The Best and the Brightest (76 page)

In July 1964 Johnson switched Forrestal’s job, moving him out of the White House to a line job at State on Vietnam where he could work on nuts and bolts, integrating the military and the civilians in the pacification program—perhaps the gravitational thrust of Vietnam would carry him along and end his doubts and he would become a team player, the way a comparable switch had changed Bill Sullivan. He spent much of the rest of 1964 working on daily minutiae on Vietnam, losing his taste for the whole thing, and losing his sense of being able to function. He worked in the late fall with Sullivan, on a plan which became known as the Sullivan-Forrestal Plan, which was a doomed attempt to buy off the military on bombing. It would give them a few things but not everything, the tempo was slower, the targets fewer, and hopefully, far from population centers. It was to be covert, and it would, hopefully, bring negotiations. It was, he realized somewhat in retrospect, aimed more at the American military than at the North Vietnamese, and not surprisingly, it did not fool the Pentagon for a minute. In late November, as part of the Bill Bundy Working Group, he wrote a paper on how we could negotiate our way out. No one seemed terribly interested. In January 1965, depressed personally and professionally, he quietly left the government.

Thus, without attracting much attention, without anyone commenting on it, the men who had been the greatest doubters on Vietnam, who were more politically oriented in their view of the war than militarily, were moved out, and the bureaucracy was moved back to a position where it had been in 1961, more the old Dulles policies on Asia than anyone realized. Those men had surfaced too quickly on Vietnam and fought on what turned out to be a peripheral issue, namely, whether or not to go with Diem, not whether to stay in Vietnam or get out. They had spent all of their force on it, and they won the battle but in a real sense lost the war, for in the struggle almost all of the doubters had become marked men; they would not be major players again on Vietnam because they had antagonized Lyndon Johnson with their opposition. It was as if an orange crop had bloomed too quickly during an unseasonal hot spell in Florida, only to be quickly killed off by a devastating frost that soon followed. Significantly, the only important doubter who stayed in the inner circle was George Ball, the Undersecretary of State. One of the reasons why he remained a player in 1964 and 1965 was that he had not interested himself in Vietnam very much in 1963 and had
not
been an important player during the Diem struggle of that year. He had been preoccupied with Europe and had allowed Harriman and his group to carry the Vietnam fight. Thus, unscarred by earlier skirmishes, he was still around to fight in 1964. Similarly, the systematic removal of the players from 1963 meant that though there was dissent and debate, some of it serious and forceful, in late 1964 and 1965 over whether to bomb, and whether to send combat troops to Vietnam, it never reached the ferocity of the preliminary struggle of 1963, when the real divisions within the Kennedy Administration emerged and when men fought on Vietnam with absolutely everything they had, not as gentlemen, but as players who intended to win and to destroy their opposition in the process. By 1964 the political side had been disassembled, the players changed, so that the balance was uneven, the odds were hopelessly on the side of force, and there was, despite Ball’s eloquence, a sense of doom about what he was doing. Though the most important question of Vietnam was whether to go all the way in or all the way out, it did not in any way provoke the greatest bureaucratic struggles of the period; rather, the first of these had taken place in 1963 over the issue of Diem. In the aftermath State’s doubters were so depleted that State easily acquiesced in the 1965 escalation; and the second great bureaucratic struggle took place in 1968, when Defense, not State, had changed, and when new and antibureaucratic civilians at the Pentagon were finally able to force another debate over the limits of escalation. Thus by late 1964 the possibilities of great debates were ebbing, and they had diminished the selection of the various players. Nowhere would the difference show more markedly than in the choice of the new Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs.

