Vietnam: The Early Decisions 9780292799400

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Vietnam

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Edited by Lloyd C. Gardner and Ted Gittinger

Vietnam The Early Decisions

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UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS, A U S T I N

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Copyright © 1997 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First University of Texas Press edition, 1997 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, Box 7819, Austin, T X 78713-7819. L I B R A R Y OF C O N G R E S S CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Vietnam : the early decisions / edited by Lloyd C. Gardner with Ted Gittinger. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-292-72800-x (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975—United States. 2. Vietnam— Foreign relations—United States. 3. United States—Foreign relations—Vietnam. 4. United States—Foreign relations—1961 —1963. 5. United States—Foreign relations—1963 —1969. I. Gardner, Lloyd C , 1934- . II. Gittinger, Ted. DS558.V55 1997 327.730597 r 09'o46—dc2i 97-2031

ISBN 978-0-292-79940-0 (library e-book) ISBN 978-0-292-73516-3 (individual e-book)

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Contents vii

Acknowledgments

i

Introduction

Lloyd C. Gardner

PART I. T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N T E X T Ii

Vietnam: An Episode in the Cold War

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A Way of Thinking: T h e Kennedy Administration's Initial Assumptions about Vietnam and Their Consequences Brian VanDeMark

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From the Colorado to the Mekong

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Hanoi's Response to American Policy, 1961 —1965: Crossed Signals? William J. Duiker

Robert A. Divine

Lloyd C. Gardner

PART I I . T H E M I L I T A R Y C O N T E X T 85

T h e Z e n of Escalation: Containment and Commitment in Southeast Asia John Prados

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Conspiracy of Silence: LBJ, the Joint Chiefs, and Escalation of the War in Vietnam George C. Herring PART HI. K E N N E D Y AND J O H N S O N

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Lyndon Johnson and the Legacy of Vietnam William Conrad Gibbons

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T h e Kennedy-Johnson Transition: T h e Case for Policy Reversal John M. Newman

IJJ

NSAM 263 and NSAM 273: Manipulating History

Larry Berman PART IV. T H E S O V I E T D I M E N S I O N 207

Turnabout? T h e Soviet Policy Dilemma in the Vietnamese Conflict Ilya V. Gaiduk

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Contributors

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Index

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Acknowledgments T h e conference that produced these essays was held in October 1993 at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas. T h e authors are all grateful for the extraordinary support given the idea by the LBJ Foundation's Board of Directors—especially by library director Harry Middleton. Deeply involved as well from the outset, David Humphrey, formerly a senior archivist at the library and now with the Department of State's Historical Division, provided constant encouragement and took care of a million details that constantly intruded on his own research and work on the steady flow of new materials into the library's holdings. I would also like to thank Ted Gittinger, my coeditor, for his skilled hand in preparing the essays for publication. The entire staff of the LBJ Library participated, in one way or another, in the production of this book. Thanks to all of them as well.

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Vietnam

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Introduction Lloyd C. Gardner Despite the already voluminous literature on the Vietnam War and American involvement in that tragic struggle, many questions remain to be answered. Among these one has long held particular interest: what if Kennedy had lived? To put the question that way presupposes the existence of clear-cut alternatives, of course, and the necessary freedom to choose between them. Various theories about inertial forces operating on individuals all the way up the policy-making ladder, from low-level bureaucrats and regional specialists to the Oval Office, challenge such an assumption. Yet many former high-level officials have taken their stand, vigorously defending one side or the other. While students of the Vietnam War have also speculated about the issue (and the way it has been formulated), most Americans have been exposed to the question through the dramatic lens provided by Oliver Stone, whose film JFK leaves no doubt about the answer: Kennedy was ready, more than that, absolutely determined, to quit Vietnam. Stone's Vietnam films all tell a powerful story. In JFK, however, he went beyond his previous efforts to recreate decision-making at the highest levels through juxtaposition of contemporary historical film footage with scenes shot in documentary-style black and white that convey to the viewer the impression of being an eyewitness to unfolding events behind the scene. The result is a powerful statement of the case for Kennedy's determination to back away from a hopeless situation; but not only that, for Stone introduces apparent evidence that the president was assassinated by a cabal operating within the government to prevent just such a decision. Years ago author Truman Capote introduced the genre of the nonfiction novel with In Cold Blood, in which he reconstructed murder victims' thoughts from external sources. In both cases, truth is arrived at by inference, although Capote's leaps of faith were considerably shorter. Less conspiratorially inclined, William Manchester, in the introduction to a new edition of The Death of a President published for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Kennedy's death, revealed that he

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was a witness to the president's decision to quit Vietnam. "His withdrawal operation, which had already begun at the time of his death, would have ended this country's Vietnam commitment in 1965 with the evacuation, as he had put it to me, of the last helicopter pilot." Manchester is equally clear about what happened instead. "After his funeral Johnson countermanded these orders." 1 Other personal witnesses to Kennedy's apparent determination to head off deeper involvement include former assistant secretary of state Roger Hilsman and former defense secretary Robert McNamara. Recently Hilsman wrote to the editor of Foreign Affairs to comment on McNamara's memoirs. "Kennedy told me, as his action officer on Vietnam, over and over again that my j o b was to keep American involvement at a minimum so that we could withdraw as soon as the opportunity presented itself."2 Hilsman's concern was not with McNamara's similar assertions that JFK probably would not have made Vietnam an American war, but with the former secretary's complaint that there were not enough knowledgeable experts in government to head off the Johnson administration in its determination to save the Saigon government from extinction. There were more than enough, Hilsman argues, but they all went unheeded. McNamara's own conclusion—after long silence—is a somewhat tenuous argument about how Kennedy would have managed, wisely, to avoid entanglement, yet how he, McNamara, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk stayed on to serve Lyndon Johnson loyally—by not standing in the way of LBJ's determination to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam, and, implicitly at least, despite their own growing doubts. To dispute the president, evidently, would have been not only disloyal but also against national interests in preventing something worse. Sometimes this has been called the elbow thesis. Those close to the president during the Cold War, the argument goes, were not supposed to jiggle the elbow of the arm over the nuclear button. 3 O n the penultimate page of his memoirs, however, McNamara offers the judgment that all of the "Vietnam presidents" acted in good faith to halt the supposed danger of communist expansion and to protect individual freedom and democracy. " T h e Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations made their decisions and by those decisions demanded sacrifices and, yes, inflicted terrible suf-

GARDNER

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fering in light of those goals and values." 4 It is a curiously ambiguous statement, difficult to interpret. If Hilsman is correct and, indeed, if McNamara's earlier statement about Kennedy's wisdom in avoiding deeper involvement is to be credited, then how were his successors acting in good faith? Can understanding the context of great decisions ever provide enough of a moral rationale for historians to absolve the actors? Such troubling questions did not arise for Dean Rusk. There are, indeed, indications that the secretary of state was not terribly enthusiastic about escalation at the outset of the Vietnam War, but he remained steadfast till the end. More important, he did not believe that Kennedy was determined to abandon South Vietnam at the time of his death in November 1963. Rusk admits that he may not have always been the one to w h o m Kennedy c o m m u n i cated his innermost thoughts, but at the same time, "Kennedy liked to bat the breeze and toss ideas around, and it is entirely possible that he left the impression with some that he planned on getting out of Vietnam in 1965." 5 His actions, however, belied such an intention. Rusk believed that Kennedy would have told him, at least once during their h u n dreds of conversations, if he were serious about leaving Vietnam, but that was not the real reason for Rusk's conviction. If he had decided to get out in 1965, Rusk argued, Kennedy would never have left Americans exposed in a combat zone for nearly two years simply for domestic political purposes. "Neither Kennedy nor any other American president could live with himself or look his senior colleagues in the eye under those conditions." 6 O n e continuing aspect of the Vietnam tragedy, however, is precisely the suspicion that political leaders were in fact capable of acting with such cynicism. A compelling reason for the continuing interest in the question of whether Johnson reversed Kennedy's policy has to do with the haunting feeling about what went wrong at the time the crucial decisions were made to intervene; it is a feeling shared by former policymakers and the public alike. Every generation rewrites its history, in search of what has been called a "useable past." Americans have lived with the Vietnam syndrome for thirty years. Even though President Bush promised that Desert Storm would vanquish it from collective memory, the syndrome continues to plague presidents as Bill Clinton struggles to normal-

INTRODUCTION

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ize relations with Hanoi over the objections of powerful interest groups determined to exploit the issue of Americans missing in action and prisoners of war. It is almost as if the bullet that killed Kennedy sent the nation hurtling through a wormhole, as imagined in some theories about space and time, forcing us to leave behind an alternative history, a better ending. Objections to recognizing Vietnam and, for similar reasons, to the proposed Smithsonian exhibit on the fiftieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb are as much about anger against contemporary political leadership and intellectual elites held responsible for imposing abstract theories on social problems, as they are about the actual questions of diplomatic relations with Vietnam or the need to drop the bomb. Akin to earlier notions about a golden age, assassination-centered history conflates Vietnam and the events of November 1963 to such a degree that the cause of the war—with all the attendant turmoil of the sixties—comes down to the events of that one day. George Reedy, one of Lyndon Johnsons press secretaries, also felt compelled to write a public letter about assassination-centered history. Unlike Roger Hilsman, Reedy remains convinced in a letter to the New York Times Book Review that Kennedy would have stayed the course. "Johnson acted the way he thought that Kennedy would have acted. I have read Roger Hilsman, who said that J.F.K. was getting set to pull out of Vietnam, and while I believe in Mr. Hilsman's honesty, I think he was ordered to go through a 'contingency' exercise. IfJ.F.K. was preparing to pull out of Vietnam after the election, his top assistants in the White House failed to inform L.B.J, of that fact. I sat in on many meetings where it was taken for granted that the war would be prosecuted."7 Obviously, scholarly accounts of the origins of American involvement in Vietnam continue to provide a "dark and bloody ground," as Civil War and Reconstruction historiography was once called. Just as certainly the issues presented in the papers delivered at a conference held at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in October 1993 continue to engage not only scholars but also the much wider audience in the nation as a whole. The chapters of this book, based on those papers, move from the general to the specific. Robert A. Divine's overview of the Vietnam War puts the struggle into its proper context as a chapter in the Cold War.

4

LLOYD C. GARDNER

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Explaining his difficulty in describing the American commitment to today's students, Divine, a major interpreter of American twentieth-century foreign policy, seeks to recall for p o s t - C o l d War classes the intensity of that struggle, a conflict that was filled with the same dramatic emotions as those that fueled the Salem witchcraft trials or that led the southern slaveholders to defend their peculiar institution. Brian VanDeMark's sympathetically critical evaluation of the beginning assumptions of the Kennedy administration offers a closely reasoned account of how the N e w Frontiersmen approached their assignments with the absolute convictions of men tempered by economic depression and war, and utterly convinced of the Tightness of their course. In the following discussion of Lyndon Johnson's experiences in government from the time of the Great Depression and the N e w Deal, I suggest that older N e w Dealers shared equally in the belief that government could play a successful role in nation-building far away in Southeast Asia. To round out the opening section, William J. Duiker discusses assumptions behind the North Vietnamese decisions in the early part of the war, providing a nice counterpart to American Cold War assumptions, as Hanoi sought to do what it could to discourage the United States from deepening its involvement. John Prados then examines what he calls the Z e n of escalation, or h o w American policymakers used and misused such constructs as the Munich analogy and the domino thesis to explain to themselves why they must be in Vietnam. George C. Herring's analysis of the Joint Chiefs of Staff's conspiracy of silence helps to explain why there was never a confrontation on the fundamental questions raised by the military strategy the Kennedy and Johnson administrations adopted. Between the Pentagon and the White House, it appears from these two essays, was nothing less than a zone of near complete opacity, caused in no small part by White House reliance on a crisis management theory that had proved successful in the Cuban missile crisis and by Pentagon assumptions about the right way to fight a war. T h e next three chapters focus on the specific issue of whether Lyndon Johnson did indeed reverse a Kennedy decision to scale down American involvement in Vietnam gradually. T h e role of contingency or counterfactuals in history often provides the basis

INTRODUCTION

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for new understandings and ways of approaching documentary materials. William Conrad Gibbons argues the case for continuity, relying on documents that demonstrate again Kennedy's wellknown role as an ardent champion of activism in foreign affairs and, in the specific Vietnam question, a believer in the domino theory. John M . N e w m a n believes that careful analysis of changes in policy documents and new materials from Robert McNamara's oral histories demonstrate, to the contrary, that while JFK was indeed a staunch Cold Warrior, he had decided Vietnam was not the place to risk a massive involvement of American ground forces. Political scientist Larry Berman discusses the possibilities of trying to come to a conclusion from available evidence. H e suggests that the case for the counterfactuals, while not proven, remains open. H e also suggests that however Kennedy might have decided the question, his death made it much more difficult for a successor to opt out of declared policies, just as it had been difficult for JFK to reverse the beginnings of a commitment undertaken by the Eisenhower administration. The final chapter, by Ilya Gaiduk, looks at the Soviet side of the early years of the Vietnam War. Making use of hitherto unavailable archival material in Moscow, Gaiduk offers a case study of a situation in which the superpower found itself under considerable pressure from an anxious member of the Eastern Bloc. T h e Soviets, it appears from Gaiduk's essay, were as baffled by events in supporting Hanoi's decisions as the Americans were in coming to Saigon's rescue. Hence we arrive at the other side of the Cold War divide, not unlike the journey Alice took through the looking glass. O u t of historical controversies emerges a better understanding of the past, and history, like life, is perhaps best understood as a p r o cess, rather than a set of final conclusions. Certainly this volume contains no last words on the Vietnam War or Lyndon Johnson's decisions in the aftermath ofJohn Kennedy's assassination. O u r best hope is that it creates an atmosphere that stimulates the reader to go beyond easy answers. N o w that President Clinton has made the decision to recognize Vietnam, it is tempting to say that a most unhappy chapter in American history has come to an end. The mixed reactions to that decision indicate that the historical debates will also continue to be a dark and bloody ground, but one that must be crossed for its importance to policymakers and the public. 6

LLOYD C. GARDNER

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Notes i.

William Manchester, The Death of a President (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. xx.

2.

"McNamara's War," Foreign Affairs 74, no. 4 (July-Aug., 1995), 164-165.

3. 4. 5. 6.

Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Times Books, 1995), p. 97. Ibid., p. 333. Dean Rusk, As I Saw It (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), pp. 441 - 4 4 2 . Ibid.

7.

New York Times Book Review, Feb. 16, 1994, p. 30.

INTRODUCTION

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Vietnam An Episode in the Cold War

Robert A. Divine T h e dramatic events that began with the liberation of Eastern Europe in the fall of 1989, symbolized by the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, and then culminated two years later in the dissolution of the Soviet Union have profoundly altered our view of the Cold War. Instead of commenting on an aspect of current affairs, scholars could begin to consider the Cold War as part of the past. T h e epic struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union might not be seen in quite the same light as the American Revolution or the Civil War, or even World War II, but at least it was now a legitimate subject for historical scrutiny. In the vast literature on the Cold War, scholars developed several separate areas of concentration. The Cuban missile crisis is one such special field and Vietnam clearly another. Beginning in the late seventies, historians began to remedy the earlier neglect of the Vietnam War—George Herring's trailblazing history was soon followed by Stanley Karnow's broad account, which along with the accompanying PBS television series helped bring Vietnam back to the forefront of national attention. As Vietnam studies evolved, they tended to become isolated from the larger field of Cold War scholarship—authors concentrated on specific topics such as Dien Bien Phu, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, the 1965 escalation, the Tet offensive, and LBJ's decision to seek a negotiated solution. In dealing with these important episodes, scholars tended to see them only in the context of Vietnam, ignoring the larger issues of the Cold War. I would refocus our attention on the simple, obvious, but often overlooked point that American policy in Vietnam can be understood only in relation to the course of the Cold War. T h e period we are probing is the early sixties, a time when the Cold War was at its most intense. As Michael Beschloss has demonstrated in his book The Crisis Years, this was a period of confrontation between Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy that led to nuclear saber

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rattling, first over Berlin in the summer of 1961 and then over the missiles in Cuba in the fall of 1962. In the relaxed atmosphere of the post-Cold War era, we tend to forget how dangerous and frightening this period was in international affairs. In his recent study of the nuclear age, Life under a Cloud, Allan Winkler reminds us how the fear of an atomic attack pervaded American life in the fifties and sixties. Educators used Bert the Turtle to teach schoolchildren to perform "Duck and Cover" drills as they sought shelter beneath their desks. "Bert ducks and covers," read a comic book distributed to three million elementary students. "He's smart, but he has his shelter on his back. You must learn to find shelter." Civil defense hit its peak under Kennedy with the fallout-shelter frenzy, which raised the ethical question of how to treat less well-prepared neighbors. In Austin, hardware dealer Charles Davis equipped his shelter with four rifles and a .357 Magnum pistol. When most Americans finally came to understand that there was no place to hide in an all-out nuclear attack, civil defense authorities switched from individual shelters to plans for evacuating entire cities—a change from "Duck and Cover," the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists noted, to "Run Like Hell." 1 When I try to describe the American commitment in Vietnam to undergraduates in the nineties, I have the hardest time trying to explain why the United States placed so much importance on a relatively minor and remote part of the world. They have no trouble understanding American involvement in World War II to defeat Hitler and avenge the attack on Pearl Harbor; they see the recent Persian Gulf War as a legitimate defense of the nation's oil lifeline; they can even accept the Korean conflict as necessary to protect Japan. But they cannot understand why the United States sacrificed more than 58,000 American lives and spent more than $150 billion in what appears today to be such an insignificant place. The answer can be found only by recalling the intensity of the Cold War. We know today that Moscow was not directing the North Vietnamese, that there was great antagonism between Hanoi and Beijing, that the fundamental issue in Vietnam was a struggle for national independence that had its origin in European colonialism. But just as we have to use our creative imagination to try to understand the Salem witchcraft trials in the seventeenth century

DIVINE

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or the determination of antebellum white southerners to defend the institution of slavery, so we must go back in time and try to put ourselves in the place of those w h o made the decisions in Southeast Asia in the fifties and early sixties that led to disaster. O u r goal is not to excuse but to understand, and to do that, we must examine the broader context of the Cold War.

I would begin with the Truman administration. In the early months of 1950, the Cold War seemed to have reached new depths. Chiang Kai-shek had been driven from the mainland and Mao and the Communists were in power in Beijing. T h e Soviets had detonated their first atomic device, signaling an end to the nuclear monopoly the West had enjoyed since the end of World War II. At home Joe McCarthy was just beginning his smear campaign against the State Department, laying the basis for the charges that the diplomats had sold out China to the Communists. President Truman responded by refusing to recognize the new regime in China, by intensifying his own loyalty program to drive suspected subversives from government service, and by deciding to answer the Soviet atomic bomb by instituting a crash program to develop the Super—the vastly more destructive hydrogen bomb. It was in this crisis atmosphere that the National Security C o u n cil began to frame its recommendations regarding the civil war being waged by the Viet Minh against the French in Indochina. Two documents from the Pentagon Papers set forth the basic premises that would guide American policy in Vietnam for the next two decades. The first, dated February 27, 1950, stated what later became known as the domino theory (after President Eisenhower's 1954 press-conference statement using that analogy). "It is recognized that the threat of communist aggression against Indochina is only one phase of anticipated communist plans to seize all of Southeast Asia," the State Department draft began. Stressing the need to halt "further communist expansion in Southeast Asia," the document asserted, "Indochina is a key area of Southeast Asia and is under immediate threat. The neighboring countries of Thailand and Burma could be expected to fall under communist domination if Indochina were controlled by a communist-dominated govern-

The Truman Administration

VIETNAM: AN EPISODE IN THE COLD WAR

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ment. The balance of Southeast Asia would then be in grave hazard." 2 In essence the State Department was fearful that the recent Communist triumph in the Chinese civil war would soon lead to a similar outcome in Indochina, thereby endangering all Southeast Asia. In light of future developments, it is interesting to note the author of this document—the deputy undersecretary of state, Dean Rusk. T h e second document, dated April 10, 1950, took the argument one step further. In a memorandum to the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff outlined the global implications. " T h e fall of Indochina would undoubtedly lead to the fall of the other mainland states of Southeast Asia," they began, echoing the State Department view. "Soviet control of all the major components of Asia's war potential might become a decisive factor affecting the balance of power between the United States and the USSR. A Soviet position of dominance over Asia, Western Europe, or both, would constitute a major threat to United States security." 3 In the crisis atmosphere that prevailed in Washington in the spring of 1950, Indochina had suddenly taken on pivotal importance in the Cold War. Not only would a Communist victory there mean the loss of all Southeast Asia, but Soviet dominance over this region would also tip the world balance of power against the United States. N o wonder, then, that in early May Truman authorized Secretary of State Dean Acheson to commit American financial aid and military advisers in an effort to help the French hold back the communist tide in Indochina. The initial American decision to become involved in Vietnam was clearly the result of Cold War fears. Truman took what he viewed as an essential step not only to save Southeast Asia from Communism but also to preserve a favorable strategic balance vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. There was little thought given to the nature of the Vietnamese struggle for independence from French colonialism, nor any consideration of what might be best for the people of Vietnam. Lloyd Gardner sums up the American view of Vietnam perceptively with his comment, "Indeed the whole of that country had assumed a fateful abstraction in American thinking as the place where the line had been drawn against the spread of international communism." 4 Vietnam was not important to American policymakers in itself; it had become a Cold War symbol, a pawn in the larger struggle against Soviet imperialism. DIVINE

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The Eisenhower administration deepened and extended American involvement in Vietnam. Initially, Eisenhower revisionists hailed Ike's handling of the Dien Bien Phu crisis, praising him for refusing to commit American forces to rescue the beleaguered French at the eleventh hour. But recent scholarship has suggested that the real purpose of the policy Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, pursued was to remove the French and allow the United States, through the regime of Vietnamese president N g o Dinh Diem, to become the barrier to further communist advance in Southeast Asia. T h e change in policy in Vietnam can best be understood as part of a broader pattern. In the 1952 campaign, the Republicans p r o m ised a sweeping change in American Cold War policy—a shift from containment to rolling back the worldwide communist advance. In reality, the shift proved to be more rhetorical than real. Safely in office, Eisenhower and Dulles were content with carrying out policies that originated with the Truman administration. Thus they brought the peace talks at Panmunjom to fruition, quickly ending the Korean War. In Europe, Dulles finally achieved the German rearmament that Acheson had sought by bringing West Germany into N A T O . Most significant of all, the Eisenhower administration incorporated the hydrogen bomb, first tested in November 1952 before Truman left office, into the American nuclear arsenal and announced the new strategy of massive retaliation. Designed to avoid limited wars like Korea and to achieve reductions in military spending, massive retaliation proved incredible when the Soviets quickly developed their own thermonuclear capability. All Eisenhower and Dulles could do then was threaten mutual suicide; as Churchill so wisely observed, world peace n o w rested on a balance of terror. The continuity in policy was much more important than the slight changes wrought by Eisenhower and Dulles in Vietnam. T h e operating assumption was still the belief that Vietnam was the key to Southeast Asia and that this region was vital to the world balance of power. Thus in 1953, the National Security Council warned that a Viet Minh victory "would mean the eventual loss to C o m munism not only of Indochina but of the whole of Southeast Asia. The loss of Indochina," concluded the council, "would be critical to the security of the U . S . " 5 Fearful that the French would allow the Communists to win by default, Dulles used the Dien Bien Phu

The Eisenhower Administration

VIETNAM: AN EPISODE IN THE COLD WAR

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crisis, as Lloyd Gardner has argued, to "free America from the tyranny of the weak, the drowning man's death grip on the living, the colonialist's wasteful misuse of resources." True liberation, Gardner contends, meant transferring the defense of freedom in Indochina from those w h o , as Dulles told the Senate Foreign Relations C o m mittee, "are, in a sense, old, tired, worn out, and almost willing to buy peace in order to have a few years more of rest," and entrusting it instead to the United States. " T h e leadership of the world has passed to us," Dulles proudly told the senators. 6 The ensuing events—the misleading talk of Operation Vulture, the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the Geneva Conference, the division of Indochina at the seventeenth parallel, and the final emergence of Diem as the American-backed leader in Saigon—witnessed the playing out of Dulles's grand design. Some scholars see more muddling-thro ugh than foresight in the final outcome; Daniel Greene stresses the great care Dulles took to spare French pride as he eased them out of South Vietnam and the degree to which Diem made himself indispensable to the United States. "Having liberated Paris from its military responsibilities in the region and committed itself to the success of the Diem experiment," Greene concludes, "the Eisenhower administration acquired a vested interest in seeing it through." 7 Whatever the intent, the result was a deepening American commitment in Vietnam. Having lost half the country to the C o m m u nists, Eisenhower and Dulles were determined to hold the line at the seventeenth parallel. Yet despite all the rhetoric about nationbuilding and experiments in democracy, there was a growing pessimism. "Free Vietnam," commented one American official in 1955, "is more an expression of desire than the establishment of a fact." As Daniel Greene points out, "If the fictional South Vietnam failed to materialize or if efforts to make it safe for anticommunism faltered, the Americans would have only themselves and no longer the French to blame." 8 David Anderson arrives at the same conclusion in his aptly named book Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953—1961. "Taken as a whole," he writes, "the Eisenhower years were a time of deepening American commitment to South Vietnam premised on superficial assumptions about the government in Saigon, its future prospects, and the importance of its survival to U.S. global strategic interests." 9 It is that last assumption, the importance of the survival of South 16

ROBERT A. DIVINE

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Vietnam to the global strategic interests of the United States, that lies at the heart of the Vietnam issue. Locked in the escalating Cold War with the Soviet Union in the fifties, American leaders— Truman and Eisenhower, Acheson and Dulles—convinced themselves that not just the fate of Southeast Asia was at stake in Vietnam but also the world balance of power itself. Tragically, the young challenger who held himself out as the voice of change, with the cry of getting the nation moving again, would be held prisoner by the same Cold War illusion. John F. Kennedy came into office at a time when most Americans were convinced that the Cold War had reached a critical point. Kennedy himself helped foster this sense of grave national danger. He and other Democratic contenders claimed that Eisenhower had failed to meet the challenge posed by Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviet Union in the wake of Sputnik. Not only had the Russians gained enormous world prestige by being first in space, but they also appeared to have opened a dangerous missile gap that threatened to turn the strategic balance against the United States by the early sixties. Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy's main speechwriter, summarizes the grim prospect facing the new president.

The Kennedy Administration

In October, 1957, the Soviet Union had launched simultaneously the first space capsule to orbit the earth and a new cold war offensive to master the earth. . . . In the three years that followed, the freedom of West Berlin had been threatened by a Soviet ultimatum, backed by boasts of medium-range ballistic missiles targeted on Western Europe. The existence of South Vietnam had been menaced by a campaign of guerrilla tactics and terror planned and supplied by the Communist regime in Hanoi. The independence of Laos had been endangered by pro-Communist insurgent forces. . . . The Russian and Chinese Communists had competed for a Central African base in Ghana, in Guinea, in Mali and particularly in the chaotic Congo. The Russians had obtained a base in the Western Hemisphere through Fidel Castro's takeover in Cuba and his campaign to subvert Latin America. Red China was building its own Afro-Asian collection of client states and its own atomic bomb. 10

In short, the United States was facing a grim prospect—losing the Cold War unless it moved quickly and decisively to confront and overcome the post-Sputnik communist offensive. VIETNAM! AN EPISODE IN THE COLD WAR

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Kennedy sounded the alarm throughout the i960 presidential campaign. H e compared the contest to Lincoln's struggle against slavery a century before, but now it was not the nation but the world that could not continue to exist half-slave and half-free. H e blamed the Republicans for the missile gap, for losing Cuba to the Communists, and for declining American prestige throughout the world. Most of all, he promised to reverse the course of the Cold War. Calling the United States "the sentinel at the gate of freedom around the world," he declared, "I believe that we can check the Communist advance, that we can turn it back, and that we can, in this century, provide for the ultimate victory of freedom over slavery." 11 Despite the narrowness of his margin of victory, once in the White House Kennedy worked hard to fulfill his campaign commitments. H e stood firm on Berlin, finally forcing Khrushchev to acknowledge defeat by building the Berlin Wall to stop the flow of East Germans seeking freedom in the West. Discovering that in reality there was no missile gap, he nevertheless kept right on increasing the strategic advantage he had inherited from Eisenhower, authorizing a massive nuclear striking force built around 1,000 intercontinental ballistic missiles and more than 600 Polaris submarine missiles. O n the most sensitive issue of all, after an early fiasco at the Bay of Pigs, he won his most famous victory by threatening nuclear war to force Khrushchev to withdraw 42 medium- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Cuba. It was in this context of increased Cold War tension and conflict that Kennedy approached Vietnam. H e accepted the prevailing view that Vietnam was the key to Southeast Asia and that this region was vital to the world balance of power, but he gave these ideas a new twist by viewing Vietnam as a test case for what he feared was the most insidious communist threat of all. Just before his inauguration in 1961, Kennedy received a copy of a speech Khrushchev had given to Soviet officials on January 6. Boasting that socialism was on the march and that capitalism was in retreat on all fronts, Khrushchev acknowledged that a world war was not only unthinkable but unnecessary. Instead, all Moscow had to do was support "wars of liberation or popular uprisings." " T h e Communists support just wars of this kind wholeheartedly and without reservation," Khrushchev affirmed, "and they march in the van of the peoples fighting for liberation." 1 2 DIVINE

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Kennedy and his advisers viewed Khrushchev's pledge of support for wars of national liberation with grave concern. Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson, cabling from Moscow, called the speech a "declaration of Cold War." The president was so alarmed that he gave copies to all his top foreign-policy aides and told them to "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest" it. Ignoring advice from Thompson, w h o cautioned that the speech reflected only one side of the complex Khrushchev, Kennedy told his top advisers, "You've got to understand it, and so does everybody else around here. This is our clue to the Soviet Union." 1 3 Today most historians believe that the speech was aimed primarily at China in an effort to recapture Soviet command of world communism. A close reading of the text reveals that Khrushchev, despite his extravagant rhetoric, was still careful to call only for the support of wars of national liberation. Kennedy, however, convinced himself that the speech indicated that the Soviet U n i o n was directing wars of national liberation. Thus the contest in Vietnam was not just a local civil war but rather a part of a global c o m m u nist effort to win the Cold War without risking a nuclear showdown. Vietnam became, in the words of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a "test case that the free world can cope with Communist wars of liberation as we have coped successfully with Communist aggression at other levels." 14 T h e belief that Vietnam was a test of the American ability to defeat the new communist tactics in the Third World lay at the core of the Kennedy administration's Vietnam policy. T h e new emphasis on counterinsurgency and the Green Berets, the strategic hamlet initiative, and the covert raids on North Vietnam were all justified on the basis of proving that the United States could contain the Soviet-directed offensive at every level, even in brushfire wars. W h e n all these efforts proved unavailing, Kennedy still believed he was pursuing the right course. In January 1962 he asked the members of the National Security Council to reread Khrushchev's "wars of liberation" speech, adding, "We are e m barked on a major effort here, and it is not going to be an easy one. 15 T h e belief that Vietnam was a testing ground for the new Soviet offensive simply reinforced the Cold War premises that had undergirded American policy since 1950. Responding to General M a x well Taylor's November 1961 call for 8,000 combat troops in South V I E T N A M : AN EPISODE IN THE

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Vietnam, McNamara repeated the familiar rubric: the fall of South Vietnam would mean communist control "in the rest of mainland Southeast Asia and in Indonesia." " T h e strategic implications worldwide," he informed the president, " . . . would be extremely serious." Dean Rusk was equally adamant, asserting that a communist victory in Vietnam "would not only destroy SEATO [Southeast Asia Treaty Organization] but would undermine the credibility of American commitments elsewhere." H e even reminded Kennedy of the disastrous impact of the loss of China on the Democratic party by adding, "Loss of South Viet-Nam would stimulate bitter domestic controversies in the United States and would be seized upon by extreme elements to divide the country and harass the Administration." 1 6 T h e essays that follow examine in detail the evolution of Vietnam policy under Kennedy and during the early years of the J o h n son administration. I would add only one final way in which the broader Cold War helped shape that course—the impact of the successful outcome of the Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy's success in forcing Khrushchev to take the missiles out of Cuba in the fall of 1962 created a dangerous sense of American power. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote lyrically about Kennedy's "combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated, that dazzled the world." Those thirteen days in October, Schlesinger observed, "gave the world—even the Soviet U n i o n — a sense of American determination and responsibility in the use of power which, if sustained, might indeed become a turning point in the history of the relations between east and west." 1 7 Zbigniew Brzezinski, then a member of the State Department's Planning Council, boasted, " T h e U.S. is today the only effective global military power in the world." The Soviet Union, he continued, lacked "the military capacity to fight in Cuba, or in Vietnam." 1 8 T h e Cuban missile crisis reinforced a trait that many observers felt characterized the Kennedy administration, what Thomas Paterson has termed "a cult of toughness." T h e emphasis on boldness and activism received a boost from the Cuban crisis. T h e president, w h o feared he had failed to show Khrushchev "that we can be as tough as he is" at the Vienna summit meeting in 1961, finally felt he had demonstrated his courage and determination. 19 It was only natural for the men w h o shaped Vietnam policy under both Ken20

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nedy and Johnson to believe in the efficacy offeree, as d e m o n strated in the Cuban missile crisis. We had stood firm and the Soviets had given way. As Brian VanDeMark points out in Into the Quagmire, these advisers "readily assumed that 'controlled' escalation would dissuade H o Chi Minh in 1965 as surely as Nikita Khrushchev had been in 1962." H e quotes Cyrus Vance as recalling, We had seen the gradual application of force applied in the Cuban missile crisis, and had seen a very successful result. We believed that if this same gradual and restrained application of force were applied in . . . Vietnam, that one could expect the same kind of result; that rational people on the other side would respond to increasing military pressure and would therefore try and seek a political solution. 20

According to James Nathan, the so-called lessons of the Cuban missile crisis—the stress on "national guts," "superior force," presidential control of decision-making, and highly secretive crisis management—all contributed to the eventual escalation in Vietnam. 21 Admirers of President Kennedy think the consequences of the Cuban missile crisis were much more benign. Sobered by the experience of going to the nuclear brink, they contend, he softened his rhetoric and began looking for ways to reach accommodation with the Soviet Union. In the oft-cited American University speech in June 1963 he asked the Russians to join him in n e w efforts to halt the arms race, saying, "If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can make the world safe for diversity." Yet he did nothing after October 1962 to halt the continuing nuclear buildup, which gave the United States an enormous strategic advantage over the Soviet Union. In the speech he planned to give in Dallas the day he was killed, he boasted of "our successful defense of freedom" in Cuba and in Berlin, attributing it to "the strength we stood ready to use." After reviewing the increases in armament that he had overseen, the president planned to conclude by reminding his audience that because the United States had played the role of "watchman on the walls of world freedom," we had been able to deny the "ambitions of international C o m m u nism." 2 2 For Kennedy, to the very end, force and confrontation were the only sure way to halt the communist offensive and defend the Free World. V I E T N A M : AN EPISODE IN THE COLD WAR

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A Cold War Framework

T h e tragedy of American involvement in the Vietnam War must be seen as part of the greater tragedy of the Cold War. We can feel fortunate, now that it is at last over, that we escaped the danger of nuclear catastrophe—that leaders on both sides proved rational enough to avoid the ultimate confrontation. Unfortunately, a policy of deterrence led directly to lesser confrontations like the one in Vietnam. Unable to bring our nuclear strength to bear directly against the enemy, we felt compelled to resist at lower levels, as in Korea and Vietnam. This compulsion, which led Truman to make the initial commitment in 1950, Eisenhower to extend it further in the midfifties, and Kennedy to reinforce it in the early sixties, finally culminated in Johnson's escalation in 1965. While each of these presidents can be criticized for his failure to reexamine the false premises on which decisions were based, any reasonable historical explanation must view their actions as part of the larger Cold War framework. George Herring summed it up best when he wrote, The United States' involvement in Vietnam was not primarily a result of errors ofjudgment or of the personality quirks of the policymakers, although these things existed in abundance. It was a logical, if not inevitable, outgrowth of a world view and a policy, the policy of containment, which Americans in and out of government accepted without serious question for more than two decades.23

All historical events, even such tragic ones as Vietnam, have their saving grace. T h e silver lining in Vietnam was that the failure there finally forced the American people to begin reassessing the policy of containment and rethinking the Cold War. It would take two more decades before the contest would finally end, but in some measure the fact that Vietnam failed to square with Cold War assumptions helped break the grip of the anti-communist obsession that had plagued American foreign policy since 1945. Thus in the long run even Vietnam proved to be redemptive.

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Notes i.

Allan W. Winkler, Life under a Cloud: American Anxiety about the Atom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 115, 117.

2.

House Committee on Armed Services, United States— Vietnam Relations, 1945—1967, study prepared by Department of Defense, 1971, Committee Print, 8:283—285. Ibid., p. 309.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Lloyd C. Gardner, Approaching Vietnam: From World War II to Dienbienphu (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), p. 337. Neil Sheehan, The Pentagon Papers: As Published by the New York Times (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), p. 10. Gardner, Approaching Vietnam, pp. 126 — 127. Daniel P. O ' C . Greene, "John Foster Dulles and the End of the Franco-American Entente in Indochina," Diplomatic History 16 (Fall 1992): 571. Ibid. David Anderson, Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953-1961 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

10. Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Bantam Books, 1966), pp. 256-257. 11. Robert A. Divine, Foreign Policy and U. S. Presidential Elections, 1952-1960 (New York: Franklin Watts, 1974), p. 282. 12. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 303. 13. Michael R. Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963 (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), p. 61. 14. Bruce Miroff, Pragmatic Illusions: The Presidential Politics of John F. Kennedy (New York: David McCay, 1976), p. 146. 15. Beschloss, Crisis Years, p. 649. 16. Sheehan, Pentagon Papers, pp. 149, 150. 17. Schlesinger, Thousand Days, p. 841. 18. James A. Nathan, "The Missile Crisis: His Finest Hour Now," in The Cuban Missile Crisis, ed. Robert A. Divine (2nd ed., New York: Markus Wiener, 1988), p. 347. Originally published in World Politics 27 (Jan. 1975). 19. Thomas G. Paterson, Kennedy's Questfor Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961-1963 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 347. 20. Brian VanDeMark, Into the Quagmire: Lyndon Johnson and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 114-115. 21. Nathan, "Missile Crisis," pp. 356-357. 22. Paterson, Kennedy's Quest, p. 20. 23. George C. Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 19501975 (New York: Wiley, 1979), p. x.

