The Best and the Brightest (71 page)

The Chiefs recommended a wide range of escalatory measures, principally designed at widening the war, and striking at the North. Thus the scenario was being written in which Hanoi would become increasingly the villain, a villain who had been allowed too free a hand. Once the Chiefs took the position, then McNamara would have to turn to it—particularly if there were additional failures in the South, something which was inevitable—and if McNamara had to react to it, so would the rest of the Administration. If nothing was going to be decided in 1964, then the Chiefs were at least staking out their position (restlessness with the existing situation, which was defensive and wasteful). No comparable political positions were being staked out. The Navy and the Air Force were particularly enthusiastic on this theme; their role in the war had been much too small so far, and an expanded war, a war directed against the North, would allow them to use air power and, in the case of the Navy, carrier-based air power. If the Army had doubts about the efficacy of an expanded war, and it did wonder what air power could effectively do, it was also restless with the existing rules of the war; part of its own ideology was to forge ahead, not to permit sanctuaries, not to use less than maximum force. If an enemy was an enemy, then you lashed out at him. Aware of some of the dangers of an expanded war, and aware of the limits of air power on interdiction, the Army nevertheless was swept along. There would be, in an expanded war, enough room for everyone.

In Washington the hope that the new government of General Minh, General Don and General Kim could be used to hold the line and begin to prosecute the war had soon vanished. There was little action and little intensification of the war, since these pleasant, emasculated men, having lived under both the French and the Diem governments for so long, made their own accommodations. They were charged with a desperate situation, and faced an enemy who was above all a revolutionary force; the last thing these men were was revolutionaries. They were nice upper-class men with no desire to repress the population, and no sense at all of the harsh demands on them. They could not cope. In addition, they had moved against Diem partly to head off pressure from younger officers who were themselves conspiring against Diem. Taking power had not necessarily removed that pressure and unified the society, but had, after all these years of harsh authoritarian rule, increased the desire for diversity in the South. The almost feudal factionalism of the South still remained a basic political problem among non-Communists, after the one factor which had briefly unified the society—the distaste and hatred for a sick regime—had disappeared. Even the military did not automatically rally around a military leadership, as the Americans learned; young officer was divided from old officer, northerner from southerner, air force from ground officer. In early 1964 there were rumblings of new coups, and of divisions. Nguyen Khanh, commander of the forces in the II Corps area in the Central Highlands, the last general to join the coup against Diem and a favorite of Americans, told his American advisers that he planned to pull a coup against the generals. The report was duly passed to MACV headquarters (and word of it unofficially went to the embassy, which took the position that it did not want to know anything). In February, Khanh deposed the generals, which pleased Harkins, who despised them and had always considered Khanh his special favorite of the Vietnamese officers (because, for one thing, Khanh spoke the best English and was considered the most pro-American).

But the coup would accelerate rather than slow down the surface political instability of the country (the real political instability was basic to the country, old and dying institutions being supported by an outside power against newer, more modern internal drives), for the immediacy of the American acceptance of Khanh, plus the fact that in contrast to how difficult the coup against Diem had been, how easily Khanh pulled his, would underscore the frailty of political control in Saigon. It would encourage rather than discourage other plotters.

Washington may not have realized how little all of this affected the average Vietnamese, but it wanted, above all, surface stability; it had never worried about subsurface instability because that was not visible to the American electorate. It could not, particularly in an American election year, sell the idea of aiding a beleaguered little ally if the ally was more beleaguered by his own officers and battalions than the enemy’s. So when Khanh pulled his coup Johnson was, if not angry, irritated and nervous; he was being assured that this was good, that the old generals were sloppy and pro-French while Khanh was our kind of officer, pro-American, he liked us, he would get with the program, that he was a doer, the kind of young nationalist we wanted to encourage and develop, young nationalist and
pro-American.
So Johnson had acquiesced, since there was nothing else to do—there was his ambassador in Saigon holding up the triumphant hand of Khanh like a winning boxer. But Johnson told his staff he wanted “no more of this coup shit.” If they had to plot, he said, let them plot against the Vietcong. It would, he said, kill him with the Congress and the newspapers. He couldn’t sell this war if they were going to play musical chairs. And he wanted this message brought to them: he wanted them to shape up and cool it. He chose his special messenger, the Secretary of Defense, who would also look over the situation, since the Chiefs were pushing for more force.

