True Compass (26 page)

When I saw that I was going to be some five votes short on confirmation, I privately told President Johnson that I would abandon my fight for Morrissey. That was on the night of October 20, 1965. The following day, before a packed Senate gallery that included Joan, Ethel, and Eunice, I spoke passionately on Frank's behalf. I traced his impoverished childhood and chided his opponents for holding him to elitist standards.

Then I steeled myself and told the Senate that I recommended the nomination be recommitted to the Judiciary Committee--in effect, withdrawing it. Francis Morrissey's name was never resubmitted. He continued on as a municipal judge, served as a trustee and chair of several Boston institutions, retired in 1980, and died on December 27, 2007, at the age of ninety-seven.

That same afternoon I boarded a flight to Vietnam with a fact-finding congressional delegation that included two good friends: my old Harvard teammate and roommate John Culver, then a congressman from Iowa, and my former moot court partner John Tunney, then a California congressman. My seatmate en route to Saigon, and my roommate for the four days and four nights we were there, was Senator Joseph Tydings. It was about as long and hard an exercise in tongue-biting as I have ever had.

Was my loyalty to Frank Morrissey excessive? To this day, my heart tells me that I was right in championing this man, who was at least the professional equal of many other sitting federal judges. My reason tells me that good and thoughtful lawyers and senators looked at his record and concluded otherwise. Some historians have written that Lyndon Johnson himself played me false in his supposed support for Morrissey, intending to hoodwink me and Bobby: hoping we'd be embarrassed by a negative Senate vote. I never really bought that theory. I thought Johnson played it straight.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Thunder

1965-1967

In the scheme of things, the Frank Morrissey episode was but one small distraction in a globally tumultuous year. Vietnam was ablaze: back in March, amid his hopeful domestic social initiatives, President Johnson had authorized a "limited" aerial bombardment of North Vietnam. But like the larger war it was designed to end, Operation Rolling Thunder slipped its restraints and took on a monstrous life of its own.

Rolling Thunder had been conceived as an eight-week demonstration of America's military might--the "shock and awe" of its time. It would strike fear into the enemy as it smashed his industrial and transportation systems and decimated his troops heading south. In short, the operation would be a technological fix for a technological failure: the jungle-andtunnel ground war that had neutralized our mass-battlefield weaponry and frontline tactics.

By the end of 1965, the bombers had been flying for nine months, and they would continue to do so until November 1968. Only after more than three hundred thousand U.S. attack sorties had resulted in nearly a million tons of bombs dropped, 745 American crewmen shot down (of whom 145 were rescued), seventy-two thousand Vietnamese civilian casualties out of the ninety thousand total, and little discernible achievement of its goals was Rolling Thunder suspended.

The bombing of North Vietnam was to become one of two cornerstones in my evolving campaign against the war. The other was refugees.

I supported the war when I arrived in Vietnam on that October 1965 visit. I still supported it upon my return. I supported it, by lessening degrees, until the spring of 1966. Supporter of the war though I was, I began to perceive almost as soon as we arrived in Vietnam that its dynamics were more complex than Americans were being led to believe. What I saw was reinforced by the findings of my refugee subcommittee, which held thirteen hearings during the summer of 1965 on the effect of our war efforts on the Vietnamese people, particularly in rural areas. A gulf had opened between what was happening in the military sphere (or what was claimed to be happening) and what was happening to the people: the civilian population. Nearly a sixteenth of them were on the run. They were essentially refugees in their own country.

Generally, we think of refugees as being people who are forced to flee for reasons of safety, but sometimes they are forced to move from place to place within their own land. Displacement is the common denominator. As I write today, for instance, there are more than two million people in Iraq who have been uprooted. They are refugees as surely as anyone who's been forced to cross a national border. The same was true of Vietnamese farmers and workers in 1965: they remained inside their country, but were constantly being forced out of home and hearth, with their lives in the balance.

The displacement most anguishing to me was that of people scrambling away from "free fire zones," areas into which U.S. forces could fire weapons without clearance from superior officers, under the assumption that friendly personnel had been evacuated and that anyone left was probably an enemy combatant.

In the four days our delegation was in South Vietnam, we received many briefings, though we were prohibited from viewing combat operations. We were briefed by General William Westmoreland, the commander of military operations there. Westmoreland told us things were going well. We were briefed by the general's subordinate military leaders, who told us things were going well. We were briefed by diplomats who were involved in humanitarian undertakings. The diplomats told us things were going well.