VIETNAM: AN EPISODE IN THE COLD WAR

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A Way of Thinking The Kennedy Administration s Initial Assumptions about Vietnam and Their Consequences

Brian VanDeMark "Thinking," an old saying goes, "is very far from knowing." But I it is something we nonetheless expect of our nation's leaders, whose grasp of the present and wisdom concerning the future are necessarily limited. Policymakers, after all, must act on uncertain assumptions and inadequate information. So it proved for President John F. Kennedy and his advisers as they grappled with the exceedingly complex problem of Vietnam beginning in 1961. Like all human beings, Kennedy and those around him approached their task with the tools available to them: their beliefs, their values, their experiences, their hopes, their fears, their prejudices. With these tools, they fashioned assumptions that guided their approach to Vietnam and generated important, farreaching consequences. President Kennedy and his advisers believed their assumptions about Vietnam to be correct and true. That did not always make them so, however. Many times they were not, and the resultant gap between intention and effect could be striking and even poignant. This incongruity between policymakers' assumptions about Vietnam and their consequences lay at the heart of America's traumatic failure in Vietnam and explains much of the tragedy of that war. It can best be summarized in the old (but no less true) adage that "the road to disaster is paved with good intentions." America took that road, and Vietnam was the disaster. The Assumptions

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We are all shaped by our experiences. Long-held notions, traditional attitudes, and past opinions pull at us in the present. T h e same must be said of Kennedy's generation. They, too, moved in a world colored by history and defined by an influential past. They interacted with and gave meaning to the world through their assumptions and beliefs. T h e Kennedy administration's thinking about Vietnam derived, in basic ways, from its generational temperament and style. Rarely

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had a new administration borne such dazzling credentials and yet been so young. Kennedy and those around him exuded vigorous confidence and self-esteem. They had grown up in and survived the Great Depression. They had answered the call of duty during World War II, and won. Their enthusiasm and energy had helped to build the richest and most powerful of nations. They had d e m onstrated considerable capacity to mold history. They had survived large troubles. They felt eager to demonstrate their excellence. They believed every problem had a solution. They believed they could handle anything. Kennedy and his advisers considered themselves able, goaldirected achievers w h o favored action. They comprised a youthful, self-confident, and activist generation eager to get the country "moving again" abroad as well as at home. They brought energy and imagination to Washington, D . C . They believed in asserting firm, aggressive American leadership in world affairs. That meant moving forward to meet dangers and threats rather than waiting to react to them. The Kennedy administration's thinking about Vietnam also derived from the weight of history—that is, the cumulative legacy of actions and decisions stretching back more than fifteen years. It began under the Truman administration after World War II. Afraid of alienating French cooperation in postwar European defense and eager to contain perceived monolithic communist expansion in Asia, the Truman administration helped France reassert control over its former colony by financing France's war effort against a nationalist revolt led by the communist Viet Minh under H o Chi Minh. T h e Eisenhower administration subsequently deepened this commitment by taking over the training and equipping of n o n communist South Vietnamese forces w h e n France left, signing the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) pact pledging the United States to South Vietnam's defense, and bolstering the n e w South Vietnamese regime under N g o Dinh Diem with massive U.S. economic and military aid. In a speech in April 1954 before France's withdrawal, Senator John F. Kennedy severely criticized lingering French colonialism in Indochina. H e saw no hope for Vietnam until the French granted the Vietnamese their independence. But at the same time, he declared America's interest there "to help maintain the independence of the area, free from Communist domination." 1 Kennedy's views A WAY OF T H I N K I N G

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on Vietnam in this speech reflected larger geopolitical assumptions that he carried with him into the presidency. H e and members of his administration perceived the world as divided into two m u t u ally hostile camps: the democratic camp, led by the United States; and the communist camp, led by the Soviet Union and China. Whatever the subtleties between Moscow and Beijing, Kennedy and his advisers perceived the two communist powers as on the offensive. That offensive, they thought, had gained dangerous m o m e n t u m in recent years and had to be stopped. Kennedy and his men considered the existing equilibrium of power between the two camps fragile; the addition of even small states to the communist camp would alter it substantially, triggering chain reactions with potentially devastating consequences. T h e domino theory seemed real. In such a world, the threat of communism appeared indivisible and the obligation to oppose that threat unlimited. T h e United States had an obligation, therefore, to resist military challenges to the existing equilibrium whenever and wherever they materialized. That included the Third World, which the Kennedy administration viewed as a principal battleground between democracy and communism in the early sixties. Kennedy and those around him took with utmost seriousness Soviet premier Nikita S. Khrushchev's January 6, 1961, speech declaring support for "wars of national liberation." In his widely publicized speech, Khrushchev declared it the duty of all communist parties and governments to support "national-liberation movements." His party saw as its task to combat the formation of western military alliances such as N A T O and SEATO and "to work for their isolation and eventual abolition." H e dismissed any idea of establishing a neutral "third force" among newly independent nations as "an outright falsehood." 2 Khrushchev's speech seemed prima facie evidence of a communist determination to exploit the instability sparked by revolutionary upheaval in nations emerging from colonial rule. T h e struggle had shifted from Europe to Africa, Asia, and Latin America, but that made it no less real or serious in the minds of American policymakers. T h e world's future, they believed, still hung in the balance. This helps to explain why South Vietnam assumed the importance it did. Kennedy and his advisers saw Vietnam as a small and relatively manageable part of a worldwide contest whose signifi-

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cance derived from its part in that contest. They considered South Vietnam important because a communist victory there might demonstrate that the "national liberation" model could be applied successfully throughout the Third World, thereby sparking a series of brushfire wars threatening world peace. Kennedy accepted what he took to be Khrushchev's challenge in his inaugural address. To friend and foe alike, he proclaimed, "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty." 3 Rhetorically eloquent, high-minded, and even moving, these words assumed an obligation to cope with challenges everywhere. Moreover, they made no distinction between key and peripheral areas in terms of American national interest. They identified a threat without defining it carefully or discriminately, nor did they refine the strategy and tools with which to meet it. Kennedy delivered his inaugural address only one day after outgoing President Eisenhower had warned him against losing Laos to communism, urging unilateral intervention if necessary to prevent this result. Kennedy chose to seek a neutralized Laos through negotiations instead because of political and military difficulties. That decision and the Bay of Pigs fiasco in April 1961 made it seem imperative to stand firm elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Many in the Kennedy administration privately wondered whether it might not be wiser to draw the line against communist expansion in a more stable and defensible area than South Vietnam. But the commitment existed, and President Kennedy and those around him felt they could not abandon it without undesirable consequences throughout Southeast Asia and, indeed, the rest of the world. They considered it essential that Washington d e m o n strate the credibility of its commitments. To do otherwise risked undermining other nations' faith in U.S. leadership and emboldening adversaries to further aggression—a process that they believed could lead to the complete erosion of America's position or even nuclear war. Kennedy and his advisers did not consider this a matter of empty prestige; quite the opposite. They considered U.S. credibility the keystone of peace in a dangerous and precarious world. As Secretary of State Dean Rusk later put it:

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The integrity of the American commitment to collective security involves the life and death of our nation. When an American president makes a commitment, what he says must be believed. If those opposing us think that the word of the United States is not worth very much, then those treaties lose their deterrent effect and the structure of peace dissolves rapidly. If the president cannot be believed, we will face dangers we've never dreamed of.4

Rusk and most of his senior colleagues felt this sentiment strongly. Why? Because of their experience and reading of history. Kennedy and most of those around him had come to political maturity before and during World War II. They had seen and felt the calamitous consequences of first standing aside while totalitarian and expansionist nations moved against their weaker neighbors, accumulating military might that left even the stronger nations uneasy and insecure, and then fighting and dying to turn back that aggression. This bitter and costly experience etched indelible symbols in their minds—Munich, Pearl Harbor, the United Nations— fraught with important lessons: that aggression must be met, that accommodation fails but toughness works, that powerful nations like the United States had a duty to protect a threatened world. Kennedy's generation committed these lessons to memory. Domestic politics reinforced history's imperative for resolution in the face of aggression—in this case, communist aggression—by compelling the Kennedy administration to protect itself against Republican charges of weakness or appeasement. Having joined in the attacks against Truman for losing China, Kennedy understood the political damage that could be inflicted on those accused of yielding further ground to communism. Setbacks during 1961 in Cuba, Vienna, Berlin, and Laos intensified this awareness of vulnerability, and thus Kennedy's determination to make a stand somewhere. As the president confided to New York Times columnist James Reston that summer, "now we have a problem in trying to make our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place." 5 Politically, the Kennedy administration possessed a missionary fervor similar in intensity, though not in objectives, to that of earlier French imperialists. As Americans, Kennedy and his men perceived themselves differently, more idealistically. They sought, not to impose colonialism, but rather to help the South Vietnamese secure their freedom, perfect their institutions, and build their VANDEMARK

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nation by applying American technology, tactics, and organizational techniques to the Vietnamese countryside, with its problems of underdevelopment, terrorism, and guerrilla warfare. They sincerely believed that they should and could reconstruct Vietnamese society along Western lines. While only the South Vietnamese could defeat the Viet Cong, the Kennedy administration believed the United States should show them how to do the j o b . This reforming zeal was rooted, to some degree, in ignorance. Kennedy, his administration, and indeed most Americans looked on South Vietnam as a young and unsophisticated nation, p o p u lated by people w h o , if sufficiently bucked up by U.S. aid, instruction, and encouragement, might succeed in maintaining their freedom if only the right combination of leaders could be found. Thus the Kennedy administration continued its predecessor's support of N g o Dinh Diem, trusting his ability to forge a viable South Vietnamese state. Although expecting a long, hard, and bumpy task, Kennedy and his advisers thought D i e m had enough ability to justify a major American effort. Success would eventually come. They thought a two-Vietnams solution possible just the way two Germanys and two Koreas had been. Assisting a small, p r o Western, anti-communist government to resist subversion seemed a logical and appropriate extension of earlier Cold War policies that had proved successful. Kennedy and his advisers viewed the people of South Vietnam in terms of their own experience. They saw in them a thirst for— and a determination to fight for—freedom and democracy. They formed an image of South Vietnam as a country whose leaders had been caught between French colonialists and communist insurgents. Since Kennedy and his men did not see themselves as colonialists (and therefore thought others did not see them this way), they expected Americans would be able to work with South Vietnamese leaders to establish and defend a non-communist government in Saigon. They looked at Diem and saw a model of western values: the French-educated Catholic determined to bring capitalist d e m o c racy to his country. They viewed him as the only effective leader of South Vietnam, w h o should be won over to American ways of thinking through trust and persuasion rather than pressure. Besides, many resisted subjecting Saigon to tight American controls to replace those imposed in the recent past by French colonialism. A WAY OF T H I N K I N G

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They regarded Diem as sufficiently incorruptible that many of the safeguards that might otherwise have been imposed seemed unnecessary in South Vietnam. They took an equally simple view of North Vietnam. Kennedy and his advisers looked at H o Chi Minh, the leader of North Vietnam, and saw not a communist nationalist historically mistrustful of China and eager to establish and protect his country's independence, but an obedient servant of the Sino-Soviet camp willingly serving its larger purpose of aggressive expansion. Militarily, the Kennedy administration thought its predecessor's heavy reliance on nuclear weapons had left the United States dangerously muscle-bound in crisis situations, unable to respond to limited threats with limited means. It resolved, therefore, to expand and modernize U.S. conventional forces to permit a more appropriate—i.e. lesser—response to various types and levels of aggression, particularly low-intensity warfare. This desire for military flexibility coexisted with a belief in the fundamentally political nature of guerrilla war. Kennedy and his men saw it as a more political than military problem. A government incapable of effective political action and popular reform would lose ground steadily and never win the war. T h e Viet C o n g could never be defeated unless the Saigon regime enlisted the support of the peasants. T h e war, in the final analysis, had to be waged and won by the South Vietnamese themselves. For this reason, and because of the lesson of Korea, the Kennedy administration felt uneasy about committing American combat troops to the Asian mainland. Kennedy and many of his closest advisers harbored deep reservations about the political wisdom and military effectiveness of such a step. They believed primary responsibility rested with the South Vietnamese. It remained Saigon's war to win and depended more on that government's efforts than on Washington's. They considered France's earlier military experience in Vietnam irrelevant. France had sought territorial conquest; the United States sought to rescue a beleaguered people. France had embodied a bygone power scheming to recapture yesterday's glory; America embodied a superpower, and everything such status entailed. France committed forces to Vietnam and, once that process started, saw no end to it. America would do things differently and avoid France's fate. 30

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In sum, President Kennedy and his advisers considered their approach to Vietnam consistent with the overall values and direction of U.S. foreign policy since the start of the Cold War. To them, Washington's commitment to South Vietnam rested on sound and unassailable premises, in line with American selfinterest and American responsibilities. It symbolized the core assumptions that had validated and sustained U.S. national security since World War II. Any other approach seemed inappropriate and inconsistent. A wise old man, when asked the difference between results and consequences, replied, "Results are what we expect; consequences are what we get." T h e adage conveys a hard and bitter truth about America's initial assumptions concerning Vietnam. W h a t President Kennedy and his advisers intended and what they wrought often proved very different things indeed. Take the matter of where policymakers focused their attention. During the first three months of the Kennedy administration, Cuba, Laos, Berlin, and the Congo all received more top-level attention than did Vietnam. Discussion of Southeast Asia throughout most of the first year centered on Laos, which seemed the most urgent and rapidly deteriorating regional crisis. In the face of such pressing problems in Laos, the gathering storm clouds in neighboring South Vietnam did not appear as ominous as they might otherwise have seemed. As a result, South Vietnam's accelerating crisis did not receive the time and attention from the administration that it deserved. W h e n it did, toward the end of the year, the problem had become more acute, the costs of involvement had grown, and the chances of success had dwindled. This reflected some of the limitations of the Kennedy administration's decision-making style. Rather than make clear-cut (if painful) decisions, the Kennedy administration often improvised, temporized, split the difference. It took the minimum steps judged necessary to stabilize the situation, leaving its resolution to the longer future, while always conscious that harder decisions lay ahead. This ad hoc approach never forced the Kennedy administration to resolve fundamental policy issues; rather, it simply postponed choices that each day grew more difficult and more intractable. The Kennedy administration's strategy essentially rested on a

The Consequences

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belief that it did not have to choose between escalation and withdrawal. In time, it thought, U.S. and South Vietnamese policies and programs would work. But this straddling act could not last. Ultimately, Kennedy or some successor would be faced with the choice he sought to avoid: withdrawal or war. Kennedy and his advisers defined their choices and shaped their rhetoric based on their experience and understanding of history. Influenced by World War II and the early Cold War, they and most Americans looked at Southeast Asia in the sixties much as they had looked at Europe in the thirties and forties. But Americans ultimately became captives of their own rhetoric. Like characters in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, they created a rationale for involvement in Vietnam that assumed a life of its own and eventually overwhelmed its creators. By stressing, again and again, their resolve to stop the spread of communism in Southeast Asia, supporters of the war reached the point where they believed they could not backtrack without jeopardizing the American government's credibility and prestige. That consideration generated p o w erful pressures to maintain U.S. involvement in Vietnam as the risks and costs of involvement multiplied. M u c h the same can be said about their stance toward Diem. Over time, Kennedy and his advisers came to learn that Diem, although profoundly nationalistic, lacked either the will or the ability to implement the reforms necessary to close the growing gap between his regime and the South Vietnamese people. Yet Americans remained wedded to the conviction that Diem's failings, and Washington's misjudgments about him, were things they could and should try to fix. They still believed America's limited partnership could work de facto changes in Diem's methods of governing and thus narrow the gap. This reflected, in part, the strong force of bureaucratic inertia. People in Washington and in the field—both diplomats and soldiers—believed Diem would succeed if only he took their good advice. This way of thinking reinforced existing policy. So the Kennedy administration tolerated Diem. As Kennedy himself put it, "Diem is Diem and the best we've got." 6 By suffering Diem, though, the Kennedy administration inadvertently encouraged his intransigence; backed a system of landlord rule in the countryside deeply unpopular with the vast rural peasantry; aided security forces under N g o Dinh N h u in their attempts to VANDEMARK

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impose Diem's will on the villages, thus identifying itself with an unpopular regime; undermined its own criteria for success in the war; and let serious problems fester into critical ones whose solution courted the deeper involvement it sought to avoid. U.S. military assistance illustrates this point. Kennedy and his men expected more American advisers and equipment to bolster Diem's confidence, allowing him to expand the counterinsurgency program and ultimately to become more independent militarily and politically. It aimed to get Diem on his feet and standing on his own. But this greater American assistance only increased Diem's military dependence, thus intensifying the pressure for continued U.S. involvement as the war against the Viet C o n g worsened. It also aggravated the underlying political conflict between Saigon and Washington because Diem resented, at the same time that he needed, increasing American advisory assistance. America's expanding presence weakened South Vietnam's already limited capacity for self-reliance—the very quality Kennedy and his advisers had sought to strengthen in the first place—and bred an ambiguous but deep dependency. Few things underscore the gap between intention and effect more starkly than the Kennedy administration's support of the strategic hamlet program. Devised to protect South Vietnamese villagers and to deny support for the Viet Cong, the program received enthusiastic American backing. But its resettlement c o m pounds further disrupted Vietnamese society by uprooting peasants with deep roots in traditional life from their native villages and alienated large segments of the population. Designed to drive a wedge between the insurgents and the peasants, it instead drove a wedge between the peasants and the government, producing less, rather than more, security in the countryside. Fearful of direct intervention, the Kennedy administration chose not to expand the U.S. military role in South Vietnam but to increase the number of people to carry it out. This step was designed to keep America's involvement indirect and limited. Rather than enhancing Washington's distance from the conflict—as Kennedy and his advisers had hoped—it drew the United States closer by generating m o m e n t u m and pressure for still deeper involvement. As America became more deeply involved through its expanded advisory presence, it became concerned about how to measure progress in a war without battle lines on a map. It seized on quanA WAY

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OF

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titative measurements of casualties, engagements, weapons seizures, desertions, and so forth for want of anything better. But North Vietnam's and the Viet Cong's particular (and considerable) advantages—their intense will and elan, fired by the fundamental drives of nationalism and anticolonialism—could not be perceived, much less expressed, in numbers or percentages. With such intangibles omitted from the equation, Washington could never accurately assess the war's course. From beginning to end, the Kennedy administration sought to keep America's commitment to South Vietnam limited. But by making Vietnam a test of both the West's ability to defeat a "national liberation war" strategy and of American credibility in the Cold War, it amplified the commitment's importance, invited greater and greater efforts to preserve it, and, in the end, increased the difficulty and raised the costs of withdrawal. Conclusions

34

What conclusions should we draw about the initial assumptions concerning Vietnam and their consequences? What should we make of it all? Vietnam, after all, remains an enormously important and unfinished chapter of history that Americans are still struggling to understand and to accept—even as the combative and e m o tional discourse of earlier years diminishes as we move further away in time from the event. Several insights stand out in the brighter light of retrospect. Hindsight underscores the painful irony that the confidence, enthusiasm, and optimism that America in the Kennedy years embodied hindered careful consideration of the true nature of the Vietnam problem and the long odds America faced there. Unquestioning when they should have been critical, President Kennedy and his advisers failed to analyze and debate thoroughly American objectives in Vietnam, the risks and costs of various ways of achieving them, and progress toward that end. They failed to sit down, think things through, and ponder just what they were getting into. Vietnam also may be viewed as a disturbing demonstration of the extent to which a great and powerful nation, with the very best of intentions, if it lacks knowledge and understanding of local realities, can misjudge a situation profoundly and be forced to pay a lamentable price in blood and treasure. M u c h of the foregoing makes President Kennedy and his advisers appear most unwise in retrospect. But that is easier to con-

BRIAN VANDEMARK

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elude now than it was then. Putting oneself in the shoes of policymakers at the time is more difficult and painful. They thought they were doing the right thing by trying to help the people of South Vietnam. But they neither looked at nor gave sufficient weight to a worst-case analysis, to what could go wrong. They became prisoners of their own assumptions.

A WAY OF T H I N K I N G

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Notes i. 2. 3.

Congressional Record, April 6, 1954, p. 4679. See Osgood Caruthers, "Victory Seen by Russian," New York Times, Jan. 19, 1961. PwWi'c Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, ig6i (Washington, D . C . : G P O , 1962), pp. 1 - 3 .

4. 5.

Dean Rusk, As I Saw It (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), p. 43 5. David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972), p. 76.

6.

Benjamin C. Bradlee, Conversations with Kennedy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), p- 59-

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From the Colorado to the Mekong Lloyd C. Gardner At 9 p.m. on April 7, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson stepped to the podium in an auditorium at Johns Hopkins University and into the glare of television lights. T h e first real stirrings of uneasiness about Vietnam had brought him there, and he was determined to place the war into a proper Cold War framework. "We will not be defeated. We will not grow tired. We will not withdraw, either openly or under the cloak of a meaningless agreement." W h a t fateful vows these were, underlined in the slow cadence Johnson always used to convey resolve: "We will not be defeated. W e will not grow tired. We will not withdraw." These were warnings, moreover, not only to the enemies of the Saigon regime but also to Americans. "We must stay in Southeast Asia—as we did in E u r o p e — i n the words of the Bible: 'Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.'" There were disturbing signs that some members of the Cold War establishment, influenced by foreign criticism or perhaps by the teach-in movement starting on college campuses, had been made more than a little apprehensive by the decision to start bombing North Vietnam. "We know that air attacks alone will not accomplish all of these purposes," the president explained that night. "But it is our best and prayerful judgment that they are a necessary part of the surest road to peace." 1 Steadfastness was the theme, that evening—and afterwards, until the end of his term. But Johnson felt the need to do more than threaten. Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing campaign, had begun on March 2, 1965, and plans were being made for stepping up the war with more ground forces. In the Cuban missile crisis, the nation had rallied to the White House summons to stand fast against the latest communist threat, but this time things were different. The first Vietnam teach-in was held at the University of Michigan on March 24. A week later, a conference of nonaligned nations meeting in Belgrade called upon the interested parties to begin negotiations "as soon as possible, without posing any preconditions." Meanwhile, on March 26, Johnson had told his national security adviser McGeorge Bundy to draft a statement the president could

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use to reply to critics and to rally support. Interestingly, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara felt that Bundy needed to come out "a little stronger" on economic development, to go with the theme of unwavering resistance to aggression. "I have also wanted to include enough history," Bundy wrote the president when he submitted the results, "to keep us straight in the line started by Eisenhower and continued by Kennedy. T h e Kennedy quotations are designed to give us protection and encouragement with some of the 'liberals' w h o are falsely telling each other that your policy is different from his." 2 Also attached to his draft were some final words of encouragem e n t — a n d caution: "This may well be the most important foreign policy speech you have yet prepared." Johnson read over Bundy's effort and told another close aide, Jack Valenti, and speechwriter Richard Goodwin, the principal author of the 1964 Great Society speech, to convert it into a presidential-style address. Get more into it about American willingness to commit large sums to the economic development of Southeast Asia, he instructed, and specifically say something about the Mekong River project, a p r o posed system of dams to rationalize irrigation patterns and bring electrification to a broad area across national boundaries that reminded the president of the N e w Deal's Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). 3 Valenti's research discovered that the Mekong project, under United Nations supervision, was still progressing despite the war in Vietnam and strained relations between Saigon and the cooperating nations, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand. Fourteen million dollars had been spent thus far on preliminary work needed to design a program to manage water and land for the population of twenty million, mostly rice farmers, w h o lived in the regions through which the lower Mekong flowed. The American contribution, Valenti emphasized, had been only about $5 million, less than the cost of four days of military aid. "Send to Goodwin this a.m.," Johnson scrawled on Valenti's report. 4 If the North Vietnamese ceased their aggression, Goodwin's draft promised, linking both the promise of the Great Society and the liberal heritage of the N e w Deal to American objectives in Vietnam, they would find the United States eager to help them overcome the bondage of material misery. " T h e vast Mekong River

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can provide food and water and power on a scale to dwarf even our own TVA." "In the countryside where I was born," the proposed speech continued, now in the form of an emotional reminiscence about what the N e w Deal had accomplished with the Rural Electrification Authority, "and where I live, I have seen the night illuminated, and the kitchen warmed, and the home heated, where once the cheerless night and the ceaseless cold held sway. And all this happened because electricity came to our area along the humming wires of the RE A." Following the model in Europe, where the Marshall Plan followed the Truman Doctrine, Johnson was pledging the nation to do something more than merely contain the communists—in fact, a lot more. Above all, however, he had deemed it essential to show that what had worked in America would work in Southeast Asia. Nebulous plans for a series of dams on the Mekong River and the proposed offer of $i billion alarmed the State Department, which argued for taking out that section because "we didn't have a plan for using it [the money]." That missed the point, replied the president's aides, w h o restored the billion-dollar offer. "I see you put this back in," observed Johnson. "That's good." 5 W h e r e America's philosopher William James had once lamented the need for a moral equivalent of war to move men's hearts to do good, Johnson was in search of a moral equivalent of the N e w Deal to move men's spirits to fight a war, not accurate estimates of bulldozers and tons of concrete. Satisfied with what his aides had prepared, Johnson read the final product to a delegation of twentyfive Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). They "received it with enthusiasm." As the ADA delegation started to leave, Johnson asked members of the National Security Council to come into the Cabinet Room. "It would be good for them to rub shoulders" with the ADA. 6 Although invocations of the N e w Deal spirit were a sure bet to provide a palliative for nervous ADAers, there was more to it than a need to calm queasy liberals. Johnson's whole career was the politics of economic development. His decision to focus on the p r o posed Mekong River project, a plan that had been bouncing around in United Nations specialized agencies for some time, had

A Moral Equivalent

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evolved, in the first place, from what he remembered about the project from 1961, when as vice president he toured Vietnam and Asia for President Kennedy. But the Mekong also resonated with Johnson's earliest political memories and for that reason added to the confidence (and urgency) he felt about Vietnam. Far more than Kennedy, Johnson had entwined his political career with both the evidence for and ideology of a positive role for government in the economic development of backward regions, whether as a newly elected Roosevelt stalwart in Congress in the thirties, or as Senate majority leader in the Cold War calling for more spending on space projects. Uncomfortable around the "Harvards," a term of opprobrium he used for eastern intellectuals, he fully shared the highly ideological world outlook expressed about Vietnam in current National Security Council estimates of the stakes of the war. O n e planner in the council, for example, had suggested to McGeorge Bundy that the president say something like: The issue goes well beyond Vietnam or Southeast Asia. Free men everywhere must oppose by every possible means the stifling of the human spirit in any part of the world. We are determined that no more doors be slammed, no more windows be shut, on the free flow of ideas and peoples and goods. For it is on this that the promise of twentieth century man depends—whatever his color, wherever his home. 7

Another memorandum in Bundy's office elaborated on these same themes, providing perhaps the best summary of N e w Frontier and Great Society views of the evolving relationship between social forces inside and outside the United States. Historians of the future, it began, might designate the sixties as the decade when "our civilization fashioned so painfully since the Reformation could be said to have reached its end." If that happened, it would likely not be because of nuclear cataclysm but rather a result of a new polarization of the world between the poor, the restless, and the nonwhite peoples, led or pushed by China, as opposed to Europe and North America. "We will find ourselves in a virtual state of siege," predicted the writer: The West, of course, still can survive as a political grouping and even as a culture. We will still maintain overwhelming military 40

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power in the sense that we could at any time reduce the land mass of Asia and of Africa to ashes. But this would provide us with slim comfort. . . . In the last analysis, the West must preserve (or at least not willingly and voluntarily default) its access to, communications with, and benign influence on the peoples of Asia and Africa. We have much that is worthwhile to offer and much to gain. Our society and theirs can be enriched and nourished by the two-way flow of ideas and goods and peoples. China has chosen to slam its doors, at least for the present. We and the other peoples of the world cannot afford to see any more doors close, for every door that closes quickens the pace of rich-poor, colored-white, NorthSouth division of the world. 8

Johnson had taken Goodwin's draft to Camp David the weekend before the speech. H e had invited an old friend from N e w Deal years, economist Arthur "Tex" Goldschmidt, now director of special funds at the United Nations, to join him at the presidential retreat. Goldschmidt had been the first to call the M e k o n g project to Johnson's attention back in 1961, as the vice president was preparing to leave on his mission to Southeast Asia. Hearing about the trip, Goldschmidt had asked to see Johnson to tell him about the Mekong project. W h e n they met, the economist went over the history of the project, explaining h o w it fit into plans for the long-range economic development of the region and its equally important potential as an example of h o w four countries, with differing political views, could work together effectively "even in a period otherwise characterized by a lot of fussing." 9 Johnson was intrigued. "It's a great thing," he told Goldschmidt, "when people of such different cultures can get together on power." 1 0 Johnson was still learning about the M e k o n g proposals when he met in Saigon with President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam in mid-May of 1961. H e left Vietnam feeling unsure of whether he had got across to Diem Kennedy's concern about the need for serious economic and administrative reforms, a feeling that continued to trouble him even as he moved as president to deepen the American commitment. 1 1 In Bangkok a day or so after leaving Saigon, he followed up Goldschmidt's suggestion that he seek out U Nyun, the executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East, to talk about the Mekong. The conversation went very well, as N y u n declared that the FROM THE C O L O R A D O TO THE MEKONG

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project envisioned not only dams and conservation plans but also highway construction "to span the Asian continent from Saigon to Singapore to Istanbul and Ankara," linking "old caravan routes and existing roads to provide an international highway that eventually will connect Asia and Europe." At this point, the vice president interrupted U Nyun, "rose from his chair, put his hands into his pockets, jingled some silver coins, and then said: 'You know, Mr. Executive Secretary, I am a river man. All my life I have been interested in rivers and their development.'" 1 2 What Goldschmidt later reemphasized to Johnson during that weekend at Camp David, just before the Johns Hopkins speech, was probably along the lines of what he had written in a more recent article on the U.S. government's role in the development of the American South and Southwest in the N e w Deal years. At that time, Tex Goldschmidt and Johnson had both been interested in the Lower Colorado River Authority, Goldschmidt as a planner, Johnson as a politician. They used to meet in Washington in those days on Goldschmidt's porch in Georgetown to discuss a report Roosevelt had requested on economic backwardness in the South. Writing later about that report, Goldschmidt noted that the South in the thirties had existed as "a kind of colony of the U.S." The traditional antidote to colonialism was obviously not available to the region. "Only economic integration with the nation as a whole could cure the South and close the North-South gap. And this integration could only be accomplished by Federal action. There is a direct parallel today in the economic development of the former colonial regions of the world." 1 3 T h e two most important government interventions, asserted Goldschmidt, were in "land reform" (broadly conceived to include improvements in farm credits and marketing) and irrigation p r o grams all the way from the TVA down to micromanagement of small streams in hills and gullies. "Water conservation and development projects, led by the pace-making Tennessee Valley Authority program, brought navigation channels, flood control projects, and power to the region." The South also provided an example of what the Third World was undergoing as economic development had been accompanied there by social upheaval and the shattering of traditional patterns of living. "In this situation fear of the future and nostalgia for the past occasionally outweigh courage and eager-

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ness for progress. But the forces of Southern development and the nation's need for that development will not be denied." It was ironic, he continued, that the region that has presented to the world such a disturbing picture of human relations should also hold out to the emerging nations such an important message bearing on their own concerns: Economic development is too important to leave to the blind play of economic forces; it can be hastened or hindered by the intervention of policies designed to increase production and promote welfare. And the process is strengthened by outside assistance. The rich nations of the world will have to do for the poor nations what the Federal Government of the U.S. did for the South.

Johnson had thanked him for the article on the South, writing, "We are in a better position to handle some of the problems of the developing countries because of the problems we faced so recently in developing our own." 1 4 T h e president returned from Camp David on Monday, April 5, confident that he was in a better position to head off defections and that he had the right mix for this speech that McGeorge Bundy had suggested could be his "most important foreign policy speech." At the final prespeech conference it was decided to "beef up the specifics" by asking Eugene Black, a former head of the International Bank, to "move on the problem now." Bundy thought this was "fine" and would "neutralize Fulbright." Senator William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had begun expressing his concern about Vietnam and what he would soon call "the arrogance of power." There was something in the speech, as well, for critics outside government, particularly Walter Lippmann, w h o had become infected, it appeared, with a virulent strain of "neutralism" that blew in to North America from Paris. White House aides were satisfied the president had succeeded in turning things around. T h e speech had brought a "sharp reversal in the heavy flow of critical mail" to the White House. From four or five to one against the administration's policy, letters and telegrams were now running four or five to one in favor. In particular, his offer of economic aid had brought strong expressions of approval, albeit mixed with some concern about paying what Republican Senator Everett Dirksen had called "tribute" to an enemy. Dirk-

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sen's response, however, only helped ensure liberal support for the war. "Significant numbers of writers," concluded the report, "note the pride they felt in the President and the country while listening to the address. Others mentioned a new feeling of optimism and relief—of new hope for the future." All in all, a more than satisfactory result. 15 Johnson was not the first to call the Mekong project a TVA for Southeast Asia. Fittingly enough, Roosevelt's former head of the TVA, David Lilienthal, suggested that name in a letter to Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles on February 9, 1961. H e and his colleagues, he wrote Bowles, were currently working on a similar project in the "heart of the ancient Persian Empire." 1 6 Quoting an article he had recently written on developmental aid, Lilienthal emphasized his belief that "the political affairs of men and nations have always been profoundly affected by water." T h e proposition that there was a link between rivers and political affairs, he observed, "also applies with special force to the Mekong as the key river in Southeast Asia." Bowles needed no convincing. H e believed that Lilienthal's TVA experience made him a perfect guide to find the way to meet the communist challenge. "May I say I was deeply gratified to see how clearly you understand that the TVA idea and method," Lilienthal responded, "represent a great political asset of the United States in parts of the world other than our own." 1 7 Seven years later the war in Vietnam had become a national nightmare, but Lilienthal had not given up on the Mekong idea. W h e n he and Johnson met in the fall of 1967, the president recalled how they had begun together in the Great Depression. Looking straight ahead as a horde of photographers entered the Oval Office, Johnson mused about his hopes that "we can divert the resources that are now going into destruction to the very things Dave here has been talking about, building the country and helping its people." 1 8 The Frontier Legacy

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Lyndon Johnson had arrived in Washington in 1931—before the N e w Deal—as political secretary to a newly elected conservative Democrat, Representative Richard Kleberg, whose family owned the fabulous King Ranch. Johnson's father, Sam Ealy, had eked out a precarious living in the parched Texas Hill Country, with occa-

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sional stints in the state legislature. His party connections helped Lyndon leave school-teaching for politics. Sam Ealy was a populistoriented Democrat, and he and his cronies had filled the Johnson living room and front porch with talk about w h o was responsible for their plight in bad times. Johnson was only twenty-seven when President Roosevelt named him to head the Texas office of the National Youth Administration (NYA), a N e w Deal agency charged with helping young people stay in school. H e welcomed the challenge. "Those were the great days," he would say later. Johnson worked terribly hard not only to find sponsors and sources of revenue beyond government appropriation but also to enable black people to receive at least some of the available NYA benefits. It was especially important to change the lives of youth, he believed, because that was the best chance to break the poverty cycle. 19 Lady Bird Johnson recalled that her husband took time off to see the 1940 film ofJohn Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath "and sat in his seat crying quietly for about two hours at the helpless misery of the Okies. I do not think he has ever forgotten it." 2 0 Like other N e w Dealers, Johnson was enthusiastic about (and probably a bit amazed by) the discovery that government really did have immense powers to change the life of Steinbeck's downtrodden Okies. H e saw it happening with Texas youth. Johnson benefited from FDR's patronage from the outset of his career. Despite doubts about his youth, the president had listened to Maury Maverick, Sam Rayburn, and the Texas senators in 1935 and appointed him to head the Texas NYA office. But Johnson always saw his future in the capital and vowed to return to Washington as a member of Congress. T h e sudden death ofJames B. Buchanan created an opening for Johnson to run in a special election for the Tenth Congressional District seat in April 1937. H e conducted this first campaign for Congress like an oath of fealty to Roosevelt and the N e w Deal—at a time when Texas Democrats and other southern politicians were beginning to pull back from all-out support for FDR's reform program. His votes in Congress generally reflected a populist agenda, favoring welfare measures and public power projects, highly patriotic, and cautious about civil rights and too much government regulation. 21 FDR took to Johnson immediately. Over the next

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four years Johnson's private lobbying efforts in the White House helped to produce $14 million in funds for various Texas dams and millions more for other purposes, and to turn Brown and Root from a small road-building company into a multimillion-dollar business. 22 Tommy Corcoran, a Roosevelt intimate put in charge of tending to Johnson's needs, would say, with good reason, "Lyndon J o h n son's whole world was built on that dam." 2 3 George and Herman Brown did not want anyone to think, however, that they or their friend Lyndon Johnson were "public power" advocates. " H e wasn't trying to revolutionize public power all over the United States," George Brown said ofJohnson; "he never had that idea in his mind." H e simply wanted to improve the Tenth District, and the only way was "to have something like the TVA." 2 4 While happy to accept the funds Washington provided his company for the dam, Herman Brown sometimes raved and ranted about N e w Deal spending, causing Johnson to snap back, "What are you worried about? It's not coming out of your pocket. Any money that's spent down here on N e w Deal projects, the East is paying for." Roosevelt was the first president to give the South a break. 25 Johnson might not have been trying to "revolutionize public power," but he certainly sounded those themes in speeches to Texas citizens, urging them to form rural cooperatives to buy power from the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA). If the people did not act, he wrote to an Austin newspaper, "the power companies will be the chief beneficiaries of this huge government investment, supposedly made in the interest of the people of Texas." 26 In a 1939 radio address, moreover, Johnson envisioned the whole region sharing in the ultimate success of the LCRA and electric cooperatives. It was high time, he said, that the physical resources of the South, and the profits therefrom, stayed in the South: Our private utilities in Texas are owned in New York. We have sold our Texas gas and oil to other corporations owned in New York. We have sold our cattle to be processed with New York capital. We have sold our cotton to be processed with New York and London capital. We have sold our cheap labor to be processed in New York and Massachusetts. What resource haven't we sold to be processed somewhere else?

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" W h e n we have begun the conservation of our natural resources," Johnson ended, only then can we "enter into our proportional share of industrial activity." By such means would the South rise, at last, to its proper place in the nation, no longer subordinate to the North and East, and a contributor as well to "the raising of the standards in other sections of the country." 2 7 At the University of Texas in Austin, historian Walter Prescott Webb, w h o would occasionally advise Johnson in the fifties, had written a book about the crisis of democracy in a frontierless society. Webb explored all of these themes and even provided a bridge to connect the views of the Browns and Johnson about Roosevelt's N e w Deal. In the years since the Civil War, he wrote, the North had established a feudal system that put the South and West in thrall, well-to-do and poor alike. Anyone could look out his window at the university and see what that feudalism meant: If I could paint a picture representing the general scene, it would be in the form of a great field stretching from Virginia and Florida westward to the Pacific and from Texas and California northward to Canada, an L-shaped region comprising nearly four-fifths of the country. Here millions of people would be playing a game with pennies, nickels, dimes and dollars, rolling them northward and eastward where they are being stacked almost to the moon. 28

Roosevelt's peaceful revolution had, for the first time since the Civil War, challenged the rules of the game. But could FDR sustain a middle course between fascism and socialism? That depended on whether he could find a quick way out of the crisis before powerful forces swept the N e w Deal into the still-deepening "chasm between the increasing poor and the decreasing number of increasingly rich corporations." 2 9 To prevent this final catastrophe, Roosevelt needed support from an alliance between the South and the West. A hopeful sign was the budding cooperation of political leaders from those sections on the public-utilities question. Ultimately, it would come down to the feudal lords themselves: They can now decentralize industry through electric power; they can co-operate more with the government, state and national, if they will; they can more generously pour out their largesses to education in those sections from whence their wealth comes. FROM THE C O L O R A D O TO THE MEKONG

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America is too rich for them to own, too independent for them to rule, too wise, we hope, for them to fool indefinitely.30

From Johnson's and Webb's perspective, Roosevelt's great mistake before the war was the court-packing scheme. It diverted national attention from the attempt to redraw lines of c o m m o n interest between the West and South and gave N e w Deal opponents a club with which to smash the new alliance. William Jennings Bryan had made the same mistake in the tragic campaign of 1896, when Free Silver frightened the bejabbers out of traditional Democrats. What people in the South and West wanted, Johnson would say, was to "live American lives." 31 That opportunity came with World War II. Johnson failed in a first attempt to win election to the Senate in 1941 and began to feel somewhat stymied in the House of Representatives. Obtaining a commission, he went into the Navy after Pearl Harbor but returned w h e n Roosevelt recalled all m e m bers of Congress to legislative duties. From that vantage point, Johnson watched the war transform his section of the country and the fortunes of his most powerful backers. T h e dam builders Brown and Root became shipbuilders for the Navy. They built 355 vessels during the war and, as George Brown recalled in 1969, reached up to higher plateaus: After the war we had these engineers whom we'd accumulated building ships and designing all the inside of the ships. We put them to work on chemical plants and industrial plants of all kinds, power plants, and became a very large integrated engineeringconstruction concern—which we are now. We're one of the biggest involved in the construction-engineering business in the United States and overseas.32

They formed a triumvirate, said George Brown—Alvin Wirtz (a powerful Texas Democrat), Lyndon Johnson, and himself. Lyndon, according to Brown, swore that "we will not let any of our friends or enemies come between us as long as we are alive." What bound them together, he added, was a set of c o m m o n feelings about the "burning questions of free-enterprise and socialist forms of government" and the belief that Johnson thought as they did about the need to "have good government to keep from having a socialist form of government.'' 3 3 H o w socialism was to be avoided apparently depended not simply on abstract philosophical agreements but also on an activist 48

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"good government" promoting companies like Brown and Root. A major military contractor in the Cold War, Brown and Root spread worldwide, from Thailand to Haiti to Australia to the Persian Gulf, and to South Vietnam, as builders of military infrastructure. W i t h an annual volume of $1.77 billion, it had become by 1969 the nation's largest construction company. 34 As Brown and Root went, so did the economy of the Southwest. Thus the war did for the region what Alexander Hamilton's economic plans for funding the national debt did for the new American republic. If the original N e w Deal spirit across the South and West was Jeffersonian in origin, it emerged after the war in modern-dress Hamiltonian garb. Johnson biographer Robert Dallek notes the changed outlook: "Where before 1941 southern state governments saw white supremacy and social stability as their primary goals, after that, encouraged by a Roosevelt administration which saw the war partly as a chance to transform the southern economy, business and industrial development became their central purpose." 3 5 Johnson's personal fortunes were transformed as well. Johnson turned down an offer of oil lands from Texas supporters, w h o said they wanted to make him "independent" of private pressures, out of fear that it would damage his political career. W i t h the help of George Brown and other friends, however, he and Lady Bird did acquire a radio station in Austin for $17,500 in 1943 that became the basis for a variety of holdings that would one day be estimated at $14 million. 36 T h e Cold War promised more and more wealth for Texas, stimulated by military spending, and Johnson operated from the center of the scramble. As a member of the House Armed Services subcommittees concerned with industrial mobilization, he fought for large defense budgets and special support for the development of the synthetics industry. "In an age of synthetics," Johnson promised, "Texas—as the fountainhead of natural gas and oil— may easily become the kingpin state in a new industrial age." 3 7 Newly prosperous Texas Democrats saw little for themselves, on the other hand, in the domestic side of Harry Truman's Fair Deal. T h e anti-government, anti-labor union trend that began in the later Roosevelt years accelerated after the war in line with the entrepreneurial spirit that dominated the state. W h a t survived through his Senate years was his Texas "nationalism," which adapted itself easily from attacks on "foreign-owned" FROM THE C O L O R A D O TO T

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private power companies to defense of the Texas oil and gas industry against "big government." W h e r e Walter Prescott Webb feared that in the end the West would succumb to the same semicolonial fate as the South, a later historian, Donald Worcester, now wrote that it was in reality an empire—transformed by the war from an empire in intention to one in being, from the source of strength for others to a master's role. "Indeed, since the war it has become a principal seat of the world-ordering American Empire." 3 8 In a statement to the Democratic Congressional Conference on January 7, 1958, Johnson expanded on a wide variety of long-time themes in his career. Johnson began with a post-Sputnik discussion of what would happen if the government did not win the contest for developing space with the Russians: Control of space means control of the world, far more certainly, far more totally than any control that has ever or could ever be achieved by weapons, or by troops of occupation. From space, the masters of infinity would have the power to control the earth's weather, to cause drouth and flood, to change the tides and raise the levels of the sea, to divert the gulf stream and change temperate climates to frigid.39

Yet if "men of selfish purpose" were dedicated to those goals, Johnson continued, it was also true that "men wholly dedicated to freedom" could thwart their evil design. They could create a world at last liberated from tyranny, and from the fear of war. "There is something more important than any ultimate weapon. That is the ultimate position—the position of total control over earth that lies somewhere out in space." Johnson then described all the things that had to be done to regain supremacy in space. In the next breath, however, he ticked off what had to be done in nonmilitary ways to get the country moving—and that turned out to be a traditional liberal agenda dealing with unemployment, farm p r o b lems, education, housing, and small business. T h e speech ended with a plea that the goals of the "human race" were too great to be divided as spoils, too great for wasted efforts in a blind race between competitive nations. " T h e conference table is more important now than ever it has been, and we should welcome to its chairs men of all nations." 4 0 Johnson cosponsored the bill that created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), but as biographer Robert

GARDNER

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Dallek notes, he was turning to other issues. Jim Rowe (another old N e w Deal collaborator) told him that "speaking solely from a selfish point of view," he had gained all there was to gain from space and missiles: "You have received a tremendous press, increased your national stature and got away scot-free without a scratch. . . . T h e obvious new issue . . . is unemployment." 4 1 Johnson always believed that the challenge of Sputnik was crucial to the revolution of the sixties. It reopened minds to the power of the federal government to accomplish things undreamed of, not only in outer space, but also at h o m e and in other parts of the world, to halt the spread of communism. People began to understand, and to ask, said Johnson, if you can send a man to the moon, w h y can't you do something for grandma with Medicare? W h e r e Kennedy felt the adventure of space, writes historian Walter McDougall, Johnson viewed the space program as demonstrating the role government could play, and should play, an assignment handed down by some Promethean party boss in the form of command technology and federal management. To Eisenhower, the essence of courage was to resist the temptation to use dangerous tools; to Johnson, the essence of courage was to take them up in a good cause. Whether in decaying cities, outer space, or Third World jungles, American technology would overwhelm the enemies of dignity.42

W h a t the Depression had done to spur government to action with the N e w Deal, Sputnik now did to launch the N e w Frontier and the Great Society. Neither Kennedy nor Johnson thought the N e w Deal experience ought to be repeated. Indeed, they believed that it must not be repeated. T h e N e w Deal legacy was not simply golden memories of Franklin Delano Roosevelt; it was also a legacy of highly charged political beliefs that had divided the country ever since. N o w quiescent, there were all sorts of signs that long repressed passions were gathering force behind the bland face of Eisenhowerera politics, especially in the schools and churches of the South. Inevitably, these movements would find their focus in the D e m o cratic Party. Whether this was because insurgent views found a natural home in the party of Wilson and Roosevelt or, as Johnson aide Harry McPherson argued, because Democratic candidates and presidents themselves believed that American electoral politics demanded that they undertake such a mission, the resulting burden

FROM THE C O L O R A D O TO THE

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for the party was the same: how to shape the politics of protest without losing control. 43 " T h e biggest danger to American stability," Johnson told Doris Kearns, "is the politics of principle, which brings out the masses in irrational fights for unlimited goals, for once the masses begin to move, then the whole thing begins to explode." 4 4 Democrats were better off out of power developing a consensus around achievable goals, with the agenda limited to the reforms necessary to those goals, the way Johnson had done in his January 1958 speech to the Democratic conference. Looked at this way, Johnson's (and Kennedy's) espousal of the space program became a choice in favor of a new frontier, whose settlement invoked memories of government intervention in the economy in the century past, rather than a reckless romance with the siren of technocracy. O n the other hand, one must be careful, as space historian McDougall is, never to exclude technology's influence over Americans (especially in the atomic age), not only as a preferred alternative to ideology or the "politics of principle," but as a shameless seducer as well of presidents seeking guidance in foreign affairs. If one could go to the moon, one could help grandma with new medical miracles, and one could persuade H o Chi Minh to accept a dam on the Mekong. 4 5 Like Johnson, Walter Prescott Webb got hooked on the space program. As late as 1951, the Texas historian had believed that civilization was still suffering "a great pain in the heart" at the closing of the frontier, "and we are always trying to get it back again." After Sputnik he wrote to Johnson with delight that he had apparently settled on the closing of the frontier too soon. H o w fitting it was, then, that the area "last to be occupied by the AngloAmerican civilization," as Webb n o w described the once downtrodden Southwest, should become the launching pad for the thrust into outer space. 46 Johnson secured a special place for an original essay by Webb in the 1961 inaugural program. Webb's "Tribute to the Southwest" was a brief recounting of the impact of the desert on the pioneers w h o encountered it, a rhapsodic ode to the "warm blanket" that spread across that part of the continent, and to the ribbony green rivers that cut through the aridness, making irrigation and cities possible. It was as opposite in m o o d from his Depression-era writings as it was possible to be. 47 52

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O n the helicopter ride back to the White House after the Johns Hopkins speech, the president told his press secretary and confidant Bill Moyers, "old H o can't turn me down." 4 8 Moyers marveled at Johnson's continuing faith that such assumptions had anything to do with ending the war in Vietnam. Moyers recalled other conversations: " H e ' d say, 'My God, I've offered H o Chi Minh $100 million to build a Mekong Valley. If that'd been George Meany he'd have snapped at it!'" 4 9 As the war deepened from misadventure into tragedy, Johnson clung all the harder to an abstract vision of Vietnam transformed just as the Texas Hill Country had been transformed. "I want to leave the footprints of America in Vietnam," he said in 1966. "I want them to say w h e n the Americans come, this is what they leave—schools, not long cigars. We're going to turn the Mekong into a Tennessee Valley." 50 N o n e of it came to pass, of course. The other war that Johnson yearned to fight in Vietnam kept being postponed. H e was going out to Guam to meet with South Vietnamese leaders and to get some new things started, Johnson told journalist D r e w Pearson in early 1967. H e was thinking of a new team. "I am taking along Dave Lilienthal to work on a sort of a TVA of the M e k o n g River. If we can get those things started, we'll really be getting someplace." 51 At the Guam conference, however, General William C. Westmoreland told his civilian superiors that it would take another 200,000 men and a decade to win the war. Lilienthal himself gave the best account ofJohnson's reaction to that shocker: The look on the President's face! (I was seated to his right, where I could see him in profile.) Ten years, my God! . . . Ten years. I imagined I could read the President's mind: think of the mothers of eight-year-old kids; could they possibly face up to that? And should the bombing be greatly increased, as the soldiers recommended, to avoid that impossible ten-year agony? 52

If the Guam conference finally put all thoughts of a Vietnamese TVA far beyond any hope of realization during his administration, the summer of 1967 saw hopes for victory in the war on poverty fading as well. Americans have been called naive and sentimental imperialists in Asia. Some Vietnam revisionists have argued that the war was lost because Washington tried to build a political democracy and institute rapid economic development before it had secured the surrounding territory. As General Maxwell Taylor put FROM THE C O L O R A D O TO T

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it in his memoirs, we tried to plant corn outside the stockade before we had eliminated the Indian menace. N o doubt Johnson erred in believing that the power of the U.S. government to change the lives of the poor could reach all the way from the Colorado to the Mekong, but it was not his error alone. W h e n President George Bush averred that the United States had kicked the Vietnam syndrome during the Gulf War in 1991, he was rewriting the history of that American tragedy as melodrama. From the outset of the Cold War, as Robert Divine so cogently reminds us, the competition between East and West shifted geographically and politically. T h e point would seem to be not that Lyndon Johnson was unique but that his sense of the need for Vietnam as proof of the superiority of American-style nationbuilding was so typical of the generation that had seen the N e w Deal transform the latent power of the government into a dynamic force for modernization. "In the last analysis," wrote the anonymous National Security Council planner in early 1965, "the West must preserve (or at least not willingly and voluntarily default) its access to, communications with, and benign influence on the peoples of Asia and Africa." Thirty years later the first American trade fair opened in Hanoi, two decades after the fall of Saigon. It is sometimes argued that the American war in Vietnam bought time for the newly emerging countries of Southeast Asia to develop free from the domination of world communism. It could just as easily be argued that Vietnam's war for independence opened the opportunity, at last, for Lyndon Johnson's offer to be taken up—should it be made again now that there is no distorting Cold War struggle to be waged over and within the world's poorest countries.