McNamara arrived with presidential orders that there were to be no more coups, and the embassy was ordered to get McNamara and Khanh on the front pages everywhere, to make it clear that Khanh was our man. The order to get front-page exposure came through the USIA office, where Barry Zorthian, the officer in charge, decided to have McNamara and Khanh barnstorm together. McNamara would campaign, even babble a few slogans in Vietnamese, thus setting an example for Vietnamese politicians of how to reach out to their own people; when McNamara was gone, Khanh would continue to campaign, and win the people. Zorthian, the most subtle member of the embassy, a man whose own skepticism about the mission was considerable but who was brilliantly effective in quashing doubts in others, asked a staff member what McNamara might say which would be good in Vietnamese. So they went off together, McNamara and Khanh, the United States presence in Asia symbolized by the face of the Secretary of Defense, cameras clicking, McNamara saying,
“Vietnam moun nam, Vietnam moun nam”
—Vietnam a thousand years, Vietnam a thousand years. They made the news shows, the Huntley-Brinkley show. Poor stiff, graceless Robert McNamara, hardly gifted at public relations in his own country, looking particularly foolish as a campaigner (later when Johnson, still in love with McNamara, thought of him as a possible vice-presidential candidate, the ablest man he had ever met, one of the reasons the idea was blocked was memories of that pathetic little barnstorming trip in Saigon). It was an appalling trip, but it worked in that it got McNamara on the front pages, though of course it did not work in stopping coups; it showed the Vietnamese not that the Americans were committed to Khanh, but that the Americans would go with whoever held the reins; for if Khanh was the new American model Vietnamese as far as Washington was concerned, the Vietnamese read him more accurately: just another former French corporal playing the game of intrigue.

As the decay in Saigon became more evident, McNamara was also charged with looking into the possibilities of bombing as a means of bringing more pressure to bear on Hanoi. Would it have to be done, and if so, should it be done immediately? Or could we wait? These were questions which the government was pushing at the President; if Vietnam was falling apart, perhaps the bombing could hold it together. It would rally Saigon and at the same time it might make Hanoi ease off on the pressure. Thus it was a card to be played perhaps without committing the President, to be played and then pulled back. It could even help protect the President. So even as McNamara was striding through the streets of Hué, the bureaucracy in Washington began to intensify its study of the bombing possibilities, and also started working on pinpointing targets. McNamara himself returned from Vietnam in mid-March with a pessimistic appraisal of the situation in Vietnam, reporting that the situation in the countryside had deteriorated, the Vietcong had up to 90 percent control in key provinces in the Delta, and neutralist sentiment was rising. Not surprisingly, he focused most of his attention on what could be done to affect the war by pressuring Hanoi. He did not recommend bombing; he had checked first with the President, and the President was not ready for it. But he did not want to be in conflict with the Chiefs; so he recommended that they go ahead with the planning of what they wanted, concentrating on two particular types of bombing. The first would be a quick strike, to be launched within seventy-two hours, primarily in retaliation for specific guerrilla incidents. The second part was the real bombing program. This, unlike the other, would not be tit for tat; it would be ready to go on thirty days’ notice, and it would be a major strike against the North’s military and industrial centers. These would be sustained raids, in effect what Rostow had been talking about for more than three years. A real bombing program, the use of the threat of bombing to coerce Ho Chi Minh to de-escalate the war rather than lose his precious industrial base.

McNamara made these recommendations officially on March 16, after checking how far the President wanted to go on the subject (which was that he wanted the study in the works, that and nothing more; he wanted his options open). On March 17 the National Security Council met, and Johnson and McNamara played out their charade, using the National Security Council as a forum to inform the rest of the Administration of their intentions. The President told the NSC that he wanted the planning on the bombing to go ahead energetically, which gave the military what they wanted. The generals had not really expected a bombing program this early; as this was an election year, they knew that the President, as Bundy told the principals and McNamara relayed to them, had “his problems.” It was not something they talked about, but there was an awareness of his difficulties. The main thing was that they were permitted to go ahead with the planning.