They told us that things were getting better in the South, and that although there was systemic corruption in the South Vietnamese government and military, our special forces were training Vietnamese troops, and that they were improving and getting better organized. The South Vietnamese officials that I spoke with had a similar message.

I was impressed and accepted at that time what Westmoreland and the others had told me: that things were moving in a positive direction and the biggest concern was the danger of success by the Vietcong and the expansion of communism in the region.

I published my impressions of that visit--reinforced by an extraordinary conversation after I returned home--in an article for the February 8, 1966, issue of
Look
.

I began by acknowledging the debate "on an almost unprecedented scale" over our presence in Vietnam, and the nearly universal public awareness of this debate. An even more important related issue, though, was receiving hardly any attention, despite an address on the subject by President Johnson the previous April:

The second conflict in Vietnam--the struggle for the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people themselves--has not been waged with the same ferocity. There has been no one firm humanitarian policy.... The struggle... has not been one that has produced a concern for the most important element in the Vietnam situation--the welfare of the Vietnamese people themselves.

As evidence, I noted the following, among several other examples:

• That Vietnam had only eight hundred doctors, five hundred of whom were in the military, leaving three hundred for a civilian population of sixteen million. (Of these, nearly one million had become refugees by December 1965.)
  
• That 80 percent of Vietnamese children suffered from worms.
  
• That the country's social institutions were being decimated by war: not one of the sixteen thousand villages or their officials had escaped assassination or terror.
  
• That the government in Saigon was indifferent to these and related problems: "Government officials assured me that the refugee situation was well in hand--yet I inspected one camp of over six hundred people without a toilet. Construction was started on seven refugee camps in anticipation of my visit. Work stopped when my plans were temporarily altered. It began again when it was finally possible for me to go."
  

I witnessed and understood quite clearly these effects of the war. They troubled me. Yet the ultimate transformation of my position on the war was spurred by the critical conversation awaiting me back in the United States.

The figure I spoke with was Bernard Fall, the extraordinary French journalist and historian who'd been writing about Vietnam since his country withdrew as a colonial power. Fall had invited Tunney, Culver, and Tydings to his Washington apartment shortly after they returned home to compare their impressions with his. When I next saw them, they urged me to seek this man out myself.

I found myself edified by a fit, lean-jawed, bespectacled man of thirty-nine, who looked as though he would be more at home in a camouflage jacket than a scholar's study. Fall was a man of penetrating ideas
and
fearless action. His parents had been part of the French resistance in World War II and paid for it--his father killed by the Gestapo, his mother dying in a concentration camp. Bernard had taken up their activist ideals. He'd observed combat as a journalist traveling with French forces in Vietnam in 1953, and had predicted France's downfall. He had accepted a professorship at Howard University, but returned to Southeast Asia, where he applied brilliantly unorthodox measurements to his study of the war. On his last visit there, two years after our talk, Fall was killed by an exploding land mine while on one of his many forays into the field--this time with a platoon of U.S. Marines pursuing the Vietcong down the fabled Route 1, which he had trod with the retreating French more than a decade earlier.

The structure of our conversation was the itinerary of my own visit to Vietnam. I would name a location and Fall would ask, "Now, who did you get briefed by?" I would reply, "Well, it was the State Department and the land reclamation people and the economic development people, and they told us that there was more rice being produced than ever."

Fall would shake his head and reach for a folder. In it would be statistics for rice production in that region before the war--say, three hundred thousand tons. I would be perplexed: "Oh? That doesn't really square with what I was told on this. It was a much lower figure." Fall would then ask, "And what was the price of rice? And what did that price tell you about security?" I would consult my notes and quote some rice prices, wondering what they had to do with security. Fall would produce a pamphlet from the Department of Agriculture, quoting rice prices at various hamlets within a region. "Why is there a 200 percent increase from this village to this one? Don't you suppose it is because this second village is not secure?"

Thus Bernard Fall, sitting in his study and drawing only upon American documents, would contrast what our official sources had told us with what could be inferred from our government's own statistics. And thus he raised the most serious questions I had yet encountered about honesty, truthfulness, and candor in war.

