The Best and the Brightest (73 page)

Actually, changes and nuances like these were indications of which way they were going, although they were not signals that the outside public, or for that matter, the men involved themselves, could read. Part of this was the growing sense of failure over Vietnam and part of it was the new style that Lyndon Johnson had brought to the White House and the government at large, a sharp contrast to the Kennedy style, which was postBay of Pigs to ventilate an issue as much as possible within the government. Above all, Johnson believed in secrecy. He liked to control all discussions; the more delicate the subject, the more he liked to control it. Thus by his very style Johnson limited the amount of intragovernmental debate, partly because debate went against his great desire for consensus, whether a good policy or not, a wise one or not. The important thing was to get everyone aboard; if there was consensus there was no dissent and this was a comforting feeling, it eased Johnson’s insecurities.

So the reins of debate began to tighten and be limited, and the bureaucracy began to gear up for war. Individual doubters began to be overwhelmed by the force of the bureaucracy, the increasing thrust of it, mounting day by day, like the current of a river as it nears the ocean. And no one symbolized the force of the bureaucracy against the stand of the individual, the incapacity to be oneself because the price of being oneself meant losing one’s governmental position and respectability as a player, more than a young Harvard Law School professor named John McNaughton.

He was the least known of the major players; his life and that of his wife and a young son ended tragically in July 1967 in a freak plane accident, a light private plane smashing into the jetliner carrying the McNaughton family. Yet when the Pentagon Papers were published the impression was that he had been the leading hawk of the era. His name seemed to be on almost every other paper, and the documents were appallingly functional and mechanistic, drained of any human juices (the public reaction to the McNaughton papers was not much different from that of his staff, which after his death had had to go through his papers and came across a private file of memos from McNaughton to McNamara, so closely held that only the two had seen them, in which they had debated and measured the troop and bombing commitments, and it was, said one of his staff members who had loved McNaughton, “like finding a secret John McNaughton”). In the Pentagon Papers he seemed to symbolize the inhumane and insensitive quality of that era, undoubting, unreflective, putting the quantifying of deaths and killing and destruction into neat, cold, antiseptic statistics, devoid of blood and heart.

Yet in many ways quite the opposite was true. No one at a high level of government had served his country better on the question of disarmament than John McNaughton. He had a genuine, cold passion for arms control, and he had helped bring McNamara and the Defense Department around to the limited test-ban treaty. Equally important, no one in the high levels of government in 1964 had greater and more profound doubts about the wisdom of the policy the nation was following in Vietnam, and no one argued more forcefully with his immediate superior against the particular course. And having lost that argument, when someone else—perhaps from State, perhaps from CIA—made the same points which McNaughton had just made to McNamara, no one tore those arguments apart more ferociously than John McNaughton. Once he left Tom Hughes, the brilliant State Department official who headed INR after Hilsman, feeling that the wind had been knocked out of him. Hughes had made an extremely pessimistic appraisal of the chances for success in Vietnam and a rather positive estimate on the vitality of the enemy. McNaughton looked at him and said with disdain, “Spoken like a true member of the Red Team,” the designation for the Vietcong-Hanoi side in the war games.

McNaughton was the classic rationalist, and he prided himself on this. When he taught evidence at Harvard Law School, he specialized in defining the difference between reality and illusion. He would walk into a law class, pull out a toy pistol, shoot a student and then take sixteen different versions of what had happened. Then he would point out to his class the difference between what they thought they had seen and what they actually saw, carefully extracting the hearsay. Facts, always facts. Define what people are saying. He could come back from meetings at Harvard, or later in the Defense Department, and replay the meeting, to the delight of subordinates, not just what each person had said, but what he meant when he said it and why he was saying it. He would bring out the prejudices, and tear at the whole petty, self-protective fraud of a meeting. Thus he was a brilliant bureaucratic gossip. He was completely detached, being able to look at a situation with all his own prejudices removed. Logic and facts alone counted; if he had any prejudice at all, it was a bias in favor of logic.