GARDNER

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Notes 1.

The Johns Hopkins speech is reprinted in a useful collection of documents that provide its context: U.S. Senate, Foreign Relations Committee, Background Information Relating to Southeast Asia and Vietnam, 90th Cong., 1st sess., 1967, Committee Print, pp. 148-153.

2.

Bundy to LBJ, March 28, 1965, National Security File, Country File, Vietnam, box 15, Johnson Papers, LBJ Library.

3.

Jack Valenti Notes, "The Johns Hopkins Speech," n.d., Statements File, box 143, Johnson Papers; Rutherford Poats to Valenti, March 26, 1965, NSF, Country File, Vietnam, box 15, Johnson Papers; Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking Press, 1983), p. 418; Richard N . Goodwin, Remembering America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), pp. 272-278.

4. 5.

Valenti to LBJ, March 29, 1965, Handwriting File, box 6, Johnson Papers. Valenti Notes, "Johns Hopkins Speech."

6. 7.

Ibid. Chester Cooper to Bundy, n.d. [ca. March 28, 1965], NSF, Country File, Vietnam, box 15, Johnson Papers.

8.

Unsigned Memorandum, Feb. [?], 1965, NSF, International Travel, boxes 28—29, Johnson Papers. The memo has notes in McGeorge Bundy's handwriting, but the basic themes were common enough in Bundy's day and in that of his successor, Walt Rostow.

9.

Goldschmidt to LBJ, May 4, 1961, Confidential Files, "Mekong River," box 167, Johnson Papers. Box 167 hereafter referred to as "Mekong River."

10. Merle Miller, Lyndon: An Oral Biography (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1980), p. 466. 11. Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963—ig6g (New York: Popular Library, 1971), p. 57. 12. United Nations Press Services, "U.N.-Aided Projects in Asia Discussed in Visit of United States Vice-President to ECAFE Headquarters," Press Release ECAFE/88, May 17, 1961, and Cesar Ortiz-Tinoco, "Mr. Johnson's Visit to ECAFE," undated, both in "Mekong River." 13. This and subsequent quotations are from Goldschmidt, "The Development of the U.S. South," attached to Goldschmidt to LBJ, Sept. 24, 1963, "Mekong River." 14. LBJ to Goldschmidt, Sept. 24, 1963, "Mekong River." 15. Chester L. Cooper, "Memorandum for the Record," April 13, 1965, NSF, National Security Council Histories, box 41, Johnson Papers. 16. Lilienthal to Bowles, Feb. 9, 1961, box 433, Lilienthal Papers, Mudd Library, Princeton University. 17. Ibid. 18. Diary Entry, Dec. 9, 1967, box 512, Lilienthal Papers. 19. Philip Reed Rulon, The Compassionate Samaritan: The Life of Lyndon Baines Johnson (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1981), p. 61. W h e n he was deciding how to approach problems of poverty in the Great Society years, Johnson naturally turned back to the NYA, modeling the Job Corps after that N e w Deal agency. George Reedy adds the important point that Johnson always valued education and educators for one

FROM THE COLORADO TO THE MEKONG

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55

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thing: what it and they could accomplish for "the cotton fields and the slums." Reedy, Lyndon B.Johnson (New York: Andrews & McNeal, 1982), pp. 2 2 - 2 3 . 20. Claudia T. Johnson, A White House Diary (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970), p. 156. 21. For a brief summary, see Paul Conkin, Big Daddy from the Pedernales: Lyndon Baines Johnson (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986), pp. 88—90. 22. Robert Dallek, Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, igo8- ig6o (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 174-176. 23. Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power (New York: Knopf, 1982), p. 469. 24. George Brown Interview 2, July 11, 1977, Oral History, LBJ Library, p. 8. 25. Caro, Path to Power, pp. 471-472. 26. Dallek, Lone Star Rising, p. 178. 27. Undated partial transcript, 1939, Handwriting File, box 1, Johnson Papers. 28. Walter Prescott Webb, Divided We Stand: The Crisis of a Frontierless Democracy (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1937), pp. 8 6 - 8 7 . 29. Ibid., p. 220. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

Ibid., pp. 238-239. Undated partial transcript, 1939. Brown Interview 2, Aug. 6, 1969, pp. 10—11. Brown Interview 1, April 6, 1968, pp. 2 3 - 2 4 , 7 - 8 . Chandler Davidson, Race and Class in Texas Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 68.

35. Dallek, Lone Star Rising, p. 293. 36. Brown Interview 1, pp. 1 2 - 1 3 . Friendly and unfriendly biographers alike are fascinated by Johnson's agglomeration of personal wealth. In addition to Dallek and Caro, see, for example, Miller, Lyndon, pp. 105, 304. Clearly, Johnson felt uncomfortable about revealing how he acquired his money. Ronnie Dugger finds the roots ofJohnson's later credibility problems in his largely successful efforts to hide from public view the manipulations of these years. Dugger's conclusion is one of a Faustian bargain unmatched in the nation's history: "By about 1958 his mature employment of these forms had evolved into a compound system for producing power and wealth from politics that in its range, professionalism, caution, and cynicism was unlike anything known before in the American democracy." Dugger, The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), pp. 382-385. 37. Dallek, Lone Star Rising, p. 293. 38. Donald Worcester, Rivers of Empire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), pp. 14-1539. Statement of the Democratic Leader . . . , Jan. 7, 1958, Statements File, box 23, Johnson Papers. 40. Ibid. 41. Dallek, Lone Star Rising, p. 532. 42. Walter McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, 1985), pp. 406-407. 43. McPherson interview, Oral History, LBJ Library, pp. 14—15. 44. Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 154. O n foreign policy specifically, LBJ also told Kearns that while the American people were usually apathetic, once they were aroused there was always

56

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the possibility of "a mass stampede, a violent overreaction to fear, an explosion of panic" as in the heyday of Senator Joseph McCarthy (p. 142). 45. The beginning of the credibility gap in American foreign policy should probably be attributed to Harry Truman's exaggeration of American atomic capabilities at the time of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not to LBJ's deviousness in the sixties. See Lloyd C. Gardner, "The Atomic Temptation," in Redefining the Past: Essays in Diplomatic History in Honor of William Appleman Williams, ed. Gardner (Corvallis: O r e gon State University Press, 1986), pp. 169-194. 46. McDougall, Heavens and the Earth, p. 388. McDougall also elaborates (in chap. 18) on the role that Webb's namesake, James Webb, played in the development of American space policy as head of NASA. James Webb was fascinated with the frontier historian's work, citing it in his own speeches. He was an absolute believer in the government-science-industry team pioneered by NASA as a model for combating communism in places like the Congo and Vietnam. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Inaugural program, Reference File, box 1, Johnson Papers. Karnow, Vietnam, p. 419. Miller, Lyndon, p. 466. Kearns, Lyndon Johnson, p. 267.

51. Notes by Drew Pearson, March 13, 1967, box G 246, Pearson Papers, LBJ Library. 52. David E. Lilienthal, The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, vol. 6: Creativity and Conflict (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), pp. 418-419.

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Hanoi's Response to American Policy, 1961-1965 Crossed Signals?

William J. Duiker In February 1965, the Johnson administration published a white paper entitled Aggression from the North: The Record of North Vietnam's Campaign to Conquer South Vietnam. T h e document claimed that in Vietnam the United States faced a "new kind of war." The conflict, it said, was unot a spontaneous and local rebellion against the established government." Rather, in Vietnam "a Communist government has set out deliberately to conquer a sovereign people in a neighboring state." To achieve its end, the paper concluded, "it has used every resource of its own government to carry out its carefully planned program of concealed aggression." 1 Few knowledgeable observers, least of all the leaders of that government in Hanoi, would today dispute the assertion that the ultimate objective of the North Vietnamese regime was to destroy the government in the South and reunify the country under C o m m u nist rule. But the white paper perhaps gave party leaders in Hanoi more credit than they deserved in ascribing to them a systematic program to achieve their objectives. In actuality, party strategists debated for several years before coming up with a successful plan to achieve national reunification. Perhaps the primary factor in hindering Hanoi's effort to come up with a winning strategy in the South was uncertainty over the attitude and possible reactions of the United States. T h e search for the proper means to bring an end to the division of the country began almost at the moment the leaders of the North (the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, or DRV) returned to Hanoi after the close of the Geneva Conference in the fall of 1954. T h e Geneva Accords, of course, had divided Vietnam into two separate regroupment zones, a Communist North and a n o n Communist South. T h e political declaration drafted at the close of the conference had called for national reunification to take place as the result of national elections held in both zones in 1956. Many

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northern leaders were clearly skeptical that such elections would ever take place, but for several reasons the regime decided to await the results of the process established at Geneva before turning to alternative means to reunify the country. O n e obvious factor was the need to shift attention to domestic reconstruction and the consolidation of Communist power in the North. A second was concern over the attitude of Hanoi's two major allies. Both the USSR and China had made it clear that they had no desire to bankroll a renewed effort by the North to achieve total power throughout Vietnam. A final factor was uncertainty over the possible response of the United States to a resumption of conflict in South Vietnam. In a speech to the Central Committee of the Vietnam Workers' Party in July 1954, DRV president H o Chi M i n h had given voice to such concerns. "Some people," he remarked, "intoxicated with our repeated victories, want to fight on at all costs, to a finish; . . . they see the French but not the Americans; they are partial to military action and make light of diplomacy." 2 After the summer of 1955, when it became clear that the n o n Communist government under President N g o Dinh Diem in Saigon had no intention of taking part in national elections, pressure within H o Chi Minh's Vietnam Workers' Party for a return to a policy of armed violence intensified. That attitude was especially prevalent among the party's followers who had remained in the South after the Geneva Conference. T h e political activities of such groups were being ruthlessly suppressed by the Diem regime. O n e vocal spokesman for a more aggressive policy in the South was Le Duan, Hanoi's leading representative in South Vietnam and a member of the party Politburo. In the fall of 1956, Le Duan presented a report to the party leadership entitled " T h e Path to Revolution in the South" ("Duong loi each mang mien N a m " ) . Although the report placed primary emphasis on the use of political techniques to achieve a reunification of the two zones, it recommended the limited use of armed struggle for self-defense purposes. 3 Le Duan's proposal had a significant impact on the party's strategy in South Vietnam, but the process of reorientation was a gradual one. Beginning in 1957, southern commanders were authorized to undertake limited self-defense measures to protect the movement against extermination at the hands of the D i e m HANOI'S RESPONSE TO AMERICAN POLICY

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government, which had now adopted the formal title "the Republic of Vietnam." In the meantime, Hanoi lobbied energetically with its major allies for recognition that in Vietnam, a "peaceful road to socialism" (the slogan adopted by the new party leadership under Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union) might not be feasible. As a clear sign that the advocates of a more aggressive approach in the South were gaining influence in Hanoi, in early 1957 Le Duan was recalled to the North to serve as acting general secretary of the party. Truong Chinh, the previous holder of the position, had been demoted as a result of problems encountered in the implementation of the regime's land reform campaign. 4 Still, party leaders shied away from adopting a clear-cut policy involving the use of revolutionary violence in the South. In part, the hesitation reflected disagreement over the precise kind of strategy to be adopted, but it also stemmed from the reluctance of some senior officials in Hanoi to place a higher priority on national reunification than on socialist transformation in North Vietnam. As an editorial in the party's newspaper Nhan Dan put it after a Central Committee plenum held in December 1956, "We must not allow the winning over of the South to detract from the requirements of consolidating the North." During the next two years party leaders stood irresolute at the abyss. According to party histories, the moment of decision was reached in January 1959. During the previous several months, N g o Dinh Diem's vigorous efforts to eliminate opposition to his regime had decimated the party's infrastructure in the South, leading to anguished appeals from southern commanders for authorization to respond in kind. At the end of 1958, Le Duan secretly visited South Vietnam on an inspection tour and then presented his conclusions to a meeting of the Central Committee held early the following year. In the words of one official party history published in Hanoi, the conference was "an extremely important milestone" in the struggle for national liberation, because it marked the decision to resort to armed force to achieve victory in South Vietnam. " T h e fundamental path of development for the Vietnamese revolution," the Central Committee concluded, "is that of violent struggle." 5 During the next few months, initial preparations were launched to strengthen the resistance movement in the South. Southern commanders were instructed to begin construction of a revolu60

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tionary base area in the Central Highlands north of Saigon, while a newly created secret organization called Group 559 (from the date of its creation, May 1959) was assigned the task of building a system of trails that could be utilized to transport personnel, weapons, and supplies from the North to the revolutionary fighters in the South. A second organization was eventually established to devise a sea route for the shipment of goods southward along the coast. T h e decision reached by the Central Committee in January 1959 may have been an important milestone in the Vietnamese revolution, but it by no means settled the crucial question of what strategy should be applied to realize the objective of national reunification. In fact, party leaders were still uncertain how to bring down the Saigon regime without angering their allies or increasing the risk of a greater involvement by the United States. Hanoi was undoubtedly aware of contingency plans drawn up by the U.S.-led Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) to introduce U.S. combat forces into Indochina in the event of an armed attack by communist forces on any one of the three countries. Clearly, party leaders felt that both political and military activity would be required, but how these two forms of struggle could be most effectively combined had not been formally decided. In a speech to the Third National Congress of the party in September i960, Le Duan was deliberately vague, remarking only that it would be "a long and arduous struggle, not simple but c o m plex, combining many forms of struggle." At the congress, he was formally elected first secretary (the new name for the general secretary, in imitation of current practice in the Soviet Union) of the party. 6 Evidently, such evidence of continued caution in Hanoi exasperated some of the party's followers in South Vietnam. During 1959 and i960, a number of so-called "spontaneous uprisings" broke out in the Mekong delta and the Central Highlands, p r o voking the Committee of the South (Hanoi's highest-level command organization in South Vietnam) to warn southern cadres against premature uprisings, since preparations for a general u p rising were not yet completed. For the moment, the committee instructed, activities should be limited to organizing resistance forces and propagandizing the masses.7 But the trend toward a more activist approach was under way. HANOI'S RESPONSE TO AMERI

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Sometime in the fall of i960, Hanoi instructed its followers in the South to form a new united front, known as the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam, or NLF, to provide the foundation for the renewed struggle for peaceful reunification with the North. Early the following year, the Politburo took another step toward concretizing its strategy by raising the importance of military struggle to the level of political struggle and calling for the immediate creation of liberated base areas in the mountains as a base of operations. In a letter to Nguyen Van Linh, then the party's leading representative in the South, Le Duan rebutted complaints that party leaders were delaying the progress of the revolution by adopting a peaceful approach. The slogan of struggle along "peaceful lines," he said, was a temporary stratagem while they moved toward an insurrection using both armed violence and the political strength of the masses.8 Hanoi's cautious approach was a patent attempt to find a way to bring about the overthrow of the Diem regime without provoking a reaction from Washington. But signs of increasing militancy within the insurgent movement were already evident to U.S. officials. Even before the election ofJohn F. Kennedy as president in November i960, U.S. intelligence sources had begun to report a significant rise in guerrilla activity (insurgent units in South Vietnam were already being alluded to as the Viet Cong, or Vietnamese Communists). A special national intelligence estimate issued by the CIA in August i960 noted a "significant increase" in the number and size of Viet C o n g attacks in several areas. Such reports inspired the Eisenhower administration to order the drafting of a counterinsurgency program to cope with the growing internal threat to the South. The draft program was completed just as the Kennedy team came into office in January 1961. 9 Washington's concern over the deteriorating situation in South Vietnam is well documented and needs no elaboration here. From Hanoi's point of view, Kennedy's decision to reiterate U.S. support for the Saigon regime and introduce additional U.S. military advisers into the South undoubtedly aroused some anxiety among party leaders, w h o may have hoped that the new administration would be less preoccupied with the menace of international communism than had been the case with its predecessor. But for the moment, the White House was more concerned about the spreading conflict in neighboring Laos. 62

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T h e crisis in Laos had been provoked by the breakdown of the peace process created at the Geneva Conference in 1954. T h e accords had called for the formation of a coalition government between the Pathet Lao (a revolutionary movement created by H o Chi Minh's Viet Minh Front) and the Royal Lao Government. In 1958, right-wing elements operating with covert U.S. support overthrew the recently formed coalition government of neutralist prime minister Souvanna Phouma and briefly besieged Pathet Lao units in the vicinity of the capital of Vientiane. T h e Pathet Lao reacted by attacking government installations, thus bringing the Eisenhower administration to the brink of military intervention. During the first several months of 1961, the situation in Laos was of more pressing concern in Washington than the simmering civil war in South Vietnam. In April, the White House placed U.S. Special Forces in Okinawa on alert and dispatched the Seventh Fleet to the Gulf of Thailand, but President Kennedy was reluctant to approve U.S. military intervention in Laos. Landlocked, m o u n tainous, lacking in railways and good highways, Laos threatened to be a logistical nightmare. Kennedy rejected an appeal by the Pentagon for U.S. intervention and signaled his willingness to pursue a diplomatic settlement. T h e U.S. decision to bring the crisis in Laos to the negotiating table was gratifying to party leaders in Hanoi, w h o saw it as confirmation that the United States could be induced to withdraw from all of Indochina without a fight. To First Secretary Le Duan, the historical record of Washington's past behavior was grounds for optimism. In a letter to Nguyen Van Linh written on the eve of the signing of the Laos agreement in July 1962, he noted that the United States had not intervened directly in the Franco—Viet Minh conflict or in the Chinese Civil War and, in the summer of 1953, had accepted a compromise settlement in Korea. T h e key to success in South Vietnam, he concluded, was to calculate carefully how much military success the insurgent forces could afford to achieve without provoking the United States into direct intervention in Indochina. " H o w far we win, how far they lose," he said, "must be calculated and measured precisely." 10 To Le Duan, it was important to guarantee that the peace agreement on Laos be seen in Washington as a possible model for a settlement in Vietnam. In waging the Vietnamese revolution, he pointed out, the interests of the entire socialist camp and its desire HANOI'S RESPONSE TO AMERICAN POLICY

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to maintain peaceful coexistence with the West must be considered. Excessive military success in the South could have some "bad consequences," since it could bring U.S. forces into the war. T h e Kennedy administration had been reluctant to introduce U.S. troops into Laos, he explained, because it shares a border with China. South Vietnam was a different matter, however, since it bordered on North Vietnam, which Washington did not consider as much of a threat as China. The key to victory, in Le Duan's eyes, was to carry on a combined political and military struggle that could be contained in South Vietnam and lead eventually to a negotiated settlement and a U.S. withdrawal. H e criticized unnamed "comrades" w h o tended to ignore the importance of political struggle and wanted to push the revolutionary movement to unreasonable limits. Pointing to the example of Laos, where Pathet Lao forces had achieved a decisive but not a total victory and therefore had been able to nudge the United States into accepting a negotiated agreement, he instructed southern commanders to keep the conflict in South Vietnam at the level of a protracted war: to make the enemy lose but not to such an extent that he would find it intolerable; to strengthen the movement in the mountains and the plains, but to refrain from attacking the cities directly, a move that could bring about a direct U.S. role in the war. T h e North, he promised, would do all in its power to help. The end result of such a strategy, Le Duan hoped, would be the isolation of the Diem regime from the population of the South, and of the United States from its allies in the world arena. In the end, Washington might decide to replace Diem as a means of setting the stage for negotiations. In preparation for that possibility, Le Duan called on party officials in the South to escalate their efforts to win the sympathy of South Vietnamese neutralist and "progressive forces" so that they could be relied on for support in case a negotiated settlement resulted in the formation of a coalition government. Southern cadres were instructed to wage propaganda to rally support among intellectuals, government workers, and members of religious organizations, even if they were anticommunist. Hanoi had already begun to cultivate neutralist elements living in France, in order to create an "under the blanket" group w h o , in the eventuality of a negotiated settlement, would be neutralist in name but pro-Hanoi in reality. 64

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Le Duan's letter was a firm indication that Hanoi still hoped to avoid a drift toward open conflict in the South, but events during the next several months disappointed such expectations. In part, it was Hanoi's own fault. In the summer, there was a brief flurry of interest in Washington over the possibility of a negotiated settlement in South Vietnam similar to the one just signed in Laos, and U.S. officials met briefly with N o r t h Vietnamese representatives to discuss the prospects for peace talks, but for inexplicable reasons the latter did not respond. By September, the prospects for peace had grown even dimmer. By now it had become clear that the North Vietnamese were ignoring the provisions in the recent settlement at Geneva that prohibited the movement of foreign military forces and equipment through Laotian territory. In fact, Hanoi had taken advantage of the agreement to increase the infiltration of personnel and supplies along the H o Chi Minh Trail through Laos into the South. Convinced that Hanoi's word was worthless, Washington lost interest in a negotiated solution to the conflict in South Vietnam and turned to other means to solve the problem. In turn, Hanoi concluded that the United States was not yet interested in a negotiated settlement and instructed the Pathet Lao to abandon its participation in the coalition government with neutralist elements that had been arranged at Geneva. 11 In the meantime, the party's forces in South Vietnam attempted the delicate task of bringing about the collapse of the Saigon regime without triggering a direct U.S. military intervention. O n e obstacle to their success was the new counterinsurgency program approved by the Kennedy administration in early 1961. T h e centerpiece of that program was the construction of strategic hamlets, an adaptation of a concept that had been successfully applied by the British against insurgent forces in Malaya. T h e strategic hamlet program has been much maligned by many Western historians, and there is no reason to doubt that the hamlets alienated many Vietnamese villagers because of the insensitive way in which they were imposed. But by Hanoi's own admission, the new fortified villages caused severe problems for guerrilla forces in the South, w h o were thereby isolated from their main source of recruits and provisions. T h e insurgents also suffered from the increased m o bility of the South Vietnamese army (Army of the Republic of Vietnam), a consequence of the recent introduction of U.S. helicopters. HANOI'S RESPONSE TO AMERICAN POLICY

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During 1962 and early 1963, Viet C o n g forces (officially known as the People's Liberation Armed Forces) relentlessly attacked the new strategic hamlets and attempted to extend their control over the South Vietnamese countryside. H o w close they were to victory during the waning months of the Diem regime is one of the more controversial questions dividing students of the Vietnam War today. The verdict by U.S. intelligence sources at the time was equivocal. Some analysts portrayed a revolutionary movement in decline, as the counterinsurgency program took hold and deprived the Viet C o n g of their access to the countryside. Others saw a less promising picture, with the unpopularity of the strategic hamlet program in rural areas operating as a counterpoint to the growing political crisis in the cities. In their eyes, while the military situation may have stabilized, the political situation was rapidly deteriorating. These differences were graphically demonstrated during the famous fact-finding trip to Saigon taken by foreign service officer Joseph Mendenhall and Marine General Victor Krulak at President Kennedy's request in the fall of 1963. Mendenhall remained in Saigon and reported the progressive disintegration of the Diem regime. Krulak visited the provinces and argued that once the political crisis had been resolved, the war in the countryside could be expected to proceed with increasing success. Kennedy's response to the report is famous: "You two did visit the same country, didn't you?" 1 2 From Hanoi's point of view, of course, the question was irrelevant, since these were not two wars but two parts of one war. The difficulties encountered by the insurgent forces in the countryside were a technical matter and could be overcome as the movement gained in strength and experience. The contradiction between the Diem regime and the population in the South, on the other hand, was a fundamental one, and would lead inevitably to its defeat at the hands of the forces of the Vietnamese revolution. Did party leaders feel that victory was near in the waning months of the Diem era? Unfortunately, the evidence from Hanoi is not clear. In the light of Le Duan's remarks in his above-cited letter to Nguyen Van Linh, however, Hanoi's failure to adopt more aggressive tactics in the midst of the Buddhist crisis during the spring and summer of 1963 may have been less a consequence of Viet C o n g weakness than of a momentary uncertainty on the part of party strategists over the proper course to adopt under the circumstances. If Hanoi 66

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truly believed that Washington might decide to replace N g o Dinh D i e m as a prelude to a negotiated U.S. withdrawal from South Vietnam, it was obviously important to avoid any measures that would provoke the United States into escalating its role in the war. To muddy the waters further, the Diem regime had secretly contacted NLF representatives to discuss a possible negotiated settlement of the conflict. 13 Hanoi's reaction to the military coup that toppled the Diem regime in early November was understandably cautious. According to U.S. intelligence sources, in the immediate aftermath of the coup the level of Viet C o n g operations increased briefly but then subsided at the end of the month, possibly because Hanoi was attempting to evaluate the purposes of the new Military Revolutionary Council under General D u o n g Van (Big) M i n h in Saigon and the probable reaction of the United States. A few weeks later, when it became clear that both Saigon and Washington intended to continue with the vigorous prosecution of the war, party leaders convened a plenary session of the Central Committee to hammer out a new policy. 14 Hanoi faced an excruciating dilemma. Le Duan's prediction that a worsening situation in Saigon might induce the Kennedy administration to withdraw had not been borne out by events. Party leaders must either decide to escalate the level of conflict in the South or resign themselves to a lengthy delay in the struggle for national reunification. But how would Washington respond to an escalation in the North Vietnamese role in the war? John F. Kennedy's Hamlet-like anguish over the U.S. role in the Vietnam conflict was undoubtedly well known in Hanoi. T h e views of his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, were not. According to the resolution issued at the close of the December meeting, the Central Committee envisaged two possible scenarios: the n e w president would either maintain the existing strategy of essentially restricting the role of U.S. troops to an advisory capacity only, or he would decide to escalate the conflict to a higher level by introducing U.S. combat units into South Vietnam. Party leaders concluded that Washington would be most likely to escalate if it came to believe that Hanoi would be unable to respond to a larger U.S. presence. Should the United States decide to escalate, of course, the political situation in South Vietnam might stabilize, thus seriously hindering Hanoi's ability to maintain the morale of HANOI'S RESPONSE TO AMERICAN POLICY

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the revolutionary forces in the South and setting back the timetable for total victory. O n the other hand, a decision by the North Vietnamese to intensify the conflict would give rise to other problems. N o t only could it provoke a harsh response from Washington, but it would also strain relations with Hanoi's chief allies. Since the rise of Nikita Khrushchev to power in Moscow, Soviet leaders had made it apparent that they were opposed to a resumption of the conflict in Indochina. China was more vocally sympathetic, but even Beijing had advised the North to keep the conflict in South Vietnam at the level of a protracted war. If Hanoi decided to escalate, it might be embarking on a lonely voyage. 15 According to sources in Hanoi, the debate over strategy at the December plenum was intense. O n e of the key topics of discussion was the possible infiltration of North Vietnamese main force units (known as the People's Army of Vietnam) into the South. Some favored the measure as a means of putting greater pressure on the Saigon regime, but others feared that the move could provoke the United States and cause difficulties in Hanoi's relations with its allies. In the end, the Central Committee approved a policy calling for the rapid strengthening of insurgent forces in the South in the hope of achieving what it described as a decisive shift in the balance offerees and realizing victory in a relatively short period of time. It rejected suggestions to introduce large numbers of North Vietnamese regulars into the South. In order to counter the larger U.S. effort, an increase in material assistance from the North was approved, but according to the resolution, the role of the two zones would continue to be different. T h e bulk of the responsibility for the struggle in the South would still be borne by local forces, w h o were now instructed to seize control of the Central Highlands and Mekong delta areas in preparation for the final general offensive and uprising to seize power throughout the country. In that effort, concluded the plenum, the role of armed struggle would be "direct and decisive." 16 The decision to shift the strategy in the South decisively toward military struggle was bound to cause problems with Moscow. Khrushchev's call for peaceful coexistence with the West had aroused anger in Hanoi for years, and Moscow's policies were harshly criticized by speakers at the December conference. But the party's senior leadership was reluctant to risk a public rupture with DUIKER

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the Soviet Union, and after the conference it sent a circular letter to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and other "fraternal parties" justifying its decision to increase the level of violence in South Vietnam. The letter argued that direct U.S. intervention in the war in the South was not probable, but if it did take place, Hanoi would make every effort to keep the conflict inside the borders of South Vietnam.17 The decisions reached at the plenum nevertheless probably widened the split with Moscow. In his own speech before the Central Committee, Le Duan sharply criticized party comrades who held "rightist views" and were "influenced by modern revisionism," an obvious reference to those who supported Khrushchev's policy of peaceful coexistence with the West. Over the next several months, individuals suspected of such views were removed from their positions in the party and the government, while Vietnamese officials snubbed their Soviet counterparts at diplomatic occasions held in Hanoi. As a veiled warning to Moscow that Hanoi had other options, Le Duan fulsomely praised China in his speech before the plenum, remarking pointedly that "it is the CCP headed by Comrade Mao Tse-tung which has carried out most satisfactorily the instructions of the great Lenin," an apparent reference to the fact that Beijing, not Moscow, had given the most fervent support to the struggle for national liberation in South Vietnam.18 Over the next several months, the political and military situation in South Vietnam continued to deteriorate. U.S. intelligence sources reported that enemy attacks were up in rural areas and that the momentum of the strategic hamlet program had been stalled. During the spring of 1964, U.S. policymakers had begun to prepare a program of escalating military pressures designed to coerce Hanoi into reducing the scope of the fighting in the South. The program was scheduled to begin with covert guerrilla operations inside North Vietnam and then proceed to air and naval attacks on targets in the North. A message threatening U.S. retaliatory measures was conveyed to North Vietnamese leaders by J. Blair Seaborn, the new Canadian representative to the International Control Commission, in June. By mid-summer, senior officials in Washington had reached a consensus that Congress and the American people had to be prepared for such stronger actions to reverse the situation in the South. The pretext appeared in early August, when North VietH A N O l ' s RESPONSE TO AMERICAN POLICY

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namese patrol boats attacked two U.S. destroyers operating in the Tonkin Gulf. Shortly after, claiming that a second attack had taken place, the White House ordered reprisal air strikes against North Vietnamese installations north of the demilitarized zone and then presented Congress with a request to authorize President Johnson to employ U.S. military forces as needed to protect U.S. lives and interests in Southeast Asia. With relatively little debate, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was approved by a nearly unanimous vote in both houses of Congress. U p until this point, party strategists in Hanoi had consistently hoped to avoid actions that might incite the United States to escalate its role in the conflict in South Vietnam. 19 But it seems clear that Hanoi's reluctance to intervene directly in South Vietnam had begun to erode as events unfolded after the overthrow of the Diem regime. Messages from Washington in the spring and summer of 1964 warning Hanoi of a possible U.S. escalation of the fighting were a preliminary signal. T h e initiation of commando operations by South Vietnamese forces against the North, combined with U.S. naval patrols along the coast of North Vietnam, undoubtedly added substance to such threats, and when at the end ofJuly U.S. naval patrols took place in the vicinity of South Vietnamese guerrilla raids on coastal areas south of the city of Thanh Hoa, North Vietnamese officials undoubtedly assumed that the patrols were directly connected to the attacks and reacted accordingly. The North Vietnamese attack on the U.S. ships was presumably intended as a warning to the White House that Hanoi's patience was limited. According to U.S. scholar Gareth Porter, an extraordinary session of the Central Committee was convened a week after the Tonkin Gulf incident to evaluate the situation. Although no overall decision on how to respond to the U.S. reprisal attacks was reached at the meeting, party leaders apparently decided to make initial preparations to dispatch North Vietnamese combat troops to the South. A training program to prepare People's Army units for such a contingency had been under way since April, and according to U.S. intelligence sources, the first units departed in September and October, arriving in the South at the end of the year. 20 Official sources in Hanoi have not yet confirmed the convening of that extraordinary plenum or its alleged decision to send the first regular units to the South. O n e official history published after the 70

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close of the war provides us with some indirect corroborating evidence, stating that a few weeks after the Tonkin Gulf incident, the Politburo met to consider the implications of the new situation. T h e meeting concluded that the political situation in South Vietnam was deteriorating rapidly and approved an accelerated effort to strengthen the military capabilities of the insurgent forces and thereby "achieve a decisive victory in the next one or two years." T h e Politburo also called for more aggressive actions to destroy the strategic hamlets, expand liberated base areas, and annihilate South Vietnamese forces. Clearly, party leaders had concluded that the United States was preparing to intervene directly in the conflict in South Vietnam and that the best way to avoid such a contingency was to achieve a decisive victory before Washington could gear itself up to move from the stage of "special war" to that of "limited war." 2 1 With the shift to a more aggressive approach in South Vietnam, Hanoi now decided to appoint a senior military officer to direct the effort. Chosen to head the entire operation was General Nguyen Chi Thanh, one of two military officers (the other being Vo Nguyen Giap) holding the rank of senior general in the People's Army. Shortly after the Tonkin Gulf incident, General Thanh visited South Vietnam in secret to evaluate the situation and present a plan of operations to the Politburo. H e had now become convinced that full-scale war was inevitable and that the insurgent forces in the South could not achieve a decisive victory without direct assistance from the North. Although some party leaders, including Thanh's rival General Giap, were reportedly skeptical that the People's Army possessed the capability to confront U.S. troops directly on the battlefield, General Thanh argued that the enthusiastic spirit of the revolutionary forces would compensate for the technological superiority of the enemy. 22 It seems likely that Nguyen Chi Thanh's expression of confidence was a vital factor in persuading his colleagues to expand the war in the South. During the winter of 1964—1965, insurgent forces became increasingly aggressive in carrying out operations against South Vietnamese troops, while Viet C o n g terrorist units for the first time began to launch direct attacks on U.S. personnel and installations in the South. From Saigon, U.S. intelligence sources were reporting that the South Vietnamese government was near collapse. HANOI'S RESPONSE TO AMERICAN POLICY

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During that ominous winter, U.S. officials agonized over how to stave off a humiliating military defeat in South Vietnam. The White House refrained from reacting sharply to Viet Cong attacks on the Bien Hoa air base and a U.S. officers' quarters in Saigon, but President Johnson was clearly bracing for the worst. In December, he ordered the formation of a working group of senior officials to advise him on future actions and instructed the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, Maxwell Taylor, to strengthen the political situation in Saigon in preparation for a possible "day of reckoning." In meetings with senior officials early in 1965, Johnson warned that if the situation did not improve, he would turn the war over to the Joint Chiefs. In Hanoi, party leaders were preparing for their own day of reckoning. In January 1965, the Politburo apparently decided to accelerate its efforts to bring about a general offensive and uprising (Hanoi's term for a combined military offensive in rural areas supplemented by an urban insurrection in the cities) in South Vietnam. In a letter to Nguyen Chi Thanh explaining the decision, Le Duan pointed out that the key question at hand was whether insurgent attacks could defeat the enemy's armed forces before the United States could reach a decision to intervene directly in the war. If that turned out to be the case, he said, the U.S. would have no alternative but to withdraw. The collapse of the Saigon regime would be followed by the formation of a neutralist government under secret party control, which in due course would call for negotiations with the North over national reunification. Le Duan conceded that the strategy might not succeed, but he expressed confidence that the overall situation was sufficiently favorable so that in the event of a setback, it would still be possible to regroup and try again. Citing the words of Vladimir Lenin, he stressed that it was vitally important to grasp the opportunity for victory whenever it arose. 23 In late March, the Central Committee convened its eleventh plenary session in Hanoi. T h e meeting took place at one of the crucial turning points in the war. A Viet Cong attack on the U.S. Special Forces camp at Pleiku in early February had brought an end to the period of indecision in the White House. O n February 13, President Johnson had approved a new program of "measured and limited air action" against selected targets in the North. Two weeks later he approved a request by General William C. 72

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Westmoreland, commander of the U.S. Military Assistance C o m mand in Vietnam, to dispatch two battalions of U.S. combat troops to South Vietnam to relieve Vietnamese units and strengthen the security of the U.S. airbase complex at Da Nang. T h e floodgates were beginning to open. Despite the indications in Washington that the Johnson administration was preparing to escalate the U.S. role in the war, the m o o d in Hanoi appeared exuberant. According to the final resolution issued at the close of the March plenum, the Saigon regime was in a virtual state of paralysis, while in rural areas of South Vietnam the strategic hamlet program was at a standstill and the majority of the population was now living in areas controlled by the revolutionary forces. Abroad, the situation was equally bright. T h e antiwar movement in the United States was rapidly gaining momentum, while support for the cause of the Vietnamese revolution in world opinion was growing. Party leaders were undoubtedly gratified by the overthrow of Nikita Khrushchev the previous October, an event that led to the emergence of a new leadership in Moscow apparently more sympathetic to the cause of Vietnamese national reunification. President Johnson's decision to send a limited number of U.S. combat troops into the South in mid-March undoubtedly introduced an element of caution into Hanoi's calculations, but the move was apparently viewed initially not as an indication of Washington's resolve to seek victory in South Vietnam but as an act of desperation by the White House designed to force concessions and then seek a negotiated settlement. In these circumstances, party leaders viewed the goal of the revolutionary forces in the South essentially as they had previously—to seek "a decisive victory in a relatively short period of time"—while at the same time preparing for the possibility of a further escalation of the war. T h e resolution issued at the close of the meeting appeared to suggest that the primary burden for completing the task of national reunification would remain with the revolutionary forces fighting in the South, although the role of the N o r t h would be substantial: Our basic mission is to positively restrain and defeat the enemy in the "special war" at its highest level in the South, endeavor to take advantage of opportunities, concentrate the forces of the entire nation to win a decisive defeat [sic] in the South in a relatively short period of time while also making preparations to H A N O I ' S R E S P O N S E TO AMER

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cope with and defeat the "limited war" if waged by the enemy in the South, continuing to build the North, closely combining economic construction with the strengthening of national defense, resolutely protecting the North, defeating the war of destruction and blockade by the enemy's air force and navy, preparing to defeat the enemy in the event that they double the intensity of their present war of destruction or transform it into a limited war in both the South and the North, endeavoring to mobilize the forces of the North to aid the South, assisting the Laotian revolution, using all of our strength to attack the enemy in the South, defending the North, and fulfilling the enterprise of national liberation throughout the nation. 24

Washington's perspective, however, was hardly the same as Hanoi's. In increasing the size and broadening the purpose of the U.S. military presence in the South, Lyndon Johnson was gambling that once H o Chi Minh and his colleagues recognized the extent of his determination to avoid defeat in South Vietnam, they would be willing to negotiate a settlement on Washington's terms. To test the waters and appease war critics at home, the White House launched a peace initiative to demonstrate its desire for an end to the violence. In an address at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore on April 7, President Johnson emphasized his desire to keep the war from spreading and offered a generous program of economic assistance to all the Indochinese countries if an end could be brought to the war. But the White House, too, had misread the intentions of its adversary. North Vietnamese leaders, sensing victory on the battlefield, were in no m o o d to entertain a peace settlement on Washington's terms. O n April 8, the day following Lyndon Johnson's address at Johns Hopkins, Prime Minister Pham Van D o n g listed Hanoi's conditions, labeled the "Four Points," for holding peace talks. The United States, he said, must unconditionally withdraw from Vietnam. A coalition government should then be formed in Saigon to engage in peaceful negotiations about reunification with the North. In the meantime, the NLF was the only legitimate representative of the Vietnamese people. 25 It is possible that Pham Van Dong's peace feeler was inspired by the hope that the United States might still be ready to pursue peace talks on Hanoi's terms. More likely, however, the gesture was intended primarily to have a psychological impact on world

