian anti-Sihanouk attitude of South Vietnam. In the last few weeks of his life he had talked with some aides, such as Kenny O’Donnell, about trying to paper it over through 1964, keeping the commitment away from Goldwater as a target, and then trying to negotiate his way out. He had spoken similar words to Mike Mansfield, though omitting the reference to the 1964 election, simply talking about de-escalating, letting out his misgivings about our involvement. The men who were close to him in the White House felt that these doubts were growing all the time. And certainly he had been burned in the past. He knew the limits of force, and he knew the limits of what the generals recommended, and the limits of institutional wisdom. What was it he had said to Harriman at the time of Laos: It’s political, if they don’t want me to go to war in Cuba ninety miles from home, how can I go to war 12,000 miles away? And yet, and yet . . . More skeptical, more subtle than his public pronouncements, he had nonetheless failed to deal with Vietnam as a political problem. His response, if not combat troops, had been highly operational and functional and programmatic. He had worked to conceal the truth about Vietnam from the public and had markedly increased the American commitment, and he had severely limited the hand of a fresh, unsure successor. And he had passed on to that successor the brilliant, activist can-do Kennedy team, a team somewhat tempered in the past by Kennedy’s own skepticism, but which now found itself harnessed to the classic can-do President. He had deepened the commitment there, and he had, in a way, always known better. He had preached, both in his book and in his speeches, about the importance of political courage, but his Administration had been reasonably free from acts of courage, such as turning around the irrationality of the China policy. In this most crucial area the record was largely one of timidity.

Chapter Sixteen

Lyndon Johnson seemed in those first few months to be always in motion, running, doing, persuading; if later much of the nation, bitter over its seemingly unscheduled and unchartered journey into Southeast Asia, turned on him and remembered his years with distaste, it was grateful for him then, and with good reason. His mandate seemed to be to hold the country together, to continue to exhort from those around him their best, to heal wounds and divisions. Kennedy had been the man who experimented, who ventured into new areas, civil rights, and in so doing caused division and pain. He had jarred our nerves in taking us places we had not intended to go; now Johnson would heal not just the pain caused by the assassination but the tensions caused in the venturesome days of some of the Kennedy policies. The healer. If later one of the Johnson qualities which caused doubts among the nation’s critics was his force, the very
abundance
of it—the great capacity to plead, to bully, to beg, to implore, the capacity to manipulate them to what he considered his interest and the nation’s interest—in those early days he was much hailed for it. He was not berated for being a manipulator then, that term would come later. His ability to drive men to a program and policy beyond what they themselves considered wise was considered a national asset, since the men he was manipulating were largely old tired conservative Southern congressmen who headed committees and thus blocked progress. A powerful Presidency was still considered very desirable in those days; the problem was seen as too much power in the Congress and too little in the executive branch, which was exactly the way that man of the Congress recently transferred to the executive office, Lyndon B. Johnson, felt.

The decision in those early months was to hold the line on Vietnam, to hold it down and delay decisions. Too many other things took primacy over it; since Vietnam had always, as far as American policy there was concerned, reflected American developments rather than Vietnamese events (the Buddhist crisis was one of the rare occasions which were primarily
Vietnamese
and contrary to what the Americans wanted), it was, despite the collapse of successive governments, imperative to keep Vietnam quiet. Though the men around Johnson were crisis-mentality men, men who delighted in the great international crisis because it centered the action right there in the White House—the meetings, the decisions, the tensions, the power,
they
were movers and activists, and this was what they had come to Washington for, to meet these challenges and handle them—in 1964 they deliberately avoided a sense of crisis on Vietnam, with the exception of the Tonkin Gulf incident, which became an incident in large part because they needed a congressional resolution. Thus events which might have been played up were played down. Provocations by the other side, the very same kind of alleged provocations which in 1965, when we were ready and geared up (that is, the presidential race run, the President elected, the inaugural given) would stir us to action, retaliation, escalation, first of words and then deeds, these acts were disregarded in 1964.

