The Best and the Brightest (81 page)

For a time it was debated within the inner councils whether or not to send the Bundy resolution to the Congress, but Johnson was lying low for the moment. Ernest Gruening of Alaska and Wayne Morse of Oregon were already making waves in the Senate, and Morse in particular was prickly, with that compelling sense of international law and an almost faultless sense of where the weak spot in an issue resided. Morse, Johnson told friends, was a tough one, the kind of man who could hurt you and expose your weaknesses even when he was standing alone. A formidable opponent. “My lawyer,” Lyndon Johnson sometimes called him, hoping that a little flattery would rub him the right way. An able and abrasive man. And Johnson knew too that if Gruening and Morse had surfaced, then there were others hiding in the cloakrooms who might spring at him, more covert in their doubts, but ready to jump if they smelled blood. Even Fulbright, who was an old friend, was showing signs of independence. And Johnson knew that his own case for a vote of confidence was a thin one, that the more prolonged scrutiny Vietnam received, the more difficult it would be for him. The whole point of the resolution was to paper over tensions, not to increase them. Johnson always believed that his problems in the Congress lay in committee rooms, not on the floor, that once a bill or a motion came out of a committee, the President could get it through the Congress. (If the committee was the problem, then the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was potentially a center of opposition.) So in June his own intuitive sense of the Congress told him that the time was not right, that he could not just spring the resolution on the Congress, but rather he must mold it to events, and if possible tie it to an issue of patriotism. Something would have to come along.

So he would bide his time on the Congress. In the meantime it was McNamara’s job to keep Vietnam in hand to tidy it up. Within the government the discussion of it became more and more limited; it became more closely held. Only the very top people were involved on the decisions and the drift of it; the others, the second- and third-echelon people who had been playing some part, were moved out. Letting McNamara be the front man for Vietnam was handy in a number of ways. He generated confidence not only to the President himself but to much of the Washington community; he was at the height of his reputation with liberals, and he was a Kennedy figure in a way that Rusk was not; thus he neutralized potential opposition. Liberal Democrats, by now co-opted by the Kennedys, could not effectively protest the drift of the Vietnam policy without criticizing at least by implication their own people. McNamara was the star of the Administration; he was able to continue his close personal relationship with the Kennedys, his regular visits with Jackie Kennedy, and at the same time receive praise such as Lyndon Johnson had never accorded mortals in the past. He was the ablest man that Lyndon Johnson had ever dealt with, the President told people; there was no one like him for service to his country. “He wields that computer and those figures like King Arthur wielded Excalibur,” Jack Valenti told the President.

“Like what?” the President asked.

“Like King Arthur wielded Excalibur,” Valenti repeated.

“More like Sam Rayburn with a gavel, I think,” the President said.

“Same thing, Mr. President,” Valenti answered.

If McNamara was regarded with awe in Washington, there were those in Saigon who had watched his trips to Vietnam with mounting disbelief. They thought that his glib press conferences, the statistics rolling off, were hopefully put-ons, that at least McNamara himself did not believe in what he was doing. Nothing fazed him, he showed no uncertainty, he plunged straight ahead. If he was learning, he was learning too little too late. Indeed, even as he became somewhat more knowledgeable in 1964 and 1965, it was not entirely a blessing. The very process of learning was achieved at the expense of his becoming more deeply involved, more attached to and identified with the problem, and thus more committed to finding a solution. Having helped bring us that far, he felt himself under extra pressure to see it through.

He had learned in late December 1963 and early 1964 that Harkins had seriously misled him and he was furious, and Harkins was in effect finished; the only reason he would be allowed to stay on a few months longer in Saigon was to save face. Not Harkins’ face, but the face of the people in Washington who had put him there, not the least of them Robert McNamara. If he were pulled back under the mounting evidence that the war had been going poorly all along, it would be an admission that the Administration had been either taken in by faulty reporting, or worse, had itself been lying. If its past estimates were not to be believed, then how could one fend off critics of present estimates? In addition, when Harkins was finally brought home, the attitude in Washington was again simplistic: a bad general was going to be replaced by a good general; it was not the whole system, the bad war, which had produced such fraud, it was simply the wrong general. Thus one replaced him with the best general around. Individuals
could
make a difference.