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public opinion. During the visit of Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin to Hanoi in February, North Vietnamese leaders had reportedly rejected his suggestion for a negotiated settlement of the conflict. The final communique issued at the close of Kosy gin's visit merely noted that both parties supported the principle of the peaceful settlement of international disputes. Ironically, the introduction of U.S. troops into the South a few weeks later may have strengthened such views. In a letter to Nguyen Chi Thanh written a few weeks after Pham Van Dong's announcement, Le Duan underlined the Politburo's contention that negotiations were not desirable at present: "Only when the insurrection [in the South] is successful," he said, "will the problem of establishing a 'neutral central administration' be posed again." In other words, party leaders intended to await the results of the projected general offensive and uprising before sitting down at the peace table with representatives from the United States. As for the Four Points, Le Duan pointed out that they were "intended to pave the way for a U.S. withdrawal with a lesser loss of face." Undoubtedly, Hanoi also hoped to sway public attitudes toward the conflict in the United States and p r o vide impetus to the growing antiwar movement there. 26 In sum, Le Duan was still confident that Washington feared a wider war and would eventually accept a negotiated withdrawal. Even with more than 100,000 troops in South Vietnam, he insisted in his above-mentioned letter to Nguyen Chi Thanh, U.S. war strategy would remain essentially defensive in nature. There was thus no need to change existing strategy but merely to intensify efforts to achieve victory before Washington could make the decision to bring thousands of additional U.S. troops into the war. Clearly, Hanoi was still hoping that a combined general offensive and uprising could bring the Saigon regime to the point of collapse. To hasten that eventuality, Le Duan advised General Thanh to combine military assaults against South Vietnamese forces in rural areas with efforts to bring the civil unrest in Saigon to a peak. Party cadres in the South were instructed to infiltrate religious organizations like the Cao Dai, the Hoa Hao, and the Buddhist movement while preparing youth assault teams to take the lead once the general insurrection broke out. The ultimate objective remained the creation of a neutralist coalition government in Saigon. Le Duan had defined such a government as one that was composed of a wide spectrum of political forces, including some HANOI'S RESPONSE TO AMERICAN POLICY

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groups sympathetic to France and the United States. In his view, the important thing was that such a neutral administration should be secretly controlled by party members, w h o would hold the key positions in the cabinet. In conclusion, Le Duan urged southern leaders not to fear the possibility of defeat. W h e n the opportunity arises, he remarked, don't wait for the total certainty of success. Even if insurgent forces do not succeed, they will still be able to pull back without having to sustain heavy losses, while the movement's military and political nucleus will still be essentially intact. T h e worst that could happen, he argued, would be that the United States might increase its forces to engage in a test of strength with the Vietnamese nation. In Hanoi, he pointed out, party leaders "are already prepared for the worst." 2 7 It was just as well that they were. In June, a military junta of Young Turks led by Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky took power in Saigon and soon began to bring a measure of stability into the chaotic political situation. By mid-summer, U.S. forces in the South had reached a level of 80,000 and began to take an active part in combat operations. T h e first major confrontation between U.S. troops and insurgent units took place in August, when U.S. Marines based at C h u Lai, on the central coast south of Da Nang, launched an assault on areas held by the Viet C o n g on the rocky and barren Batangan Peninsula. In the meantime, the U.S. First Cavalry Division was deployed in the Central Highlands to forestall a predicted attempt by the Viet Cong to seize Route 19, one of the few highways that stretched from the coast to the Laotian border, and thus to divide the country in two. While General Westmoreland drew up plans to take the war to the enemy, in Washington the White House ordered a high-level review of the situation and prospects. After a wide-ranging exchange of proposals, in late July Johnson approved a program set forth by Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara to increase U.S. troop strength to over 150,000 by the end of 1965. T h e United States was now fully into the war. T h e arrival of U.S. combat troops and the new political leadership in Saigon shored up the shaky fortunes of the South Vietnamese regime, and by the end of the summer it was clear in Hanoi that its projected general offensive and uprising was not going to materialize, at least for the foreseeable future. In September the 76

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Politburo met to evaluate the situation and draw up plans for the coming months. In the view of party leaders, the n e w U.S. strategy presented them with new problems, but not insurmountable ones. Recent actions taken by the Johnson administration were a clear indication that the White House no longer feared that U.S. combat operations inside South Vietnam would lead to a wider war, but party leaders remained convinced that Washington was still unlikely to attack North Vietnam directly, since it would then face the possibility of a confrontation with the entire socialist camp. Moreover, even with half a million troops in South Vietnam, the Johnson administration would still be faced with the key disadvantages that had plagued U.S. policy from the beginning—a fragile puppet regime in Saigon and an absence of firm public support in the United States. In the end, party leaders were confident that Washington would ultimately accept a small defeat in Vietnam in order to avoid a larger one throughout the region. 28 The Politburo thus concluded that its current strategy of p r o tracted war leading to a general offensive and uprising need not be entirely abandoned. The presence of large numbers of U.S. combat troops changed the equation, however, and necessitated the infiltration of larger numbers of North Vietnamese regular forces to bolster the forces of the Viet Cong in the South. General Thanh was instructed to maintain the offensive throughout the southern provinces and to attack U.S. as well as South Vietnamese units (in his words, "Stick close to the Americans, and hit them where it hurts"). Direct attacks on U.S. units, however, were to be avoided except where the balance of forces in the immediate vicinity was advantageous to the cause of the insurgency. Otherwise, contacts with U.S. units and installations were to take the form of flank attacks and harassing actions rather than frontal assaults on fortified positions. The ultimate goal was still to achieve a "decisive victory" (in Hanoi's parlance, a decisive victory was somewhat less than a complete one) in a relatively short period of time. T h e Politburo had thus decided to confront the United States directly in the South. It now remained to seek the approval of fraternal allies, since such a decision would obviously necessitate substantial amounts of military assistance from abroad. In the fall, a delegation of senior officials led by Le Duan visited both Beijing and Moscow. Evidently they received a commitment from both HANOI'S RESPONSE TO AMERICAN POLICY

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countries for increased military aid, but they may also have received a lecture from China on the virtues of patience and selfreliance. In a speech delivered at an army conference in May 1966, Le Duan pointedly remarked that "it is not fortuitous that in the history of our country, each time we rose to oppose foreign aggression, we took the offensive and not the defensive. . . . Taking the offensive is a strategy, while taking the defensive is only a stratagem. Since the day the South Vietnamese people rose up, they have continually taken the offensive." 29 Having received at least a qualified promise of support from Moscow, party leaders gave final approval to the Politburo decision to escalate the role of the North in the fighting in the South at the Twelfth Plenum of the Central Committee in December. T h e resolution issued at the close of the plenum called for the mobilization of the entire nation to complete the revolution in the South. T h e new strategical guidelines were to fight a protracted war based on the philosophy of self-reliance, while seeking sympathy and assistance from foreign countries and adopting the selective use of military, political, and diplomatic techniques. T h e new slogan for the entire nation was "Protect the North, assist the South." 3 0 Conclusions

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By the fall of 1965, the civil conflict in South Vietnam was thus on the verge of becoming a full-scale war. Each side was convinced that it had no choice but to escalate the military struggle to meet the increased efforts of the other. Hanoi had concluded that Washington's decision to introduce large numbers of U.S. combat forces left it little choice but to respond in kind. T h e Johnson administration argued that its decision to Americanize the war had been dictated by Hanoi's prior decision to intervene in the South to have its way As the administration stated in the white paper issued in February, " T h e hard core of the communist forces attacking South Vietnam are men trained in N o r t h Vietnam. They are ordered into the South and remain under the military discipline of the Military High C o m m a n d in Hanoi. . . . Increasingly the forces sent into the South are native North Vietnamese w h o have never seen South Vietnam." 3 1 T h e white paper was an essentially accurate presentation of the facts as they were known in Washington at that time, but by leaving the impression that Hanoi had a master plan to conquer the South by military force and that N o r t h Vietnamese leaders bore

WILLIAM J . DUIKER

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full responsibility for the escalation of the war, the report was seriously misleading. It seems clear from the available documentary evidence that Vietnamese strategists in Hanoi had groped for several years to find the proper approach to complete their struggle for national reunification and had made serious efforts to avoid a militarization of the conflict. W h e n they did turn to the military option, it was with considerable reluctance, and even in so doing, they went to considerable pains to stress the fundamental importance of political struggle in the quest for final victory. H o Chi Minh and his colleagues, of course, had good reasons for seeking to avoid a direct military conflict. In the first place, it was in the realm of politics that the forces of revolution possessed a marked superiority over their adversary. A generation of fierce competition with their non-Communist rivals had convinced party leaders that in an open contest, they would have little difficulty in achieving total victory in South Vietnam. At the same time, the North Vietnamese were under severe pressure from their allies to avoid a resumption of the conflict in Indochina, and Hanoi's actions since the mid-fifties made it clear that they would go to considerable lengths to prevent that eventuality. Nevertheless, it is clear that senior party leaders were willing to turn to the military option if such a shift in approach appeared to be in their interest. As Le Duan pointed out in one of his letters to Nguyen Chi Thanh, if the United States wants a protracted war, it will have it. We will fight, he said, whatever way the enemy wants. It was the Johnson administration that first turned to the military option, in the desperate hope that U.S. technological superiority would turn a political defeat into a military victory. It was a fateful decision.

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Notes i.

Aggression from the North: The Record of North Vietnam's Campaign to Conquer South Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State, 1965), reproduced in Viet Nam: History, Documents, and Opinions on a Major World Crisis, ed. Marvin E. Gettleman (New York: Fawcett, 1965), pp. 284-285.

2.

H o Chi Minh, Selected Writings (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Press, 1977), p. 180.

3.

An English-language version of Le Duan's report is located in Gareth Porter, ed., Vietnam: The Definitive Documentation of Human Decisions (Stanfordville, N.Y.: Earl M. Coleman Publishers, 1979), 2 : 2 4 - 3 0 . Le Duan was born in Quang Tri province in central Vietnam in 1908 and joined the revolutionary movement in the late twenties. In 1939 he became a member of the Central Committee of the Indochinese Communist Party, the predecessor of the Vietnam Workers' Party, but was arrested shortly thereafter. Released from jail in 1945, he became the party's leading organizer in South Vietnam during the Franco—Viet Minh conflict and became identified as a vociferous advocate for the cause of national reunification following the Geneva Conference.

4.

The underlying reasons for Le Duan's promotion have never been divulged, but knowledgeable Vietnamese sources have reported that H o Chi Minh had recommended Le Duan's appointment as acting general secretary precisely because of his strong commitment to the cause of national unification.

5.

Cuoc khang chien Chong My Cuu Nuoc, 1954—1975: Nhung su kien quan su (The antiU.S. resistance war, 1954-1975: Military events) (Hanoi: Quan Doi Nhan Dan, I 9 8 i ) , p p . 29—30. An English-language translation appears in Joint Publications Research Service (JPRS), Translations on North Vietnam, no. 80968, June 3, 1982. For the convenience of readers I have cited the English-language version, hereafter referred to as CKC.

6.

Le Duan's report to the congress is printed in Third National Congress of the Vietnam

7.

The directive of the Committee for the South is available as item 1044, in Race

Workers' Party (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Press, i960), 1:62. Documents, a collection of materials deposited by Jeffrey Race with the Center for Research Libraries, Chicago. For a translation, see Porter, Vietnam, document 26, pp. 59-678.

Le Duan to Muoi Cue (Nguyen Van Linh), Feb. 7, 1961, Le Duan, Letters to the South (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Press, 1986), pp. 9 - 1 0 . This is an abridged English-language version of the original, entitled Thu vao Nam (Hanoi: Su That, 1986) and printed in Vietnamese. Because it is more complete, I will hereafter cite the Vietnamese version.

9.

For the estimate, see "Short-term trends in South Vietnam," Aug. 23, i960, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-IQ6O, vol. 1: Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: G P O , 1986), p. 539. Foreign Relations of the United States hereafter cited as FRUS.

10. Le Duan to Muoi Cue, July 1962, Le Duan, Thu vao Nam, pp. 6 3 - 6 6 . 11. O n the meeting between U.S. and DRV representatives at Geneva, see Meeting of July 22, 1962, FRUS 1962, vol. 1, pp. 543-544. Also see the oral history interview with William H. Sullivan, Aug. 5, 1970, at the Kennedy Library, Boston. I am grateful to William C. Gibbons for sending me a copy of that interview.

DUIKER

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12. The debate over the underlying trends in the war is reported in John Newman's JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power (New York: Warner Books, 1992), pp. 223-239. 13. For a tantalizing hint of the nature of those negotiations, see Miesczyslaw Maneli, War of the Vanquished (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 128. 14. See the CIA reports dated Dec. 2 and Dec. 16, 1963, in FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 4, pp. 647 and 711-713. 15. Vietnamese leaders had encountered a similar problem at Geneva in 1954, when both Moscow and Beijing had pressured them to accept a compromise settlement with the French. Dissatisfaction with the results of the Geneva Conference may have induced some Politburo members to recommend that the DRV ignore the advice of Moscow and press ahead. 16. The resolution of the Ninth Plenum is available in an English-language translation in Viet Nam Documents and Research Notes (U.S. Mission in Saigon), no. 96. Curiously, sources in Hanoi have never divulged the exact dates of the meeting. Sources in the United States became aware of the results of the plenum through a captured document obtained later in the Vietnam War. 17. The circular is contained in Viet Nam Documents, no. 98. The harsh criticism of Moscow at the plenum in December 1963 is an apparent indication that H o Chi Minh's influence on policy might have been waning. Throughout his career H o had consistently gone out of his way to avoid irritating potential allies, and one Vietnamese source claims that he never heard Ho speak harshly of either the Soviet Union or China. 18. Ibid., p. 57. 19. According to the Polish diplomat Mieczyslaw Maneli, H o Chi Minh and other DRV officials had periodically asked him how they should act toward the United States in order to avoid giving Washington a reason to escalate its role in the South. See Maneli, War of the Vanquished, p. 156. 20. Gareth Porter, "Coercive Diplomacy in Vietnam: The Tonkin Gulf Crisis Reconsidered," in The American War in Vietnam, ed. Jayne Werner and David Hunt (Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1993), pp. 19-20. 21. Nhung su kien lich su dang (Party documents) (Hanoi: Thong Tin Ly Luan, 1985), 3 : 309—312. In Hanoi's parlance, "special war" was the waging of the conflict with South Vietnamese troops, with U.S. forces used as advisers only, while "limited war" involved the introduction of a limited number of U.S. combat troops without raising the level of the war to a great-power confrontation. 22. W h y Vo Nguyen Giap was not picked to head the operation has often puzzled Western observers. There are indications, however, that leading party officials, including Le Duan himself, had lost confidence in Giap's ability and strength of will. Among other things, he was suspected of harboring sympathy with Khrushchev's policy of peaceful coexistence. 23. Le Duan to Anh Xuan (Nguyen Chi Thanh), Feb. 1965, Le Duan, Thu vao Nam, p. 96. 24. CKC, p. 69. The complete resolution is available in Vietnamese in Mot so van kien cua dang Chong My, Cuu Nuoc, 1954—1965 (Party documents on the antiU.S. national salvation movement, 1954-1965) (Hanoi: Su That, 1985), 1 : 2 1 1 228. 25. For the full text of Pham Van Dong's statement, see George M. Kahin, Intervention:

HANOI'S

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TO

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How America Became Involved in Vietnam (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor-Doubleday, 1987), p. 326. Sources in Hanoi imply that the statement was a direct response to Lyndon Johnson's speech. See CKC, pp. 71—73. 26. Le Duan to Nguyen Chi Thanh, May 1965, Le Duan, Thu vao Nam, passim. 27. Ibid. 28. It was undoubtedly in this context that North Vietnamese leaders observed with mounting anger Beijing's veiled assurances to Washington that it would not enter the Vietnam War so long as its own territory was not threatened. The first clear hint had come in an interview between Mao and journalist Edgar Snow in March. One U.S. intelligence report noted that China had assured the United States it would not intervene so long as U.S. troops did not cross the demilitarized zone. A public suggestion to Hanoi that it should adopt a policy of self-reliance came in Lin Biao's famous article, "Long Live the Victory of People's War," in September. In Hanoi's eyes, such assurances gave the United States carte blanche for offensive operations inside South Vietnam. For a brief discussion and sources, see my China and Vietnam: The Roots of Conflict (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1987), p. 49. 29. Donald Zagoria, Vietnam Triangle: Moscow, Peking, Hanoi (New York: Pegasus, 1967), p. 84. 30. CKC, p. 85. 31. See Gettleman, Viet Nam, p. 287.

DUIKER

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The Zen of Escalation Containment and Commitment in Southeast Asia John Prados

"In retrospect," as perceptive journalist Neil Sheehan puts it in his return-to-Vietnam book After the War Was Over, "a terrible inevitability seems to have been at work, as if the men w h o ran the United States, because of their flawed image of themselves, could have acted in no other way than they did." x This is Sheehan speaking of the way he perceived America's growing involvement in Southeast Asia, now in the past, then as a reporter in South Vietnam and subsequently a Pentagon correspondent for the New York Times. The quote captures several elements frequently found in discussions of the Vietnam War, including the sense of inexorable events in immutable sequence, the notion of flawed men and women leading the nation into the quagmire, and the idea, reintroducing historical inevitability, that leaders could have acted in no different way than they did. I believe these perceptions deserve further exploration, even at this late date, especially at this late date, when a new world order beckons to American policymakers with new images of tragic need. Let me begin with the question of self-image. There were p r o b lems of self-image for many of the American leaders w h o led this nation into Vietnam. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson both now have biographers intent upon convincing us that these characters were nothing but flawed, although, of course, we are now [in 1993] told Harry Truman was perfect. For Neil Sheehan personally, a tragic flaw proved a key element in the figure he saw as epitomizing America in Vietnam, U.S. Army Colonel J o h n Paul Vann, a hero from early reportorial days, w h o m Sheehan later made the subject of a biography and to w h o m he discovered there was more than met the eye. 2 Sheehan shared Vann's ear, and an office, plus for a time a Saigon apartment, with David Halberstam, w h o has given us the quintessential account of personal flaws among our Vietnam leaders, the tome titled The Best and the Brightest.3

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But flawed self-image is a particular kind of a thing—are we to believe that Lyndon Johnson sent half a million troops to the other side of the world because he felt his manhood challenged, or that Walt Rostow advocated invasion of the North Vietnamese panhandle because he harbored a secret inferiority complex? O f course there is a level at which such explanations help account for some events of the Vietnam War (plenty are the stories, for example, of how LBJ made a certain decision a particular way because he feared the leakers or wanted to get at some politician w h o held another view, or the like), but one cannot rest an entire explanation of state policy upon personal proclivity. The story of Vietnam encompasses a whole range of decisions over an interval of decades, decisions on recognition, on support, on negotiation, on aid, on a burgeoning client state-major ally relationship, on commitment, on escalation, and finally on war strategy. The odds against the participants in all these decisions, even just the major ones, all being subject to flawed self-images are astronomical, except if one argues that everyone without exception has such a flaw, in which case wise policy becomes unattainable by definition. At that point the objection to Vietnam policy loses its meaning. Though flawed self-images are perhaps not the answer, this is not to say Sheehan does not make a very good point by focusing on the individual, reminding us again of the importance of people in history. Systemic explanations, such as Leslie Gelb and Richard Betts's incremental model (for want of a better label) or Daniel Ellsberg's "stalemate machine," often seem brittle and ultimately unsatisfying, all right as explanatory devices in political science but failing in establishing the causal relations important to history. 4 Because models are so central to policy analysis, some examination of these influential ones from a political science standpoint is useful. Gelb and Betts argue that the central irony of decisionmaking on Vietnam was that the system worked as designed but nevertheless led directly to imbroglio. At the risk of some compression, this happened because at each stage the bureaucracy served up a limited range of options, excluding choices such as bailing out altogether. Presidents, preoccupied with an imperative not to lose, chose between the minimum necessary and maximum feasible options, often listed as "Option C " in relevant decision memoranda. Falling short of actions that might really work, policy choices were further debased by false perceptions of Vietnamese os

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realities and by temptations to select options most suitable to maintaining political credibility in the face of mounting public doubts. W h a t is less than satisfying about the Gelb and Betts model, however, is the driving mechanism. A goal of not losing has little explanatory power w h e n confronted with the question of why the United States became involved in the first place. Arguments about the driving force of careerist goals among bureaucrats and military officers similarly fall short. Careerists in the Foreign Service, the intelligence community, and the military would have made do in terms of personal goals with whatever external situation confronted the America of their time. Daniel Ellsberg's model of the stalemate machine argues that advisers never claimed to presidents in advance of a decision that the specific measures entailed would suffice to win the war, and that there is no evidence any president was ever radically more optimistic regarding a recommended option than his advisers. Explaining decisions in the light of these insights led Ellsberg to posit a series of decision rules. As he saw events, no special action seemed necessary during a succession of "Phase A" periods in which Vietnam activity appeared stable, but "Phase B " periods invariably ensued during which deterioration of a military or political nature became evident and new decisions were required. T h e first rule, similar to that of Gelb and Betts, was not to lose in Vietnam prior to the next election. The second stricture was not to adopt any often specified escalatory options except to avoid violating the first rule. Ellsberg's third rule, in consonance with matters of credibility, was to choose those actions that minimize the risk of loss (or public expectation thereof) while not ruling out some (future) possibility of a win. Viewed from afar, this again is a model that fails to reveal any driving mechanism other than external events. Yet, however reactive it may have been, American policy ought not to be seen as merely responding to events. Such a view begs the question of responsibility for intervention in Vietnam, fails to explain the initial decision for involvement, and also is inadequate in accounting for subsequent decisions that involved positive escalations, such as the Kennedy decision to expand the military advisory program, certain Johnson decisions on bombing and rules of engagement, and Nixon decisions on expanding the war into Laos and Cambodia. THE ZEN OF ESCALATION

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The apparent lack of driving mechanisms in our best-known models of Vietnam decision-making should not be held to invalidate the models. Rather, we can bridge the gaps in the models by postulating a framework of guidance for officialdom other than presidents. Joining with Sheehan and Halberstam, the keynote is impact of individuals upon history, but rather than centering analysis of outcomes or effects on the presence or absence of character flaws, here the accent is on generally held beliefs. Such perspectives shaped the thinking of the U.S. government at key points of decision, as this essay will illustrate. What should be noted here, however, is that this view is not one of the inexorability of Vietnam but rather a vision of a series of events conditioned, but not determined, by commonly held individual perspectives. Were this a simulation model, one might say Vietnam was more probable because of these perspectives, what Irving Janis would call "groupthink," 5 but other outcomes were possible as well. A caveat at this point is that the attitudes and beliefs discussed below are not limited to lower-level officials. Presidents certainly shared some of these visions of the world. The central difference from the presidential standpoint is that, as the models tell us, presidents responded to political rationales in addition to substantive arguments. Another limitation which bears mention is that there is no claim here to have identified all aspects of the official mind-set driving the engine of escalation in Vietnam. N o r is there a claim that these aspects are exclusive discoveries never before adduced in the literature. In the nature of things this is a first cut, and the effort is to fit pieces, some of which may be known, into place in our decision models of Vietnam. Chutes and Ladders

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As a number of analysts have observed, at the point of decision in a foreign policy crisis, responsible officials frequently reason by historical analogy. Perhaps most recently, Ernest May explores this phenomenon in some detail with his co-authors in Thinking in Time.6 For America's encounter in Vietnam, however, reasoning by analogy proved not some more or less conscious process of historical insight but rather a very specific application of one particular historical analogy. This analogy exercised great influence among senior policymakers because it rose from the ashes of World

J O H N PRADOS

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War II, the central formative experience in the lives of most of these officials. That analogy is Munich, the southern German city where, in 1938, British, French, Italian, and German leaders gathered to negotiate a settlement of Central European disputes, which effectively gave Adolf Hitler a green light for the German takeover of Czechoslovakia. This appeasement of Hitler, though some hold it was calculated to buy time for Western rearmament, is quite frequently counted among the causes of World War II. Thus the lesson of that war was that appeasement was a cardinal error. As Bernard A. Weisberger puts it in a nice general account of the Cold War, "appeasement became a code word standing for a disastrous policy of giving in to threats. In time, the Munich analogy would be repeatedly invoked to bar tactical compromises or strategic retreats of any kind." 7 As the country entered the depths of the Cold War, Americans applied the Munich analogy far too liberally. Munich, after all, was a way station to central war among the great powers of the day. In the Cold War the analogy reared its head in the context of any number of regional situations entirely lacking the essential characteristics of the real Munich. In passing it should be said that the lesson for generations of students w h o come to history in the p o s t - C o l d War age is not to attempt to apply any analogy without comparison of its original situational characteristics to those of the current predicament. Regardless of lessons for today and tomorrow, the Munich analogy was considered valid by senior policymakers facing the Vietnam crisis. This can easily be illustrated by reference to key figures and documents of the period. For example, appealing for British solidarity to face up to the need for intervention to save France in Vietnam at the time of the Dien Bien Phu crisis, in April 1954 President Dwight D. Eisenhower included the following language in a letter to British prime minister Sir Winston Churchill: "We failed to halt Hirohito, Mussolini and Hitler by not acting in unity and in time. That marked the beginning of many years of stark tragedy and desperate peril." 8 Similarly Walt W. Rostow, w h o served the Kennedy administration on the National Security Council staff and in the State Department and w h o became national security adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson, con-

THE ZEN OF

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eludes his retrospective discussion of the merits of the Vietnam involvement with the statement that a withdrawal (appeasement) was not likely: "Kennedy and Johnson believed the outcome would be a larger war." 9 Secretary of State Dean Rusk, according to Marvin Kalb and Elie Abel, used to tell friends that if Mussolini in Ethiopia or Hitler in Czechoslovakia had been stopped, World War II might have been avoided. 10 O n e need not take reporters Kalb and Abel at their word; Rusk's own memoir contains this: " W h e n one views the sad events of the 1930s in Europe, I think that the United States and Western democracies, with our pacifism, isolationism, and indifference to aggression, were guilty of'tempting thieves.'" n It was but a short step from Munich to Vietnam, as Paul M . Kattenburg makes clear. As the State Department's top desk officer for Vietnamese affairs in 1963 - 1 9 6 4 , Kattenburg had a ringside seat during the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the assassination of N g o Dinh Diem, and other crucial events of the period. Kattenburg writes, Reasoning by historical analogy became a virtual ritual in the United States under Secretaries of State Acheson (1949-52), Dulles (1953-58) and Rusk (1961-68), who very early persuaded themselves that the Soviet Union under Stalin and Khrushchev, the Chinese under Mao, as well as the Vietnamese Communists under Ho, behaved similarly in all important respects of external policy to the Nazi Reich under Hitler, Fascist Italy under Mussolini, and Japan under the militarists. These evil dictatorships had, at what tragic cost, been appeased by the reigning powers of the thirties. To deal diplomatically and on a serious basis with such monsters, the reasoning went, was in fact akin to appeasing them. 12

Thus a supposed lesson of history led directly to arguments for involvement, then escalation, to ward off presumed consequences. T h e Munich axiom, if one can call it that, seemed incontrovertible to the generation of World War II. Far less convincing was the domino theory. This was the hypothesis that defeat in Indochina would lead to the inevitable fall of other Southeast Asian countries, in some formulations right down to Indonesia and the Philippines. First advanced in a 1952 National Security Council document, then made public by President Eisenhower at an April 1954 news conference (note again the heat of the Dien Bien Phu crisis), the domino theory lacked the Substance of a lesson of history, and in 90

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hindsight one can demonstrate that indeed it was not correct, since the Southeast Asian dominos did not fall. Nevertheless a belief need not be correct to be held strongly, and many U.S. government officials subscribed to the domino theory. While the Munich axiom and the domino theory may have driven senior policymakers to the conclusion that they needed to do something, these principles were general rules and not guides to action. It was the conjunction of senior policymakers convinced of the need to act with subordinates—that ubiquitous layer of assistant secretaries, special assistants, and military staffs—who offered means of action that made the Vietnam decisions so explosive. These men and women were, as David Halberstam put it, "schooled in the language and litany of the Cold War." 1 3 Here technological development had been formative, though impelled and showcased by World War II, which ended with the use of atomic weapons, bringing on the nuclear age. T h e era of absolute weapons drove military thinkers and diplomatists to search for ways force could be applied at all without triggering central war. As thinkers pondered nuclear weapons, the care and feeding of them, the use of them, creating an idiom of the nuclear age in deterrence theory, other analysts applied themselves to less than all-out confrontations. Robert E. Osgood, probably the leading limited-war theorist of the fifties, and M o r t o n H . Halperin, w h o filled that role into the sixties, both (very notably) discussed limited war in terms of concepts drawn from deterrence theory. 14 T h e act of warding off, or deterring, war became an established feature of the theory. This was a positive, purposeful action, something one achieved through concrete measures. Equally important, one could deter within a war, even as conflict continued on all sides, so-called intrawar deterrence. Many deterrent actions involved threats or uses of force with the implication, implicit or explicit, that conflict could be moved to a higher level of violence, "escalation" in the idiom of the theory. T h e actor w h o could more easily dictate that level of violence, because of raw capabilities or ability or will to use them, possessed "escalation dominance." 1 5 H e could call the shots. As America moved into the sixties the nuclear theorists even supplied an "escalation ladder" that purported to show the many steps or escalations that could be made before reaching the dreaded threshold of nuclear war, and even escalatory steps within that kind of conflict.16 THE ZEN OF ESCALATION

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Specifics of deterrence theory need not detain us long. Rather, the essential points to draw from it are, first, that the theory was a prescription for action (one could not attain escalation dominance without acting), and second, that these prescriptions had become pervasive among the second rank of officialdom w h o supported and implemented the decisions of our policymakers on Vietnam. So ingrained did the notion of purposeful action become, with military posturing featuring in so many crises of the fifties and sixties, that some came to believe a diplomacy of threat and force was the norm rather than the exception. In fact analysts coined the term "coercive diplomacy" to describe this kind of approach. 17 It happened that Vietnam was a gray area, in the parlance of the theorists and national security bureaucrats, a place where superpower interests did not clash directly and where one might hope to avoid such a clash by coercive diplomacy. T h e case was there to be made for a preemptive assertion of escalation dominance. Those concerns, expressed in the very idiom examined here, are present in U.S. decision documents from an early stage of involvement. O n e need not go far to document the usage. Here are the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a May 1961 memorandum to the secretary of defense: The Joint Chiefs of Staff recommend that the decision be made now [!] to deploy suitable U.S. forces to South Vietnam. Sufficient forces should be deployed to accomplish the following purposes: a. Provide a visible deterrent to potential North Vietnam and/or Chinese Communist action; b. Release Vietnamese forces. . . e. Indicate the firmness of our intent to all Asian nations. 18

Worth noting is the convergence between this Joint Chiefs formula and the general requirements for "containment in the gray areas," which Robert Osgood postulated in 1957: a. The existence within indigenous regimes of a minimum internal cohesion and stability and a minimum ability to satisfy social and economic demands to prevent Communist ideological and political penetration. b. The existence of indigenous military establishments capable of combating local insurrection and guerrilla activity.

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c. The ability of indigenous troops, acting as nuclei of resistance in conjunction with American forces and American military and economic aid, to defeat larger military incursions on a local basis.19

A key refrain in deterrence theory was the notion that actions should be credible, that is, of sufficient weight, force, and purposefulness to convince an adversary of America's determination. Localized action in Vietnam could have global overtones in a Cold War context. This concern is expressed as early as November 1961 in a paper jointly prepared by Secretary of State Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara: " T h e loss of South Viet-Nam to Communism would not destroy SEATO [a regional alliance] but would undermine the credibility of American commitments elsewhere." 2 0 American actions in 1963 - 1 9 6 4 clearly reveal links to nuclear theories. The Tonkin Gulf air strikes in August 1964, for example, were an effort to deter North Vietnamese interference with U.S. intelligence gathering and naval operations off the North Vietnamese coast. The graduated military pressures embodied in Operations Plan 34A were an obvious exercise in coercive diplomacy. General Maxwell D. Taylor, then ambassador to South Vietnam, told Secretary McNamara in a January 1964 memorandum that the U.S. needed "to put aside many of the self-imposed restrictions which now limit our efforts." T h e basic reason was that "the United States must make plain to the enemy our determination to see the Vietnam campaign through to a favorable conclusion. To do this, we must prepare for whatever level of activity may be required and, being prepared, must then proceed to take actions as necessary to achieve our purposes surely and promptly." 2 1 T h e concept of escalation dominance is quite apparent in this Taylor memo. Applying the tenets of coercive diplomacy to the Vietnam situation required officials to advocate actions the United States had found objectionable. That officials went ahead under such circumstances is an index of the strength and depth of this mind-set. For example, during the Korean War Americans had castigated North Korea and China for negotiating a cease-fire on the one hand while continuing the war on the front lines (similar charges would be leveled at Hanoi during the Vietnam conflict). Witness there-

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fore the considered recommendations of the departments of State and Defense, along with the embassies in Saigon and Vientiane, on August I I , 1964, just a few days after the Gulf of Tonkin incident: A solution in both South Viet-Nam and Laos will require a combination of military pressures and some form of communication under which Hanoi (and Peiping) eventually accept the idea of getting out. Negotiation without continued pressure, indeed without continued military action will not achieve our objectives in the foreseeable future. But military pressure could be accompanied by attempts to communicate with Hanoi and perhaps Peiping—through third country channels, through side conversations . . . provided always that we make it clear both to the Communists and to South Viet-Nam that the pressure will continue until we have achieved our objectives. After, but only after, we know that North Vietnamese are hurting and that the clear pattern of pressure has dispelled suspicion of our motives, we could accept a conference broadened to include the Vietnam issue.22 In broad outline this was precisely the political-military strategy advisers recommended and presidents accepted. T h e notion of tacit (that is, nonexplicit) signals was an important component of deterrence and associated limited-war theories. In fact it was through such tacit signals that the adversary was supposed to k n o w that a war was being limited. O n e of the early lessons drawn from perceived success in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 was that such tacit signals could be understood and were practical. Similar reasoning would be applied to Vietnam, as is evident in a November 1964 m e m o Walt Rostow prepared for Robert McNamara: Our force dispositions to accompany an initial retaliatory move against the north should send three further signals lucidly: a. that we are putting in place a capacity subsequently to step up direct and naval pressure on the north, if that should be required; b. that we are prepared to face down any form of escalation North Vietnam might mount on the ground; and c. that we are putting forces into place to exact retaliation directly against Communist China if Peiping should join in an escalatory response from Hanoi. 23

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As the Vietnam War unfolded it was Hanoi that showed, on the ground, that it was prepared to meet each successive U.S. escalatory move. Unlike in Cuba, Washington never attained escalation dominance. American officials not only seemed to miss Hanoi's signal but until 1968 also behaved as if they believed the U.S. had complete control of the situation. O n e of the effects of the North Vietnamese-Viet C o n g Tet offensive was to send the unmistakable signal that the other side remained entirely capable of escalation in its own right. By that time the intensity of the war was already so great the Johnson administration judged that mobilization for a matching response would not be worthwhile. During the interval the sides continued a process of move countermove. Once the Viet Cong appreciated the capability the U.S. was furnishing South Vietnam, their response was to strike at an explicitly American target. In late 1964 and early 1965 such Viet C o n g strikes were carried out against officers' quarters in Saigon, the U.S. embassy, and the American air bases at Pleiku and Bien Hoa. Washington officials failed to perceive these car bombings or mortar bombardments as signals. Rather they were simply called spectaculars (as in "spectacular terrorist incident") and made o c casions for retaliations against North Vietnam, as in the Gulf of Tonkin affair. These tit-for-tat retaliations proved unsatisfying, and when Pleiku was mortared in February 1965, national security adviser McGeorge Bundy wrote President Johnson, "We are convinced that the political values of reprisal require a continuous operation. Episodic responses geared on a one-for-one basis to 'spectacular' outrages would lack the persuasive force of sustained pressure. More important still, they would leave it open to the Communists to avoid reprisals entirely by giving up only a small element of their own program." 2 4 Put differently, by early 1965 the military impact of bombing (and its political effect in South Vietnam) had become more important to key Washington officials than the value of the attempt to signal the adversary. A tacit signal became ever more ambiguous once the only perceptible indicator was the relative intensity of a continuing stream of bombs. So one day Washington woke up and found itself, far from a diplomatic process, in the midst of a regular air campaign. W h e n that too seemed to lose its effect, commitment to ground war followed. Having started out to climb, more or less

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carefully, an escalation ladder, Washington ended up sliding down the chute into a bitter conflict. Conclusion

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Where political rules of the game may have sufficed for presidents faced with Vietnam, decision rules based solely on such factors do not effectively explain the recommendations and actions of the second layer of officials. It was the latter individuals w h o bore the brunt during the run-up to the Vietnam War, making recommendations, being responsible for implementation, identifying and making the myriad daily small-scale decisions that add up to execution of policy. Explaining the attitudes and mind-set of these subordinate officials fills the gap in our general models of Vietnam decision-making, supplying a driving mechanism that helps show how successive decisions came to presidents framed in a certain way. Individual character flaws do not adequately account for what happened. While officials undoubtedly had such flaws, and some no doubt had quite large defects of character, that kind of impediment to policy on an overall scale can have been no more than episodic. In model or simulation terms, character flaws amount to little more than a random effect. War came to America with some inevitability, far more than the marginal luck one might associate with a threat that leaves something to chance. Perhaps George Ball can serve as a boundary case. As under secretary of state with both Kennedy and Johnson, George Ball is someone w h o warned against involvement in Vietnam early and resisted with some ferocity the 1964—1965 proximate escalations that marked the final steps to war. "I had no doubt that the Soviets would lurk patiently in the bushes to pounce on any emerging target of opportunity," Ball recounts in his memoir. "That meant we had to be prepared to fight limited wars—or at least assist Third World nations to fight them. . . . The real concern was that the Soviets would test us in areas where our interests were too marginal to justify a suicidal response." 25 Thus even Ball wandered in the labyrinth of the wizards of Armageddon. The difference was serendipitous—where others did not bother to analyze Vietnam from a perspective of local interests, George Ball had a close understanding of France, French colonialism in Indochina, and the nationalist and post-colonial thrust of the troubles in Southeast Asia. Except for such saving grace, Ball might have been as caught up in the rat pack as, for example, Walt Rostow.

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Officials from Ball to the Bundy brothers and from Rostow to Rusk thus held remarkably homogeneous views, and their i m m e diate subordinates had operative beliefs that complemented those visions. T h e widely held beliefs of second-level officials, drawn from the strategic idiom of the nuclear age, supplied the driving mechanism of decision models like the incremental policy model or the thesis of the stalemate machine. O n other issues and in different times the range of choice may be different, and the specific interests of presidents will certainly differ, but the bureaucracy will continue to possess a certain homogeneity of view, and there will be widely held operative notions at the subordinate level. These views and notions should be empirically discoverable. Incremental policy models have applications wider than Vietnam, as does the "stalemate-machine" model, a name supplied by Daniel Ellsberg when that analyst was politically preoccupied with Vietnam. Actually the stalemate machine can be conceived more properly as a decision-rule model, in which the rules vary given the subject of the policy being studied. In this kind of model the decision rules essentially establish an algorithm or logical progression. Insertion of a driving mechanism in the shape of bureaucratic mind-sets should facilitate explanation of the policy outcome. Finally, back to Vietnam. The senior officials w h o faced the imbroglio there were infused with the lessons of Munich, so c o m promise in Southeast Asia was seen as blackly as appeasement of Hitler. Some, in addition, were suffused with the stark predictions of the domino theory. These views militated against full-spectrum policy review and in favor of forceful action. T h e bureaucratic mind-set of key subordinates in turn provided a mechanism for translating general policy views into purposeful maneuver. But those subordinates, steeped in the idiom of nuclear deterrence and limited war, led the way to supposed solutions like coercive diplomacy, graduated force, and escalation dominance. The combination of Munich and dominos with deterrence and coercion became explosive in terms of the decisions made about Vietnam. The environment for decisions, the zen if you will, was conditioned by this powerful driver that supposed means to be flexible and errors avoidable. Everything seemed calculable, so neat, so precise. Reality proved otherwise. The mind-set left no place for the lessons the future would bring, and precious little r o o m to perceive actions coming from the other side. Ultimately the other side could THE ZEN OF ESCALATION

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match American escalations ratchet for ratchet, and the Vietnam roller coaster became a stalemate machine. The Vietnam War was certainly tragic, for both Americans and Vietnamese. To the degree that the zen of escalation could not be transcended in Washington, the Vietnam War proved inevitable as well. A measure of responsibility lies embedded in that fact.

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Notes i.

Neil Sheehan, After the War Was Over: Hanoi and Saigon (New York: Random House, 1992), p. 61.

2.

Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie:fohn Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1988). David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972). Leslie Gelb, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1979); Daniel Ellsberg, Papers on the War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972). Irving L. Janis, Victims ofGroupthink (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972).

3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers (New York: Free Press, 1986). Bernard A. Weisberger, Cold War, Cold Peace (New York: American Heritage Library, 1985), p. 21.

8.

Peter G. Boyle, ed., The Churchill-Eisenhower Correspondence, 1953-1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p. 138. 9. Walt W. Rostow, The Diffusion of Power, 1957-1972 (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. 501. 10. Marvin Kalb and Elie Abel, Roots of Involvement: The U.S. in Asia, 1784-1971 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), p. i n . 11. Dean Rusk, As I Saw It (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 83. 12. Paul M. Kattenburg, The Vietnam Trauma in American Foreign Policy, 1945-1975 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1980), p. 98. 13. Halberstam, Best and the Brightest, p. 364. 14. Robert E. Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy (Chicago: U n i versity of Chicago Press, 1957). Cf. Morton H. Halperin, Limited War in the Nuclear Age (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1963). 15. Bernard Brodie, Escalation and the Nuclear Option (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). 16. Herman Kahn, Thinking about the Unthinkable (New York: N e w American Library, 1965). 17. Alexander L. George, David K. Hall, and William E. Simons, The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy: Laos, Cuba, Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971). 18. Neil Sheehan, The Pentagon Papers: As Published by the New York Times (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), pp. 125-126. 19. Osgood, Limited War, p. 269. 20. Sheehan, Pentagon Papers, p. 150. 21. Ibid., pp. 274-275. 22. Drafted by William P. Bundy, edited by John T. McNaughton; ibid., p. 295. 23. Ibid., p. 419. 24. Ibid., p. 425. 25. George Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern: Memoirs (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), p. 178.