In Saigon there were attempts to stop the coups, to stop these malignant acts which kept getting in the American newspapers and which made it harder and harder to convince the American public that the struggle there was necessary. So 1964 became a year when Vietnam could no longer be kept on the back burner; events there would thrust the country, the frailty of it all, in front of the American people, but it was a year in which the highest level of American policy makers refused to accept the necessity for making important decisions, tried to delay them, to buy the President a little more time. Besides, Lyndon Johnson liked choices and options. So it was a lost year; opportunities were lost for possible political negotiation, of re-evaluation of American attitudes, of perhaps convincing the American public that it wasn’t worth it, that the Vietnamese themselves did not care that much about the war. Instead of that, they held the line. They did not think time was working against them and decided not to deal with Vietnam in 1964, but to keep their options open. They would not be entrapped, they would make their decisions carefully and in their own time (they were above all functional, operational,
tactical
men, not really intellectuals, and tactical men think in terms of options, while intellectuals less so; intellectuals might think in terms of the sweep of history and might believe that twelve months would make little difference in Vietnam, that if the sweep of history was bad in 1964, it would probably, if anything, be a good deal worse in 1965). They could, they thought, control events, but it was all an illusion. Time had been closing off options relentlessly since 1945 and 1946, when it would have been easy to have a political settlement, a favorable one, with the United States dealing from strength, but ever since those days, the possibility had steadily diminished as the other side, the Vietnamese Communist forces, had become progressively stronger and the United States had become increasingly committed to the idea (then hardly part of its global outlook) that Vietnam was vital.

Thus past years had shown that time diminished options, and this would be true in 1964 as well. A year later the Communists would be that much stronger, the government in Saigon that much weaker, and the United States, having used force in Tonkin, that much more committed. Events, George Ball would write in 1965, a year later, in beginning his final and most important paper in trying to keep us out, and drawing on a quote from Emerson, are in the saddle and tend to ride mankind. When they came to make the final fateful decisions, there would be options, but the real ones would be long since lost; the options they would deal with in 1965 were artificial ones. Given their outlook and their conception of the country and of their own political futures, they would be driven to certain inevitable, highly predictable decisions, but they still had the illusion that they could control events. They were rational men, that above all; they were not ideologues. Ideologues are predictable and they were not, so the idea that those intelligent, rational, cultured, civilized men had been caught in a terrible trap by early 1964 and that they spent an entire year letting the trap grow tighter was unacceptable; they would have been the first to deny it. If someone in those days had called them aside and suggested that they, all good rational men, were tied to a policy of deep irrationality, layer and layer of clear rationality based upon several great false assumptions and buttressed by a deeply dishonest reporting system which created a totally false data bank, they would have lashed out sharply that they did indeed know where they were going.

Yet the old dilemma of Indochina was now finally coming to its illogical conclusions. Being good and decent men, they could not use nuclear weapons, not on first strike at least, perhaps in retaliation, though. They were the policy makers of the greatest nuclear power in the world, except that they could not use those weapons—indeed, their private defense policies were based on the unwillingness to use nuclear weapons—particularly against a small nation in a guerrilla war. Yet because of the Cold War legacy, the loss of China, they could not lose more territory (contested territory; uncontested territory was another thing) to the Communists. And yet we could not fight a long limited war. Korea had been deeply unpopular, and now finally the illusion of a viable South Vietnamese government able and anxious to fight for its own sovereignty was dying. We could not let go, and yet we did not want to get in.

The leadership of course was very good. The loss of Kennedy was mourned, and yet Johnson, this new President . . . he was a powerhouse, a mover. He went after the same programs that Kennedy had wanted, but with more force. McGeorge Bundy, sensing grave doubts about Johnson in his White House shop, where the relationship to Kennedy had been so personal, where the men had been something of a reflection both of Kennedy and Bundy, lectured some of them, telling them not to be such Eastern snobs about Johnson, to cast that arrogance aside. Perhaps he did not have the elegance of his predecessor, but he got things done, and perhaps, being somewhat weak in foreign affairs, he would need them more; there would perhaps be a greater role to play. So it would, some thought, be an Olympian union, the Kennedy staff and style in foreign affairs, and the Johnsonian force in domestic events. And if they were impressed by Johnson, not just the force, but the fact that there was, for all the braggadocio, far more subtlety to the man than anyone had realized, as if some of the roughness of style and of language was a deliberate attempt to hide his sensitivity—he was impressed by them. He had never had men like these working for him. McNamara, the head of Ford Motor Company. “The ablest man I’ve ever met,” he called him. Bundy, flashingly brilliant, the dean of Harvard College, working for this old boy from San Marcos State Teachers College. He did not really like Bundy, sensing at times a patronizing attitude, though occasionally so delighting in him, in Mac’s style—Mac briefing, tidying up a complicated question, so professional, so clean—that a small amused smile would come to his face, like a hitting coach watching a fine hitter or a connoisseur watching a great ballet dancer. Mac was dancing, and dancing for
him.
It was an art form. And Rusk . . . Rusk had been the head of the Rockefeller Foundation, a Rhodes scholar, and Rusk was intelligent and cautious, a wise person.