The Best and the Brightest (99 page)

Bothered by the direction of the war, and by the attitudes he found around him in the post-Tonkin fall of 1964, and knowing that terrible decisions were coming up, Ball began turning his attention to the subject of Vietnam. He knew where the dissenters were at State, and he began to put together his own network, people with expertise on Indochina and Asia who had been part of the apparatus Harriman had built, men like Allen Whiting, a China watcher at INR; these were men whose own work was either being rejected or simply ignored by their superiors. Above all, Ball was trusting his own instincts on Indochina. The fact that the others were all headed the other way did not bother him; he was not that much in awe of them, anyway. He would, knowing there was a meeting the next day, stay up all night working on a paper, questioning the men around him, going through books on Indochina, and then he would write and rewrite his papers, and have his staff play the part of the opposition as he went through the dry run. And he would go off to battle, taking genuine delight in it, and his aides could sense the excitement, the adrenaline was really pumping. He would often return, not depressed, but almost exhilarated,
Johnson was listening.
He was getting to him. We’re getting through, he would say, and then he would start talking about the next paper. To him, Johnson was the most sympathetic man in the room, a real listener, and he had the feeling that Johnson was not so much ill prepared for foreign affairs as he
felt
that he was ill prepared, made insecure by all these intellectuals around him. Even Ball himself. “George, you’re an intellectual too,” Johnson would say. “I know it, and you know it.”

Since Ball had not been in on any of the earlier decision making, he was in no way committed to any false hopes and self-justification; in addition, since he had not really taken part in the turnaround against Diem, he was in no way tainted in Johnson’s eyes. While some of the others, implicated in the origins of the commitment, were either psychologically involved (in the case of Taylor) in trying to make their estimates come true, or (in the case of McNamara) having miscalculated earlier and thus feeling they must protect the President and share the responsibility (a belief which sucked many good men farther into the quagmire, and would help account in part for the peculiar behavior of Robert McNamara), Ball was freed from the mistakes of the past. He had, at the time of the original Kennedy commitment, warned that 15,000 men would become 300,000; that was his own prediction, and it was not a bad one.

And so now he began, first by writing a memo to Rusk, McNarama and Bundy expressing his doubts, and expecting that Bundy would pass the memo on to the President. But to Ball’s surprise the memo did not reach Johnson, so the next time Ball passed his memo to Bill Moyers, the bright young assistant of Johnson’s who showed his own doubts on Vietnam largely by encouraging other doubters to speak and by trying to put doubters in touch with one another. Moyers passed the memo to the President, who encouraged it, and so, beginning in the early fall of 1964, Ball emerged as the voice of dissent. Ball argued that the ground troops would not work, that the United States would repeat the French experience, soon costing us what few friends we had in the South, that the situation “would in the world’s eyes approach that of France in the 1950s.” But he also argued vigorously against the bombing, saying that if the United States used air power, Hanoi would feel the need to respond, and failing to have air power, they would respond with increased ground forces. He cited U.S. intelligence estimates that if Hanoi chose to, it could infiltrate two divisions through Laos and the demilitarized zone in two months. What he was in fact doing was systematically compiling all the evidence that the intelligence community, the real experts on Southeast Asia, had compiled, all the stuff which normally had been filtered out, and was using it at the level of the principals.