In February 1964 one of the most important changes of players took place with Hilsman’s resignation. His successor was William Putnam Bundy, who came over from a similar position at Defense, bringing his attitudes with him, above all both a man of force and a man of the bureaucracy. He had served in three quite different capacities under three very different Presidents, and he had risen under all three. The job of Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs is a crucial one, perhaps on the subject of Vietnam the most crucial one. If there were doubts on Vietnam, they should have been voiced first of all by State. And in the case of Vietnam the position of the Assistant Secretary for FE was particularly vital, for the skepticism, the expertise, an empathy for the origins of the insurgency, all that knowledge which dated back to the French Indochina war and which came from the various lower-level experts in the Department, would have to filter through the Assistant Secretary and Undersecretary. He was the pivot, the man who had contact with the Secretary and Undersecretary, while at the same time the lower-level men, the experts, had 90 percent of their contact with him. So if it was the Assistant Secretary’s job to implement the policies of his superiors, it was also his job to fight for the judgments of his subordinates. Thus, if the doubts and pessimism of the lower-level State people did not filter through to the principals in Vietnam (and they did not), it was primarily the fault of the Assistant Secretary. If anyone should have made the principals uncomfortable in their determination to go ahead and use force, it was a strong and uncompromising Assistant Secretary. For it was not American arms and American bravery or even American determination that failed in Vietnam, it was American political estimates, both of this country and of the enemy, and that was the job of State, and in particular of the Assistant Secretary. If, perhaps, there had been no McCarthy period, no ravaging of the precious-little expertise, the Assistant Secretary might have been someone very different.

Under normal conditions it might have been John Paton Davies, Jr.; he and John Stewart Service had seemed equal in overall ability, but those who knew them both well thought Davies was more likely to succeed in the operational aspect of government, to move up into the part of the Department where an expert begins to exercise power, while Jack Service was more cerebral, ticketed perhaps for a post as an ambassador, or for a major role at the Policy Planning Council. Had it worked out that way, with John Davies as Assistant Secretary, it might all have been different, because this would have meant that one of the principals was a genuine area expert. He would have been able to explain to his peers and his superiors the danger signals, the toughness of the fabric of the enemy, and the weakness of the friendly society. He would have been able to fight for the views of the intelligence people, in large part because those would have been his own views. But John Paton Davies was not in the State Department at the time, he was not in Washington at the time, he was, in fact, not in the country at the time. He was sitting in Peru manufacturing furniture, calling himself “an unfrocked diplomat.” He was watching American policy in Asia, and he was appalled by it.

He was not an optimist about the incumbent Administration; he regarded the excitement and the promises of the New Frontier with a considerable amount of skepticism. He had become, involuntarily, a good deal more of an expert on political and bureaucratic timidity than he had ever intended. He watched from his distant vantage point as Kennedy and Nixon ran against each other, and their banalities on Quemoy and Matsu did not bring him any great confidence that they were ready to come to terms with the irrationality of America’s China policy; the Democratic party, if anything, still seemed to be very much on the defensive, and this did not bode well either for the China policy or for John Davies. His wife had listened to shortwave accounts of the Kennedy election victory and was genuinely excited. Nixon was a reincarnation of Dulles, but these were their people, their friends coming back into office. Rose Kennedy herself was a good friend of Lucretia Grady, the mother of Patricia Grady Davies; they were both of the same generation, both of that special Catholic aristocracy in America. Lucretia Grady was a real political trooper who had worked hard for the Kennedys in the campaign, giving parties and raising money. There would be some influence there, and there was talk between the women that something would be done for John Davies, his name cleared, his security clearance reinstated, his ability to make a living restored.

A few weeks after the election Patricia Davies felt even better when she learned that the new Secretary of State would be Dean Rusk. Dean was a friend, a good friend of John’s; they had served together in the CBI theater, and what could be better than have an old friend heading the very institution that had wronged her husband? Then day by day as the other names of the Administration were announced she was even more enthusiastic: Kennan and Harriman, two old friends who knew John Davies’ real worth and had stood by him during his long and terrible ordeal. This was going to be so much better than the atmosphere of the old administration of John Foster Dulles, who had fired her husband. John Davies, however, was more cautious; he did not think the new Administration was in any great hurry to change past policies, and if they were not willing to take any political heat to change a policy of irrationality toward 700,000,000 Chinese, then it might be too much to expect them to take a great deal of heat, or even a little heat, for one fallen and easily forgotten comrade. John Davies had always viewed human nature with an abiding skepticism, and he had rarely been wrong.