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Conspiracy of Silence LBJ, the Joint Chiefs, and Escalation of the War in Vietnam George C. Herring Oliver Stone's film J F K suggests a conspiracy in which Lyndon Johnson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others, contrive by means most foul to undercut John F. Kennedy's noble effort to extricate the United States from Vietnam. This paper will argue that LBJ and the Joint Chiefs were indeed parties to a conspiracy, a conspiracy of silence that during the crucial period 1964—1965, and especially in July 1965, prevented a full and candid discussion of the major issues, leading to intervention in Vietnam in a manner that ensured frustration and ultimate failure. To understand this conspiracy, it is necessary first to grasp the depth of alienation that had developed between the Joint Chiefs and the civilian leadership during the Kennedy years. Youthful and insecure civilian officials feared the power of the military, its close ties with the right wing in American politics, and its clout with Congress. They deplored the lack of sophistication of top military officers, especially their inability to conceive of the use of force for anything but a full-scale war, and their perceived recklessness, which, if unchecked, could lead to a nuclear holocaust. Some senior officers, on the other hand, expressed contempt for the young and inexperienced civilians in the White House and Pentagon, especially the liberals and Ivy League intellectuals, the " c o m puter types," Air Force General Thomas Powers complained, w h o "don't know their ass from a hole in the ground." 1 They deplored the civilians' perceived political naivete and softness on c o m m u nism, and feared that their weakness would lead to war. From the Bay of Pigs through the Cuban missile crisis, civilmilitary conflict grew apace. Blaming the 1961 debacle in part on his top military advisers, JFK from that point on instinctively distrusted military advice. H e thus went around the Joint Chiefs by appointing the more "intellectual" and compatible General Maxwell Taylor as his personal military representative, for all practical purposes excluding the chiefs from the decision-making process. 2

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O n the other side, Kennedy's unwillingness to "go all the way" in Cuba infuriated some top military leaders. T h e military also felt, with some justification, that they got the blame for the Bay of Pigs while, in fact, according to Air Force chief of staff General Curtis LeMay, "we didn't have a God damned thing to do with it." 3 The gap widened in the Cuban missile crisis. For reasons of politics, Kennedy was careful to consult the chiefs, but Taylor, appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs in 1962, was the only m e m ber to serve on the president's all-important Executive Committee. Insistent military advocacy of massive air strikes and an invasion of Cuba in this hour of supreme nuclear peril frightened the civilians. O n the other hand, as with the Bay of Pigs, the military deplored civilian weakness. W h e n Kennedy at the end of the crisis called in the Joint Chiefs to thank them for their support, chief of naval operations Admiral George Anderson reportedly shouted, "We have been had," and LeMay pounded the table and denounced the settlement as "the greatest defeat in our history." According to one account, Kennedy was "absolutely shocked" and reduced to "stuttering in reply." 4 T h e missile crisis thus confirmed the worst fears of each about the other. " T h e military are mad," Kennedy is said to have remarked, and he and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara developed an abiding fear of blundering into nuclear disaster. T h e administration was more than ever convinced that crisis management was the key to maintaining world peace and more than ever certain that the military could not be trusted. Top military officers' contempt for civilian weakness was reinforced, and they resented their growing isolation. 5 T h e Kennedy administration all but excluded the military from its major decisions on Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs were clearly impatient with the administration's "marginal and piecemeal efforts," pressing for more rapid escalation, for greater use of airpower and defoliants, and even for the use of U.S. combat troops. 6 W h e n the president asked in late 1961 how he could justify sending troops to Vietnam w h e n he had done nothing about Cuba, Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer shot back that the Joint Chiefs thought the United States should also go into Cuba. 7 T h e Joint Chiefs also began to think in terms of attacking North Vietnam. Army chief of staff General Earle Wheeler complained in early

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1963 that H o Chi Minh was fighting the war for "peanuts" and advised the president that if the United States expected to win it must make him "bleed a bit." 8 The administration ignored such proposals. Except for Taylor, the chiefs were given little opportunity to promote their views and were left out of most major decisions. As far as the other chiefs were concerned, Taylor was the White House's man, too "political" and suspected of watering down their views and not pushing anything he felt had no chance of being accepted. "We in the military felt that we were not in the decision-making process at all," LeMay later complained. 9 In the year after Kennedy's assassination, the Joint Chiefs b e gan to regain some of their influence on Vietnam and other issues. This was not the result of a sinister alliance with Lyndon Johnson but rather of a much more complex set of factors. To some extent, of course, their reentry into the decision-making process did stem directly from the change in the White House. LBJ was more inclined to use regular channels than his predecessor, and it was natural under these circumstances for the Joint Chiefs to regain the role prescribed for them by legislation. Indeed, in a move that was certainly designed as a peace-making gesture and would have been unthinkable just days before, the new president on November 29, 1963, called in his top military advisers, reminded them of his long-standing interest in military affairs as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and expressed his confidence in them. 10 Johnson was no less suspicious of the chiefs than Kennedy had b e e n — i n a purely visceral sense he may have been more so. "This goddam military," he once snorted to Carl Rowan, "I just don't know when I can trust 'em and when I can't." LBJ brought to the White House the southern populist's suspicion of the military. Suspecting that the brass needed war to boost their reputations, he was determined to keep a close check on them. 11 His approach to handling them differed sharply, however. W h e r e Kennedy shunted them aside, Johnson, characteristically, sought to finesse and coopt them. H e would rather have them inside the tent pissing out, as he reportedly said of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, than outside pissing in. Sensitive to—indeed almost paranoid about—their ties with the political right and Congress, he was disposed to bring them into the inner circle

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where he could watch and neutralize them rather than leave them sulking dangerously on the outside. Changes in the composition of the Joint Chiefs also facilitated their return to a position of influence. As chairman, Taylor continued to act independently, and he never won the full confidence of his colleagues. Still, he was far more savvy politically than his predecessor, the abrasive Lemnitzer. H e was not as close personally to Johnson as to Kennedy, and after November 22, 1963, he reverted to something more like the traditional role of his office. O n July 1, 1964, moreover, Taylor was appointed ambassador to South Vietnam and was replaced by Army Chief of Staff Wheeler. Unlike Taylor, Wheeler saw himself as spokesman for the Joint Chiefs. An experienced staff officer, calm in demeanor and skillful in dealing with people, he was politically sophisticated and bureaucratically astute and thus was much more effective at working within the system than either Taylor or Lemnitzer. Undoubtedly cognizant of the damage LeMay and Anderson had done, he seems also to have made a special effort to keep them under control, thereby minimizing conflict with the civilians during a crucial period. More than anything else, deterioration of the military and political situations in South Vietnam following the overthrow of N g o Dinh Diem and the assassination of Kennedy brought the Joint Chiefs back into the picture. The alarming growth of the National Liberation Front (NLF) insurgency made clear that Kennedy's advisory effort had failed, appearing to leave few alternatives to a stepped-up military effort and greater U.S. involvement. In addition, the rampant and unremitting political chaos in the Saigon government caused U.S. policymakers increasingly to look toward North Vietnam for the possible solution of a problem that could not be solved in the south. In either case, the increasing necessity for military measures reopened access to the top echelons of power for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Throughout 1964, a pattern of decision-making took form that would have profound influence on America's 1965 decisions for war. From the beginning of the year to the end, the Joint Chiefs peppered McNamara and Johnson with proposals for drastic escalation. Warning that it was impossible to defeat insurgents operating from sanctuaries, they complained of "self-imposed restrictions" on U . S . - S o u t h Vietnamese operations and pressed for permission

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to launch air and ground attacks against NLF sanctuaries in North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Deploring what they viewed as confusion regarding the nation's purpose in Vietnam, they called for direct military attacks to destroy North Vietnam's will and capability to fight, thereby compelling it to stop supporting the insurgency in the south. 12 T h e chiefs also made clear their growing dissatisfaction with their position in the decision-making process. They complained that their proposals had not been forcefully presented to the president by Taylor and McNamara and that existing policy had been framed largely without consulting them. They expressed resentment at being excluded from top-level missions to Vietnam. Warning that the present cautious policy could lead to a major disaster—what they privately labeled an Asian Bay of Pigs—they admonished that this time they would not be the scapegoats, and they were therefore keeping careful records of their recommendations to McNamara and the president. They leaked only slightly veiled hints that the most disgruntled of their group might at some point go public. 13 With the situation in Vietnam steadily deteriorating, an election campaign approaching, and the right wing increasingly noisy, an obviously nervous administration handled the Joint Chiefs with the utmost care. T h e president's top civilian advisers privately complained that the chiefs were pushing narrowly military solutions to highly complex problems, but they recognized that they must parry the growing pressures. O n e answer was to engage the military actively in the planning process and try to steer them into areas that would be "politically productive" before being confronted with a "mass of ineffective and politically explosive" p r o posals.14 Another was to make concessions to them. T h e president's civilian advisers also pondered the possibility of holding off the chiefs with "very delicate" hints of future escalation. 15 Most important, as White House staffer Jack Valenti pointed out on November 14, 1964, it was vital before any major decisions were made that the president " 'sign on' the Joint Chiefs. . . . That way they will have been heard, they will have become part of the consensus, and our flank will have been covered in the event of some kind of flap or investigation later." 16 T h e president skillfully employed these devices from March to December 1964. O n the one hand, he made emphatically clear to the Joint Chiefs that he would not take any steps that would "lead IO4

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us to a Korea situation" before the November election. 17 At the same time, he authorized limited escalation and preparations for the next steps. H e was careful to include the Joint Chiefs in the planning process, putting General Wheeler on a working group appointed in November to consider further escalation. While deflecting Joint Chiefs pressures, he also hinted of further escalation. Employing a technique he would resort to repeatedly in dealing with the military, he rejected in November 1964 Joint Chiefs' proposals to launch major air attacks against North Vietnam, arguing that South Vietnam was still too fragile to risk a full-scale war. At the same time, he held out the prospect that once South Vietnam was stabilized he would be ready to do more. 1 8 Similarly, in December 1964, he mitigated rejection of proposals for a major escalation of the war with tantalizing hints of future action. South Vietnam would be given one more chance to shape up. "If more of the same," he added, looking directly at Wheeler, "then I'll be talking to you, General." 1 9 Changes in the composition of the Joint Chiefs during this same period reinforced the growing tendency to deal with issues by indirection and finesse. LeMay and Anderson departed and were replaced by General John P. McConnell as Air Force chief of staff and Admiral David McDonald as chief of naval operations. These "new breed" military leaders lacked the prestige and combat record of LeMay and Admiral Arleigh Burke. They were "planners and thinkers, not heroes," Time said, "team men, not gladiators." 20 They were men allegedly as much at home behind a desk as in the field, men whose military expertise was complemented by knowledge of politics, economics, and diplomacy. Above all, they accepted and deferred to civilian authority. The appointment of McConnell, a soft-spoken Arkansan, as replacement for the gruff, cigar-chomping LeMay was seen as symptomatic of the changing of the military guard, the coming of age of a new generation of military leaders sensitive to the political and diplomatic implications of military decisions and, as Time put it, able to "cooperate in the overlapping area between military and political policy without breaking a lot of crockery." 21 The new breed were also less inclined to go against the grain. They had seen the damage caused by LeMay's outspoken opposition, and they were therefore more inclined to go along or oppose by indirect means. Under the skillful leadership of Wheeler, the new Joint Chiefs C O N S P I R A C Y OF SILENCE

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also sought to render themselves less vulnerable to manipulation by the civilian leadership. In fact they differed sharply on the proper response to the impending crisis in Vietnam. The Air Force and Marines were hawkish, advocating the provocation of incidents to justify a full-scale bombing program. T h e Army and Navy were more cautious. At Wheeler's direction, however, the Joint Chiefs put aside their differences and presented the administration with consensus recommendations, thereby strengthening their position within the bureaucracy but narrowing the range of choices and voluntarily limiting debate on crucial military options. 22 T h e pattern of decision-making established in 1964 thus tightened. T h e Joint Chiefs were increasingly impatient with the restraints on military action and the limits they felt weakened the U.S. response, but they acquiesced in the president's piecemeal escalation, probably with the expectation that events would force him to go further. For his part, Johnson was undoubtedly alarmed with the step-by-step movement toward war, and he was increasingly frustrated with recommendations that appeared to leave him little choice but to move in that direction. "Bomb, bomb, bomb. That's all you know," he reportedly blurted out to Army chief of staff General Harold Johnson in the spring of 1965. "You generals have all been educated at the taxpayer's expense, and you're not giving me any ideas and any solutions for this damn little pissant country. N o w I don't need ten generals to come in here ten times to tell me to bomb. I want solutions. I want some answers." 23 But he continued to escalate, and while rejecting many of the measures advocated by the Joint Chiefs he continued to hold out the prospect of more. T h e ambiguity that increasingly shrouded the decision-making process was clearly manifested in the winter and spring of 1965. The Joint Chiefs disagreed sharply among themselves on the value of bombing North Vietnam, and they were especially skeptical that the limited bombing program they devised in February 1965 at McNamara's request would work. Yet they endorsed the program anyway and, following Wheeler's strategy, continued to submit unified recommendations. Once again, they most likely acted in the certainty that if the program did not work the president would have no choice but to do more. 2 4 In another way, as Clark Clifford later recalled, the February decision to initiate the bombing had an "air of unreality" about it. While routinely submitting paralI06

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lei requests for ground troops, the Joint Chiefs did not make clear to the president the extent to which the bombing of N o r t h Vietnam would require additional troops. The president and his civilian advisers, on the other hand, did not question the military persistently enough on the issue to get answers they did not want to hear. 25 T h e ground-troop issue was glossed over again in March 1965. After a trip to South Vietnam and on the basis of careful staff work, Army Chief of StaffJohnson informed the president at a private session with the Joint Chiefs on March 15 that it could take five years and 500,000 men to win the war. The statement, by one account, sent "quite a shock wave" through the administration. But the president appears not to have pursued the issue with the chiefs and they did not press it with him. 26 T h e civil-military conspiracy of silence is best revealed in the president's July 1965 decisions for war in Vietnam. Determined to avoid the sort of public debate that might threaten his cherished domestic programs, LBJ rigged the decision-making process to produce consensus rather than controversy. As a result, some questions were raised but not answered; others were not even raised. Profound divisions within the administration over the way the war should be fought were glossed over in the interest of maintaining surface harmony. General Bruce Palmer is correct in asserting that these deliberations comprised the only full-scale top-level examination of U.S. strategy until after Tet 1968.27 T h e president and the Joint Chiefs ensured that the sort of debate that might have led to a reconsideration of the U.S. commitment or to a more precise formulation of U.S. strategy did not take place. T h e tensions and divisions that were left unresolved would provide the basis for bitter conflict when the steps taken in July did not produce the desired results. T h e story ofJohnson's decisions for war has been told elsewhere and need not be recounted here. 28 The military and political situation in Vietnam deteriorated drastically in the spring and summer of 1965, and on June 7, General William Westmoreland requested an additional forty-four battalions, roughly 150,000 men, and the authority to take the war to the enemy through an aggressive search-and-destroy strategy. The request set off an intensive period of deliberation among Johnson's top advisers. T h e Joint Chiefs supported Westmoreland's recommendations and also proposed C O N S P I R A C Y OF SILENCE

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a major escalation of the bombing of North Vietnam. McNamara subsequently endorsed the military's proposals and recommended a partial mobilization of the reserves to meet the manpower requirements. T h e president's other civilian advisers were more cautious. The in-house dove and under secretary of state George W. Ball warned of the grave dangers of massive intervention and urged the president to find a way to cut the nation's losses and extricate it from a hopeless entanglement. Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy sought a middle way, a more modest increase in the force level and no escalation of the bombing. After two weeks of intensive discussion and endless rounds of meetings, Johnson in late July quietly authorized the increase to forty-four battalions and the shift to search and destroy, but he rejected expansion of the bombing and mobilization of the reserves. During the July discussions, the civilians dominated the decision-making process. To be sure, Westmoreland and the Joint Chiefs framed the agenda, but having done that they had only very limited influence. During the entire period of deliberation, the Joint Chiefs met with the president only once, and most observers agree that this meeting was pro forma, carefully staged to create the appearance of discussion and debate while building a consensus for what the president wished to do. 29 Fearful of the implications of the military's proposals, wary of their possible influence in C o n gress, Johnson kept the chiefs at arm's length, insuring that they were on board but conceding them little actual influence. At the same time, the civilians did not provide the military strategic direction, set precise limits, or even define with clarity what they wanted done. National security adviser McGeorge Bundy later conceded that a "premium [was] put on imprecision." 3 0 T h e discussions ofJune-July skirted many of the major issues. T h e debate centered on whether and how the troops would be provided, not h o w and for what purpose they would be employed. Yet even here there were omissions. O n perhaps the fundamental issue, Johnson rejected mobilization of the reserves, as proposed by the Joint Chiefs and supported by McNamara, without permitting any discussion or debate. Every contingency plan for fighting a war of the size proposed called for mobilizing the reserves. The Joint Chiefs were therefore alarmed and deeply concerned by Johnson's decision, but they acquiesced. 108

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Sharp internal divisions on strategy continued to be subordinated to the tactical necessity of maintaining the facade of unity. T h e Joint Chiefs remained sharply divided on how the war should be fought. T h e Marines strongly objected to the Army's and especially Westmoreland's determination to fight guerrillas by staging largescale conventional battles. 31 Air Force Chief of Staff McConnell wanted a short and intensive bombing campaign beginning in the south of North Vietnam and moving steadily northward in which the United States used all available assets and hit all designated targets. T h e other chiefs preferred concentrating on N o r t h Vietnamese lines of communication to cut the insurgents off from external sources of supply. As before, the Joint Chiefs in the summer of 1965 compromised their differences and developed unified positions to prevent the civilians from exploiting their divisions. T h e Marines acquiesced in Westmoreland's design while fighting their own war in the northern coastal region of South Vietnam. M c Connell abandoned his program, and the Joint Chiefs incorporated some of his targets into their lines-of-communication plan. 32 There were even deeper divisions between the military and civilians. T h e military seem to have perceived—perhaps much more accurately than the civilians, as it turned out—the scale of the conflict and the difficulty of the task in Vietnam. They had bitter memories of the frustrations of Korea, of limited objectives and crippling restrictions on the use of force. The Joint Chiefs correctly saw that involvement in Vietnam would require a full-scale war. They wanted to mobilize the reserves and declare a limited national emergency to make clear that the nation was not embarking on some "two-penny military adventure." 3 3 They felt, as G e n eral Johnson put it, that if the United States was not willing to go all the way it should not go in at all and that if military forces were committed, they should be committed at the "most rapid rate possible and n o t . . . at the rate of. . . an eye dropper." 3 4 T h e civilians continued to regard Vietnam more as an exercise in crisis management than the war it had become. They persisted in believing that slow and carefully measured increases in military pressure would locate that point where the North Vietnamese would be convinced that the cost of war would be greater than the potential gain. Once the North Vietnamese had been persuaded to stop infiltration of men and supplies, the southern insurgency could be contained. They also feared that the military proposals C O N S P I R A C Y OF SILENCE

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for drastic escalation might provoke the Third World War that the commitment in Vietnam was intended to deter. These differences never surfaced in the June-July discussions, and on those few occasions w h e n they spoke to each other, the civilian and military leaders did not speak frankly and directly. Even on those issues that were discussed, including the crucial and fundamental question of what would be required to achieve U.S. objectives, clarity and candor were not always the order of the day. T h e Joint Chiefs later claimed that they presented the harsh realities to the president—it would take 500,000 to a million men and five years simply to prevent North Vietnam from taking the South. In an oblique sort of way, perhaps, they did. An article planted in the New York Times Magazine in February 1965 by the Joint Chiefs warned that a war in Vietnam would be "long, nasty and wearing" and might require from 200,000 to one million American troops. 35 As noted, moreover, General Johnson, by some accounts, informed the president on March 15 of his estimate of five years and 500,000 troops. If the Joint Chiefs accurately foresaw what the United States was getting into, however, they pulled their punches when the issue came up in July. At President Johnson's request, an ad hoc study group of the Joint Chiefs, chaired by General Andrew Goodpaster, analyzed early in the month the fundamental—and notably ambiguous—question of whether the United States could win if it did everything it could. T h e conclusions were closely qualified and carefully phrased but generally positive and optimistic. Goodpaster's group operated on the assumption that the Soviet Union and China would not intervene. It made clear that success would require additional forces, an offensive ground strategy, a "full scale air campaign," and the "removal of restrictions, restraints and sources of delay and planning uncertainty." Badly miscalculating or erring on the side of optimism, the report grossly underestimated the N o r t h Vietnamese ability to match U.S. escalation. It therefore concluded optimistically that the United States might have to add only seven to thirty-five infantry battalions beyond the forty-four requested by Westmoreland to achieve its goals. "Within the bounds of reasonable assumptions. . . ," it concluded, "there appears to be no reason we cannot win if such is our will— and if that will is manifested in strategy and tactical operations." 3 6 T h e president's top military advisers were anything but starry110

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eyed optimists in the brief, tightly controlled discussions of late July. Marine commandant General Wallace Greene called for 72,000 Marines in addition to the men requested by Westmoreland and warned that it would take five years and 500,000 men to prevail. General McConnell would go no further than to predict that with the forces requested by Westmoreland "we can at least turn the tide to where we are not losing anymore." Wheeler admonished that it would be unreasonable to expect to win in a year. T h e United States might do no better than reverse the trend, and it could take as long as three years to register real progress. 37 Still, in responding to LBJ's questions, the Joint Chiefs evinced a firm, can-do spirit, and like the ad hoc study group, they either grossly underestimated the North Vietnamese reaction or minimized the difficulties. Wheeler confidently affirmed that the mobility provided by airpower and particularly by the helicopter drastically reduced the 10-1 "textbook" ratio of soldiers to guerrillas in counterinsurgency warfare. W h e n LBJ asked what North Vietnam would do if the United States escalated, Greene flatly retorted, "Nothing," and Admiral McDonald indicated that it could do nothing if the United States increased the bombing. Wheeler conceded that the North Vietnamese might themselves escalate, but he insisted that they would put in no more than 25 percent of their 250,000-man army and affirmed that they "can't match us on a buildup." H e went on to suggest that large-scale North Vietnamese intervention would be a good thing because it would "allow us to cream them." 3 8 The Joint Chiefs were in fact deeply disappointed with Johnson's July decisions. New York Times military analyst Hanson Baldwin, a mouthpiece for the Pentagon, reported on July 29 that the military viewed the president's decisions as no more than a stopgap measure. T h e buildup might not be fast enough to match the rate of deterioration in South Vietnam, and the refusal to mobilize the reserves left American manpower inadequate to meet global c o m mitments. 39 Yet while they vented their frustration to Baldwin, the military did not protest to Johnson, and w h e n the president inquired at the National Security Council meeting on July 27 whether they were on board, Wheeler nodded in the affirmative. The July discussions thus comprised an elaborate cat-and-mouse game, with the nation the ultimate loser. Johnson was keenly aware of the Joint Chiefs' view that the United States was "only C O N S P I R A C Y OF SILENCE

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pin pricking" the North Vietnamese, "just goosing them." 4 0 Yet he chose not to confront them directly. Eager to get them on board, he gave them enough to suggest that they might get more later, and he did not set limits or dictate strategy to them. At the same time, without permitting any real debate, he denied them several of the items they deemed crucial to succeed. T h e Joint Chiefs did not deliberately deceive the president, and on the crucial issue of N o r t h Vietnam's ability to match U.S. escalation they may have miscalculated as badly as the civilians. Perhaps to prevent Johnson from moving to George Ball's position, however, they tended to minimize the difficulties the United States might face, and they quietly acquiesced w h e n Johnson rejected mobilization of the reserves and the type of air war they considered indispensable to their overall concept of operations. It has been argued that they should have resigned at this point, forcing the debate the president did not want and sparing them from being accomplices to his deviousness. In fact, a deeply frustrated General Harold Johnson did contemplate resignation, removing his stars and driving to the White House gates before deciding that he could accomplish more by working within the system. 41 There is no evidence to suggest that the other chiefs, individually or as a group, ever seriously considered resigning. Unlike such predecessors as LeMay, Burke, or Anderson, the new breed of political generals and admirals appears to have learned how to play the game, soft-pedaling their disappointment with the president's decisions, perhaps assuming that once the United States was committed they could maneuver him into doing what they wanted. Civilian and military leaders thus went to war in July 1965 without clear channels of communication and operating under vastly different—and largely unspoken—expectations about each other and the war they were entering. A conspiracy of silence thus played a key role in the Johnson administration's escalation of the Vietnam War in 1964 and 1965. Perhaps if military leaders had been more aware of the president's determination to keep the war limited, they might have been more reluctant to press for intervention. If, on the other hand, Johnson had been more aware of military perceptions of what would be required to succeed in Vietnam, he might have been more cautious. Ambiguity prevailed over understanding, however, and in 1965, at least, each side seemed to prefer it that way. If they had 112

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confronted each other directly, David Halberstam has observed, the "vast and unbridgeable differences" between them would have been exposed. 42 The ambiguity persisted through the Tet offensive of 1968. T h e Joint Chiefs continued to press for escalation and mobilization. Johnson continued to make concessions to them and to hold out the possibility of more, but he steadfastly resisted mobilization and he stopped well short of the full-scale war they sought. T h e chiefs continued to acquiesce, hoping, through what Wheeler called a "foot in the door" approach, to get what they wanted. By dealing with each other in this manner, the two parties averted a MacArthur-style crisis of command, but the fundamental issues of strategy were never really addressed, much less resolved. N o one wrote a better epitaph for a badly flawed command system than its architect, the man w h o had imposed his own brand of unity on a badly divided administration. At a time w h e n the newspapers were full of reports of disagreements between the Joint Chiefs and the president, Lyndon Johnson proudly proclaimed to his National Security Council: "There have been no divisions in this government. We may have been wrong, but we were not divided." 4 3 It was a strange observation, reflecting a curiously distorted sense of priorities. And of course it was not true. T h e administration was both wrong and divided, and the fact that the divisions had been finessed rather than addressed contributed to the wrong policies, at huge cost to the nation.

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Notes i.

John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (New York: Oxford University Press,

2.

Trumbull Higgins, The Perfect Failure (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), p. 167.

1982), p. 25 n. 3.

Thomas M. Coffey, Iron Eagle: The Turbulent Life of General Curtis LeMay (New York: Crown Publishers, 1986), p. 355.

4.

Michael Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, ig6o-ig6j

(New York:

Edward Burlingame Books, 1991), p. 544. 5. 6.

Coffey, Iron Eagle, p. 355. Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer to Joint Chiefs, May 8, 1961, Foreign Relations of the United States, ig6i-ig63

[hereafter cited as FRUS 1961], vol. 1: Vietnam, ig6i (Washing-

ton, D.C.: G P O , 1988), pp. 126-267. 7.

Notes on National Security Council meeting, Nov. 15, 1961, FRUS ig6i, vol. 1, p. 610.

8.

FRUS ig6i, vol. 3: Vietnam, January-August

9.

Coffey, Iron Eagle, p. 422; John Taylor, Maxwell Taylor (New York: Doubleday,

ig6^ (1991), p. 73.

1989), pp. 270-276; Douglas Kinnard, The Certain Trumpet (New York: Brassey's, I99i),pp. 74-78. 10. Memorandum for the record, Nov. 29, 1963, Files of C. V. Clifton, box 2, Meeting with the President, vol. 1, LBJ Library, Austin. 11. Carl Rowan, Breaking Barriers: A Memoir (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), p. 266, 271; Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 262. 12. See for example Editorial Notes, Foreign Relations of the United States, ig64~ig68, vol. 1: Vietnam, ig64 (1992) [hereafter cited as FRUS ig64], p. 35; and also in FRUS ig64, letters from Joint Chiefs to McNamara dated March 2, 1964, pp. 110-111; June 2, 1964, pp. 437-438; June 24, 1964, pp. 528-529; Aug. 14, 1964, pp. 6 8 1 682; Aug. 27, 1964, pp. 713-714; Oct. 27, 1964, pp. 847-859. 13. C. V. Clifton, Talking Paper, March 27, 1964; Clifton memorandum for McGeorge Bundy, March 19, 1964; and Clifton memorandum for the record, May 25, 1964; all in Clifton Files, "Joint Chiefs of Staff," vol. 1, box 2, LBJ Library. 14. FRUS ig64, pp. 198, 206-207, 223> 242-243. 15. Ibid., p. 243. 16. Jack Valenti to LBJ, Nov. 14, 1964, N D 1 9 / C O 312 Vietnam (Situation in 19641965), CFF, box 71, White House Confidential File, LBJ Library. 17. Note, March 5, 1964, Clifton Files, box 2, Meeting with the President, vol. 1, LBJ Library. 18. Rusk to Taylor, Nov. 1, 1964, FRUS ig64, p. 878; Wheeler to Sharp, Nov. 2, 1964, FRUSig64,p.

881.

19. Notes on a meeting, Dec. 1, 1964, FRUS ig64, p. 968. 20. "The Management Team," Time, Feb. 5, 1965. 21. Ibid. 22. Joint Chiefs memo to Secretary of Defense, Sept. 9, 1964, and memorandum for the record, Sept. 14, 1964, Johnson Papers, National Security File, Country File, Vietnam, box 6, LBJ Library; The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History

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of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, Senator Gravel edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971-1972), 3:563-564. 23. David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972), p. 564. 24. Congressional Research Service, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War: Executive and Legislative Roles and Relationships, part 3, Jan.—July 1965 (Washington, D.C.: G P O , 1988), pp. 8 3 - 8 4 . 25. Clark Clifford with Richard Holbrooke, Counsel to the President: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1991), pp. 406-407. 26. Congressional Research Service, US. Government, p. 166. 27. Bruce Palmer, Jr., The Twenty-Five-Year War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), p. 41. 28. See especially Larry Berman, Planning a Tragedy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), and Brian VanDeMark, Into the Quagmire: Lyndon Johnson and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 29. Berman, Planning a Tragedy, pp. 111 - 1 1 2 ; Stanley Resor oral history interview, LBJ Library; Harold Brown oral history interview, LBJ Library. Brown observed that the president wanted to be sure that if there was trouble later everyone was implicated in the decision, and he went around the room asking each person his view to get him on record. 30. Halberstam, Best and the Brightest, p. 564. 31. See for example Gen. Victor Krulak to Gen. Wallace Greene, July 19, 1965, Victor Krulak Papers, box 1, Marine Corps Historical Center, Washington, D . C . 32. Lawrence J. Korb, Joint Chiefs of Staff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 160. 3 3. Gen. Earle Wheeler oral history interview, LBJ Library. 34. Palmer, Twenty-Five-Year War, p. 28; Gen. Harold Johnson oral history interview, U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Pa. 35. Hanson Baldwin, "We Must Choose—(1) 'Bug Out' (2) Negotiate (3) Fight," New York Times Magazine, Feb. 21, 1965. Baldwin later asserted that Wheeler, Harold Johnson, and Gen. Wallace Greene had all told Lyndon Johnson it would take one half million to a million men and at least five years just to prevent North Vietnam from taking over the South. See Baldwin oral history interview, U.S. Naval Academy Library, Annapolis, Md. Also Baldwin letter to the editor ofArmy, Sept. 1975, p. 2, and Greene to Baldwin, Sept. 24, 1975, Baldwin oral history interview. See also Greene handwritten notes, Wallace Greene Papers, box 24, Marine Corps Historical Center, Washington, D.C. Presumably speaking for Johnson's civilian advisers, William Bundy later admitted that "we didn't have any such figure as 500,000 in mind." Their estimate was in the neighborhood of 250,000 to 300,000. Michael Charlton and Anthony Moncrieff, Many Reasons Why: The American Involvement in Vietnam (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978), p. 120. 36. Report of Ad Hoc Study Group, "Intensification of the Military Operations in Vietnam: Concept and Appraisal," July 14, 1965, Johnson Papers, National Security File, Country File, Vietnam, box 20, LBJ Library. 37. Record of meeting with Joint Chiefs of Staff, July 22, 1965, Johnson Papers, Meeting Notes File, box 1; also McGeorge Bundy handwritten notes on meeting, July 22, 1965, Bundy Papers, box 1, LBJ Library. 38. Ibid. See also Jack Valenti, A Very Human President (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), PP-330-354-

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39- Hanson Baldwin, "Military Disappointed," New York Times, July 29, 1965. 40. Record of meeting with advisers (immediately after meeting with Joint Chiefs), July 22, 1965, Johnson Papers, Meeting Notes File, box 1. 41. See Korb, Joint Chiefs, pp. 163 and 179, for the argument that the chiefs should have resigned. For Harold Johnson's change of mind, see Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 16. 42. Halberstam, Best and the Brightest, p. 595. 43. Tom Johnson notes on N S C meeting, Nov. 29, 1967, Johnson Papers, Tom Johnson Notes on Meetings, box 1.

Il6

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Lyndon Johnson and the Legacy of Vietnam William Conrad Gibbons In his memoirs, Lyndon Johnson described the task he faced after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963: "I knew from the moment President Kennedy died that I must assume the awesome responsibility for uniting the country and moving toward the goals that he had set for us. . . . I eventually developed my own programs and policies, but I never lost sight of the fact that I was the trustee and custodian of the Kennedy administration." Johnson said that he did not have a "mandate from the voters," but he knew it was "imperative to grasp the reins of power and do so without delay."x And he did, beginning with an address to a joint session of Congress on November 27, in which he emphasized the need for continuity and for action on Kennedy's requests for legislation on civil rights and taxation that were stalled in Congress. He also pledged to keep U.S. commitments "from South Vietnam to West Berlin." "We are still the keystone in the arch of freedom," he said, "and I think we will continue to do as we have done in the past, our duty."2 On Sunday, November 24, Johnson met briefly with his principal national security advisers, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, Under Secretary of State George W. Ball, and the presidential special assistant for national security affairs, McGeorge Bundy, to hear a report from the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge. CIA director John A. McCone was also present. The subject was Vietnam. It might be assumed that the meeting was called because of the importance of the Vietnam problem, and that it was held so soon after Johnson took office, and on a Sunday, because ofJohnson's concern about the problem and his feeling that it required immediate attention. On the contrary, it was held because Lodge was in Washington, where he was to have met with President Kennedy to discuss Vietnam following a top-level conference in Honolulu on November 20. Johnson doubtless was concerned about Vietnam,

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but he apparently did not consider it to be so important or serious a problem as to require immediate and special attention. According to McGeorge Bundy, "the historical fact" is that Johnson "was having that meeting because Lodge was back, to get everybody to go ahead and do the best they could . . . in order really to put it aside because he had so many other things to do." Johnson's "real agenda," Bundy says, was to continue with the Kennedy [domestic] program, and "he did not have Vietnam, aside from this meeting, on the front of his desk in the months that followed." 3 In keeping with his desire to get on with other things and to maintain continuity, Johnson also did not replace any of Kennedy's principal advisers. This resulted, George Ball said, in leaving the management of the war "largely in the hands of those w h o took its prosecution for granted." Johnson, Ball says, "was as anxious as Kennedy to avoid an irreversible embroilment. . . . H e resented the whole idea of the war but was swept along by a m o m e n t u m others had set in motion." Ball added that during the coming months, as Johnson was "pushed by events and the well-meant prodding of the same men w h o counseled President Kennedy, among all the top command, I found President Johnson the most reluctant to expand America's involvement." 4 During the meeting on November 24, Lodge reported that the change in the South Vietnamese government, since the assassination of President N g o Dinh Diem on November 1, had been an improvement, and "he thought by February or March [1964] we would see marked progress." M c C o n e , however, said that the CIA's estimate of the situation was "somewhat more serious," and he could not give a "particularly optimistic appraisal of the future." 5 President Johnson said he "approached the situation with some misgivings." H e noted that many people had questioned the overthrow of Diem and that "strong voices in Congress felt we should get out of Vietnam." But the coup was over, and "we have to see that our objectives are accomplished." 6 McNamara said he had examined the economic situation, and he felt that the U.S. should "give generously of economic aid" but "must not ask the South Vietnamese government to do the impossible at this particular time." T h e president said he supported McNamara's position, "but at the same time he wanted to make it

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abundantly clear that he did not think we had to reform every Asian into our own image. . . . H e was anxious to get along, win the w a r — h e didn't want as much effort placed on so-called social reforms." "I received in this meeting the first 'President Johnson tone' for action as contrasted with the 'Kennedy t o n e , ' " M c C o n e observed in his notes of the meeting. "Johnson definitely feels that we place too much emphasis on social reforms; he has very little tolerance with our spending so much time being 'do-gooders.'" At the time Johnson became president, the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam consisted of large and growing military and economic assistance programs as well as an active program of political intervention. "By the time ofJohn Kennedy's assassination," said Robert Manning, Kennedy's assistant secretary of state for public affairs (1962-1964), "the few hundred American military that Eisenhower had sent had grown to more than sixteen thousand U.S. soldiers participating in hundreds of armed confrontations. By the end of 1963, they had flown some seven thousand air missions, lost twenty-three aircraft, and suffered 108 deaths." "After eight years of unqualified American support," Manning added, less than half of the territory of South Vietnam was under Saigon's control. The Northern-directed National Liberation Front was levying taxes and exerting various degrees of control in at least part of all but three of South Vietnam's forty-four provinces. The situation was steadily growing worse. Such was Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam inheritance: a frequently enunciated American commitment to save South Vietnam, an American public poorly informed by their political leaders as to what that commitment might require, and a situation on the ground in South Vietnam which exposed thousands of American soldiers and civilians to injury, captivity and death. . . . Johnson did not inherit a clear national policy. He inherited hubris— a commitment boldly and frequently stated, and . . . already characterized by a sizeable American presence. 7

Early in Kennedy's presidency, the decision was made to increase substantially the role of the United States in the Vietnam War and in the political and governmental affairs of South Vietnam. In National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 52, of May 11,

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1961, Kennedy reaffirmed the position of previous presidential directives that the U.S. objective should be "to prevent C o m m u nist domination of South Vietnam." 8 N S A M 52 also declared that it was the objective of the United States "to create in that country a viable and increasingly democratic society." This objective, too, had been emphasized previously, but Kennedy and his associates tended to give political and social reform a greater emphasis. To achieve these objectives, N S A M 52 provided that the U.S. would "initiate, on an accelerated basis, a series of mutually supporting actions of a military, political, economic, psychological and covert character." According to William P. Bundy, The Administration was impregnated with the belief that C o m munism worldwide . . . was on the offensive, that this offensive had been allowed to gain dangerous momentum in the last two years of the Eisenhower Administration, and that it must now be met solidly. . . . Although some have suggested that Kennedy was reluctant in this early decision, this was certainly not the mood of his advisors nor the mood that he conveyed to them. 9

Kennedy also sent Vice President Johnson to South Vietnam to discuss the proposed program with President N g o Dinh Diem. Johnson, w h o had not been a party to the development of the plan or asked to advise on the N S A M 52 decisions made by the president, was given a letter from Kennedy, which he was directed to give to and review with Diem. 1 0 H e also received written instructions from the State Department, which among other things stressed the importance of emphasizing U.S. confidence in Diem: Your visit to Vietnam will provide added encouragement to the Vietnamese Government in its continuing struggle with the Communists. Meetings with President Diem will help to produce broad understandings on the need for accelerated joint Vietnamese-U.S. action to resist Communist encroachment. They will also serve to confirm to the President our confidence in him as one of the strong figures in Southeast Asia on whom we are placing reliance.11

As instructed, Johnson reviewed the letter with Diem, w h o agreed to its various points. At a subsequent meeting, Johnson asked Diem whether U.S. or SEATO combat troops were needed, and Diem replied that he desired this only in case of "overt aggression." 12

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It has been suggested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff "wanted to put U.S. combat troops into Vietnam" and that by raising the issue of troops, Johnson, w h o allegedly was rehearsed, "carried out the Joint Chiefs' proposal." 13 There is no evidence to support these assertions. Although it is not clear whether Johnson was instructed to raise the question of combat troops with Diem, or whether there was a tacit understanding that he would do so, during discussions in Washington prior to the trip it seems to have been assumed that Johnson would raise the question with Diem in some form. A plan of action presented to Kennedy alluded to the study being made by the Defense Department of the size and composition of troops that would be needed "in preparation for possible commitment of U.S. forces to Vietnam, which might result from an N S C decision following discussions between Vice President Johnson and President Diem." 1 4 According to the Pentagon Papers, "President Kennedy apparently decided to feel out Diem's reaction on the subject of U.S. combat troops in Vietnam. Vice President Johnson . . . was empowered to bring up the question." Moreover, N o strong inference can be drawn from the fact that Johnson, rather than Diem, raised the issue. Even if the President had decided against making troop commitments to Vietnam at that time, there would have been nothing outrageous about instructing Johnson to refer to such a possibility once Diem began to talk about his concerns. . . . After all, the whole point of the Johnson mission was to reassure Diem and other Asian leaders, that the U.S. could . . . be counted on in Asia. Simply reading the American newspapers would have told Diem that at least as of May 5, the Administration was seriously considering sending American troops to Vietnam, and that Johnson was expected to discuss this with Diem. 15

In reporting to Kennedy on his trip, Johnson asserted that "the battle against Communism must be joined in Southeast Asia . . . or the United States, inevitably, must surrender the Pacific and take up our defenses on our own shores." The "momentary threat of Communism" was not the "greatest danger," however. Rather it was the "danger [that] stems from hunger, ignorance, poverty and disease," and "we must—whatever strategies we evolve—keep

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these enemies the point of our attack." W i t h respect to using U.S. combat troops, the report stated: Asian leaders—at this time—do not want American troops involved in Southeast Asia other than on training missions. American combat troop involvement is not only not required, it is not desirable. Possibly Americans fail to appreciate fully the subtlety that recently-colonial peoples would not look with favor upon governments which invited or accepted the return this soon of Western troops. To the extent that fear of ground troop involvement dominates our political responses to Asia in Congress or elsewhere, it seems most desirable to me to allay those paralyzing fears in confidence, on the strength of the individual statements made by leaders consulted on this trip. This does not minimize or disregard the possibility that open attack would bring calls for U.S. combat troops. But the present probability of open attack seems scant, and we might gain much needed flexibility in our policies if the spectre of combat troop commitment could be lessened domestically 16 In addition to his m e m o r a n d u m to the president, Johnson p r e pared a separate report on Vietnam in which he discussed at greater length the situation in Vietnam and recommendations for U.S. action, including one on U.S. troops: We should make clear, in private, that barring an unmistakable and massive invasion of South Vietnam from without we have no intention of employing combat U.S. forces in Vietnam or using even naval or air-support which is but the first step in that direction. If the Vietnamese Government backed by a three-year liberal aid program cannot do this job, then we had better remember the experience of the French who wound up with several hundred thousand men in Vietnam and were still unable to do it. And all this, without engaging a single Chinese or Russian. Before we take any such plunge we had better be sure we are prepared to become bogged down chasing irregulars and guerrillas over the rice fields and jungles of Southeast Asia while our principal enemies China and the Soviet Union stand outside the fray and husband their strength. 17 In early June 1961, Kennedy met with Russian leader Nikita K h r u shchev in Vienna. Khrushchev strongly challenged Kennedy, w h o left the meeting convinced of the need to affirm American power and resolve. Immediately after the meeting he told James Res ton

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of the New York Times, "We have to demonstrate to the Russians that we have the will and the power to defend our national interests. . . . We have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place." 1 8 In an interview in early 1964, Kennedy's special counsel T h e o dore C. Sorensen explained why Kennedy believed that the U.S. had to stand by its commitment to South Vietnam: In Laos it was clear that a negotiated settlement was the best we could reach. It was not accessible to American forces. It was up against the border of the Red Chinese. A policy of trying to establish an American protege there was contrary to the wishes of our allies. And therefore, inasmuch as a negotiated settlement was possible, since negotiations with the Soviet Union were possible, that was the most desirable alternative. In Vietnam, on the other hand, exactly the opposite was true. It was militarily more accessible, and there was no obvious route to negotiations inasmuch as we were not and could not be in a position of dealing directly with the Red Chinese and the North Vietnamese. And therefore, the President felt that we would have to maintain our military presence there until conditions permitted a settlement which would not be a disaster for the United States.19

Interviewer Carl Kaysen, w h o had been on Kennedy's National Security Council staff, noted that the U.S. had negotiated with the Chinese over Korea, and then asked Sorensen, "Were the possibilities or prospects for a settlement by negotiation ever considered, to your knowledge, examined—any sounding made?" Sorensen replied, " N o , not to my knowledge." Kaysen continued: "So the President assumed from the first that we had to deal with this problem by military means?" and Sorensen responded, "That's right." Sorensen added that Kennedy did not consider it to be just a military problem. Sorensen: He felt that getting the enthusiastic support of the country, its population, and its army was at least one-half of the problem and, therefore, would require economic and political and social reforms as well as military action on our part. Kaysen: Yes, but from the first, there was this judgment that we have to support military action with whatever also was required to do that. And throughout the whole of the President's Administration, we found ourselves increasing our commitment to Viet-

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nam, although at no time did the prospects improve. Did this reflect a judgment that a favorable decision in Vietnam was really vital to U.S. interests? Sorensen: It reflected rather the converse of that—that an unfavorable decision, or a retreat, an abandonment of Vietnam, an abandonment of our commitment would have had a very seriously adverse effect on the position of the United States in all of Southeast Asia. Therefore, we had to do whatever was necessary to prevent it, which meant increasing our military commitment.