In June 1964 General William C. Westmoreland became the commander of American forces. On June 22 Lyndon Johnson held a ceremony for Harkins at the White House, where he presented him with an oak-leaf cluster for his Distinguished Service Medal. As was the President’s wont, particularly in cases where he did not believe what he was saying, he resorted to considerable flattery in his description of Harkins, noting that though the general would soon retire, “I have asked Secretary McNamara, who has such great and unlimited confidence in this great soldier, to have the general remain in the Washington area so that we may benefit from his broad knowledge of and his experience in the various theaters of the world, and particularly Southeast Asia.” (McNamara had of course lost confidence in Harkins, in fact was very bitter about him, telling interviewers such as Professor Henry Graff of Columbia that Harkins had failed in Vietnam.)

At this point Harkins uttered one of the most revealing statements ever made by an American commander. He was an optimist, he said. “I guess I was born one, and I continue to be an optimist about Vietnam.” As such, he was very encouraged by recent reports. The way would be difficult, it would require time and patience. “I am reminded of our own Revolution,” the general continued. “It took eight years to get through our Revolution, and then we ran into some of the toughest guerrillas that we ever want to run into any place—the American Indians. We started what we call in Vietnam today an oil spot moving across the country. The last Indian war was 1892, over a hundred years after we started our Revolution. There is a social revolution going on now in Vietnam. They are not at the stage to say 'We the people,’ but when they do get to that stage, then things will be fine . . .” The general’s view of revolution was nothing short of remarkable; if an SDS member had formulated it for him, it could not have been more perfect for the radical left.

In May and June things began to look better and better for the President. In the past, Johnson had not particularly liked polls, partly because he did not like what they told about himself, but now some of his staff began to do some testing for the President among the citizenry. The first results were very good: though George Wallace had run well in the Indiana primary, the impression was that the white backlash against Negro progress was not yet a real issue (in addition, some of the President’s staff told him that Goldwater, an economic conservative as well as a racial one, would have trouble moving in on the blue-collar people, who felt an immediate empathy with Wallace). The polls showed Johnson running well among people who had never liked him before, and cutting in on large segments of Republican voters (one poll taken by Oliver Quayle in the spring of 1964 showed that half of the people who had voted for Nixon in 1960 were now for Johnson). The message confirmed his own intuition; it was going very well, and he did not need Robert Kennedy on the ticket; if anything, given the restlessness in the South over civil rights, Robert Kennedy, who as Attorney General had been the Cabinet officer most deeply involved, might even hurt him. Now he moved to end the Kennedy threat.

Jack Kennedy had never taken Lyndon Johnson’s attacks upon his youth and his family seriously, but Robert Kennedy had; Jack Kennedy had always treated Vice-President Johnson courteously and with great sensitivity; Robert Kennedy had not. The antagonism between the two men was very real. Friends thought the origins went back to the 1960 convention, when Johnson had attacked Jack Kennedy in a personal way, and even more important, had attacked Joseph Kennedy personally at a press conference, saying, “My father never carried an umbrella for Chamberlain.” John Seigenthaler, Bobby’s closest aide, who was at the press conference, had reported back to Kennedy that he was sure now that Johnson knew he was going to lose, that he was desperate. Robert Kennedy remembered the incident, as had Johnson, and a year later at a dinner party Johnson, the Vice-President and outsider, took Bobby, the Attorney General and insider, aside and said, “I know why you don’t like me. The reason you don’t like me is because I made those remarks about your father at the press conference and they were taken out of context and I was misquoted.” Kennedy denied that he knew what Johnson was talking about. “Yes, you do,” Johnson said, “you know what I’m talking about and that’s why you don’t like me.” The next day Kennedy called Seigenthaler and repeated the conversation to him, and Seigenthaler dredged up copies of the quotes from four different newspapers; it had, after all, stayed in both of their minds a long time. None of the tensions had eased after Johnson became President, and Robert Kennedy and the people closest to him felt that Johnson was somehow a usurper. Johnson, sensitive to Robert Kennedy’s feelings, had worked hard to ease the pain, but he had met little success.