They were living in their own self-imposed exile in Peru, and while he ran the furniture factory, she helped him and did some interior decorating on the side. They had recast their lives after he was fired in 1954; at that point, when McCarthy’s charges finally caught up with him, he was serving in Peru (he had been transferred from a more important job in Berlin because he was under investigation); they had remained in Peru, starting their own factory. They were not particularly good at the furniture business, at least in the financial sense (some of his designs, however, won international prizes), and they had made as many mistakes as one could possibly make, they had union problems in their tiny shop; nothing had gone easily. But they had managed to make a living since that date in 1954 when John Davies was forced out of government, and from that date on he never looked back. His past had died, the career as a foreign service officer had died, and the China he knew had died. He would not look back nor mourn the past. He spent the day after he was fired from his profession with Theodore White, but though they were old friends from China, they did not discuss the past. John Davies had walked in, carefully checked White’s apartment for microphones—he was already showing that much effect from his persecution—and then he had talked of the future. Only the future. He had unfurled a map of Peru. He was going to go to the inner slope of the Andes and carve out a new living. He would not let his life dwindle into a special kind of idleness and frustration, sitting by a phone hoping for someone else to determine his fate and his future. John Davies would not pass on his failed hopes to his children. He would instead determine his life himself. He was a man of ferocious pride; though he was practically without means, he would not, even when separated from the Department, sign a release which would have brought him several thousand badly needed dollars, because resigning would deprive him of his own professional papers and perhaps a future chance to challenge what had happened to him and to write honestly of it. He was not anxious to remain in America, it was his country and he would not criticize it, but again, he did not want his children to grow up in an atmosphere of condescension, political insecurity or fake sympathy. So Peru it would be.

There he created his new life. He moved his family away from the luxurious American ghetto of Lima into a native quarter, partly because the American section was a good deal more expensive and also because he wanted to be out of that particular all-American atmosphere, more suburban than the most antiseptic of suburbs at home. If he was going to live overseas he wanted his children to grow up in a truly cosmopolitan climate. After all, he had grown up in that kind of special atmosphere of being a poor expatriate forced to live both in and off a foreign culture, and he did not think it had hurt his childhood at all. In Peru his family became exclusively his world. He was the patriarch of a large family growing larger; though he and his wife were not young, they started a second tier of their family, three more children were born, making a total of seven. It was, thought friends of theirs, done as an act of the human spirit as much as anything else. Life centered, not as it might have under normal conditions for most successful Americans in the achieving society, on job and career, but rather on home and family. It was a special kind of childhood for the young Davieses: with a father who was very demanding of them, setting high moral, intellectual and human standards, and yet who was always there and always, for all his sternness, very gentle with them.

By contemporary American upper-middle-class standards they were reasonably poor. They wore hand-me-down clothes, yet they made the most of what was around them. They went exploring, setting off every weekend and every vacation for trips into the interior, always in the same tired old 1953 station wagon, which the children were somewhat ashamed of, always hoping that it would not break down. Slowly the children of John Davies came to realize that of them, their father was the greatest adventurer; he always wanted to try something and learn something new. By 1961 there was a touch of irony to this: John Davies living outside the fancy swish of the New Frontier, which by ability, style, charm, connections and professionalism he seemed to be bred to, but instilling in his children some of the stoicism which was part of the frontier values and virtues he had learned on another frontier as a missionary’s child in China. His children grew up uncorrupted by the plush, air-conditioned alienation of American middle-class life (when the family returned to America in 1964 Mrs. Davies believed her children were better for the hardness of their life. The family seemed to have traditional values and a strong sense of loyalty at a time when the children of most of their friends were on some kind of drugs).