Though he had been a Harvard Law School professor, he was markedly different from the rest of the Cambridge crowd. His roots were not in that Eastern establishment; instead he was the scion of Pekin, Illinois, the son of the owner of the local newspaper there. He was a man who almost flaunted his Midwestern quality, who could put on the twang at a moment’s notice and mimic his origins. Not only that, and more important, he could mimic the styles of his Eastern colleagues, playing the role of the country hick, letting the smooth Easterners know that John McNaughton was a little different, that he might in a sense be a good liberal like the rest of them, but that he had his own identity and it was a little more skeptical of their attitudes. He had once run the family paper in Pekin and also gone back once to run for Congress; it was a very good race, but he lost and returned to the East.

Tall and cool, almost brusque (was the brusqueness a cover for shyness because he was a gangling skinny six foot four?); not a particularly good teacher and not liking to teach that much (he did not intend to go back to Harvard Law after his tour in government), disliking the military and making it obvious (though he was perhaps McNamara’s most trusted deputy at the end of his life, he could never have succeeded him as Secretary of Defense; there was too much antagonism built up there, even among the younger brighter military officers who felt what they considered McNaughton’s contempt not just for the old-fashioned bombs-away generals, but for themselves as well, the men who felt they were working for the same thing as McNaughton and were hurt by his brusqueness and rudeness). Since he was not of that Eastern elite, he was not wedded to their ideas in national security, to containment in Europe, to the arms race, and to the domino theory. From the moment he joined the Defense Department he had begun to question the wisdom of some of America’s commitments, what were considered then the realities of foreign policy and now are considered the myths. The young men around him, who were schooled in the language and litany of the Cold War, regarded him with certain misgiving. Wasn’t this a kind of Midwestern isolationism showing? Wasn’t it too bad that McNaughton hadn’t taken the right graduate courses with Kissinger and the others so he would
know
about these things, as they knew?

Instead he brought an intuitive doubt to many of the issues; he did not, as many of them did, accept all the assumptions of the Cold War. He was perhaps the most iconoclastic member of the government, questioning privately and sometimes publicly the most sacred assumptions, and he could sit with Senate aides, this man who held such power at the Defense Department, its budget always rising, and say, “How much do we really need for the
defense
of the United States of America? Only the defense, to defend its shores? . . . Well I suppose the maximum for the defense of our shores is one billion dollars. So all the rest of our defense budget relates to what we regard as our responsibilities as a world power?” Probably the best definition yet of a country emerging as the new Rome, by one of the head Romans himself.

He was also totally driven and very ambitious; he projected his working hour to the minute. Roger Fisher, a Harvard Law School friend, calling him for lunch, would find that McNaughton was busy—was it that important? And Fisher said yes, and then McNaughton said, “All right, make it twelve thirty-five and we’ll have a sandwich,” and at 12:35 the door would open and Fisher went in, and a sandwich it would be, for ten minutes. The first thing that Fisher, who was worried about the direction of American policy in Vietnam, said was that McNaughton was too tied to the daily routine, that he was overworked and needed time to think, not to rush more and more papers through, but to stop and to reflect and look ahead, and in particular to think about an idea which was a favorite theme of Fisher’s, what the political objective of American policy was, what we wanted Hanoi to do. “Look at my schedule,” McNaughton said, and Fisher protested that the schedule had to be pushed aside. He didn’t care how many meetings there were, how much pressure there was, how many five-minute increments marked on that carefully kept schedule; this was the most important thing for McNamara’s chief political officer. “No,” repeated McNaughton, “look at my schedule.” Finally Fisher did and there, after all those tiny meetings and tiny increments, five minutes each, he had blocked out five hours, from 1:15 to 6:15, and noted:
“What are we trying to get Hanoi to do?”

He was a man after McNamara’s heart in this, the quantifying of everything, the capacity to break things down, to do it numerically and statistically. Even when he spoke against the arms race, to limit it if not halt it, his terms often seemed curiously mechanistic, as if human beings never entered the calculations. In 1966 McNaughton was asked to meet with a group of sociologists and economists headed by Kenneth Boulding, to explain what McNamara was trying to do at the Pentagon. McNaughton agreed because some old friends were organizing the meeting, and he gave a particularly brilliant performance on the McNamara revolution, on cost effectiveness, a presentation of both force and brilliance, and yet curiously unsatisfying, so that finally one of the young sociologists got up and said, “Mr. McNaughton, I’ve had enough. All your facts, all your statistics, all your slide rules, all your decisions—you speak it all so well, and yet where is
man
in all this, Mr. McNaughton? Where are his needs, and where are his problems? Does all of this do him any good? Or does it do him more harm?” McNaughton rose again and said, in effect,
touché:
“At last someone’s made the point. All day long I’ve been talking with you and you’ve been giving me the standard left-wing stuff, and you’ve been debating whether we count better than you do, and now finally we have something, and the trip is worthwhile for me.”

