The Best and the Brightest (80 page)

His move to State was an important step. At Defense he had shown no doubts about the policy. He had never been for any of the pressures against Diem, his recent attitudes on Vietnam had been oriented toward the military, and he held his new job in part because he had in no way angered or irritated the hawks of the government; in fact, he had worked well with them and had their confidence. He had come to State to make sure that State co-operated with Defense, and he was perfect for the job, since he had lived through the Cold War years and believed in all the attitudes of them; he was not Acheson’s son-in-law for nothing, and was perhaps even more than his brother a man of force. He believed in covert operations from his CIA days and believed that we were justified in what we did because the Communists inevitably were worse. He was a man who, in the words of his new boss, Lyndon Johnson, would “run it in through to the hilt.” But curiously enough, though his new job at State was seemingly a promotion, his father-in-law, Acheson, always zealous of Bill’s career, was not particularly enthusiastic, and there were two reasons why. Part of it was Acheson’s doubts about Rusk; to Acheson, Rusk was a failed figure on his way out (Acheson, hearing people say that they did not know what Rusk was thinking during crucial meetings, would respond, “Did it ever occur to you that he wasn’t thinking?”), and he thought Bill would be better served by staying with McNamara,
there
was the real powerhouse of the Administration—perhaps McNamara would be going over to State and Bill could make the transfer then. But the second reason for Acheson’s doubts was Vietnam itself; he sensed that FE was going to be a graveyard, and that anyone working there would be charged with either liquidating the war or escalating it, and he did not want Bill Bundy caught in this particular trap. He made these reservations known to the President, but they had no effect; Bill Bundy got FE.

It was an odd year, 1964, the calm before the storm; the bureaucracy was, in a phrase which the Vietnam war would help create, doing its own thing, planning away, storing up options. The military were beginning to check out bombing sites, and deep in the bowels of the Pentagon, trained professional staff men who knew something about contingency plans were working on what might be needed if we decided to go to war, and if we needed ground troops, and if so, which units would go and which reserve units might be called up. All ifs, of course, but the Pentagon was ready. At the top level, through much of 1964, there was still lip service to optimism. But the advisory commitment was a passing stage; in the back-channel world of the Army, where the
word
was far more important than the public statement (the public statement of a military man allowed no dissent, it was built totally upon loyalty to policy, to chief, and thus was without subtlety, so that the
word
was the truth, the word was that it was all coming apart, and we might have to go in there with the first team). Much of the Army brass had never really believed in the advisory commitment; they had accepted that role because it was the only role authorized, but it was not a satisfactory role. It excluded more elements of the military than it permitted in, it handcuffed more than it liberated, and so American generals were quite capable of saying what a great thing the advisory role was, how well we were doing, what great fellows the little ARVNs were, Little Tigers, and believing it, and yet at the same time never believing it. They thought it was all a lie, but it was the only lie available, and you did what you were told, though with your own way of winking: Don’t knock the war in Vietnam, it may not be much but it’s the only war we have. Or on the definition of the adviser: an adviser is a bastardized man-made animal which is bound to fail. Until 1964 the war in Vietnam had not really even been a war, but now they were getting ready, just in case this country wanted to go to war.

In the country and in the government, however, there was no clear sense of going to war. Each person working around the President saw Johnson through his own special prism, and had his own impressions of Vietnam confirmed. Thus the domestic political people assumed that Johnson was committed to the programs that they were preparing, and thus what was peaceful in his rhetoric was the real thing. The national security people did not talk to the domestic people; no one walked both sides of the street. The national security people were above politics (except for their desire to protect their President and keep him in office, which would also keep them in office as national security people), and if they thought about the dark consequences of the road ahead, they were somehow sure that a confrontation could be avoided. They were, in particular, believers in the idea that the threat of force would make the use of force unnecessary. So if they played their roles properly—and they were all crisis veterans now; they wore the battle ribbons of the Cuban missile crisis and knew how to negotiate through danger, to show the willingness to use force, to convince the other side of the seriousness of their intent, to pass their messages as civilized gentlemen—they could prevent both war and aggression. As 1964 progressed and ended, it became apparent that the Cuban missile crisis had been the test run for Vietnam, that the Vietnam planning was derivative from the missile-crisis planning: enough force but not too much force, plenty of options, careful communication to the other side to let him know what you were doing, allowing him to back down. They were very confident of themselves and their capacity to wield power. The dry runs were behind them. They could handle events. They had confidence in themselves and in each other.