A copy of the Policy Planning study which Robert Johnson had put together was smuggled to him. He was in effect choosing to see that which everyone had decided not to see. He argued that the bombing would not, as its advocates were claiming, have very much effect on South Vietnamese morale. Rather, he said, it might affect the upper level of the government, and even that rather briefly and impermanently; it would never take root in the country. While the others kept talking about South Vietnam as if the government and the people were somehow linked, for Ball, South Vietnam was not even a country. As for the effectiveness of the bombing on morale, he was suspicious; he cited a post-Tonkin CIA study made by Vietnamese-speaking Americans which showed that of about two dozen Vietnamese questioned, all but one disapproved (the one being an American-trained airborne sergeant). He denied all the peripheral arguments, that we had to stand in Vietnam because if we did not, our allies in Europe would be nervous and unsure of us (an argument which McGeorge Bundy was to become fond of). He submitted, quite accurately, that this was the official view, that our allies formally said things like this, but the reality was quite different, even among the Germans: they did not consider the South Vietnamese to be the equal of themselves in legitimacy, and the real fear in Europe was that the United States was going to be diverted from its primary concern in Europe by less important adventures in Asia. And to Ball, the arguments of Mac Bundy and Taylor that we must bomb to shore up the morale of the South Vietnamese because the government was so frail that it would otherwise collapse was foolishness of a high order. It was all the more reason
not
to commit the power and reputation of the United States to something that weak. The South Vietnamese were, he noted, allegedly a people about to be overrun by their sworn enemies, and if they really cared about the freedoms we were so anxious to protect, why did we have to make a gesture like this to convince them to save themselves?

He looked farther down the road, warning that we were essentially dealing from a position of weakness despite what we thought, and perhaps almost most important of all, he challenged that greatest of American assumptions, that somehow, whatever we did, the other side would lie down and accept it. He pointed out
that we did not necessarily control the rate, the intensity and the scale of the war.
The enemy, he noted, was not entirely without the means of response. In October 1964 he had written in answer to McNamara and Mac Bundy: “It is the nature of escalation that each move passes the option to the other side, while at the same time the party which seems to be losing will be tempted to keep raising the ante. To the extent that the response to a move can be controlled, that move is probably ineffective. If the move is effective it may not be possible to control or accurately anticipate the response. Once on the tiger’s back we cannot be sure of picking the place to dismount.” Here he was prophetic again, as Johnson, once committed, would find himself in a terrible squeeze, the military pushing relentlessly for more force, for escalations which they claimed would end it quickly; yet each of these moves would seem to bring in the Chinese. Thus nothing that could be truly effective against the North Vietnamese could be tried without the fear of a much larger war which Johnson wished to avoid. The things which could be done against Hanoi without bringing in the Chinese were always, accordingly, ineffective.

So Ball made his dissent, and he made it powerfully, and if he was not changing the men around him he was certainly affecting the President, touching those doubts which already existed in the President’s mind. Ball was making the President very unhappy, and thus he was slowing down the process. Was the President waffling? Might he turn back? Sometime in the fall of 1964 Joe Alsop feared that he was, and set out to help clarify the way for the President. Hearing that George Ball was making a major dissent on Vietnam, Alsop wrote on November 23 that Ball’s “knowledge of Asia could be comfortably contained in a fairly small thimble.” What Ball was not telling the President, even though he was European-minded, was, Alsop wrote:

The Ball memoranda further assert that the trouble in Vietnam is damaging the United States in Europe without bothering to note that a gigantic United States failure in Vietnam will virtually give the European game to General Charles de Gaulle. . . . A majority of President Johnson’s chief advisers are certainly on the do-something side and the more able and courageous appear to favor doing something pretty drastic.

Alsop, still uneasy about the lack of decision and possible portents, wrote on December 23:

There are plenty of discouraged Americans in Saigon who think the President is consciously prepared to accept defeat here. They believe that he cannot bring himself to take the measures needed to avert defeat, and they therefore suspect that he is simply planning to wait until the end comes and then to disclaim responsibility. But since the President has the means to avert defeat he cannot disclaim responsibility. It will be his defeat as well as a defeat for the American people and for millions of unhappy Vietnamese. It does not seem credible that Lyndon B. Johnson intends to accept and preside over such a defeat. But the alternatives open to him are narrowing very fast.