Back in the Senate, I resumed work on issues tangential to the war. I began on a reform that would take years to be enacted into law: an overhauling of the Selective Service System to create a fairer process for the military draft.

The draft method then in use had changed little, in structure at least, from the late 1940s. It required all men aged eighteen to twentysix to register for conscription into the army, with the option of volunteering for the navy, marines, or air force. The length of commitment, including active duty and reserve time, was six years. Local draft boards would select names from these lists, in theory starting with the oldest registrants first.

The problem with this method was that as the years went on and the threat of war receded, the SSS built in an ever-expanding array of deferments, or available excuses for avoiding military service. The reason for this was bureaucratic survival: the officers in charge of running the draft did not want Congress to abolish their administrative authority in favor of an all-volunteer army. Lieutenant General Lewis Hershey, the system's director, actually argued that the prospect of being drafted had the power to terrify young men into enlisting, in the hope of getting the best possible deal for themselves. These layers of deferments led inevitably to a de facto system of class privilege for those who claimed "other priorities": potential college students, who were mostly white, could avoid or delay the draft, while young black men, with no college prospects, could not.

I began to face the fact that while draft reform was well worth pursuing, it was subsidiary to the overarching question of the war itself. In the spring of 1966 I began addressing this question. I was not yet ready to call for an American pullout from Vietnam. But I was ready to challenge Lyndon Johnson on a cornerstone strategy in his prosecution of the war.

An occasion presented itself: a meeting the president called at the White House on the evening of June 29. He'd invited some thirty-five members of the House and five senators: George McGovern, Fritz Mondale, Joe Tydings, John Cooper, and me, all of whom had traveled to South Vietnam. He wanted our input--or so he declared.

My notes on that meeting provide a window into the president's leadership style and "consultation" with Congress. President Johnson came in at about 6:15 p.m. and asked Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to give us a report on that morning's bombing of petroleum tank farms near Hanoi and Haiphong Harbor.

The president mentioned that the congressional response he had heard to date had been principally critical of the bombing. He was distinctly uneasy as he went around the table asking for our comments. His concern quickly evaporated, however, as the first members to speak indicated that they wanted the president to go even further.
They
were concerned that he was holding back and hadn't taken the wraps off the air force and the military completely. Johnson visibly relaxed.

When the president called on me, I broke the mood. "I regret that I have to sound the first note of discord this evening," I began. I felt we should be moving in a different direction because aerial bombing had never been successful in bringing people to a peace conference table. I quoted the mayor of Hamburg, Germany, as saying in May of 1945 that although the city had suffered forty-five thousand civilian casualties under Allied bombing, the will of the people had never been stronger in defense of their city and country. I said that we should halt the bombing in the North and do what was necessary in the South to maintain the security of our forces, while continuing the search-and-destroy efforts. If it was necessary to send additional troops to achieve this goal, then that step should be taken. In the silence that followed, I added that what disturbed me the most about the current phase was that we appeared to have given up our diplomatic efforts.

What does the future hold? I asked. Will we continue the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong? Are we prepared to respond at this time if Chinese ships enter this port or Chinese planes attack our bombers? Are we going to stop them or destroy them? Are we going to bomb the port facilities?

The president dismissed my concerns. According to my notes, he said, "What would anyone do in this situation? Everyone wants an easy answer. When a fella is about to hit you, what do you do? If fifty trucks come down the road, do you just crawl under the rug? Or do you hit 'em back? I've given this a lot of thought. I think we should hit 'em back." McNamara expressed his own concern about ending the bombing: "How do you tell American [infantry] to face fifty trucks of ammunition when you have planes and bombs to take them out?" Johnson then said that he hadn't received a letter from one soldier in Vietnam who wanted the U.S. military to withdraw from the country. And until the North Vietnamese get more discouraged than they are today, he said, we would not be able to reach any agreement with them. By bombing Hanoi and Haiphong, we would raise the cost of the war to them to such a level that they would no longer be interested in it. It was obvious that the administration had made up its mind. George McGovern and Joe Tydings asked about the nature of our objectives in Vietnam. But George Ball summarily dismissed their questions just before the president broke in and said, "We have already stated the problem twice--what our objectives are in Vietnam." Tydings said he'd seen a recent speech by Secretary of State Dean Rusk that he felt left open the interpretation about our fundamental objectives. He thought they should be clarified.