In addition, the McNamara report (written by John McNaughton), was by itself a particularly significant document. In its preamble it set out the aims of American policy, and the rationale for the objectives. It was significant because these aims had not been so clearly stated before, nor would they be subsequently. In fact, another version of them would become the critical inner governmental paper on American objectives; years later, in looking back over the papers which had determined the goals of the war, the staff which compiled the Pentagon Papers came up with Nassam 288 (National Security paper 288). It was based on the McNamara paper and was almost word for word identical. Nassam 288 said:

We seek an independent non-Communist South Vietnam. We do not require that it serve as a Western base or as a member of a Western Alliance. South Vietnam must be free, however, to accept outside assistance as required to maintain its security. This assistance should be able to take the form not only of economic and social measures but also police and military help to root out and control insurgent elements.

Unless we can achieve this objective in South Vietnam, almost all of Southeast Asia will probably fall under Communist dominance (all of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), accommodate to Communism so as to remove effective U.S. and anti-Communist influence (Burma), or fall under the domination of forces not now explicitly Communist, but likely then to become so (Indonesia taking over Malaysia). Thailand might hold for a period with our help, but would be under grave pressure. Even the Philippines would become shaky, and the threat to India to the west, Australia and New Zealand to the south, and Taiwan, Korea, and Japan to the north and east would be greatly increased.

All these consequences would probably have been true even if the U.S. had not since 1954, and especially since 1961, become so heavily engaged in South Vietnam. However, that fact accentuates the impact of a Communist South Vietnam not only in Asia, but in the rest of the world, where the South Vietnam conflict is regarded as a test case of U.S. capacity to help a nation meet a Communist “war of liberation.”

It was, in fact, the Secretary of Defense playing the role of Secretary of State, and going ahead with the straight domino theory, though the CIA and the other intelligence agencies were reporting, quite the opposite, that the dominoes were not all the same size, shape and color, that the loss of South Vietnam might have less impact outside the immediate Indochinese peninsula, that the other countries reacted to very different political pressures, and that Vietnamese nationalism, left over from the colonial war, which was the principal force aiding the Vietcong in Vietnam, might have no effect in a country which had not undergone a colonial experience. But the McNamara position did not take into account the aftereffects of the French war which might make Vietnamese Communism different; instead, Communism was some great force which was sweeping right across a wide area.

It was an important moment, even though immediate action was postponed. The given, which was that there was a country called South Vietnam, that it wanted to be free and had to be denied to the Communists, hardened within the bureaucracy, as did the ostensible reason for holding it, the domino theory. (Johnson himself did not take the domino theory seriously; he was far more worried about the loss of a country to the Communists and what this would do to him in terms of domestic politics, though this could not be expressed so bluntly in an official paper.) These assumptions became realities, became the given. Since McNamara had noticed the increase of neutralist sentiment in Vietnam, the kind of sentiment which might lead to a neutralist coup, a coalition government which would ask the Americans to leave, he warned the President there was a real danger of this, that U.S. policy must be aimed against this threat. Three days later Johnson cabled Lodge that he was intent on “knocking down the neutralization wherever it rears its ugly head, and on this point I think nothing is more important than to stop neutralist talk wherever we can by whatever means we can.” At the very time that they were talking about keeping their options open, they were closing them off. They were not questioning the given or the assumption of Vietnam; they were determining that the country would stand, like it or not, able to stand or not. They were not distinguishing between Communism in Vietnam and why it was successful and the exterior Communist threat to other countries in the region. And they were not analyzing to what degree the people of South Vietnam did or did not sustain the Vietcong. McNamara made his assessments in a vacuum, and the kind of challenge to them that might have taken place was absent. State made no rejoinder, there was no debate over the assumptions of the facts, no discussion of possibilities of negotiation. The man who was in charge of the counterassessments at State, William Bundy, had just come from McNamara’s shop and he was entirely agreeable to the goals. Thus, without seeming to make a decision, while on the contrary seeming to avoid a decision, the bureaucracy both at Defense and at State had been given the go-ahead, and told in effect to start planning for war. It was not so much that Defense was strong; it was that State was both weak and amenable.