It was another example of something that Alsop did brilliantly; he was an odd man, sophisticated, talented, arrogant; his real talent and perhaps his real love lay not in writing about politics but about archaeology. If his political writing did not last long and did not read well years after, it was not a fault of intellect, it was something else: it was that Alsop was a man of Washington and its power, and he wrote to the power play of the day, he wrote not to enlighten but to
effect,
to move the principal players on decisions like this. And in that sense there was a brilliance, for he had an unerring sense for the raw nerve of each player, for knowing how to couch his arguments in terms which would make them most effective, not on the general readership but on the individual himself. He knew intuitively that the thing Johnson feared most was that history would write that he had been weak when he should have been strong, that Lyndon Johnson had not stood up when it was time to be counted, that his manhood might be inadequate; and in late 1964 and early 1965 he played on that theme masterfully; the Alsop columns on Johnson were part of a marvelous continuing psychodrama. For instance, on December 30, again noting that Johnson might be too weak to take the necessary steps, Alsop wrote:

The unpleasantness of making the required effort does not need underlining. But it must certainly be underlined that the catastrophe now being invited will also be remarkably unpleasant. For Lyndon Johnson, Vietnam is what the second Cuban crisis was for John F. Kennedy. If Mr. Johnson ducks the challenge we shall learn by experience about what it would have been like if Kennedy had ducked the challenge in October, 1962 . . .

And so there it was, posed again: Did Johnson have as much manhood as Jack Kennedy? In Washington, Walter Lippmann would read those columns with a sick feeling and tell friends that if Johnson went to war in Vietnam, at least 50 percent of the responsibility would be Alsop’s; at the White House, Johnson, who never liked or trusted Alsop (later, when the latter was virtually the only columnist in town still supporting the war, he would read the columns and rage against Alsop for closing off his options, for trapping him in, and he was deeply suspicious that the Bundys, who were old Alsop friends, were the sources of the leaks), was very angry about the columns, but he was not unaffected by them. They posed the question as he knew it might be posed out in the hinterland, as he, Lyndon Johnson, might pose it himself against a political adversary.

While the bureaucracy in Washington was working on escalation, Taylor was negotiating the Saigon mission to virtually the same position: it would be bombing, but limited bombing.

The Bill Bundy working group, the people immediately under the principals, had formulated the policy in the late fall, and their proposals were discussed at the late-November meetings. The group had been instructed to come up with various options, but those concerning negotiation had been moved aside, and the options were all ones of force (there had been one proposal of the civilians, which was a fraudulent use of force, and was based on the instability in Saigon and the fear of McCarthyism here at home. It was to launch a short, intense bombing campaign, show that it had no effect on the South, then to blame the South for its own instabilities and to get out. It was in effect a flash of power and a retreat. The Chiefs immediately vetoed it).

The Bundy group had presented the President with three options. Option A was light bombing, more reprisals and more use of covert operations, essentially more of the same with light bombing thrown in. Option B was the Chiefs’ suggestion, minus the dikes—very heavy massive bombing right from the start, including the Phuc Yen airfield at Hanoi and cutting the rail links with China. And Option C, the moderate solution (it was typical of the bureaucracy to present its predetermined position by putting one option to the left of it and one to the right of it, thus it was recommending the just and moderate position), the slow squeeze, which allowed the United States to put increasing pressure on Hanoi while “keeping the hostage alive” while still permitting it to pull back if it wished to. This was the McNamara position, the moderate one, designed to give the Chiefs something of what they wanted, yet give the civilians the opportunity to control it, to turn it down, turn it up, turn it off; it was the solution which allowed the civilians presumably the most control. One reason why the Chiefs, who did not like it and believed it was a false use of force, did not fight it more vigorously was their assumption that if it failed, which it probably would, the civilians would have to turn to more and more force. The civilians always thought they were smarter than the military and understood them better than the military understood the civilians; the reverse was true, in fact; the military always read the civilians better. The minimal force necessary to keep the Chiefs on board had been worked out between McNamara and the Chiefs, and the architect of it was that most curious combination of human being and bureaucrat, the divided man, John McNaughton, who was quite capable of doing the most precise kind of planning and paper work for the bombing and then coming back, and almost with pleasure, telling a few chosen aides that it had not yet jelled, the President had not yet bought it, Johnson was still referring to it as “this bombing bullshit.”