Sorensen added, "I think the President did feel strongly that for better or worse, enthusiastic or unenthusiastic we had to stay there until we left on terms other than a retreat or abandonment of our commitment." During the summer and fall of 1961, there was increasing tension between the United States and the USSR over Berlin, culminating in August with the construction of the Berlin Wall, and this, after Khrushchev's threatening behavior at Vienna, apparently fortified the feeling of Kennedy and his advisers that the U.S. had to stand firm in South Vietnam. O n November 22, 1961, Kennedy approved N S A M 111, which provided for a "sharply increased joint [U.S.—South Vietnamese] effort" in the war, including large increases in U.S. military and economic aid.20 As proposed to the South Vietnamese, the new program would involve "a much closer relationship than the present one of acting in an advisory capacity only. We would expect to share in the decision-making processes in the political, economic and military fields as they affected the security situation." 21 W h e n the plan was presented to Diem, he objected to this statement, saying that his country did not want to be a U.S. protectorate, and the language was softened to describe a partnership "so close that one party will not take decisions or actions affecting the other without full and frank prior consultation." 22 As a result of this new commitment, U.S. personnel and equipment immediately began pouring into South Vietnam. "Within weeks," George Ball said in his memoirs, "we had sent almost seventeen hundred men to Vietnam and more were to follow. That meant that the balloon was going up, and although it was not climbing as rapidly as some of my more belligerent colleagues would have liked, I had no doubt it was headed for the stratosphere." 23 126

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Vice President Johnson does not appear to have participated in the making of this new U.S. commitment to join in a limited partnership with South Vietnam. Available records indicate that he did not attend any of the key meetings, although his military aide seems to have been present for at least some of them and to have reported to Johnson. 2 4 There is also no indication that Congress was consulted before President Kennedy made his decision, even though he committed the U.S. to a new role in South Vietnam, to an open-ended use of U.S. military and civilian personnel, and to the possibility of a much larger role in the future resulting from this initial action. N o r was Congress consulted before U.S. military personnel began engaging in combat soon after the new decision was made. Rather, the White House denied to Congress and the public that U.S. personnel were engaged in combat and resorted to various means to cover up that fact.25 In the months that followed, the size and scope of the U.S. role continued to grow, but there were few signs of improvement in the situation. In December 1962, Roger Hilsman (then director of intelligence at the State Department) sent Kennedy a long m e m o randum on the prospects in Vietnam. He reported that little progress was being made, that the Communists were stronger than ever, and that the sharp increase in U.S. military involvement had not weakened the resolve of the Communists to take over South Vietnam. After receiving this report, Kennedy sent Hilsman and Michael V Forrestal, a member of the National Security Council staff, to Vietnam for a report on the situation. They concluded that "the Viet C o n g . . . are being hurt. . . . We are probably winning, but certainly more slowly than we had hoped . . . [and] the conclusion seems inescapable that the Viet Cong could continue the war effort at the present level, or perhaps increase it, even if the infiltration routes were completely closed." 26 Kennedy had reason to wonder whether the new U . S . - S o u t h Vietnamese partnership was succeeding or could succeed, or whether he had committed the U.S. to a course of ever-ascending increases in men and money leading only to higher levels of stalemate. Yet, he considered the alternatives—reducing the c o m mitment or withdrawing—unacceptable. In a press conference on March 6, 1962, Kennedy said, "I don't see h o w we are going to be able, unless we are going to pull out of Southeast Asia and turn it LYNDON J O H N S O N AND THE LEGACY OF V I E T N A M

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over to the Communists, . . . to reduce very much our economic programs and military programs in South Vietnam, in Cambodia, in Thailand." 2 7 In May 1963, Laotian Communists threatened to overrun government forces, and the Kennedy administration, which had sought in the 1962 Geneva Accords to neutralize Laos, was once again faced with the problem of what to do. The response to a similar situation in May 1962 had been, in part, to deploy five thousand U.S. troops to Thailand, but these had been withdrawn in December following the neutrality agreement. 28 O n June 18, Michael Forrestal reported in a memorandum to the president that a meeting was scheduled for June 19 to consider Laos planning, based on the paper ofJune 17 that had been cleared by State, Defense, and the CIA. " T h e root of the problem in Southeast Asia," the paper stated, is the aggressive effort of the North Vietnamese to establish C o m munist control in Laos and South Vietnam as a stepping-stone to control all Southeast Asia. . . . U.S. prestige is engaged in both Laos and South Vietnam. If we are to preserve the prospects for success in South Vietnam and keep our commitment to defend Thailand within manageable bounds, we must pursue our intention of preventing further expansion of Communist control in Laos. Our efforts over the past year to obtain North Vietnamese withdrawal from Laos by international agreement have gained for us a great deal of political capital internationally. They should, therefore, not be abandoned lightly or before we have exhausted their possibilities completely. Since, however, the Communist effort is ambiguous, we require a program for graduated increases in U.S. political and military pressure which, without setting into motion an irreversible pattern, will enable us to achieve, if not a truly neutral Laos, under an effective Government of National Union, at least the facade of neutralist government presiding over a stabilized de facto partition.

The paper proposed a three-phase graduated pressure plan of political and military action designed to stop " N o r t h Vietnamese expansionist aggression in Laos and reduce its threat to peace in Southeast Asia." Phase 1 would involve "the use of non-U.S. forces which can be supported by stretching the Geneva Agreements"; Phase 2, "the non-combat use of U.S. forces, including

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certain violations of the Geneva Agreements"; and Phase 3, "the combat use of U.S. forces." 29 State and Defense did not agree on the sequence of military measures in Phase 3, as Forrestal explained in a memorandum to the president: State believes that in order to convince North Vietnam and the Chicoms of the seriousness of U.S. intentions in Laos without running the danger of a rapid escalation, it is essential that some U.S. ground forces, if only of a token nature, be introduced into Laos before an air or ground attack upon North Vietnam. Defense and the JCS maintain their position that no U.S. forces should be introduced into Laos except in connection with a simultaneous operation against North Vietnam. The military fear that unless our action and our objectives are clearly designed to eliminate the heart of the threat in Hanoi, to introduce troops into Laos would risk long term commitment of U.S. personnel under the most adverse military circumstances. 30

In the meeting with his advisers on June 19, the president approved Phase 1 and planning for Phase 2. H e said that Phase 3 needed further study. H e questioned the proposed air strikes against North Vietnam, "commenting that he wondered how much damage these would cause and if they would not immediately involve the Chinese." 3 1 H e asked whether it might not be wiser to send a limited number of U.S. ground forces to Laos before beginning action against North Vietnam. T h e same day, President Kennedy met with his advisers to consider a program of action developed by the State and Defense departments. 32 Vice President Johnson did not attend and probably was not invited, nor does he appear to have been asked to take part or to have taken part in any of the policy discussions on Laos during this period. By the end ofJuly, the situation in Laos was "relatively quiet." In a meeting on July 30, the president was asked and agreed to approve the initiation of certain Phase 2 operations and to approve planning for the remaining operations proposed for Phase 2. 33 Thus in Laos, as in Vietnam, President Kennedy approved a general plan of action and, by authorizing the first steps to implement that plan, set in motion a process that ultimately could have led to the deployment of U.S. troops. While he did not send U.S. troops

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to Laos, he made the commitment to do so, if necessary, and he approved the objectives for U.S. action set forth by Rusk and McNamara in their memorandum ofJune 17. Subsequently, Kennedy admitted that his plan for neutralization of Laos was not working. In a meeting with his advisers on September 3, 1963, he "pointed out that neutralization was not working in Laos and he wondered why Walter Lippmann had suggested that the Laotian case provided an illustration of what should be done in Vietnam." 3 4 In response to the suggestion in another meeting that neutralization might work in Vietnam, he said that while this could be considered in the future, it was not possible at that time. 35 Roger Hilsman, assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, w h o was present at both meetings, seemed to have forgotten Kennedy's statement about the failure of Laotian neutrality when, some years later, he contended that Kennedy's position was that the United States "must keep a low profile in Vietnam so we can negotiate its neutralization as we had in Laos." 36 By the end of September 1963, the situation in Laos was "temporarily static," and action under the graduated pressure program had not been further escalated. O n September 23, Kennedy met with Prince Souvanna Phouma, prime minister of Laos, and assured him of the continuing U.S. commitment. According to notes of the meeting, " T h e President emphasized that we would never accept Communist control of Laos and are determined to support the Prime Minister's government." 3 7 Meanwhile, in Vietnam tension increased in the spring and summer of 1963 between the South Vietnamese government and the United States, as U.S. officials, reacting in part to the government's repression of Buddhist demonstrations, became more critical of Diem and more insistent that he take steps to improve the situation. From the beginning of Kennedy's administration in 1961, there had been considerable opposition to Diem among some U.S. officials and discussions of how and by w h o m he might be replaced. Although few of the details have been or probably will be released, it would appear that in May 1963 the U.S. started to prepare for the replacement of Diem. This was followed by discussions with coup leaders in July; the notorious cable of August 24, crafted by Hilsman, Forrestal, and W. Averell Harriman, under secretary of 130

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state for political affairs, giving the green light for a coup; and the eventual coup on November i. Lyndon Johnson did not participate in the process by which the U.S. government positioned itself during the spring and summer of 1963 to approve and to assist with the overthrow of Diem. H e finally was given the opportunity to do so w h e n he was asked to attend a meeting of the president's advisers—without the president—on August 31, after efforts to organize a coup, following the green-light cable of August 24, had collapsed. Rusk, w h o had maintained good relations with the vice president, chaired the meeting, which had been called to discuss the question of a coup. H e and McNamara both stated their opposition to U.S. efforts to organize and manage a coup. As the meeting ended, Rusk asked the vice president if he wished to speak. Johnson responded that he agreed with Rusk and McNamara. H e said he had "great reservations" about a coup. While he recognized the evils of Diem, he had not seen any genuine alternative to him. " H e stated that from both a practical and a political viewpoint, it would be a disaster to pull out; that we should stop playing cops and robbers and get back to talking straight to the Government of Vietnam, and that we should once again go about winning the war." There were, he added, "bad situations" in South Vietnam. "We might cut down on aid and tell Diem that he had created a situation which we cannot handle politically and he must do 1,2, 4, 5 and 5 [ s i c ] . . . . It may be necessary for someone to talk rough to them." 3 8 U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam continued to be ruled out by President Kennedy. In a press conference on July 17, 1963, he said that to withdraw "would mean a collapse not only of South Vietnam, but Southeast Asia. So we are going to stay there." In a press interview on September 2, 1963, he said he did not agree with those w h o advocated withdrawal. "That would be a great mistake," he said. "We . . . have to participate—we may not like it—in the defense of Asia." In another press interview on September 9, Kennedy said, "What I am concerned about is that Americans will get impatient and say because they don't like events in Southeast Asia or they don't like the government in Saigon, that we should withdraw. That only makes it easy for the Communists. I think we should stay. We should use our influence in as effective a way as we can, but we should not withdraw." In the same inLYNDON J O H N S O N AND THE LEGACY OF V I E T N A M

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terview, he was asked whether he "had any reason to doubt this so-called 'domino theory,' that if South Vietnam falls, the rest of southeast Asia will go behind it," and he replied, No, I believe it. I believe it. I think that the struggle is close enough. China is so large, looms so high just beyond the frontiers, that if South Vietnam went, it would not only give them an improved geographic position for a guerrilla assault on Malaya, but would also give the impression that the wave of the future in Southeast Asia was China and the Communists. So I believe it.39

In an interview a few months after President Kennedy's assassination, Attorney General Robert Kennedy explained that the president "felt that he had a strong, overwhelming reason for being in Vietnam and that we should win the war in Vietnam. . . . All of Southeast Asia" would be lost, he said, "if you lost Vietnam. It would just have profound effects on our position throughout the world and our position in a rather vital part of the world." H e was asked, "There was never any consideration given to pulling out?" " N o , " he replied. 40 William Bundy says that Kennedy's opposition to withdrawal "reflected exactly what the internal record shows was being said by his senior advisers in council. Short of the most dire extremes, the U.S. simply should not think of withdrawing." 4 1 In mid-September 1963, Hilsman's office drafted a plan to exert pressure on Diem. In the memorandum transmitting it to Rusk, Hilsman explained that it was "a phased program designed to persuade the G V N [Government of Vietnam] to take certain actions to ensure popular support necessary to win the war." T h e U.S. objective in South Vietnam, Hilsman said, "is to win the war against the Viet Cong. . . . Withdrawal by the U.S. would be immediately disastrous to the war effort. O n the other hand, acquiescence by the U.S. to recent G V N actions would be equally disastrous, although less immediately so." T h e proposed plan consisted of a four-phase program of "multiple pressures" on the government of South Vietnam, beginning with U.S. efforts to induce change through conciliation and persuasion, followed if necessary by reduction or suspension of U.S. economic aid and finally by the overthrow of the government if all else failed.42 T h e question of bringing about change in the South Vietnamese WILLIAM CONRAD GIBBONS

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government had been discussed at a meeting at the State Department on September 10, attended by McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Robert Kennedy, Harriman, Hilsman, Forrestal, Sorensen, General Maxwell D . Taylor (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), M c C o n e , and General Krulak. Rusk did not attend. Vice President Johnson did not attend and probably was not invited. At the meeting, McNamara said he thought the U.S. should try to change Diem's policies, but he questioned the effort to overthrow Diem, saying that "we had no alternative to Diem that he knew about." Harriman "stated his flat disagreement. He said Diem had created a situation where we cannot back him." Hilsman described the pressure program, but he "acknowledged that if we started down this path we would have to be prepared to contemplate the use of U.S. forces on the ground in Vietnam." General Taylor responded that although he favored efforts to influence Diem, he was reluctant to consider using U.S. combat forces "either against the D i e m government or against the Viet Cong." 4 3 T h e next day (September 11), the same group met again, joined by Rusk (McNamara did not attend, nor did the vice president, w h o probably was not invited). 44 Rusk took issue with the position of Harriman, Hilsman, and Forrestal, saying that "we must not yield to the temptation of despairing of Diem and act in a way which would result in the Communists taking Vietnam. . . . It is possible for us to work with Diem." In other comments Rusk explained the dilemma faced by the United States: "If U.S. presence is not needed now, we should leave, but we want to leave behind an independent Vietnam. We cannot leave if to do so consists of abandoning Vietnam to the Viet Cong. At the other extreme, we do not want to apply U.S. force because, if we introduce U.S. troops, we will then have returned the situation in Vietnam to that which existed when the French were fighting a colonial war there. . . . If we go in with U.S. c o m bat troops, the Vietnamese will turn against us." Rusk said that rather than using a pressure approach, which Hilsman had acknowledged could result in the use of U.S. combat troops, Lodge should "wrestle with D i e m " to make changes in his government, specifically to remove his brother, N g o Dinh N h u . There was also strong CIA opposition to the pressure approach. M c C o n e said he doubted whether alternative leadership existed that would be an improvement on Diem. 45 LYNDON J O H N S O N AND THE LEGACY OF V I E T N A M

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Robert Kennedy asked M c C o n e whether there had been any estimates of how Diem would react if the U.S. stipulated conditions for U.S. troops to remain in Vietnam, and he replied that no such estimates had been made. President Kennedy joined the group at 7 p.m., and the meeting continued. 46 After Rusk and others presented their views, the president asked for further information on the pressures plan, adding that "we should express our concern to Diem and get a response from him." O n September 17, the president met again with his advisers to discuss the instructions to Lodge. Apparently, he approved the pressures plan and directed the initiation of Phase 1, described by McGeorge Bundy, w h o drafted the cable to Lodge reporting on the president's decision, as "the final effort of persuasion and pressure short of a decision to dump the regime, no matter what." 4 7 Kennedy also decided to send McNamara and Taylor to Vietnam for a report on the situation. In their report to the president on October 2, McNamara and Taylor said that the military campaign had made "great progress and continues to progress." 48 T h e timetable for final victory ("If, by victory, we mean the reduction of the insurgency to something little more than sporadic banditry in outlying districts"), provided there was adequate political stability, was to win by the end of 1964 in all but the IV Corps (the delta south of Saigon) and sometime in 1965 in the IV Corps. But they also concluded that the political situation continued to be "deeply serious" and could affect the conduct of the war. U.S. pressure on Diem was required to p r o duce change, but might make him even more uncooperative. A coup was not likely at that time, "although assassination of Diem or N h u is always a possibility." O f the three alternatives—reconciliation, selective pressure, or active promotion of a coup—McNamara and Taylor said that the first would be ineffective and the third unwise. They favored the second and recommended that the U.S. continue to apply such selective pressures, primarily through withholding of aid funds, but that nothing should be done that would impede the war effort. "We should work with the Diem government but not support it." Although the U.S. should continue to develop relations with "an alternate leadership if and when it appears," it should not actively promote a coup at that time. "Whether or not it proves to be wise

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to promote a coup at a later time, we must be ready for the possibility of a spontaneous coup, and this too requires clandestine contacts on an intensive basis." T h e final text of the McNamara-Taylor report also recommended the establishment of a program to train Vietnamese "so that essential functions now performed by U.S. military personnel can be carried out by Vietnamese by the end of 1965. It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of the U.S. personnel by that time." This was followed by the recommendation that "in accordance with the program to train progressively Vietnamese to take over military functions," the U.S. should announce the plan to withdraw 1,000 military personnel by the end of 1963. "This action," they added, "should be explained in low key as an initial step in a long-term program to replace U.S. personnel with trained Vietnamese without impairment of the war effort." 49 Whether to include these recommendations in the report had generated considerable controversy during the trip, as explained by William Sullivan, a member of the group: We were each drafting a separate chapter of this report and then exchanging the chapters around. When I got Max's [Maxwell Taylor] chapter—we all had offices in the old MACV [U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam] out there—I went to Bob McNamara and I said, " . . . This is totally unrealistic. We're not going to get troops out in '65. We mustn't submit anything phony as this to the president." And Bob agreed and he went in and talked to Max, and Max agreed to scrub it. Then on the plane on the way we talked about it a bit. Max said, "Well, goddammit, we've got to make these people put their noses to the wheel—or the grindstone or whatever. If we don't give them some indication that we're going to get out sometime, they're just going to be leaning on us forever. So that's why I had it in there." I said, "Well, I can understand that. But if this becomes a matter of public record, it would be considered a phony and a fraud and an effort to mollify the American public and just not be considered honest." 50

Although the record is not clear, it would appear that, following McNamara's usual procedure, a draft of the report was shown to the president, and based on his comments, revisions were made and the final report was then submitted. In all probability, w h e n McNamara and Taylor and others met with the president on the

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morning of October 2, they presented a draft of the report that did not contain the provisions for troop withdrawal. During the meeting, however, the president took McNamara and Taylor into his office, where it apparently was decided that these provisions should be reinstated in the report. There is no record as to what transpired during this meeting or why the provisions were restored. O n e possible explanation has been suggested by McGeorge Bundy: "I have a recollection," he said, "that I have no way of testing, that there was a pretty substantial undertaking or understanding or promise of effort, at least, between McNamara and Senator Russell [chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee] not to put more in and to begin to pull out." 5 1 W h e n the group returned from the president's office, M c N a mara directed that the withdrawal provisions be restored. According to Forrestal, w h o was present, there was "much 'expostulation.' " Kennedy, he said, "listened impatiently, turned on his heel and left the room. T h e statement remained." 5 2 Later that day, the president held a half-hour National Security Council meeting to discuss a public announcement of the findings of McNamara and Taylor. 53 T h e vice president, w h o had not attended the earlier meeting or been involved in the decision to reinstate the provision on withdrawing troops, was present for the council meeting but did not comment. The draft of the proposed public announcement stated that the major part of the U.S. military task could be completed by the end of 1965, "although there may be a continuing requirement for a limited number of U.S. training personnel," and that "by the end of this year, the U.S. program for training Vietnamese should have progressed to the point where 1,000 U.S. military personnel assigned to South Vietnam can be withdrawn." T h e president objected to the phrase "by the end of this year." According to notes of the meeting, "he believed that if we were not able to take this action by the end of this year, we would be accused of being overoptimistic." McNamara responded that he saw "great value in this sentence in order to meet the view of Senator Fulbright and others that we are bogged down forever in Vietnam. H e said the sentence reveals that we have a withdrawal plan." It was agreed that the sentence would remain in the announcement but that it would be attributed to McNamara and Taylor rather than to the president, as follows: I36

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Secretary McNamara and General Taylor reported their judgment that the major part of the U.S. military task can be completed by the end of 1965, although there may be a continuing requirement for a limited number of U.S. training personnel. They reported that by the end of this year, the U.S. program for training Vietnamese should have progressed to the point where 1,000 U.S. military personnel assigned to South Vietnam can be withdrawn.

At a meeting on October 5 of the president and his principal advisers to discuss the McNamara-Taylor report and instructions to Ambassador Lodge, the president, apparently on the advice of Taylor, said that the decision to remove 1,000 troops by the end of the year should not be "raised formally with Diem. Instead the action should be carried out routinely as part of our general posture of withdrawing people w h e n they are no longer needed." 5 4 T h e president also said that there should not be a formal announcement of the actual implementation of the plan to withdraw 1,000 by the end of 1963. 55 This action was apparently intended to serve several military and political purposes, one of which would be the advantage of not inviting criticism if there were delays in meeting the schedule for withdrawal. O n October 7, at a meeting of McGeorge Bundy with members of the White House and National Security Council staff, Bundy commented that he was "surprised that some people were taking as 'pollyanna-ish' the McNamara-Taylor statement that we should pull out of Vietnam in two years. H e said that what struck him was that two years was really a long time, considering that by then the war would have lasted four years—or longer than most wars in U.S. history." T h e group agreed that "the general line will be that in two years the Vietnamese will be able to finish the j o b without U.S. forces on the scene—a position considered reasonable by everyone around the table." Bundy asked Forrestal to prepare a national security action memorandum in order to clarify for relevant government departments and agencies what the president had approved. H e said that the New York Times had "the only version of what was decided at a recent N S C meeting, and while he did not mind communicating with various agencies through the Times, General Taylor had suggested the need for something more official." 56 O n October 11, N S A M 263 was issued. It stated that the LYNDON J O H N S O N AND THE LEGACY OF V I E T N A M

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president had approved the military recommendations of the McNamara-Taylor report, including the provision for establishing a plan by which most U.S. forces could be withdrawn by the end of 1965, beginning with 1,000 by the end of 1963, but that he had directed that no formal announcement be made of the implementation of plans to withdraw the 1,000 U.S. personnel. 57 Until Taylor suggested the need for an action memorandum, neither the president nor any of his associates seems to have seen the need for or raised the question of issuing such a presidential memorandum on the subject. Moreover, N S A M 263, although one in a series of action memoranda, was not an action memorandum. It did not direct the taking of any action; rather, it recorded the action that the president had already taken. There was, furthermore, no need for a memorandum on withdrawing U.S. forces. Planning for the phasedown by the end of 1965 was already taking place under the Comprehensive Plan, and plans for the withdrawal of 1,000 U.S. personnel by the end of 1963 were also under way. Whatever presidential action may have been deemed to be necessary or desirable had already been taken. N S A M 263 was an afterthought prompted by a newspaper article, and except possibly for Taylor, no one at the time appears to have viewed it as anything other than a routine formality. In a memorandum to McGeorge Bundy on November 7, Forrestal, w h o drafted N S A M 263, alluded to the provisional, conditional nature of the withdrawal plan. H e recalled that the president had made a speech in which he said that if the North Vietnamese would cease their aggression, the need for U.S. military assistance would end and the U.S. could withdraw from South Vietnam. "More recently," Forrestal said, referring to the action of the National Security Council and N S A M 263, "we have added a gloss to this formula and implied (in the N S C statement of last month) that we would also withdraw the bulk of our personnel as soon as the South Vietnamese were able to cope for themselves. Secretary McNamara and General Taylor estimated that this might occur in 1965." 5 8 Forrestal apparently interpreted the C o m p r e hensive Plan, not as a plan for U.S. withdrawal according to a timetable established by the U.S., but as a plan whose implementation depended on the ability of the South Vietnamese to cope for themselves. A few weeks later, Hilsman interpreted the withdrawal plans as I38

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having been developed for reasons other than reducing the U.S. involvement and said they would not affect the conduct of the war. In a meeting on November 27 with a leading South Vietnamese diplomat, w h o asked him about the significance of the 1,000-man withdrawal and the plan to withdraw U.S. forces by the end of 1965, Hilsman replied that withdrawal of the 1,000 was "psychologically important in showing success, encouraging Vietnamese people by showing they can increasingly take over the j o b , and defeating Communist propaganda about American objectives in Vietnam." Regarding the plan to withdraw U.S. forces by 1965, Hilsman explained that "this means only training personnel, since Vietnamese expected to be fully trained by then, and we shall keep in Vietnam whateverforces are neededfor victory" (emphasis added). 59 In a meeting with his advisers on October 5, Kennedy approved the McNamara-Taylor recommendations, and Lodge was directed to implement a program of pressure on the Diem government. At the same time Kennedy, while stating that "no initiative should now be taken to give any active covert encouragement to a coup," sent word to Lodge that there should be "urgent covert effort. . . to identify and build contacts with possible alternative leadership as and w h e n it appears." 60 W h e n President Kennedy issued these instructions he was fully aware not only that they were designed to encourage and induce a coup but also that they were the precise signals of U.S. support for a coup that potential coup leaders had said they needed to have before proceeding. Vice President Johnson attended the meeting on October 5 at which the instructions to Lodge were approved, but he was not called on nor did he volunteer any comments. 61 O n November 1, 1963, the coup took place. Diem and N h u were killed. Although reportedly shocked by the murders, Kennedy and those of his associates w h o supported the coup apparently were pleased to have a new government that they hoped would perform more adequately (from the American perspective). But the United States was hoist with its own petard. It had assumed a far broader responsibility, "a responsibility," as the president cabled Lodge, "to help this new government to be effective in every way we can . . . [with] the real problems of winning the contest against the Communists and holding the confidence of its own people." 6 2 T h e effect of the coup, as William Bundy has said, was to deepen LYNDON J O H N S O N AND THE LEGACY OF V I E T N A M

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the U.S. "commitment to the preservation of South Vietnamese independence. . . . In an intangible way, Americans in both public and policy circles were bound henceforth to feel more responsible for what happened in South Vietnam." But according to Bundy, "all of the participants" involved in the policy-making process "assumed that the stakes in South Vietnam were so serious as to warrant the deepened commitment, if that was what it came t o . " 6 3 Both William Bundy and Theodore Sorensen agree that before his assassination President Kennedy was not considering withdrawing from Vietnam. In the book he wrote in 1964 after leaving the White House staff, Sorensen says that in November 1963 "no early end of the Vietnam war was in sight," and while the president was "eager to make clear that our aim was to get out of Vietnam, . . . he was going to weather it out. . . . Talk of abandoning so unstable an ally and so costly a commitment 'only makes it easier for the Communists,' said the President. 'I think we should stay.' " 6 4 O n November 20, 1963, a special one-day, all-agencies conference was held at the Commander in Chief, Pacific, headquarters in Honolulu, attended by forty-five senior U.S. officials including McNamara, Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, and Taylor, as well as Lodge and Westmoreland, at which there were speakers and briefings on the current political, military, and economic situations and on "prospects and measures for improved prosecution of the war u n der the n e w government." T h e conference opened with a review of the political situation by Lodge, w h o called it "hopeful." 6 5 After describing the views of the military junta, Lodge said he "doubted the wisdom of the U.S. making sweeping demands for democratization or for early elections at this time." H e "emphasized that if we can get through the next six months without a serious falling out among the Generals we will be lucky," and he urged constraint, saying that "we should not push them too hard for several months." Lodge also commented on the need to continue to keep in mind the value of setting dates for phasing out U.S. activities, adding that the statement in October about phasing out U.S. forces by the end of 1965 was having a "tonic effect." General Harkins discussed the military situation and the changes that could be expected from the next government, and this was followed by a discussion of the economic situation.

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T h e only general comments during the meeting, apart from several questions about the n e w government, were made by M c N a mara, w h o said "he was afraid a certain euphoria had settled over us since the coup. True, the Generals are friendly to us, but the situation in Cambodia is deteriorating and the V C showed they have a tremendous reserve capability by trebling their rate of incidents week before last. H e wondered if current U.S. programs put enough power behind our objectives." McNamara then summarized the situation as follows: South Vietnam is under tremendous pressure from the VC. The V C are as numerous today as they were a year or two years ago. The surrounding area is weaker. The Cambodian situation is potentially very serious to the RVN. The input of arms from Cambodia before the recent developments was very worrisome in the Delta. The Generals head a very fragile government. The United States should not try to cut the corners too fine. We must be prepared to devote enough resources to this job of winning the war to be certain of accomplishing it instead ofjust hoping to accomplish it. T h e technical aspects of the Comprehensive Plan for phasing out U.S. forces were briefly discussed, as was the military assistance program. McNamara said "he wanted to move ahead with the war effort as fast as possible, spend whatever is necessary to w i n it." 6 6 O n November 21, McGeorge Bundy drafted an action m e m o randum based on the Honolulu conference proceedings. The President has reviewed the discussions of South Vietnam which occurred in Honolulu, and has discussed the matter further with Ambassador Lodge. He directs that the following guidance be issued to all concerned: 1. It remains the central object of the United States in South Vietnam to assist the people and Government of that country to win their contest against the externally directed and supported Communist conspiracy. The test of all decisions and U.S. actions in this area should be the effectiveness of their contribution to this purpose. 2. The objectives of the United States with respect to the withdrawal of U.S. military personnel remain as stated in the White House statement of October 2, 1963. 3. It is a major interest of the United States Government that the present provisional government of South Vietnam should be

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assisted in consolidating itself and in holding and developing increased public support. All U.S. officers should conduct themselves with this objective in view. 4. It is of the highest importance that the United States Government avoid either the appearance or the reality of public recrimination from one part of it against another, and the President expects that all senior officers of the Government will take energetic steps to insure that they and their subordinates go out of their way to maintain and to defend the unity of the United States Government both here and in the field. More specifically, the President approves the following lines of action developed in the discussions of the Honolulu meeting of November 20. The office or offices of the Government to which central responsibility is assigned is indicated in each case. 5. We should concentrate our own efforts, and insofar as possible we should persuade the Government of South Vietnam to concentrate its efforts, on the critical situation in the Mekong Delta. This concentration should include not only military but political, economic, social, educational and informational effort. We should seek to turn the tide not only of battle but of belief, and we should seek to increase not only our control of land but the productivity of this area wherever the proceeds can be held for the advantage of anti-Communist forces. (Action: The whole country team under the direct supervision of the Ambassador.) 6. Programs of military and economic assistance should be maintained at such levels that their magnitude and effectiveness in the eyes of the Vietnamese Government do not fall below the levels sustained by the United States in the time of the Diem Government. This does not exclude arrangements for economy on the MAP account with respect to accounting for ammunition and any other readjustments which are possible as between MAP and other U.S. Defense resources. Special attention should be given to the expansion of the import distribution and effective use of fertilizer for the Delta. (Action: AID and D O D as appropriate.) 7. With respect to action against North Vietnam, there should be a detailed plan for the development of additional Government of Vietnam resources, especially for sea-going activity, and such planning should indicate the time and investment necessary to achieve a wholly new level of effectiveness in this field of action. (Action: D O D and CIA.)

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8. With respect to Laos, a plan should be developed for military operations up to a line up to 50 kilometers inside Laos, together with political plans for minimizing the international hazards of such an enterprise. Since it is agreed that operational responsibility for such undertakings should pass from CAS to MACV, this plan should provide an alternative method of political liaison for such operations, since their timing and character can have an intimate relation to the fluctuating situation in Laos. (Action: State, D O D and CIA.) 9. It was agreed in Honolulu that the situation in Cambodia is of the first importance for South Vietnam, and it is therefore urgent that we should lose no opportunity to exercise a favorable influence upon that country In particular, measures should be undertaken to satisfy ourselves completely that recent charges from Cambodia are groundless, and we should put ourselves in a position to offer to the Cambodians a full opportunity to satisfy themselves on this same point. (Action: State.) 10. In connection with paragraphs 7 and 8 above, it is desired that we should develop as strong and persuasive a case as possible to demonstrate to the world the degree to which the Viet Cong is controlled, sustained and supplied from Hanoi, through Laos and other channels. In short, we need a more contemporary version of the Jorden Report, as powerful and complete as possible. (Action: Department of State with other agencies as necessary.)67 There can be little doubt that Kennedy would have approved Bundy's draft of the N S A M with few if any changes. H e had sent Bundy to Honolulu to serve as his personal representative, and Bundy says that in preparing the draft, "I tried to bring t h e m [the Honolulu recommendations] in line with the words that Kennedy might want to say." 68 In recommending a larger, stronger role for the United States in the war and an expansion of military action against N o r t h Vietnam, the draft N S A M was consistent with and represented an extension of U.S. policy and programs, and it provided for the implementation of the enlarged role resulting from the decision to force a change in the government of South Vietnam. McNamara, w h o , like McGeorge Bundy, tried to couch his statements in a

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manner that would meet with the president's approval, provided an important insight to Kennedy's own thinking when he said in Honolulu that the U.S. should "move ahead with the war effort as fast as possible" and should "spend whatever is necessary to win it." Even if one were to argue that McNamara, knowing of Kennedy's desire to withdraw U.S. forces, wanted to "win" the war for that reason rather than winning in the sense of achieving U.S. goals, the result would be the same: increased U.S. involvement and an escalation of the use of force. Another factor that could have been expected to weigh heavily with Kennedy in his action on the draft NSAM was that every senior adviser and every U.S. agency and department involved in the war supported the program agreed on at Honolulu and recommended in the draft NSAM. T h e draft was circulated for comment on November 21 and elicited little comment. 6 9 O n November 26, 1963, after meeting with his advisers on November 24, President Johnson approved Bundy's draft, which became N S A M 273. 70 According to the Pentagon Papers, this action was "intended primarily to endorse the policies pursued by President Kennedy and to ratify provisional decisions reached in Honolulu. . . . Both the President and the governmental establishment consciously strove for continuity." 71 A few days after the issuance of N S A M 273, disturbing information began to be received in Washington. T h e Communists apparently were taking advantage of the conditions created by the coup and were intensifying their attacks. 72 President Johnson decided to take "a fresh new look" at the situation. O n December 3, an interdepartmental group met and outlined basic topics as well as assigning papers. 73 O n December 6 there was a meeting at the State Department of the president's principal advisers, including Rusk, McNamara, Ball, McGeorge Bundy, Taylor, U. Alexis Johnson (deputy under secretary of state), William Bundy, William Colby (chief of the CIA's Far East Division), and Hilsman, after which the State Department sent Lodge a cable reporting on what had been discussed. The cable stated that the president "has expressed his deep concern that our effort in Vietnam be stepped up to highest pitch." Accordingly, an all-agencies review was under way of the situation and of programs and activities and how they might be improved. The cable said that at the meeting the Defense Department had pre-

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sented a "disturbing analysis" of the military situation. This presentation was viewed by the group "as possibly indicative of a p r o tracted intensification of V C effort, as well as suggesting the possibility of increased outside aid, both of which might seriously derange our prospects for the future." The group agreed to take several steps, including a. To expedite for further consideration plans for phased operations against N V N . b. Institute analysis of waterborne traffic into Vietnam and develop plans to interrupt infiltration by this means. c. Develop for further consideration detailed plans for probes into Laos including aerial recon over Laos and Cambodia. d. Assessment of political consequences of "c" above including what must be done covertly and what Lao Government might agree to. 74

O n December 19—20, McNamara and Taylor, accompanied by M c C o n e , William Bundy, General Krulak, and William Sullivan, among others, visited South Vietnam and reported to the president that the situation was "very disturbing." "Viet C o n g progress has been great during the period since the coup . . . the Viet C o n g now control very high proportions of the people in certain key areas, particularly those directly to the south and west of Saigon." "Current trends, unless reversed in the next 2 - 3 months, will lead to neutralization at best and most likely to a Communistcontrolled state. T h e new government," McNamara said, "is the greatest source of concern. It is indecisive and drifting." Despite the urgency of the military situation, McNamara said that U.S. resources and personnel "cannot usefully be substantially increased." W i t h respect to the infiltration problem, McNamara said that various plans were presented for cross-border operations into Laos, but these "would not be politically acceptable or even militarily effective." 75 Plans prepared by military and CIA personnel in Saigon for covert action against North Vietnam, pursuant to the provision in N S A M 273 and the suggestion of the interagency group that met at the State Department on December 6, were also presented to the McNamara group and apparently were well received. 76 In his report, McNamara recommended the approval of the program, advising that among the wide range of proposed sabotage and

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psychological actions, those that provide "maximum pressure with minimum risk" should be selected. O n December 21, President Johnson met with Rusk, M c N a mara, Taylor, and other advisers and approved the McNamaraTaylor report. H e also directed an interdepartmental committee, chaired by General Krulak, to recommend a minimum-risk p r o gram of action against North Vietnam. O n January 2 Krulak reported, and on January 16, 1964, the president approved the new program, which became known as OPlan 34A.77 Thus began what was to become known as Lyndon Johnson's war. Like Kennedy, Johnson came into office facing the commitments and decisions of previous administrations, which, Robert Miller notes, "narrowed the options for each succeeding administration to abandon the effort of South Vietnam or even to limit it." Kennedy's decisions, Miller says, "sealed the ultimate commitment of U.S. forces to South Vietnam's defense": political decisions that undermined an already weakening South Vietnamese internal political structure, thereby ensuring U.S. responsibility for the country's fate; military decisions that progressively involved the United States in the conduct of the war in South Vietnam but avoided, or postponed, the issue of sending combat troops; and management decisions that turned the U.S. effort into a bureaucratic nightmare and compounded the prospects for failure.

These decisions by Kennedy, Miller says, served to move U.S. policy forward in a straight line from those taken by the Truman and Eisenhower administrations; they progressively burdened the United States with ever-greater responsibility for the fate of South Vietnam, thereby correspondingly reducing South Vietnamese incentive for shaping its own future itself. Failure became inevitable. 78

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Notes 1.

Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage Point (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971), pp. 12, 18-19.

2.

New York Times, Nov. 28, 1963. Before becoming vice president, Johnson had very little interest in or association with the situation in Vietnam. He supported the policies of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, and both he and Kennedy, although absent on the day of the vote, also were in favor of the 1955 creation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) for collective defense against communist aggression. Only once did Johnson become actively involved in debate on the war. In 1954, when the Eisenhower administration was considering French requests for U.S. military intervention at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, Johnson, then the Democratic leader of the Senate, along with other Senate leaders, attended a meeting with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to discuss the matter. Johnson raised the question of consultation with other countries that might also be asked to supply forces. Dulles said they had not been consulted. All of the members of Congress who were present then agreed that before asking Congress to approve action, the U.S. should get allied support. For details see William Conrad Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pt. 1, chap. 4. In the end, Dulles was unable to get allied support, and no U.S. military action was taken.

3.

Ted Gittinger, ed., The Johnson Years: A Vietnam Roundtable (Austin: LBJ Library, Lyndon B.Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas, 1993), p. 14. Another indication ofJohnson's relatively low concern about the Vietnam problem was that at his first National Security Council meeting on Dec. 6, there was a twohour discussion of the world situation during which the subject of Vietnam, according to Chester Cooper, then a member of the council staff, "was barely touched upon." Cooper, The Lost Crusade: America in Vietnam (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1970), p. 222.

4.

George W. Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), pp. 374-375, 377-

5. 6. 7.

For McCone's notes of the meeting, see Memorandum for the Record, South Vietnam Situation, Nov. 25, 1963, Meeting Notes File, LBJ Library. For Johnson's recounting of the meeting see Johnson, Vantage Point, p. 46. Robert Manning, "Development of a Vietnam Policy, 1952—1965," in Vietnam Reconsidered, ed. Harrison E. Salisbury (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), p. 43. For Kennedy and Vietnam, see Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Times Books, 1995); Gary Hess, "Commitment in the Age of Counterinsurgency: Kennedy's Vietnam Options and Decisions, 1 9 6 1 1963," in Shadow on the White House: Presidents and the Vietnam War, ed. David L. Anderson (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993); Lawrence J. Bassett and Stephen E. Pelz, "The Failed Search for Victory: Vietnam and the Politics of War," in Kennedy's Quest for Victory, ed. Thomas G. Paterson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), as well as Paterson's own essay in the same volume, "John F. Kennedy's Quest for Victory and Global Crisis," and his Meeting the Communist Threat from Truman to Reagan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). In addition to earlier works on Kennedy cited in Hess's article, see Richard Reeves, President Ken-

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nedy: Profile of Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), and Reeves's excellent bibliographic essay on pp. 756 ff. The study by John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power (New York: Warner Books, 1992), is a disturbing blend of fact and speculation aimed at proving Newman's (and Oliver Stone's) conspiracy thesis. For one response, see Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot (Boston: South End Press, 1993). For Johnson and Vietnam, the existing literature covers primarily the period after 1964, and the biographies by Robert Caro and Robert Dallek presently end before Johnson became president. But there are a number of useful works, including George Herring, LBJ and Vietnam (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994); John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); and Paul Y. Hammond, LBJ and the Presidential Management of Foreign Relations (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992). Although it contains little material on Vietnam before 1964, see also Warren I. Cohen and Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, eds., Lyndon Johnson Confronts the World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), especially Richard Immerman's "A Time in the Tide of Men's Affairs: Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam." 8.

The text of NSAM 52 is in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, vol. 1: Vietnam, 1961 (Washington, D.C.: G P O , 1988), pp. 132-134. Foreign Relations of the United States is hereafter cited as FRUS.

9.

William P. Bundy, unpublished manuscript on Southeast Asia, chap. 3, pp. 36, 4 1 42, LBJ Library. See also The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, Senator Gravel edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971-1972), 2:57.

10. House Committee on Armed Services, United States- Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967, study prepared by Department of Defense, 1971, Committee Print, 11:132-135. Hereafter cited as Pentagon Papers, Department of Defense ed. 11. Letter from Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles to Vice President Johnson, May 8, 1961, President's Office File, National Security File, box 242-252, Kennedy Library, Boston. 12. Saigon to Washington 1743, May 15, 1961, Vice Presidential Security File, Classified Papers—Far Eastern Trip—May 1961, LBJ Library. 13. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, pp. 72—73, 75. Newman admits that there is "no proof" that Johnson was "rehearsed" but says that "the idea is hard to rule out." 14. Pentagon Papers, Department of Defense ed., 11:143. 15. Pentagon Papers, Gravel ed., 2:445-446, 56. 16. Pentagon Papers, Department of Defense ed., 11:163. 17. See FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 1, pp. 152-157. 18. James Reston, Deadline (New York: Random House, 1991), p. 291. See also Gibbons, U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, pt. 2, pp. 2 3 - 2 4 , 48. 19. Oral history interview with Theodore Sorensen, March 26, 1964, p. 96, Kennedy Library. 20. For the text of NSAM i n , Nov. 22, 1961, see FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 1, pp. 6 5 6 65721. Washington to Saigon 619, Nov. 15, 1961, Pentagon Papers, Department of Defense ed., 11:400-405. 22. Washington to Saigon 693, Nov. 27, 1961, FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 1, p. 677. 23. Ball, Past Has Another Pattern, p. 3 69.