Now in the early summer of 1964 he knew that Robert Kennedy was promoting himself for the Vice-Presidency. He tried to head it off, using McGeorge Bundy, among others, as an emissary (the fact that Bundy, nominally a Republican, was willing to run this kind of errand for Johnson particularly infuriated Robert Kennedy, and Bundy’s connections with the inner Kennedy group were badly shattered). All of this failed. In late July the President called Robert Kennedy in and told him he would not be on the ticket, that he had a bright future in politics but this was not his year. Johnson would be pleased to have him run the campaign. Their talk seemed to have gone very well, but later Johnson called in three White House correspondents for a leisurely lunch. He described the meeting with Kennedy and could not restrain his talents as a mimic; he demonstrated how Bobby had gulped when the news was broken. Within a few hours the story was all over Washington, complete with Johnsonian embellishments; Robert Kennedy was furious. Johnson soon went on television to say that he had decided against naming any members of his Cabinet to the Vice-Presidency. Thus Johnson took care of Robert Kennedy, and the way was clearer to his own Presidency, but he had paid a price; the tension between the Kennedy people and the Johnson Presidency was more real than ever.

But he still had to deal with the question of the Congress as far as Vietnam was concerned. He wanted that extra protection before he went into the campaign. At the end of July he got his way; an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin provided the factor of patriotism that he had sought for his congressional resolution. It was to be called the Tonkin Gulf incident, and in reality it had begun back in January, when the President and his top advisers gave permission to General Krulak and the restless JCS to go ahead and plan a series of covert activities against the North under the general code name of 34A. These would be run from Saigon under the command of General Harkins (though of course the Vietnamese would be nominally in command), and the purpose would be to make Hanoi pay a little for its pressure on the South, to hit back at the enemy, to raise morale in the South, to show Hanoi we were just as tough as they were, that we understood the game of dirty tricks and could play it just as well as they did. (Which, of course, we could not.)

In that sense the origins of the Tonkin Gulf went back even farther, to the height of the Cold War tension in the late forties, which had seen the growth and acceptance of a certain part of the Cold War mentality: the idea that force justified force. The other side did it and so we would do it; reality called for meeting dirty tricks with dirty tricks. Since covert operations were part of the game, over a period of time there was in the high levels of the bureaucracy, particularly as the CIA became more powerful, a gradual acceptance of covert operations and dirty tricks as part of normal diplomatic-political maneuvering; higher and higher government officials became co-opted (as the President’s personal assistant, McGeorge Bundy would oversee the covert operations for both Kennedy and Johnson, thus bringing, in a sense, presidential approval). It was a reflection of the frustration which the national security people, private men all, felt in matching the foreign policy of a totalitarian society, which gave so much more freedom to its officials and seemingly provided so few checks on its own leaders. To be on the inside and oppose or question covert operations was considered a sign of weakness. (In 1964 a well-bred young CIA official, wondering whether we had the right to try some of the black activities on the North, was told by Desmond FitzGerald, the number-three man in the Agency, “Don’t be so wet”—the classic old-school putdown of someone who knows the real rules of the game to someone softer, questioning the rectitude of the rules.) It was this acceptance of covert operations by the Kennedy Administration which had brought Adlai Stevenson to the lowest moment of his career during the Bay of Pigs, a special shame as he had stood and lied at the UN about things that he did not know, but which, of course, the Cubans knew. Covert operations often got ahead of the Administration itself and pulled the Administration along with them, as the Bay of Pigs had shown—since the planning and training were all done, we couldn’t tell those freedom-loving Cubans that it was all off, could we, argued Allen Dulles. He had pulled public men like the President with him into that particular disaster. At the time, Fulbright had argued against it, had not only argued that it would fail, which was easy enough to say, but he had gone beyond this, and being a public man, entered the rarest of arguments, an argument against it on moral grounds, that it was precisely our reluctance to do things like this which differentiated us from the Soviet Union and made us special, made it worth being a democracy. “One further point must be made about even covert support of a Castro overthrow; it is in violation of the spirit and probably the letter as well, of treaties to which the United States is a party and of U.S. domestic legislation. . . . To give this activity even covert support is of a piece with the hypocrisy and cynicism for which the United States is constantly denouncing the Soviet Union in the United Nations and elsewhere. This point will not be lost on the rest of the world—nor on our own consciences for that matter,” he wrote Kennedy.