Perhaps if the people who knew a good deal about Vietnam (the fact that the weakness in the South would continue and grow worse, that the other side would react to force with the patient, dogged determination which had marked the French war, that there was no way to bluff Asian Communist peasants) had gotten together with the domestic political people who knew something about Lyndon Johnson, which way he would react to certain pressures, then they probably could have plotted the course of the future. But the national security people did not know Johnson, which would be part of the problem. They were all new to him, and they had little sense of his real instincts and subtleties. To foretell what would happen in Vietnam, what Johnson’s reaction would be and what the enemy’s reaction would be to Johnson’s moves required a combination of expertise which no one had. Therefore, in 1964 each man saw his own estimates as the deciding ones, pulling from the contradictions of Administration rhetoric what he wanted to believe. If a person was dovish, then he was dovish for forceful reasons, and he assumed that the principals were probably dovish too; and if he was hawkish, he assumed that he could control events. It was a time when the play became more and more closely held by the principals, and that as doubts about the future grew, the willingness to discuss them and share them diminished; as they grew more serious, the doubts became more private than public, as in the case of John McNaughton.

Chapter Nineteen

In the White House, Lyndon Johnson was in the first stage of becoming a President; he wanted to keep not just Vietnam at arm’s length but all foreign problems. In the first months of 1964 he wanted to play from strength, not from weakness; domestic policy was strength, foreign policy was weakness. If one had to deal with foreign policy, then it was best to deal at the very top, to personalize it (as he did during the Panama Canal Zone crisis, picking up the phone and calling the President of Panama). He was not at ease with the general class of people who made diplomacy their profession, particularly ambassadors. They were, after all, the worst of two worlds, being both State Department people and foreigners. As a result, he almost refused to see the members of the diplomatic corps. “Who are these people?” he would say. “Why do I have to see them? Have Rusk see them. They’re his clients, not mine.”

The list of ambassadors waiting to see the President grew and grew. Some could not assume their responsibilities and make the official Washington diplomatic circuit until they had first paid a call on the President. In desperation, groups of envoys were run through, one group including the British ambassador. On another occasion it was decided to run the French and the Vietnamese ambassadors through together, the idea being that since they both spoke French, it would make things easier. At the last minute this idea was vetoed.

Those visitors who were granted what were supposed to be important private audiences often found that Johnson had invited some member of the press or friend visiting the White House to come along for the meeting. When Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands showed up for a private meeting he found himself being photographed with a dozen or so White House tourists who had been selected by Johnson with the invitation “Come on, have your picture taken with a
real
prince.” Eventually, under pressure from his staff and from Rusk, it got a little better. More than most men, Johnson could put himself in the other politician’s position and see his problem (he once told Harold Wilson, facing a difficult re-election, not to come and do his campaigning on the White House steps). But he did not like problems in the abstract; he was a politician and he preferred dealing with other politicians at the moment of crisis—that was reality and he felt more at ease in that kind of pressurized atmosphere.