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24. See the various memoranda to Vice President Johnson from Col. Howard L. Burns, Vice Presidential Security File, LBJ Library. Although the records do not show who was invited to the meetings but did not attend, it is quite likely that the vice president was not invited. This would not have been unusual. The vice president has not generally been considered by the Executive Branch to be an official of the Executive from the standpoint of the policy-making process, partly because of his constitutional role as president of the Senate. 25. See Gibbons, U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, pt. 2, pp. 107—109. It should also be noted, however, that Congress seems to have made little effort at the time to question the decision to increase the U.S. role. Ibid., p. 127. 26. Ibid., pp. 130, 134. 27. Ibid., p. 137. 28. In his memoir, At the Right Hand of Power (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1984), p. 326, U. Alexis Johnson notes that this was the first time U.S. troops had been stationed in Southeast Asia and observes that this action "should be recalled by those trying to assess what Kennedy's attitude might have been toward American ground troops in Vietnam." 29. Texts of Forrestal's memorandum ofJune 18 and of the proposed plan for Laos are in FRUS 1961 — 1963, vol. 24: Laos Crisis, pp. 1021 ff. For a list of twelve proposed military actions under Phase 1, see p. 1026; for sixteen proposed military actions under Phase 2, see pp. 1027-1028; for a list of four or five military actions under Phase 3, see p. 1029. 30. Ibid., p. 1022. Emphasis as in original. 31. Ibid., p. 1032. 32. See ibid., pp. 1023 -1034. 33. Ibid., pp. 1036-1042. 34. FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 4: Vietnam, Aug.—Dec. 1963, p. 100. Lippmann was a highly respected journalist. 35. FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 24, p. 1053. 36. Hilsman letter to the editor, New York Times, Jan. 20, 1992. In a letter to Rusk on March 14, 1964, Hilsman advocated the strengthening of the U.S. military posture in Southeast Asia "in ways which will make it clear that we are single-mindedly improving our capability to take whatever military steps may be necessary to halt Communist aggression in the area." Cited in Gibbons, U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, pt. 2, p. 237). In To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), pp. 533 — 534, Hilsman explained that if there was evidence that the North Vietnamese were increasing their use of infiltration routes through Laos, the U.S. should deploy a division of U.S. ground forces to Thailand as a warning. If that was not heeded, the division could be moved up to the Laos border and another U.S. division brought into Thailand: "If that set of warnings was also ignored, a division could be introduced into Vietnam, and so o n — n o t to fight the Viet Cong, which should remain the task of the South Vietnamese, but to deter the north from escalating." Hilsman added (pp. 536-537) that "if the North Vietnamese vastly increased their use of the infiltration routes, so as to include large numbers of North Vietnamese soldiers and regular North Vietnamese units, he [Kennedy] might well have introduced United States ground forces into South Vietnam." Hilsman said he believed that Kennedy would not have ordered U.S. forces "to take over the war effort from the Vietnamese but would have limited their mission to that of occupying ports, airfields, and

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military bases to demonstrate to the North Vietnamese that they could not win the struggle by a policy of escalation either" (emphasis in original). 37. FRUS ig6i-ig63, vol. 24, p. 1053. 38. There are three sets of notes of the meeting on Aug. 31, all of which were drawn on for this account. They are the notes by Bromley Smith, executive secretary of the National Security Council, cited in FRUS ig6i-ig63, vol. 4, p. 74; notes by Roger Hilsman, Jr., FRUS ig6i-ig63, vol. 4, pp. 6 9 - 7 4 ; a n d notes by Maj. Gen. Victor H. Krulak, U S M C , special assistant for counterinsurgency and special activities, Joint Staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Pentagon Papers, Department of Defense ed., 12:540-544. 39. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, ig6j (Washington, D.C.: G P O , 1964), pp. 569, 652, 660, 659. In a letter in the New York Times, Jan. 20, 1992, Roger Hilsman said that this last statement has been taken out of context, that it was an answer to a question "not about troops or fighting but about why Kennedy continued to send Vietnam economic and military aid." As can be seen, this is not correct. It was an answer to a very specific question about whether Kennedy had "any reason to doubt" the domino theory. 40. Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman, eds., Robert Kennedy in His Own Words: The Unpublished Recollections of the Kennedy Years (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), PP- 394-39541. Bundy MSS, chap. 10, p. 9. 42. The Sept. 16, 1963, memorandum from Hilsman to Rusk on the pressure plan is in National Security File, Country File, Vietnam, Kennedy Library. For an earlier draft of Sept. 11, see FRUS ig6i-ig6j, vol. 4, pp. 177-180. Each of these phases was discussed in Hilsman's first draft of the memorandum, but the description of phases 3 and 4, which involved steps designed to produce a coup, was deleted when the memorandum was declassified in 1981. See Gibbons, US. Government and the Vietnam War, pt. 2, p. 179. The first draft was replaced by a draft that discussed only phases 1 and 2 and omitted phases 3 and 4 on the grounds that governments should proceed by "incremental steps," as Hilsman said in a cover memorandum to Rusk. H e gave phases 1 and 2 "only a fair chance of success" but said that phases 3 and 4 "will create a situation over which we would have little if any controls at least if they were launched in the near future." FRUS ig6i-ig63, vol. 4, pp. 221—230. O n e paragraph from the first draft's description of Phase 4, however, does appear in FRUS ig6i-ig63, vol. 4, p. 230 n. 43. FRUS ig6i-ig63, vol. 4, pp. 169-171. 44. Ibid., pp. 185-190. 45. Ibid., p. 170. At the meeting, McCone passed out copies of a memorandum by William Colby, former CIA chief in Saigon, who at the time was director of the Far East Division of the CIA's covert action (Operations Directorate), arguing that the U.S. should seek to persuade Ngo Dinh N h u to withdraw from the government. Colby, who had worked closely with Nhu, volunteered to undertake the task. McGeorge Bundy read parts of the Colby memorandum to the group, but as Colby notes in his memoirs, it was "read without a comment." He says, "It was clearly out of tune with the Administration's tempo. Pressure not persuasion had become the main theme of Washington's policy." See ibid., p. 189, and William Colby, Honorable Men (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), pp. 2 1 2 213.

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The CIA's opposition to the pressures plan and a proposal for an alternative approach were presented in a memorandum on Sept. 30, "Proposal for a U.S. Policy in South Vietnam," developed by the agency's South Vietnam Working Group. This 3 i-page document, which was sent to CIA director M c C o n e and may never have been distributed outside the agency, said that the pressures plan developed by the State Department was "too unrealistic to merit further expenditure of Washington time and energy." There is a copy of the paper in National Security File, Country File, Vietnam, box 199, LBJ Library. For some reason, it was not published in FRUS. For a summary of the CIA paper "A Program for Vietnam," Sept. 4, which McCone mentioned in a meeting of the president's advisers on Sept. 12, see FRUS ig6i-ig63, vol. 4, pp. 201-202. In the Sept. 30 memorandum, the working group argued that although the U.S. should be concerned about the "character, behavior, or international image of the GVN, the overriding U.S. consideration should be the effectiveness of the regime in stimulating the armed forces and the populace of South Vietnam to resist and reduce the Communist threat. U.S. effort must not waste itself in ideal, but unattainable pursuits, but instead should seek—within the realm of the possible, and as an immediate goal—to repair the damage of recent weeks [in relations between the U.S. and the GVN] and prevent any serious decline in South Vietnam's war effort." The group stated that "we have tried to extract promises of meaningful reform and failed," and steps should be taken to "defuse" the controversy, to avoid setting conditions that probably would not be met, and to propose "litmus issues"—actions that the G V N "must soon take if it is to attract the internal support necessary to lead the country to victory and if it is to indicate its readiness to cooperate in this effort with the U.S." Based on the response of the GVN, the U.S. would then be in a position to determine whether its objectives could be achieved under a Diem government. Meanwhile, the U.S. should exercise greater restraint in its relations with the South Vietnamese government, including refraining from threats to cut aid. In addition, it should unobtrusively reduce its presence in South Vietnam, military and civilian, particularly in the cities. "This unannounced and subtle reduction may have a sobering effect on them [Diem and his brother]; in any case, it can do no harm." (There had been complaints by the Ngos that the role of the U.S. was becoming too dominant.) The first step in this plan would be for Lodge, after consultation in Washington, "to end the U.S. period of'freeze' by confronting Diem and N h u (together) with the various 'defusing' and litmus' demands of the U.S. . . . He should indicate U.S. readiness to take certain actions to lessen U.S.-GVN tensions. He should indicate that the G V N is, in effect, on trial; but he should refrain from any threats concerning the consequences of GVN uncooperativeness." If the U.S. became convinced that the G V N "had genuinely moved in the direction of the reforms urged by us," it should "attempt gradually to refurbish the G V N and to improve its domestic and international image." On the other hand, if the response was not positive, the U.S. would then be faced with having to choose among such alternatives as: Continue with Diem and N h u "to almost certain eventual U.S. / G V N defeat," commit large numbers of U.S. combat troops "in an attempt to save the GVN, despite itself," make plans to withdraw "with as little risk and embarrassment as possible," negotiate a settlement, or [the language of this final alternative was deleted when the document was declassified]. 46. FRUS ig6i-ig63, vol. 4, pp. 188, 190 ff.

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47- Ibid., p. 252 n. The text of the president's cable to Lodge on Sept. 17, 1963, is on pp. 252-254. There are no notes of the Sept. 17 meeting. See p. 240 n. 48. The final version of the McNamara-Taylor report is in FRUS 1961 —1963, vol. 4, pp. 336-346. 49. Planning for withdrawal of U.S. forces began in 1962. In a conference in Honolulu in July, McNamara, after an optimistic report from Gen. Paul D . Harkins, commander, U.S. Military Assistance Command in Vietnam, said that "6 months ago we had practically nothing and we have made tremendous progress to date." FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 2: Vietnam, 1962, p. 548. See also McNamara, In Retrospect, pp. 4 8 49. "However," McNamara continued, "we have been concentrating on shortterm crash-type actions and now we must look ahead to a carefully conceived long-range program for training and equipping RVNAF [Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces] and phase-out of major U.S. combat, advisory and logistics support activities." He asked Harkins how long it would take "before the V C could be eliminated as a disturbing force." Harkins replied that it would take about a year from the time South Vietnamese forces were "fully operational and really pressing the V C in all areas." McNamara said that to be conservative it should be assumed that it would take three years, adding, "We must line up our long-range program as it may become difficult to retain public support for our operations in Vietnam. The political pressure will build up as U.S. losses continue to occur. In other words we must assume the worst and make our plans accordingly." Another reason for such planning, as the Pentagon Papers suggest, was "to put the lid on inevitable bureaucratic and political pressures for increased U.S. involvement and inputs into Vietnam . . . to force all theater justifications for force buildups into tension with long-term phase-down plans." Pentagon Papers, Gravel ed., 2:161. This was the origin of what became known as the Comprehensive Plan for South Vietnam, under which U.S. forces were to be withdrawn as their training mission was completed and South Vietnamese forces acquired "adequate military capability." It was not a plan for withdrawing U.S. forces from the war, come what may. It was a contingency plan for withdrawing U.S. forces as South Vietnamese forces were able to function more effectively, and it rested on the implicit assumption that the war could be won by the South Vietnamese, without regard for the possibility that the Communists would increase their military capability and operations. In April 1963, President Kennedy met with Robert G. K. Thompson, head of the British Advisory Mission to Vietnam, a recognized expert on counterinsurgency, who had just returned from studying the situation in South Vietnam. Thompson said he thought the war was going favorably from the military standpoint, and that Diem was receiving good support. If Diem "disappeared," however, there would be a risk of losing the war within six months "since there was no other leader of his caliber available." FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 3: Vietnam, Jan.—Aug. 1963, p. 198. Thompson also offered a suggestion that apparently made an impression on the president. If the present rate of progress continued, he said, the U.S. might want to consider announcing later in the year that it was withdrawing 1,000 troops. This would have three good effects: "a. It would show that we were winning; b. It would take the steam out of the Communists' best propaganda line, i.e., that this was an American war and the Vietnamese were our satellite; c. It would reaffirm the honesty of American intentions." At a conference in Hawaii on May 6, 1963, where the Comprehensive Plan was

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discussed, Harkins "did not attempt to predict a date when the insurgency would be broken, but did feel that we are certainly on the right track and that we are winning the war in Vietnam, although the struggle will be a protracted one" FRUS ig6i — ig63, vol. 3, p. 265. McNamara declared that the phaseout of U.S. forces was too slow and should be accelerated, and said that he wanted a plan for the South Vietnamese takeover of some functions so that the U.S. could withdraw 1,000 or so troops by the end of the year (1963) "if the situation allows" (p. 270). The plan for withdrawing 1,000 troops was submitted to McNamara by the Joint Chiefs on Aug. 20, 1963, with the caveat that "no U.S. units should be withdrawn from the Republic of Vietnam for purely psychological reasons until the political and religious tensions now confronting the Government of Vietnam have eased," and for that reason, the final decision to withdraw the 1,000 should not be made until late October (p. 591). The Joint Chiefs also recommended that "to achieve maxim u m press coverage, and at the same time cause the least impact on U S / R V N military operations, the withdrawal should be programmed over approximately two months." O n Sept. 3, 1963, McNamara approved the plan for withdrawing 1,000 troops, but he apparently accepted the Joint Chiefs stipulation that no troops should be withdrawn until political and religious tensions had eased. 50. Second oral history interview with William Sullivan, Kennedy Library. In an interview with the author some years later, General Taylor commented, "This [the provision for withdrawing forces] was a part of the pressure business, because Bob and I drew up together a two-year program which, looking at our resources, looking at the progress we had made up until the Buddhist affair in a reasonably satisfactory ongoing program, that if we could get back and do as well as we did the year before that, in two years we should get to the point where we are virtually out and can turn these things over. Not only should we be thinking that way, but we should make Diem realize that he has got to do better, by the fact of the deadline, and should not expect us to stick around indefinitely. Again, to reconfirm it, then we will take out about 1,000 Americans. . . . It was really a gesture to convince Diem of our sincerity, of our feeling that we can end this thing if he will do his part, and he better do his part or we won't be around. That fact came out in the press, and it looked like complete stupidity and maybe it was, but at least it wasn't intended to be stupid." Maxwell Taylor interview with William Gibbons and Patricia McAdams, Jan. 11, 1979, in the author's possession. According to Thomas Schoenbaum's authoritative study of Dean Rusk, "the troop withdrawal plans were intended primarily to pressure Diem for reform," thus, no formal announcement was made of the implementation of withdrawals. Thomas J. Schoenbaum, Waging Peace and War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), p. 400. Leslie Gelb, a Department of Defense official at the time (and subsequently in charge of preparing the Pentagon Papers), says that most officials saw the withdrawal plan as a "Kennedy bureaucratic scheme to regain control of the leaping American pressure in South Vietnam" and as "part of a White House ploy to scare President Diem into making political reforms." New York Times, Jan. 6, 1992. 51. McGeorge Bundy interview with Gibbons and McAdams, Jan. 8, 1979, in the author's possession. 52. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy and His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), p. 716. See also Cooper, Lost Crusade, p. 216, and Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 403. 53. For notes of the meeting, see FRUS ig6i-ig63,

vol. 4, pp. 350-352. Presidential

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recordings were made of both the morning and the afternoon meetings, but the tapes and transcripts of these are still being withheld by the Kennedy Library. Apparently, there was no recording of the small meeting of the president, McNamara, and Taylor in the president's office. McNamara, who was given access to the tapes when writing his memoir, says that at the morning meeting the recommendation to remove 1,000 troops by the end of 1963 was "a major subject of discussion." He does not elucidate this point, nor does he refer to the transcript except to quote what he says was his own comment: "I think, Mr. President, we must have a means of disengaging from this area, and we must show our country that means." In the afternoon meeting, McNamara says, again citing a presidential recording, there was "heated debate" about troop withdrawal. The majority of those present, he said, believed that withdrawal was premature. The president approved the troop withdrawal recommendations, and did so, McNamara recalls, "without indicating his reasoning." McNamara, In Retrospect, p. 79. 54. FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 4, p. 370, and Pentagon Papers, Gravel ed., 2:188. The probable reason for not raising it with Diem was that he would view it as pressure, thus further impairing U.S. efforts to get him to make certain reforms. See Maxwell D. Taylor, Swords and Plowshares (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), p. 299. 5 5. See the statement in NSAM 263, cited below. 56. FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 4, p. 387. 57. Ibid., p. 396 (NSAM 263). 58. Ibid., p. 581. See also p. 595. 59. Ibid., p. 640. 60. See ibid., pp. 377-379 (two cables to Lodge, Washington to Saigon 534 and McGeorge Bundy to Lodge CAP 63560, both dated Oct. 5, 1963). For a summary record of the National Security Council meetings on Oct. 5, see pp. 368-370. 61. Of the sixteen meetings of the president and his advisers held between Aug. 26 and Nov. 1, 1963, the period during which the question of a coup was under discussion, Vice President Johnson attended four meetings. In addition, he was present at two of the seven meetings of the president's advisers held in the absence of the president. 62. Washington to Saigon 746, Nov. 6, 1963, National Security File, Country File, Vietnam, Kennedy Library. 63. Bundy MSS, chap. 10, pp. 8-10. See also Bundy's comments in Kenneth W. Thompson, ed., The Kennedy Presidency (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985), p. 255. Robert H. Miller, a retired ambassador who was the State Department's Vietnam desk officer and head of the Vietnam Task Force at the time, says the decision to support the coup "made U.S. responsibility for the fate of South Vietnam inevitable." Miller, "Vietnam: Folly, Quagmire, or Inevitability?" Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 15 (1992): 113. 64. Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 6 6 0 - 6 6 1 . 65. There is little information presently available on the conference except for a memorandum of discussion prepared by Commander in Chief, Pacific ( C I N C PAC), the major part of which is in FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 4, pp. 608-624. Not included is the section on items C—E, but this has been declassified at the request of the author: Item C i , "Revision of Military Comprehensive Plan"; Item C2, "Status Report on FY 64 MAP"; Item D, "Outline in terms of forces training and numbers involved, the projected program for reduction U.S. military forces by end

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FY 65"; and Item E, "Country Team suggestions for revision of current reports to develop a consolidated country team reporting system." 66. Memorandum of Discussion, Item C i , p. C-1-1, cited above. An example of the view of the conditional nature of the plan for withdrawal occurred during discussion of the Comprehensive Plan. Maj. Gen. Richard G. Stilwell, Westmoreland's assistant chief of staff for operations, stated that Westmoreland might recommend retention of the Marine helicopter squadron for three to six months beyond the programmed phaseout "in order to support I Corps operations during the next dry season." McNamara replied that he would be "sympathetic to its retention in I Corps beyond the planned phaseout date if it would materially contribute to planned offensive operations against the V C " (Item C i , pp. D-2, D-3). O n Nov. 26, the Joint Chiefs directed CINCPAC and Westmoreland to make a specific recommendation on the extension of the helicopter squadron beyond the "currently contemplated withdrawal date." NSF Country File, Vietnam, JCS 3698, 261755Z Nov 63, LBJ Library. McNamara's willingness to consider changing the withdrawal date for the helicopter squadron was particularly significant in terms of the implementation of the Comprehensive Plan. U.S. helicopters were being used to support South Vietnamese combat operations and thus were a key element of U.S. assistance, as well as a potent symbol of the U.S. role. 67. A copy of Bundy's draft NSAM is in NSF, NSAM File, NSAM 273, South Vietnam, box 2, LBJ Library. 68. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 439, from his interview with Bundy. Efforts by the author to obtain a copy of the interview from Newman have been unsuccessful, and Newman apparently has changed his mind about depositing the tapes and transcripts of interviews with his other papers in the Kennedy Library. (For his statement that he would do so, see p. viii.) Newman himself (p. 441) suggests that Kennedy would have approved Bundy's draft of the NSAM: "The draft NSAM was an effort to produce . . . a directive that Kennedy could live with. Kennedy, after all, could be expected to approve measures which would 'intensify' . . . the struggle, so long as they contributed toward the overall objective of de-Americanizing the war." 69. Apparently, the only proposed changes were those suggested by the State Department's bureau of Far Eastern affairs (Hilsman), but he noted these on his copy of the draft, which cannot be found. FRUS 1961 — 1963, vol. 4, p. 637 n. 70. For the text of NSAM 273, see FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 4, pp. 637-640. 71. Pentagon Papers, Gravel ed., 3 :2, 17, 190. The most extensive and possibly also the most potentially farreaching of these decisions was the provision for action against North Vietnam, item 7 in Bundy's draft. In NSAM 273, item 7 reads, "Planning should include different levels of possible increased activity, and in each instance there should be estimates of such factors as: A. Resulting damage to North Vietnam; B. The plausibility of denial; C. Possible North Vietnamese retaliation; D . Other international reaction. Plans should be submitted for approval by higher authority." It will be noted that the statement is incomplete. There is nothing to indicate what "planning" refers to. Planning for what? There is no known explanation for the

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lack of a reference. It could be conjectured that there was an error of omission, and that the statement of item 7 in Bundy's draft was supposed to have been inserted in the beginning of item 7 in NSAM 273, making it clear what "planning" referred to. O r it is possible that those involved understood what planning referred to and that it was not considered necessary to add prefatory language. Whatever the reason, there is no basis for the argument that because NSAM 273, unlike Bundy's draft, omitted reference to South Vietnamese "resources," it thereby opened the door to direct U.S. actions against North Vietnam. (See Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 446.) Such action could have occurred and eventually did occur as a matter of military strategy and presidential order, and did not depend on language in a national security action memorandum. Moreover, U.S. personnel were already involved, prior to the issuance of NSAM 273, in conducting covert operations against North Vietnam and continued to be involved in the covert operations carried out on an expanded scale after the plan provided by NSAM 273 was implemented. It should also be noted that the plan submitted to President Johnson in January 1964 (OPlan 34A) specified that expanded covert operations against North Vietnam would be conducted by South Vietnamese personnel and, like Bundy's draft of Nov. 21 and NSAM 273 itself, made no mention of U.S. resources. See McGeorge Bundy's memorandum to the president, Jan. 7, 1964, in FRUS 19641968, vol. 1: Vietnam, 1964, p. 4. As to any contention that the language of NSAM 273, by allegedly providing for direct U.S. action against North Vietnam, thereby set the stage for the Gulf of Tonkin attacks in 1964 and subsequent U.S. retaliation, those incidents could as easily have occurred under the Bundy draft, which also provided for the planning of covert attacks on North Vietnam. McNamara's memoir (In Retrospect, p. 103) states that NSAM 273 "made clear that Johnson's policy remained the same as Kennedy's: 'to assist the people of [the] Government of South Vietnam to win their contest against the externally directed and supported Communist conspiracy' through training support and without the application of overt U.S. military force. But Johnson also approved planning for covert action against North Vietnam by CIA-supported South Vietnamese forces. First raised at the November 20, 1963, Honolulu conference, this proposal later became known as Operation Plan 34A." What McNamara neglects to say is that such covert action was already occurring, though on a much smaller scale than OPlan 34A, having been authorized probably as early as 1961 by Kennedy, and that at the Honolulu conference McNamara and other participants agreed to recommend a large increase in these operations. Bundy's draft, consistent with the temper of the meeting in Honolulu, declared that plans for a new program of action against North Vietnam should be designed "to achieve a wholly new level of effectiveness in this field of action." There is no explanation as to what was envisioned by "wholly new level of effectiveness," but the phrase suggests that U.S. policymakers, before Kennedy's assassination, had determined that action against North Vietnam was becoming a more important element in the conduct of the war and that such action needed to be greatly increased. See FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 4, pp. 653 and 664. Pentagon Papers, Gravel ed., 2:191. FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 4, pp. 685-686. See ibid., pp. 732—735, for the text of McNamara's report. There are also reports

RAD GIBBONS

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from Krulak, pp. 721-727, Sullivan, pp. 728-731, and McCone, pp. 735-738. See also McNamara, In Retrospect, pp. 103-106. Sullivan's report (FRUS, p. 729) stated that the cross-border plan "would amount to a Vietnamese invasion of all Southern Laos over to the region controlled by the FAR [the Laos army]. The invasion would be accompanied by U.S. personnel and would also envisage air strikes. I think it is fair to say that the plan was a non-starter." 76. These plans provided for "actions of escalating intensity, ranging from minor propaganda moves to destruction of major resources by raid or bombing . . . based on the premise that by covert means the North Vietnamese would be warned that their support of the Viet Cong insurgents was about to bring down direct punishment and, after an interval, to proceed with selected elements of the escalative programs, making clear always that it would stop when the assistance to the Viet Cong stopped." That description is from Krulak's report, FRUS ig6i-ig63, vol. 4, p. 724. Sullivan noted in his report (p. 729) that as a result of the discussion in Saigon of this proposal, "it was decided to take the necessary steps immediately to acquire and inventory whatever equipment would be needed for the proposed action" and to recruit and train personnel. Meanwhile, the plan would be studied by an interdepartmental group in Washington. 77. There is no known record of the Dec. 21 meeting. The Krulak report, "Program of Operations against North Vietnam," is still classified. The plan of the program stipulated that it should be a twelve-month, three-phase operation. Phase 1 (Feb.— May 1964) would involve intelligence collections through U-2 (high-altitude observation nights) and communications intelligence missions, psychological operations, and twenty "destructive undertakings. . . designed to result in substantial destruction, economic loss and harassment." Phases 2 and 3 would involve the same kinds of actions but of increased tempo and magnitude, and destructive actions would be extended to targets "identified with North Vietnam's economic and industrial well-being." Pentagon Papers, Department of Defense ed., bk. 4, C. 2 (a), p. 1. According to the Pentagon Papers, members of the Krulak committee "reasoned that Hanoi attached great importance to economic development, and that progressive damage to the economy—or its threatened destruction—would convince Hanoi to cancel support of insurgency. But, the committee cautioned, even successful execution of the program might not induce Hanoi to 'cease and desist'" (pp. I X - X ) . 78. Miller, "Vietnam: Folly," p. 114. Miller also argues that "Kennedy's gradualist, measured approach" had other consequences. It "misled Hanoi and its backers in Moscow and Beijing into underestimating how far the United States was prepared to go to defend a small country 10,000 miles away. It also weakened the tolerance of the American people when war finally came and U.S. casualties mounted for a cause whose costs seemed increasingly disproportionate to the ever-elusive perception of U.S. interest in a small, far-off land."

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The Kennedy-Johnson Transition The Case for Policy Reversal

John M. Newman President Johnson reversed President Kennedy's policy in Vietnam. Johnson's dispatch of American combat troops to Vietnam reversed not only a fundamental aspect of Kennedy's Vietnam policy but also a long-standing American proscription against intervening in Asia with combat troops, a tenet that had been in place since the American experience in Korea (1950—1953). Time and again, the same men w h o later advised Johnson to send in the troops advised Kennedy to do it, and Kennedy never wavered in refusing. Confronted with these undeniable facts, proponents of the notion that Johnson continued Kennedy's Vietnam policy attempt to build their case on the argument that Kennedy would have eventually dropped his opposition to sending combat troops to Vietnam. This proposition is arguably more speculative than the proposition that Kennedy would have adhered to his ban against their use, but without it the continuity thesis crashes. It is not surprising that the continuity proponents ignore the fact that Kennedy ruled against combat troops in Vietnam, not w h e n he was in a position of political strength or when the argument could have gone either way, but in 1961 when he had suffered the twin losses in Laos and Cuba and w h e n he was told that failure to send c o m bat troops to Vietnam would lead to the loss of that country and much more. T h e lingering resistance in American academe to accepting the above simple truth is an anachronistic and somewhat embarrassing outgrowth of the apologia for American intervention in Vietnam. The notion that the bad dream of Vietnam might not have been is not only unattractive but also painful. T h e idea outrages disparate commentators from the right and left ends of the political spectrum. The real caretakers of the JFK-LBJ Vietnam continuity thesis, however, have been prominent mainstream academics, and the continuity thesis has easily survived efforts to counter it by men personally close to Kennedy, such as Arthur Schlesinger and Theodore Sorensen.

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T h e argument that Kennedy would have held the line against combat troops has always suffered from the unpalatable implication that the Vietnam nightmare might have been avoided. T h e burden of proof has therefore tended to rest with those w h o advance that argument. In addition, Kennedy significantly deepened the American stake in Vietnam, which is one of the few unassailable arguments the continuity proponents have. The problem with this part of the argument, however, is that this essentially externally visible characteristic (i.e., more American money, advisers, and equipment) may or may not be an accurate reflection of the secret internal record. T h e facts pertaining to the classified record of Kennedy's Vietnam decisions have been released only in the last few years. O n a more fundamental level, the problem stems from the duplicity ofJohn Kennedy, a duplicity overlooked by JFK's supporters because it detracts so much from his image, and overlooked by the proponents of the continuity thesis precisely because it destroys their argument. There is no question but that in the main, Kennedy's 1963 press conferences gave the impression he was unwilling to lose in Vietnam. The truth, however, is that Kennedy was preparing for—and in fact began—a withdrawal from Vietnam when the battlefield situation was desperate. What was American policy in Vietnam in the early sixties? From early in his administration, President Kennedy accepted that the primary American objective was to prevent the communist domination of South Vietnam. There was never any argument over the ends of American Vietnam policy under Kennedy, but there was an argument over the means to be employed to achieve those ends. M o r e specifically, President Kennedy's policy was to assist the South Vietnamese to prevent the communist domination of their country. The prohibition against engaging in another American land war in Asia was a fundamental policy of the Kennedy administration, and one which President Johnson actually endorsed in 1964. To deny that the decision to send in ground combat units did not reverse this long-standing feature of American Vietnam policy simply ignores the most basic facts. A popular proposition used by observers w h o dispute that the use of combat troops reversed U.S. policy is the gradual-slide argument, which holds that on a

Combat Troops: Just Another Notch or a Fork in the Road?

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so-called policy continuum, ground combat units simply represent the next rung on the ladder of escalation. In other words, when the Marines waded ashore it was as if the mercury in the thermometer went from 72 to 73 degrees. Under Kennedy the temperature increased so many degrees and under Johnson it increased so many degrees and, since both were in the same direction, J o h n son simply continued the policy. Such arguments blur the crucial distinction between a policy of advising the South Vietnamese army how to fight the war and a policy of using the American army to fight the war. From any perspective, not the least of which was the Viet Cong's, the difference between the South Vietnamese army and the American army was not subtle, and neither was the difference between the Special Forces, on the one hand, and the Marines or 82d Airborne Division, on the other. These differences are fundamental, and to construe a large increase in advisers as something only slightly less or a little different from brigades and divisions of ground forces is just nonsense. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson could have deepened American commitments and ratcheted up American participation in the war effort without crossing the Rubicon of conventional forces in Vietnam. Sending in the American army was nothing less than taking a different turn at the main fork in the road to Vietnam. There are those w h o argue that the Kennedy administration never faced this fork in the road and that the dire situation faced by Johnson developed only after Kennedy's unfortunate demise. This argument is misinformed, as the record of Kennedy's first year in office makes unequivocally clear. ig6i: NSAM 111 and the Limits to American Involvement

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W h a t does the record of the Kennedy administration's first year reveal about Vietnam policy? W h a t was the situation? What was the president told and how were the policy choices framed? What policy did Kennedy choose? T h e political and military situation in Vietnam was already critical and deteriorating further by the time Kennedy was inaugurated in January 1961. For the first three months the worsening situation in Vietnam was overshadowed by the crisis in Laos, but over the summer and fall of 1961 Vietnam became the focus of American attention in Indochina. As the military situation became increas-

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ingly critical, calls within the administration for the use of American combat forces in Vietnam prompted a major debate over Vietnam policy in October and November 1961, a debate Kennedy finally resolved with one of his most important decisions on Vietnam: National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 111, p r o mulgated on November 22, 1961. 1 T h e president sent his top experts to Vietnam for a look while the concerned departments and intelligence agencies in Washington studied the situation anew. All of this activity produced a veritable slew of proposals about what to do, and although there were differences between many of them, almost all advocated sending American combat troops to Vietnam. The argument that Kennedy was never confronted with the situation that Johnson confronted, that Kennedy did not face the difficult choices that Johnson later faced, ignores the heart of the Kennedy record on this matter. 2 Kennedy was told in no uncertain terms that the military situation in Vietnam was critical and that the fate of South Vietnam hung in the balance. Moreover, Kennedy's advisers framed the issue this way: the loss of South Vietnam to the communists would affect vital U.S. interests regionally and globally, and the only way to prevent such an outcome was to send in American ground forces. 3 T h e president was told that nothing short of several American combat divisions could save South Vietnam. It was in that dire context and against those forceful arguments that Kennedy said no to American combat forces in Vietnam. T h e record on this permits no argument and no wiggle room. Kennedy was irreconcilably opposed to an American ground war in Vietnam. Instead of combat troops, Kennedy agreed to a substantial increase in American advisers. This decision was implemented under the provisions of NSAM i n . Those observers w h o cite this decision as evidence that Kennedy pushed a reluctant military into Vietnam obviously are misinformed about the context in which this decision was made. W h e n the situation, the recommendations, and Kennedy's decision are looked at as a whole, they boil down to this: even w h e n Kennedy was told the only workable solution was conventional American forces, he would agree only to assist the South Vietnamese army.

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The War Effort in 1962: Winning or Losing?

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The significant expansion of the American advisory effort flowing from N S A M 111 led to a far larger intelligence capability on the ground in Vietnam than had so far been there. W h a t the newly formed M A C V (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) intelligence organization—augmented by the best men that could be found from Washington and the Pacific theater—found was an enemy far larger and growing much faster than had been imagined by the decisionmakers in Washington. W h a t this startling intelligence meant was that the Viet C o n g military force was already well beyond the capacity of the South Vietnamese army to cope with it. T h e irony for John Kennedy was that his advisory policy could not work because the force being advised was too small for the j o b . Unfortunately, and perhaps tragically for history, this critical intelligence was blocked by (at the least) M A C V officers w h o , fearful that the data might threaten the growing U.S. presence in Vietnam, reduced the enemy strength figures by more than an order of magnitude. 4 T h e figures were deliberately kept low thereafter, and other intelligence data, including reports on the effectiveness of South Vietnamese operations in the field, were similarly corrupted. The year 1962 is one of the darkest moments in the history of military intelligence, for the truth was not just altered a little but was wholly reversed. The new American program in 1962 was no more than a minor speed bump to the surging Viet C o n g machine, and had this intelligence been sent to Washington Kennedy would have been forced to choose between withdrawing along the lines of the neutralization strategy then being pursued in Laos or committing American ground combat forces. Prompted by John Kenneth Galbraith, Kennedy did at this very time—in April 1962—seriously entertain the thought of a neutralist solution in Vietnam. H e was dissuaded by a consensus of his military and civilian advisers, w h o argued rather vehemently against Galbraith's advice. 5 Here the deception of progress looms large in building the case for a lengthier American presence and in encouraging false hopes for victory. Kennedy decided against Galbraith's recommendation, but M c N a mara made clear to the Pentagon—probably at the president's urging—that there was a limit to how long U.S. participation in Vietnam could last. Consumed by the Cuban missile crisis over the summer and fall of 1962, however, Kennedy allowed Vietnam policy to run its

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course, languishing as it did in the illusion of success, which someh o w always seemed to require more men, a few more planes, more helicopters, and more equipment to sustain it. By the end of 1962, Kennedy and McNamara found themselves trapped in a deepening vortex of military escalation in which victory seemed ever more elusive. W h y did President Kennedy begin to withdraw the advisers less than two years after sending them to Vietnam? The record of h o w the administration moved from the November 1961 decision to increase the American advisory effort to the October 1963 decision to end it has remained shrouded in controversy to this day. That record—unlike the relatively clear record of 1961—is murky, contradictory, and confounded by deception and intrigue. T h e declassification of relevant documents has resolved some questions and raised others anew. N o serious scholar that I know of still challenges the fact that Kennedy implemented the withdrawal plan in October 1963 by promulgating N S A M 263. That decision and the minutes of the National Security Council meeting in which it was made are now available to the public. 6 They make it clear that Kennedy in fact ordered the first 1,000 men to come home by December 1963. T h e issue has now become: w h e n he ordered the withdrawal to begin, did Kennedy think he was winning or losing in Vietnam? In spite of the enormous lie emanating from MACV, the preponderance of evidence suggests that Kennedy initiated the withdrawal of American advisers from Vietnam when he knew that South Vietnam was losing the war. By the end of 1962, the M A C V success story became embattled by charges of fraud from some of its own officers in Vietnam, 7 and by early 1963 the State Department's intelligence element, the CIA, and even the Vietnam specialist on Kennedy's National Security Council, Michael Forrestal, began to question the very basis of MACV's claims. In one of the rare exceptions where South Vietnamese ground forces were urged into action by their American advisers, the Viet C o n g scored a stunning victory in January 1963 at Ap Bac. A national intelligence estimate, which would have told the truth about the deteriorating war effort in late 1962, was rewritten in early 1963 after being remanded by CIA director John A. M c C o n e .

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By the spring of 1963 there were certainly enough indicators that McNamara and Kennedy had the opportunity to conclude that MACV's reporting might be horribly erroneous. T h e extent of American involvement in Vietnam, coupled with the failure unfolding on the battlefield, began to shape up as a possible major issue in the upcoming 1964 election campaign. T h e seriousness of the impending crisis was underscored when the Buddhist crisis erupted in April and proceeded, over the summer, to knock the political bottom out of the regime in Saigon. In fact, the 1,000man withdrawal, which had originally been conceived to take place during the campaign in 1964,8 was accelerated after the B u d dhist crisis erupted. At the May Secretary of Defense Conference McNamara announced "concrete" plans to withdraw 1,000 men by the end of 1963. T h e record of the May conference makes it clear, however, that McNamara told those present that the phaseout would take place as "the situation improves," and that "we can take out 1,000 or so personnel late this year if the situation allows." 9 These words were less than straightforward, for the military officers present would have been justified in concluding that any withdrawal would be based on battlefield success. In JFK and Vietnam, I advanced the argument that the contradiction between Kennedy's public antiwithdrawal statements and private prowithdrawal statements was deliberate and designed to conceal his willingness to withdraw in the face of defeat. Kennedy's ability to conceal his true intentions until a time of his own choosing was dependent on McNamara's cooperation. In telling the military that the 1,000-man withdrawal would occur "if the situation allows," McNamara was covering for his boss, President Kennedy. What I had not seen when I wrote JFK and Vietnam was the extent of the evidence that McNamara was indeed fully prepared to execute a withdrawal in the face of a battlefield defeat. In his own oral history for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, M c N a mara shed considerable light on this very subject: I think that early on in, say, 1961—62, there was reason to accede to Diem's request for assistance to help train his forces. I believed that to the extent we could train those forces, we should do so, and having done it, we should get out. To the extent those trained forces could not handle the problem—the subversion by

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North Vietnam—I believed we should not introduce our military forces in support of the South Vietnamese, even if they were going to be "defeated." 10

Part of this passage appeared in a 1993 book by journalist Deborah Shapley, w h o failed to understand its true significance w h e n she argued that McNamara "arranged" this story "later," w h e n the war had become a tragic trauma for the nation. 11 W h a t this passage makes painfully clear is that Kennedy was not being truthful about his ultimate plans for withdrawal, and it is therefore not something McNamara would say to make Kennedy look good for the seventies, eighties, or nineties. Although many administration officials knew of the withdrawal plan, very few knew Kennedy's ultimate intentions. Even Kennedy's national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, told me he was not clear on this because he remembers the 1,000-man withdrawal came from discussion "quite closely held between Kennedy and McNamara." 1 2 It was indeed closely held, as was the growing awareness of both McNamara and Kennedy that the advisory p r o gram in South Vietnam was in deep trouble. As the war continued to deteriorate over the summer Kennedy asked McNamara to go to Vietnam. McNamara returned with news that "the military campaign had made great progress and continues to progress." 13 This news, based on the false story of success provided by MACV, was used to justify the withdrawal from Vietnam, a move that sparked indignation and protest from officials w h o knew the truth about the war but not about Kennedy's ultimate intentions. O n e such official—who had been on the trip with M c N a mara—was William Sullivan, assistant to Secretary of State Dean Rusk. While still in Saigon Sullivan happened to read what M c N a mara was proposing to do and told the secretary, " . . . This is totally unrealistic. We're not going to get troops out in '65. We mustn't submit anything phony as this to the president." 1 4 Sullivan threatened to write a dissenting report. He claims that McNamara agreed and that General Taylor agreed to "scrub it." Sullivan is probably right, since the 1,000-man withdrawal is clearly missing from the draft as it stood by the time the men reached Honolulu. 1 5 Thus, there was no dissenting Sullivan report once they reached the White House, at which time the 1,000-man withdrawal was reinserted.