In 1964 McNaughton was very unsure of his relationship with McNamara; he was newer in his position than McNamara was in his. He was almost mesmerized by McNamara; he had never seen anything like him and admired the Secretary without reservation, being almost slavish in his subservience. That and being extremely ambitious, and wanting, now that he was operating in the big and fast world of Washington, to remain there. So he became at once the man in the government where two powerful currents crossed: great and forceful doubts about the wisdom of American policy in Vietnam, and an equally powerful desire to stay in government, to be a player, to influence policies for the good of the country, for the right ideas, and for the good of John McNaughton. Though he was a Harvard law professor, there was no more skillful player of the bureaucratic game than John McNaughton, for he understood the bureaucracy very quickly and how to play at it, and he learned this, that his power existed only as long as he had Robert McNamara’s complete confidence, and as long as everyone in government believed that when he spoke, he spoke not for John McNaughton but for Bob McNamara. That, with its blind loyalty and totality of self-abnegation, meant bureaucratic power, and John McNaughton wanted power. Any doubts he had were reserved for McNamara, virtually alone, and perhaps one or two other people that he knew and trusted, who would not betray him with gossip, so that the word would not go around Washington that McNaughton was a secret dove. Nor was he at all unaware of the enormous political sensitivity of even thinking like a dove, and of doing dovish papers. In late 1964 he assigned Daniel Ellsberg to the job of looking for ways of rationalizing the American way out of Vietnam—if everything collapsed. It was in effect to be a covering White Paper along the lines of the China White Paper. The secrecy involved in Ellsberg’s assignment was paramount: Ellsberg, McNaughton made clear, was to talk to no one else about his assignment, not even his colleagues in the McNaughton shop. He was not to use a secretary on his reports but was to type them himself. In addition McNaughton wanted to make clear that this very assignment might damage Ellsberg’s career, that a repeat of the McCarthy period was possible. “You should be clear,” he repeatedly warned Ellsberg, “that you could be signing the death warrant to your career by having anything to do with calculations and decisions like these. A lot of people were ruined for less.”

Yet the doubts expressed in the Ellsberg papers clearly reflected McNaughton’s own doubts. In 1964, rather early, John McNaughton had begun thinking the darkest thoughts, touching very quickly on the central problems of Vietnam, not whether it was a question of personnel, getting better people there, or better programs or more equipment, but whether we should be there at all, whether, to use an almost isolationist term, those people wanted us there. Was it worth it, shouldn’t we perhaps just get out quickly at a lower price? He had few illusions about the ability of our Vietnamese allies, and the more he studied the war, the more respect he had for the Vietcong. He was capable, in 1964, of listening to aides brief him on the quality of Vietcong leadership and motivation, and saying almost offhandedly, in a rare off-guard moment, “If what you say in that briefing is true, we’re fighting on the wrong side.” Knowing that McNamara did not yet share these doubts, he was very careful about getting some corroboration before he went head-on to his boss with them. And in this increasingly tense atmosphere, as he looked for someone to share his doubts with, someone who knew something about Vietnam and would not talk out of turn and just might be dovish, he finally decided that he might find a co-conspirator, not at State, State was too gossipy, but at the White House, there was less bureaucratic entanglement there. The White House was safer; it was somehow a more private place. Michael Forrestal was an old friend of McNaughton’s, they had worked together on the Marshall Plan, and very early in the game McNaughton had sensed Forrestal’s own growing doubts about Vietnam. Since Forrestal was a key link in the Harriman group and had spent a good deal of time in Vietnam, he was the ideal man to talk to and would be able to confirm or refute McNaughton’s suspicions.