A strategy for 1964 slowly began to evolve: fend off the outside world, particularly Vietnam. Keep Vietnam quiet, do not explore its problems, and do not reflect upon them, but keep them papered over. Make it a functional, factual issue, send more aid, more weapons, a few more men to Saigon. The doubters were to be cleared out. The man in charge of keeping the commitment running as smoothly as possible was McNamara. Above all, it was not to surface as an issue in 1964; it was to be controlled, and managed, and kept away from the reaches of Barry Goldwater; it was not to be an issue for the right. Goldwater would be the candidate against Johnson, and he appeared to be a particularly easy mark; he would drive Americans back to political divisions answered years earlier. If anything, Goldwater would serve a convenient purpose, he might propel Lyndon Johnson into his own Presidency with a momentum which Johnson would be hard put to create himself. Anything that diminished the possibility not just of a victorious election but of a real landslide, which would allow him to take the Congress by storm in 1965, was to be avoided. Vietnam was the most identifiable trouble spot.

Thus if he could keep his people together, the liberals and the Democrats, then he was confident the issue would be Goldwater, and by early 1964 it was clear to him that his real problems—in that they could create serious factional rifts—were, first, his relationship with Robert Kennedy, which was particularly touchy, and second, the broader aspect of handling the Congress, using it in effect as an umbrella, on the question of Vietnam. The matter of the Congress was made all the more difficult because while Johnson wanted it as a weapon to fend off a potential challenge from the right, his problem at the moment was not with the right wing in the Senate, but with the left wing, where Senate liberals were beginning to mount increasing numbers of attacks on the American presence in Vietnam. Thus he faced the problem of going to the Congress to stop the right and becoming involved in a Pyrrhic battle with people from his own party.

The problem of Robert Kennedy was a special one. The relationship between him and Johnson had always been marked by coldness, suspicion and barely concealed dislike. Now both men were jockeying for the right to be John Kennedy’s legatee. Robert Kennedy had the right to it by blood and by emotion, but not by law; Lyndon Johnson had no emotional base at all, but he had it by constitutional right. The last thing he needed or wanted was a split between himself and the Kennedy people; he could understand a passive opposition from Kennedy loyalists, but an open one would have dire consequences. It would divide his party, severely limit his capacity to govern and sustain the image of Johnson as the usurper. What he wanted, and what he eventually achieved, was to take hold of the Kennedy legacy in 1964, carry out Kennedy programs with Kennedy men, at the same time diminishing the role of Robert Kennedy; then run for President and win on his own, and thus shed the Kennedy mantle. But in order to get rid of the Kennedy mantle he first had to gain control of it. All of this required deft handling. Johnson was partially aided in the business of neutralizing Robert Kennedy by the fact that all the key men of the previous Administration now worked for him, so the Attorney General could not make an outright challenge against his late brother’s closest advisers. Yet at the same time Robert Kennedy had ambitions of his own, and by the spring of 1964 he was openly campaigning for the Vice-Presidency, precisely the position Lyndon Johnson did not have in mind for him (a landslide victory against Goldwater would become less of a personal triumph if there was a Kennedy on the ticket. The press, which was Eastern and pro-Kennedy, would give Robert Kennedy considerable credit for the victory). So Robert Kennedy was a serious potential problem in 1964, unlike Barry Goldwater, who was regarded as something of an asset.

The Congress was a more complicated problem: if an issue as fragile and volatile as Vietnam became a major part of the upcoming political campaign, then Johnson wanted some kind of congressional support, for protection. He was very much a creature of Congress: to him the Congress was the country and he wanted the Congress on board, partly as a way of keeping the country on board. As early as May 1964 Dean Acheson stopped a White House friend at a cocktail party and said that he thought Vietnam was going to turn out much worse than they expected, that it was all much weaker than the reports coming in—Acheson assumed that if the official reporting was beginning to be a little pessimistic, then it was surely far worse—and that it might be very tricky in the middle of the campaign. He thought the President ought to know this and ought to try and protect himself. Acheson’s warnings paralleled the President’s own suspicions, and he asked the people around him to start thinking in terms of a congressional resolution. This would protect him from the pressures on the right, and would force Goldwater to support whatever the President was doing on Vietnam, or isolate him even further. Bill Bundy drafted the first copy of the resolution, a document of purposely vague intent and proportions, signifying that all good Americans were behind their President against the invidious enemy.