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Because many of the participants are still living, this material is sometimes difficult to deal with, but scholars must begin to deal with it with the few that remain alive, for the sake of history. That Kennedy was concealing his real intentions is central to the story that unfolded in the fall of 1963. T h e private nature of his ultimate plans at this point is attested to by yet another source, Chester Cooper, assistant for policy support to the CIA's deputy director for plans. Cooper was in the White House the day an argument erupted over the sentence in the October 2 White House public statement on McNamara's recommendation that U.S. advisers could be withdrawn by 1965. Cooper recalls that in spite of the opposition of McGeorge Bundy and others to the sentence, McNamara was "trapped," because "the sentence had been worked out privately with Kennedy and therefore imbedded in concrete." 1 6 In his oral history, McNamara clearly states it was his belief that U.S. forces should not be introduced even if it meant defeat. " C o n sistent with that belief," he explained, "some time in the latter part of 1963, following my return from a trip to South Vietnam, I recommended to President Kennedy that we announce a plan to begin the removal of our training forces." McNamara recounted his—and the president's—thinking in this way: "I believed that we had done all the training we could, and whether the South Vietnamese were qualified or not to turn back the North Vietnamese, I was certain that if they weren't, it wasn't for lack of our training. More training wouldn't strengthen them; therefore we should get out. T h e President agreed." In other words, not only had combat troops been ruled out but the president was preparing to declare the training mission at an end too. The key issue remains what battlefield context these decisions were made in. W h e n pressed specifically by the oral historian on whether he felt optimistic or pessimistic at the time, McNamara offered this illuminating answer: "I think that you will find in my reports—probably in the one in October 1963, a month before Kennedy's death—evidence that I felt there was considerable doubt as to whether we had succeeded in training a Vietnamese force that would be capable of defeating the attempts of North Vietnam or China to subvert the government of South Vietnam." Thus, McNamara doubted whether the training had been successful, yet he recommended that the withdrawal proceed anyway. 166

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Against the backdrop of his 1963 public statement that the war had made great progress and was continuing to progress, this passage from his oral history provides yet another piece of hard evidence that Kennedy and McNamara were misleading the public about the nature of the withdrawal they were planning. To repeat, this is hardly the sort of thing McNamara would arrange or concoct to make either the president or himself look good. It is simply the tragic truth, which the president's assassination makes all the more painful. At the time, however, their focus was on resisting the forces urging intervention and on winning the election in 1964. Secretary of State Rusk had no illusions about the direction of the battle that September and what it would lead to if it continued: "If the situation continues to deteriorate in Vietnam, and if our relations with Diem continue to deteriorate, and if U.S. domestic opinion becomes strongly anti-Diem, we will find no alternative short of a massive U.S. military effort." 17 That is what Kennedy feared and why it had become so important to get the withdrawal under way. Cooper's observation that the private agreement between Kennedy and McNamara on the October 2 White House statement was cast "in concrete" was very astute. McNamara's recommendation that the advisers could be brought home by 1965 and 1,000 brought out by the end of 1963 had p r o voked a storm of controversy w h e n discussed in the National Security Council on October 2. In his oral history, McNamara explains the schisms that divided the council over his recommendation: "There was great controversy over that recommendation. Many in the Defense Department, as well as others in the administration, did not believe we had fully carried out our training mission. Still others believed that, in any event, the South Vietnamese weren't qualified to counter the North Vietnamese effectively. They therefore concluded that we should stay." T h e president simply steamrolled over the opposition and approved McNamara's recommendation. " T h e n there was an argument," McNamara's account continues, "over whether we should announce the decision. I thought that the way to put the decision in concrete was to announce it. So we did. It was agreed that it would be announced that day." Once again, we see the reference to putting the withdrawal plan "in concrete," only this time it is in McNamara's, not Cooper's, account. This notion of casting the decision in concrete is important, THE K E N N E D Y - J O H N S O N T R A N S I T I O N

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especially because the argument is sometimes advanced that the decision to begin the withdrawal was just a charade to put pressure on Diem. According to McNamara, the idea of putting the withdrawal plan in concrete had as its intended audience not Diem but American decisionmakers. "Those w h o opposed the decision to begin the withdrawal," he explained in his oral history, "didn't want it announced since they believed, as I did, that if it were announced, it would be in concrete." Those opposing the announcement lost that argument too, but the discussion was not over yet. The president was concerned about being identified personally with an optimistic timetable. The National Security Council minutes reveal the following exchange: " T h e President objected to the phrase 'by the end of the year' in the sentence 'The U.S. program for training Vietnamese should have progressed to the point where 1,000 U.S. military personnel assigned to South Vietnam could be withdrawn.' H e believed that if we were not able to take this action by the end of this year, we would be accused of being over optimistic." 1 8 McNamara, apparently afraid Kennedy might be considering dropping the sentence entirely, interjected his view: "Secretary McNamara said he saw great value in this sentence in order to meet the view of Senator Fulbright and others that we are bogged down forever in Vietnam. H e said the sentence reveals that we have a withdrawal plan. Furthermore, it commits us to emphasize the training of Vietnamese, which is something we must do in order to replace U.S. personnel with Vietnamese." Again, in these minutes, there is the sense in McNamara's words of a commitment, of crossing a line, and of withdrawing the advisers from Vietnam. T h e result of this Kennedy-McNamara exchange was a change in the wording of the October 2, 1963, White House announcement on withdrawal. T h e alteration was done in such a way as to render the predictions for withdrawing 1,000 men in 1963 and all the rest by 1965 "a part of the McNamara-Taylor report rather than a prediction of the President." 1 9 McNamara himself made the announcement from the steps of the White House, and as the secretary headed off to the waiting reporters, Kennedy is reported to have yelled after him, "And tell them that means all of the helicopter pilots too." 2 0

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T h e idea that the i,ooo-man withdrawal should be used as a pressure tactic was Taylor's, not Kennedy's. Indeed, the general had voiced this idea on the September 1963 trip to Vietnam with McNamara. It was inevitable, as Kennedy's advisers sought to come up with measures to pressure Diem to reform, that Taylor's idea of using the withdrawal timetable as a weapon would come up in the discussion. O n October 4, during the second day of the talks in the White House—neither of which the president attended—Robert Kennedy questioned "the logic of making known the plan to withdraw U.S. soldiers," and the minutes indicate the following remark by McNamara: "Mr. McNamara rationalized this course of action to him in terms of there being no wisdom in leaving our forces in Vietnam, when their presence is no longer required, either by virtue of the Vietnamese having been trained to assume the function, or the function having been fulfilled."21 This did not, however, answer the attorney general's specific question: why make the withdrawal known? At the October 5 White House meeting, the president himself addressed the issue of making the plan known to Diem. T h e minutes indicate that Kennedy brought it up during the discussion on the McNamara-Taylor report: " T h e President also said that our decision to remove 1,000 U.S. advisors by December of this year should not be raised formally with Diem. Instead the action should be carried out routinely as part of our general posture of withdrawing people when they are no longer needed." 2 2 Thus the 1,000-man withdrawal was not to be used as a device to pressure D i e m — i t was a policy objective in its own right. Moreover, this particular passage contains another significant item: it uses the words "our decision" to refer to the 1,000-man withdrawal. In the October 5 National Security Council meeting, Kennedy implemented the 1,000-man withdrawal. The fact that McGeorge Bundy forgot to mention this important detail in the minutes of the meeting he drafted two days later is only a minor nuisance for historians. W h e n Forres tal drafted the final m e m o r a n d u m — w h i c h was not officially signed as NSAM 263 until October 11—he did not forget to describe the president's historic actions on October 5: " T h e President approved the military recommendations contained in Section I B (1-3) of the report, but directed that no formal announcement be made of the implementation of plans to withdraw

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1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963" (emphasis added). 23 The military recommendations in Section I B (1-3) of the McNamara-Taylor report were these: (1) M A C V and Diem should , come up with what had to be done to complete the military campaign in I, II, and III Corps by the end of 1964 and IV Corps by the end of 1965; (2) a training program should be established so that the South Vietnamese could take over essential functions and permit the bulk of American forces to be withdrawn by that time; and (3) the Defense Department should announce "in the very near future" the 1,000-man withdrawal. T h e president, however, made some changes on the third provision. T h e McNamara-Taylor report had said the Defense Department should announce the withdrawal soon and explain it "in low key" as an initial step in the long-term withdrawal of U.S. forces. First Kennedy actually implemented the plan, directing that 1,000 men be withdrawn before the end of the year and that "no further reductions in U.S. strength would be made until the requirements of the 1964 [military] campaign were clear." 24 Furthermore, in directing that no formal announcement of the implementation be made, the president jettisoned the idea that the Pentagon make any statement or explanation. T h e question is, why did the president slap a secrecy order on the withdrawal? H e did so for several reasons. In the first place, the moment he implemented the withdrawal plan, he was exceeding the White House statement issued three days earlier. At that time the public had been told only that McNamara and Taylor had reported that "the U.S. program for training Vietnamese should have progressed to the point" where the 1,000 men could be withdrawn by the end of the year (emphasis added). It would have been awkward, having disassociated himself from this timetable, to suddenly embrace it publicly three days later. Also, as already mentioned, Kennedy specifically ordered that the subject not be brought up with Diem; Kennedy did not want his approval of the plan to be construed by anyone in Saigon or Washington as part of the pressures package he also approved on October 5. Finally, and most important, Kennedy had not yet decided how he was going to justify his withdrawal plan publicly. T h e withdrawal plan had publicly been couched in terms of a battlefield success story, a success story so far not attributable to the

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president. A major risk associated with the withdrawal plan was the possibility that the battlefield might fall apart during the 1964 election campaign. What would Kennedy do then? While others may have different views, my argument in JFK and Vietnam was that Kennedy's reticence to make a formal public announcement that he had begun the withdrawal reflected his unease over the deteriorating situation and his fear of public criticism for being overly optimistic about the war effort. This concern was the reason the October 2 White House statement had been changed to make the time predictions a part of the McNamara-Taylor report rather than prognostications of the president. T h e withdrawal plan would have to be explained somehow, and Kennedy had always been cautious about making positive public assessments of the battlefield. It was he who had said—where others had denied it—that the Buddhist crisis had affected the war negatively, and he probably did so because he was wary of h o w tricky the issue might prove to be in the campaign. T h e choices were bleak, but the worst case would be the return of American soldiers in body bags after the president himself said the war was being won. The primaries were just around the corner, and he would have to make up his mind soon. That he decided to implement the withdrawal plan on October 5 and keep it secret indicates that he was still in the process of doing just that. O f course we cannot know what was going through Kennedy's mind at the time of his unfortunate death. We do know that before he died, he ordered the withdrawal to begin. What clues we do have about how Kennedy might have explained the withdrawal in 1964 under adverse conditions come from the person in w h o m he was confiding his plans the most—his secretary of defense. In his oral history, McNamara explained, as his boss might have, h o w the role of U.S. forces in Vietnam under John Kennedy had come to an end: "Their military role was a training role, and there's only so much you can do to train. If the student can't learn, after the training period is completed there's no use in your staying on. If he can learn, he will have done so by the end of the training period and you can go home." Once again events in Vietnam intruded, much as they had with the eruption of the Buddhist crisis in April. This time, only three weeks after N S A M 263 was put into effect, Vietnamese president Diem was assassinated. Diem's murder gave rise

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to a policy review, which was itself interrupted by the assassination of President Kennedy. NSAM 273 and Beyond: Reversing Course in Vietnam

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T h e Vietnam policy review that took place in Honolulu two days before Kennedy's assassination produced a new draft memorandum, which national security adviser McGeorge Bundy authored the day before the murder and President Johnson made changes to just four days afterward. T h e Honolulu meeting and both versions of NSAM 273 are the subjects of two chapters in my JFK and Vietnam and are dealt with fully there. T h e story that emerges from them is this: two days before Kennedy's death, a debate erupted over whether the war should be widened to include the more direct use of American power. The major news at the Honolulu conference was MACV's announcement that the battlefield situation was going downhill, especially in the critical delta region of South Vietnam. Thirtythree years later, the proceedings of the conference are still classified, a wholly inappropriate situation to persist after the Cold War and one that should not have persisted past the end of American involvement in any case. We do know from anecdotal reports that options to escalate the war, up to and including the massive and direct use of American military power, were discussed and, perhaps, hotly debated. McGeorge Bundy's November 21 draft of NSAM 273 does not, as some conspiracy theories argue, show that Bundy expected Kennedy to die. O n the contrary, Bundy knew Kennedy was against the direct use of American forces, and the draft therefore attempted to bring the Honolulu recommendations in line with Kennedy's philosophy. T h e result was a draft that sought to intensify the war effort without Americanizing it. Bundy's draft appears to be the act of a loyal adviser w h o fully expected his president to be alive to read it. These memoranda certainly do not prove Kennedy's murder was a conspiracy. They also do not suggest the reverse. Historians on both sides of the debate about Kennedy and Vietnam would do well to avoid drawing their material from movies to interpret these memoranda. The facts are, four days after Kennedy's death, Bundy's draft was altered and the crucial sentence in paragraph 7, which would have limited the increases in military activity to the use of South Vietnamese forces, was simply lined through and removed. T h e result-

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ing memorandum opened the door to a more direct American role in the conflict. Resisting the simple logic of this argument by claiming it is hair-splitting is pointless. The change is there, it is blatant, and nothing need be read into it to see h o w drastic it was; whereas other paragraphs were altered by changing a word or a phrase, someone took a pen and put two huge lines through the entire paragraph, and then it was totally rewritten. 25 It was this very change in paragraph 7 that opened the door for the operations that began shortly thereafter and led, the following August, to the Gulf of Tonkin incidents. For those w h o have difficulty analyzing the changes on these memoranda or, for whatever reason, refuse to accept that they demonstrate the new direction in which President Johnson took America in Vietnam from the outset, it might be easier to focus simply on the issue of combat troops. Here was an issue on which Kennedy never yielded, no matter what doomsday argument was dredged up to persuade him to send them in. H e simply refused to do what Johnson later did. It is a mistake to argue, as some continuity proponents try, that because both men had the same advisers, Kennedy would therefore have sent in combat troops just like Johnson did. It is the fact that Kennedy said no to precisely the same men making precisely the same arguments Johnson heard that makes this argument so untenable. O f course it is possible that Kennedy too, had he lived, might have shelved his withdrawal plans and reversed his policy as J o h n son did. But there is no hard evidence for this. Perhaps if we had an escalation plan secretly ordered by Kennedy, or if he had called in his secretary of state and said, "Dean, I want you to k n o w I have been rethinking things, and I want you to come up with a plan to intervene after the election if the war effort is still critical," then we could discount the way Kennedy overruled his entire cabinet w h e n they called for sending combat troops. There is nothing elaborate or perspicacious in making the observation that the Americanization of the war effort carried out under Johnson ended Kennedy's policy of containing the U.S. role to an advisory one. NSAM 273, changed in the wake of Kennedy's death, effectively authorized a more direct American role, and the reversal was completed seventeen months later w h e n Johnson sent in the first of what would soon become half a million U.S. ground troops. These are facts, not an argument counter to the facts. What THE K E N N E D Y - J O H N S O N T R A N S I T I O N

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Kennedy would have done had he lived is speculative by nature. My own view is this: Kennedy's clear rejection of intervention with combat troops in the face of the most compelling arguments for using them swings the argument decisively in favor of the proposition that he would have continued rather than reversed this policy. This argument requires no conspiratorial presumptions, no political science models, and no obtuse reasoning to advance. It is probably the most obvious and straightforward case one can make that proceeds from the facts we do know about Kennedy's Vietnam policy while he was alive. The policy-reversal thesis and its corollary that Kennedy would have continued the withdrawal he started suggests that history would have been very different had Kennedy lived. This draws derisive rhetoric from observers such as Noam Chomsky, whose historical paradigm permits no such grandiose historical role to single individuals. Outraged, Chomsky charges that I am making a saint out of Kennedy.26 From the other end of the political spectrum comes equally vindictive rhetoric. Advancing this thesis is pure mendacity, argues Harry Summers, whose Kennedy-asClausewitz paradigm moves him to charge that I have "vilified Kennedy beyond the wildest dreams of his worst enemies."27 Perhaps it would be more illuminating if Chomsky and Summers debated each other, for it is their arguments that perpetrate the saints-and-demons approach to John Kennedy. The time has come to take the pitchfork out of Kennedy's hand and remove the halo from above his head, and recognize that Kennedy, like presidents before and after, had both strengths and weaknesses. When we are ready to do this, the process of learning from Kennedy's accomplishments and failures can begin.

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Notes i.

See NSAM i n , Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, vol. 1: Vietnam, 1961 (Washington, D.C.: G P O , 1988), document 272V. Foreign Relations of the United States is hereafter cited as FRUS.

2.

The better part of two chapters (7 and 8) in my JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power (New York: Warner Books, 1992) is devoted to the pressure put on Kennedy by his advisers in late 1961 to send American combat troops to Vietnam. The battle became vituperative at times, with Kennedy arguing that if the U.S. was not going to send troops to Cuba they should not be sent to Vietnam, and the Joint Chiefs responding that they wanted to send troops into Cuba too (pp. 137-138).

3.

See, for instance, Joint Chiefs memo, Jan. 13, 1962, House Committee on Armed Services, United States- Vietnam Relations, 1945—1967, study prepared by Department of Defense, 1971, Committee Print, 12:448-454, for just one of many examples. United States— Vietnam Relations, 1945—1967 hereafter cited as Pentagon Papers.

4.

See Newman, JFK and Vietnam, chaps. 11 - 1 3 , for a fully documented discussion of the order of battle cutting. See Galbraith memo to JFK, FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 2: Vietnam, 1962, document 141, and the Joint Chiefs memo to McNamara, April 13, 1962, Pentagon Papers 12: 464-465.

5.

6.

See FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 4: Vietnam, Aug.-Dec. 1963, documents 169, 170, 172, 174, 179, 187, for pertinent N S C meetings and document 194 for NSAM 263.

7.

See Newman, JFK and Vietnam, chaps. 1 4 - 1 6 , for a full discussion and complete listing of all the documents involved, which include materials from State, CIA, and N S C . Source is Senator Mansfield, quoted in Michael Charlton and Anthony Moncrieff, Many Reasons Why: The American Involvement in Vietnam (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978), p. 81.

8.

9.

M e m o for Record of the Secretary of Defense Conference, Honolulu, May 6, 1963, FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 3: Vietnam, Jan.-Aug. 1963, document 107. 10. McNamara oral history, Office of the Historian, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Washington, D . C . To his credit, McNamara, who has avoided the subject and was aware of the arguments in JFK and Vietnam, permitted me access to his oral history. 11. Deborah Shapley, Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), pp. 2 6 2 - 2 6 3 . 12. McGeorge Bundy interview with author, July 16, 1991. 13. McNamara-Taylor Memorandum to the President, Oct. 2, 1963, FRUS 19611963, vol. 4, document 167. 14. William Sullivan, second oral history, Kennedy Library, Boston. 15. See the Oct. 1, 1963, version of "Report of the McNamara-Taylor Mission to South Vietnam, 24 S e p t . - i Oct. 1963," Hilsman Papers, Vietnam, McNamara & Taylor Trip, box 4/6, Kennedy Library. 16. Chester Cooper, The Lost Crusade: America in Vietnam (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1970), pp. 215-216.

THE K E N N E D Y - J O H N S O N T R A N S I T I O N

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17- Minutes of the 10:30 a.m. White House meeting, Sept. 6, 1963, FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 4, document 66. 18. Summary Record of the 519th Meeting of the National Security Council, White House, 6p.m., Oct. 2, 1963, FRUS ig6i-1963, vol. 4, document 169, pp. 350-352. 19. Ibid. 20. Kenneth O'Donnell, fohnny, We Hardly Knew Ye (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), p. 17. 21. Memorandum for the Record of a Meeting of the Executive Committee, White House, 4 p.m., Oct. 4, 1963, FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 4, document 174. 22. Memorandum for the Files of a Conference with the President, White House, 9:30 a.m., Oct. 5, 1963, FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 4, document 179. 23. NSAM 263, Pentagon Papers 12: 578 and FRUS 1961 -1963, vol. 4, document 194. 24. The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, Senator Gravel edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971-1972), 2:169. Researchers beware that the date in this chronology in the Pentagon Papers is mistaken. It has this meeting taking place on Oct. 3; the correct date, however, is given in the narrative portion of the same volume on p. 251. 25. See Newman, fFKand Vietnam, chap. 23. 26. Noam Chomsky, letter, Lies of Our Times, May 1992. 27. Harry Summers, "JFK and Vietnam: An Interpretation That Makes Him Politically Correct?" Baltimore Sun, March 15, 1992.

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NSAM 263 and NSAM 273 Manipulating History

Larry Berman For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebearers. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. President John F. Kennedy June 11, 1962

O n October 11, 1963, the administration of President John F. Kennedy issued its final policy directive on the subject of South Vietnam. Drafted by Special Assistant McGeorge Bundy, National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 263 consisted of three short paragraphs. T h e first reported that at a meeting on O c t o ber 5, 1963, President Kennedy had considered the recommendations contained in the report of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor on their mission to South Vietnam. Second, "the President approved the military recommendations contained in Section I B ( I - 3 ) of the report, but directed that no formal announcement be made of the implementation of plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963." Finally, "after discussion of the remaining recommendations of the report, the President approved an instruction to Ambassador Lodge which is set forth in State Department telegram N o . 534 to Saigon." 1 The president's instruction to Lodge emphasized that these "actions are designed to indicate to Diem Government our displeasure at its political policies and activities and to create significant uncertainty in that government and in key Vietnamese groups as to future intentions of United States. At the same time, actions are designed to have at most slight impact on military or counterinsurgency effort against Viet Cong, at least in short term." Paragraph 17 noted that "if, in fact, G V N does begin to move along lines we desire, an opportunity will be provided to test and probe

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effectiveness of the actions in improving war effort." Paragraph 22 noted that "at President's next press conference, he expects to repeat his basic statement that what furthers the war effort we support, and what interferes with the war effort we oppose." Paragraph 24 concluded that "we are seeking necessary but limited improvements from a government very difficult to move, and we do not wish to encourage unjustified sense of optimism or of triumph from those who wish this situation was easier than it is." 2 In President Kennedy's subsequent public statement on U.S. policy,3 the president reaffirmed a number of key elements of U.S. policy: 1. The security of South Vietnam is a major interest of the United States as of other free nations. We will adhere to our policy of working with the people and Government of South Vietnam to deny this country to communism and to suppress the externally stimulated and supported insurgency of the Viet Cong as promptly as possible. Effective performance in this undertaking is the central objective of our policy in South Vietnam. 2. The military program in South Vietnam has made progress and is sound in principle, though improvements are being energetically sought. 3. Major U.S. assistance in support of this military effort is needed only until the insurgency has been suppressed or until the national security forces of the Government of South Vietnam are capable of suppressing it. Secretary McNamara and General Taylor reported their judgment that the major part of the U.S. military task can be completed by the end of 1965, although there may be a continuing requirement for a limited number of U.S. training personnel. They reported that by the end of this year, the U.S. program for training Vietnamese should have progressed to the point where 1,000 U.S. military personnel assigned to South Vietnam can be withdrawn. 4. The political situation in South Vietnam remains deeply serious. The United States has made clear its continuing opposition to any repressive actions in South Vietnam. While such actions have not yet significantly affected the military effort, they could do so in the future. 5. It remains the policy of the United States, in South Vietnam as in other parts of the world, to support the efforts of the people of that country to defeat aggression and to build a peaceful and free society. I78

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On November i, 1963, three weeks following NSAM 263, Ngo Dinh Diem, president of South Vietnam, was murdered during a general's coup that had received encouragement from the Kennedy administration. Three weeks later, on November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was murdered in Dallas. On November 26, the new administration of President Lyndon Baines Johnson issued its first policy directive on Vietnam— NSAM 273. Prepared by McGeorge Bundy for President Kennedy, this memorandum stated, based on November 20 discussions among the principal policymakers in Honolulu: 1. It remains the central objective of the United States in South Vietnam to assist the people and government of that country to win their contest against the externally directed and supported Communist conspiracy. The test of all U.S. decisions and actions in this area should be the effectiveness of their contribution to this purpose. 2. The objective of the United States with respect to the withdrawal of U.S. military personnel remains as stated in the White House statement of October 2, 1963. . . . 7. Planning should include different levels of possible increased activity, and in each instance there should be estimates of such factors as: A. Resulting damage to North Vietnam; B. The plausibility of denial; C. Possible North Vietnamese retaliation; D. Other international reaction. Plans should be submitted promptly for approval by higher authority. [Emphasis added.] 4

A six-second flash in Oliver Stone's film JFK shows copies of NSAM 263 and 273 in an effort to dramatize a policy change from withdrawal to escalation. Professor John Newman maintains that President Lyndon Johnson instructed McGeorge Bundy on November 24 to revise paragraph 7 of the original NSAM 273, which quickly opened the door for OPlan 34A activities. Johnson's instructions represented "a significant escalation of the war that went way beyond the dropping of South Vietnamese commandos into the North that Kennedy had approved."5 Newman is not alone in taking this view of NSAM 263 and 273. Professor Peter Dale Scott has recently written that "Johnson redirected U.S. Vietnam policy from this graduated disengagement (NSAM 263) to graduated escalation (NSAM 273)."6 Newman carries the argument NSAM 263 AND NSAM 273

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even further: "There seems little doubt that Kennedy was headed for a total withdrawal—come what may—from Vietnam when he left for Texas. . . . The vague sentence in N S A M 273 on withdrawal—however much we contrast its nuances with the clear-cut words of 263—became a fig leaf of continuity in the hands of the new President. The tragedy in Texas, in the end, brought about the outcome that Kennedy had opposed throughout his presidency: full-scale American intervention in Vietnam." 7 Evidence and Inference

180

Social scientists have long been intrigued by the proposition that had A not occurred, B might not have occurred. Such propositions are to be encouraged in academic discourse. 8 Counterfactuals make claims about events that did not actually happen—in this case that President Johnson did something different from what President Kennedy would have done had he lived. In Newman's words, "Kennedy had to disguise a withdrawal, Johnson had to disguise intervention." 9 What criteria of evidence and inference should be utilized for thinking about events that might have but never actually did happen? "Indeed we cannot grasp the full significance of what happened unless we have some idea of what the situation would have been otherwise." 1 0 In the view of H. Stuart Hughes, "the most satisfactory type of causal explanation in history, simply tries to locate the factor, which when removed, would make the decisive difference in a given sequence of events—that is, the factor which, if thought away, would render the event in question inconceivable." 11 If we "think away" Kennedy's assassination, what is the evidence that leads one to conclude that U.S. military involvement and the introduction of ground troops in the war would also disappear? Between event A, the Kennedy assassination, and event B, the use of combat troops, there elapsed a period of twenty months, which were different from the twenty months that would have elapsed had Kennedy not died. " T h e period immediately following the death of Kennedy has been regarded, quite rightly, as one of the main turning points in the evolution of U.S. involvement in Vietnam." 1 2 We must actually differentiate two counterfactual arguments— (1) without Kennedy's assassination, the U.S. would have with-

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drawn from Vietnam by the end of 1965, and (2) Kennedy would have acted differently from Johnson if he had faced the same circumstances and events Johnson faced between November 1963 and July 1965. In this essay I will investigate the probabilities of whether President Johnson undertook a course different from the one Kennedy would have chosen, had all other factors been equal. I hope to avoid "a deconstructionist's heaven [where] every event becomes a pseudo event, fiction becomes fact, imagination becomes reality, and the whole tangible world disappears." 13 Nevertheless, the question is exceedingly important: did Lyndon Baines Johnson actually change the course of history by instructing the alteration of N S A M 273, thereby negating Kennedy's secret plan to withdraw from Vietnam? If Kennedy had not been killed, America's Vietnam quagmire would have been avoided. Let us first turn to the Kennedy record on Vietnam, the public record on which democratic politics is premised. Former secretary of state Dean Rusk makes the point that "President Kennedy's attitude on Vietnam should be derived from what he said and did while president, not what he may have said at tea table conversations or walks around the Rose Garden." 1 4 Does the record show that John Kennedy was determined to avoid the Americanization of the war in Vietnam? Did he intend to withdraw all U.S. advisers by the end of 1965? T h e president did tell Walter Cronkite on September 2, 1963, that the Vietnamese had to win the war, "but I don't agree with those w h o say we should withdraw. That would be a great mistake. . . . We took all this—made this effort to defend Europe. N o w Europe is quite secure. We also have to participate—we may not like it—in the defense of Asia." Just a week later the president told NBC's Chet Huntley, "I believe it, I believe it," when asked about the domino theory applied to Southeast Asia, and "we are not there to see a war lost." Kennedy was scheduled to deliver the following remarks at the Dallas Trade Mart just prior to his assassination: "We in this country in this generation, are—by destiny rather than choice—the watchmen on the Avails of freedom. . . . We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of 'peace on earth, good will toward men.' That must always be our

The Kennedy Record

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goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength." Kennedy's speech included the following words: " O u r assistance to . . . nations can be painful, risky and costly, as is true in Southeast Asia today. But we dare not weary of the task" (emphasis added). If Kennedy did possess a withdrawal plan, it began with Secretary McNamara's sixth Secretary of Defense Conference on July 23, 1962. N e w m a n writes that McNamara based his recommendations on deceptive accounts of battlefield success: "Top secret briefings and reports of progress at the conference, though completely at odds with the reality of the villages and the battlefield, justified the prophecy of victory and McNamara's order to plan for an eventual American withdrawal." 1 5 Kennedy's withdrawal plan was based on five premises: 1. T h e adoption of N S A M 111 set Kennedy's permanent boundary—no combat troops. 2. Kennedy had recognized reported success as a deception by March 1963. 3. Kennedy concluded that his Vietnam policy was a failure. H e continued his public record of support for involvement in Vietnam solely to deceive his opponents and disguise his true intent of complete withdrawal. 4. Kennedy revealed his plans only to majority leader Mike Mansfield, McNamara, and a few others. 5. Kennedy believed he had to wait until after the presidential election and for his second term to withdraw. "Kennedy decided . . . to get out of Vietnam even if it meant the war would be lost," writes Newman. 1 6 T h e evidence on which this conclusion is based is Kenneth O'Donnell's account of a meeting Kennedy had with Mansfield: The President told Mansfield that he had been having second thoughts about Mansfield's argument and that he now agreed with the Senator's thinking on the need for a complete military withdrawal from Vietnam. "But I can't do it until 1965—after I'm reelected," . . . if he announced a withdrawal of American military personnel from Vietnam before the 1964 election, there would be a wild conservative outcry against returning him to the Presidency for a second term. . . . After Mansfield left the office, the President said to me, "In 1965, I'll become one of the most

BERMAN

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unpopular Presidents in history. I'll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don't care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy scare on our hands, but I can do it after I'm reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I am reelected." 17

In his personal correspondence, Mansfield denied the inferences drawn from O'DonnelTs account: The only thing discussed at that meeting . . . was the President's desire to bring about a withdrawal but recognizing that it could not be done precipitantly but only over a period of months. The election was not even mentioned nor thought of and I must disassociate myself with any inference that the President and I agreed that "the party image" would or should be taken into consideration. What conversations Mr. O'Donnell and the President had after my meeting, I am not aware of.18

Yet, according to William Bundy, My own comment on this starts with noting that the subsequent revelations by O'Donnell and Mansfield came at the height of anti-Vietnam sentiment and go alongside other literature on the Kennedy family suggesting that President Kennedy would have acted very differently from what was done later. But I think this line of thought is open to grave doubt. Was President Kennedy affirming an intention to withdraw under any and all circumstances? I do not believe that, not at all. I believe the President was simply reflecting what I have already described, the optimism of that period and the assumption that the progress we then perceived would continue, and that therefore it would make it possible to withdraw American forces—but consistently with, and indeed in the interest of, having South Vietnam stand firmly on its own feet. In other words I believe that the suggestion that Kennedy really thought we should withdraw come what might is simply not historically the correct assessment of his views. [Emphasis added.] 19

The recollections of Robert F. Kennedy (in an oral history interview) are particularly valuable: "The President felt that he had a strong, overwhelming reason for being in Vietnam and that we should win the war in Vietnam. . . . [Why?] The loss of all of Southeast Asia if you lost Vietnam. I think everybody was quite clear that the rest of Southeast Asia would fall." When asked if his NSAM 2 6 3

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brother ever gave consideration to pulling out, the attorney general said, " N o . " W h e n asked if President Kennedy would have introduced ground troops if the South Vietnamese were likely to lose the war, Robert Kennedy answered, "We'd face that when we came to it." 2 0 The lore is that Kennedy's intent was also known by Secretary McNamara. According to Deborah Shapley, "McNamara has since told others—apparently in confidence—that Kennedy planned to withdraw 'even if the Vietnamese were going to be defeated.' " 2 1 Daniel Ellsberg was also told of a secret agreement between Kennedy and McNamara to get out of Vietnam after 1964. Ellsberg learned of the agreement through John McNaughton, a trusted assistant to w h o m McNamara allegedly revealed the agreement in the spring of 1964.22 Senator Wayne Morse also reports the following evidence: "I'd gone into President Kennedy's office to discuss education bills, but he said, 'Wayne, I want you to know you're absolutely right in your criticism of my Vietnam policy. Keep this in mind. I'm in the midst of an intensive study which substantiates your position on Vietnam. W h e n I'm finished I want you to give me half a day and come over and analyze it point by point.'" 2 3 Michael Forrestal also reports that Kennedy had said to him, " W h e n you come back (from Vietnam), I want you to come to see me, because we have to start to plan for what we are going to do now, in South Vietnam. I want to start a complete and very p r o found review of how we got into this country; what we thought we were doing; and what we now think we can do. I even want to think about whether or not we should be there." 2 4 The public record shows that Kennedy expanded and never reduced military operations. Never was there an explicit decision made to give up on the South Vietnamese. Indeed, Fredrik Logevall documents how Kennedy and his advisers opted to reject, at each opportunity, negotiated resolutions to conflict and chose instead to increase American military presence. 25 Kennedy feared neutralization, and during the summer of 1963 efforts to achieve a political settlement were quite serious, but the U.S. rejected any form of losing Vietnam by treaty. Never did Kennedy ever publicly state that he was willing to leave Vietnam if the result was defeat for the South Vietnamese. The public outcry would certainly have been loud. 26 Winning in Vietnam is the goal stated in April 1961 when 184

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NSAM i n was signed, and it was also the goal w h e n Kennedy adopted the recommendations of the McNamara-Taylor report in October 1963. While supporting the 1,000-man withdrawal, the report also recommended that "no further reduction should be made until the requirements of the 1964 campaign [against the North Vietnamese] become firm." Withdrawal was always qualified by the battlefield situation: South Vietnamese troops should be able to replace essential functions now performed by U.S. military personnel. In other words, if the South Vietnamese could not be trained to perform those functions, U.S. personnel would not be withdrawn. Perhaps the plan was to be announced in a low-key manner because personnel reductions depended on the battlefield situation. T h e White House had no intention of announcing the policy as if it were a promise to withdraw, and the president never disclosed his reasoning or motives to those in his inner circle. T h e idea of a phased withdrawal originated in the 1963 C o m prehensive Plan for South Vietnam. One of the decisions made at the July 23, 1962, conference in Hawaii was to develop a comprehensive plan. This planning exercise ofJanuary 19, 1963, sought "to provide for bringing the counterinsurgency effort to a successful conclusion, withdrawing U.S. special military assistance, and developing within G V N a capability to defend against the continuing threat in Southeast Asia." 27 T h e Comprehensive Plan stated that "to defeat the insurgency by the end of 1965 and effect early withdrawal of U.S. special military assistance, it will be necessary to accelerate training, equipment deliveries, and combat operations." T h e plan was based on three assumptions: (1) The insurgency will be under control at the end of three years (1965); (2) extensive U.S. support will continue to be required during the three-year period, both to bring the insurgency under control and to prepare G V N forces for early takeover of U.S. activities; and (3) previous military-assistance-plan funding ceilings for SVN are not applicable. 28 While the plan had no operational authority, it did provide a measure whereby planning would occur with a five-year projection. (By March 14, 1964, McGeorge Bundy was writing to President Johnson, under the heading "Can this be ended by 1965?," that "1965 has never been anything more for us than a target for the completion of certain forms of technical training and assistance. A struggle of this kind needs patience and determination.") 2 9 NSAM 2 6 3

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Where did Kennedy first get the idea into his head that the i ,ooo-personnel withdrawal had political payoff? In a memorandum of a conversation at the White House on April 4, 1963, on Vietnam, the president heard from Robert G. K. Thompson, head of the British Advisory Mission to Vietnam, If the GVN continued to progress at the present rate, if it were possible to declare one or two provinces white areas by summer 1963 (no announcement about white areas should be made unless it were certain that the areas were indeed freed of the Viet Cong) and finally, if confidence of success continued to grow until the end of the year, an announcement out of the blue by the United States that it was reducing the American military in Vietnam by say 1,000 men would have three good effects: a. It would show that we were winning; b. It would take the steam out of the Communists' best propaganda line, i.e., that this was an American war and the Vietnamese were our satellite; c. It would reaffirm the honesty of American intentions. [Emphasis added.] 30

The written report submitted by McNamara and Taylor on October 2, 1963, was also clearly optimistic in tone and strategy: "The military campaign has made great progress and continues to progress." In their timetable, victory was defined: "If, by victory, we mean the reduction of the insurgency to something little more than sporadic banditry in outlying districts," then by the end of 1965 victory, even in IV Corps, would be achieved. But all of this was premised on adequate political stability, and the political situation continued to be "deeply serious" and "could affect the conduct of the war."31 On November 15, Kennedy noted that initial withdrawal plans would await scheduled policy meetings in Honolulu, but he doubted that the goal of removing 1,000 men could be met by the end of the year. The deterioration of the military situation was spelled out in detail at the Honolulu conferences, and the 1,000man withdrawal turned into "a meaningless paper drill." Indeed, recently declassified documents show that on November 20, 1963, Secretary McNamara's views in early October were that "he wanted to move ahead with the war effort as fast as possible, spend whatever is necessary to win it, but at the same time to refine the program so as to avoid spending as much as the $187.5 million indicated in this presentation."32 Whatever the true rationale behind the 1,000-person withdrawal BERMAN

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plan, there was never disengagement from action. In fact, great pains were taken to have the least possible effect on the war effort. W h e n Johnson succeeded Kennedy he carried out those withdrawal details; by December 1963 the withdrawal was technically achieved, although "it proved essentially an accounting exercise. Technically, more than a thousand U.S. personnel did leave, but many of these were part of the normal turnover cycle. T h o u g h the replacement pipeline was slowed somewhat, year-end total incountry strength nevertheless was close to 16,000. This did not even represent a decline of 1,000 from the October peak level of i6,372." 3 3 Does N S A M 263 suggest that the commitment to Vietnam was to be abandoned? " T h e principal concern of N S A M 263," according to R. B. Smith, "was to demonstrate that the war was going well enough to permit continuation of the 'Phased Withdrawal' plan adopted earlier in the year." 34 This plan was made without benefit of accurate intelligence data on the Chinese determination to coordinate revolutionary movements of Southeast Asia as well as the Vietnamese intent to intensify their own armed struggle. T h e December 1963 decision at the Ninth Plenum of Lao D o n g Party to expand North Vietnamese support of the war effort in the South would have in all likelihood led Kennedy, as it did Johnson, to N S A M 28 8's clear statement of a new U.S. objective, an independent noncommunist South Vietnam. Writing in the New York Times on January 6, 1992, Leslie Gelb argued that NSAM 263 "was grounded in one of the few periods of genuine optimism about the war. So Kennedy had some basis for believing the war might be w o n soon and that U.S. forces could be withdrawn." General Phillip Davidson writes that by 1962 "the increased United States support to the South Vietnamese government and armed forces began to pay dividends. A major factor in the shift of the scales in 1962 was the introduction into the war of the U.S. helicopter companies approved by President Kennedy in late 1961." Air mobility propelled the U.S. deeper into Vietnam and made withdrawal, except with victory, difficult if not impossible to conceive. " T h e beginning of 1963," wrote Davidson, "saw American officials optimistic about the progress of the war." 3 5 Secretary Rusk also refers to "a period of optimism in the summer of 1963 w h e n we thought the war was going well and we could begin to think of withdrawing American advisors." 36 Fred Nolting NSAM 2 6 3 AND

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writes, "By early 1963, Washington was in a m o o d of euphoria about Vietnam. South Vietnam, with limited help, seemed to be winning its long struggle against subversion." 37 Indeed, any withdrawal plan under conditions short of military victory "would require a strategy conceived in global, not merely bilateral terms," and Kennedy had yet to demonstrate a global mind-set in foreign policy. " H e really had no theory of international politics, no coherent world view. H e was really quite imbued with this idea of an ad hoc approach to crisis." 38 M o r e over, Kennedy's "interest in the region, however, had not led Kennedy to any special insights; indeed, his thinking was representative of the nation's foreign policy elite in that he had defined U.S. interests in Southeast Asia within a cold war context, had criticized French colonial and military policy during their struggle against the Viet Minh, and had identified U.S. interests with the emergence of an anti-communist Vietnamese nationalism." 39 The Diem Assassination

Between August 1963 and the November 1, 1963, coup, two separate high-level fact-finding missions were sent to Vietnam—the Krulak-Mendenhall mission and the McNamara-Taylor mission. The latter's October 2 report concluded that "the security of South Vietnam remains vital to United States security. For this reason, we adhere to the overriding objective of denying this country to communism and of suppressing the Viet Cong insurgency as promptly as possible." 40 McNamara and Taylor recommended three options for the president: 1. Return to the avowed support of the Diem regime and attempt to obtain the necessary improvements through persuasion from a posture of "reconciliation." This would not mean any expression of approval of the repressive actions of the regime, but simply that we go back in practice to business as usual. 2. Follow a policy of selective pressures: "purely correct" relationships at the top official level, continuing to withhold further actions in the commodity import program, and making clear our disapproval of the regime. A further element in this policy is letting the present impressions stand that the U.S. would not be adverse to a change of Government— although we would not take any immediate actions to initiate a coup.

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3. Start immediately to promote a coup by high-ranking military officers. This policy might involve more extended suspensions of aid and sharp denunciations of the regime's actions so timed as to fit with coup prospects and planning.

At the October 2 National Security Council meeting the president selected option 2. Economic sanctions against Diem would continue and the United States would support the plotting of a coup. The October 1963 McNamara-Taylor report included recommendations for withdrawal through successful execution of the training mission: The military campaign has made great progress and continues to p r o g r e s s . . . It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that time [end of 1965]. In accordance with the program to train progressively Vietnamese to take over military functions, the Defense Department should announce in the very near future presently prepared plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963. This action should be explained in low key as an initial step in a long-term program to replace U.S. personnel with trained Vietnamese without impairment of the war effort.41

T h e minutes from the October 5 meeting, which resulted in N S A M 263, document that "the President also said that our decision to remove 1,000 U.S. advisors by December of this year should not be raised formally with Diem. Instead the action should be carried out routinely as part of our general posture of withdrawing people when they are no longer needed." 4 2 This, in fact, happened, and NSAM 273 stated that the withdrawal of 1,000 advisers would "remain as stated." During an October 29 meeting attended by the president, the attorney general "stated that the proposed coup makes no sense on the face of it from the U.S. standpoint. It would mean placing the whole future of Vietnam and Southeast Asia in the hands of an official w h o m we do not know well. We do know Diem is a fighter w h o will go down fighting." 43 O n November 1, Diem was removed from office and murdered in the back of an Americanbuilt personnel carrier. While the coup was planned and implemented by Vietnamese air force officers, Henry Cabot Lodge and the CIA were deeply involved. Diem's death was followed by a period of great instability in

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Saigon. After Maxwell Taylor replaced Lodge as ambassador on July 2, 1964, he dealt with five different governments and five different prime ministers within the space of one year. Despite the revolving governments in Saigon, one constant remained—American complicity in the coup seemingly tied the United States to all succeeding regimes. Bromley Smith's notes from a meeting on November 2 report President Kennedy in the alibi business. " O u r line should be that the aid pressures which we used against D i e m were not for the purpose of overthrowing him, but for the purpose of putting pressure on him to come to terms in order to ensure the success of the war against the Viet Cong." 4 4 President Johnsons associates recall him as always believing that his predecessor's complicity in the overthrow of President Diem had been the worst error made by the United States during its involvement in Vietnam. T h e United States became responsible for the fate of successive governments in South Vietnam. Ambassador Taylor later reflected that Diem's overthrow set in motion a sequence of crises, political and military, over the next two years which eventuallyforced President Johnson in 196$ to choose between accepting defeat or introducing American combatforces. There is no question but that President Kennedy and all of us who advised him bore a heavy responsibility for these happenings by having encouraged the perpetrators through the public display of our disapproval of Diem and his brother. That responsibility extends beyond the death of Diem—so bitterly regretted by President Kennedy—to the prolongation of the war and to the increased American involvement of later years, which were among the consequences of the events of this autumn of disaster. [Emphasis added.] 45

T h e authors of the B D M study reported, Few will argue against the fact that the role played by the U.S. during the overthrow of Diem caused a deeper U.S. involvement in Vietnam affairs. As efficient as the military coup leaders appeared, they were without a manageable base of political support. When they came to power and when the lid was taken off the Diem-Nhu reporting system, the GVN position was revealed as weak and deteriorating. And, by virtue of its interference in internal Vietnamese affairs, the U.S. had assumed a significant responsibility for the new regime, a responsibility which heightened the U.S. commitment and deepened the U.S. involvement. 46 190

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General Westmoreland's assessment was even more acute: The young president, in his zeal, made the unfortunate mistake of approving our involvement in the overthrow of President Diem in South Vietnam. This action morally locked us in Vietnam. Political chaos prevailed in South Vietnam for over two years. Were it not for our interference in political affairs of South Vietnam and based on pragmatic consideration, we could in my opinion have justifiably withdrawn our support at that time in view of a demonstrated lack of leadership and unity in South Vietnam. 47 At a press conference in 1971 President N i x o n candidly observed, "I would remind all concerned that the way we got into Vietnam was through overthrowing D i e m and the complicity in the murder ofDiem." Kennedy's hands are all over the decision to endorse the category of phase 2, bearing on applying economic pressure to Diem, and to reject "reconciliation." Indeed, the actions were calculated to p r o duce or induce a coup. "Thus, October 5, 1963, was the day the President of the United States decided to move against President N g o D i n h Diem, knowing that the result probably would be the overthrow of the Vietnamese President." 4 8 Following the coup, President Kennedy cabled Lodge: Now that there is a new Government which we are about to recognize, we must all intensify our efforts to help it deal with its many hard problems. As you say, while this was a Vietnamese effort, our own actions made it clear that we wanted improvements, and when these were not forthcoming from the Diem Government, we necessarily faced and accepted the possibility that our position might encourage a change of government. We thus have a responsibility to help this new government to be effective in every way that we can, and in these first weeks we may have more influence and more chance to be helpful than at any time in recent years. I am particularly concerned myself that our primary emphasis should be on effectiveness rather than upon external appearances. If the new Government can limit confusion and intrigue among its members, and concentrate its energies upon the real problems of winning the contest against the Communists and holding the confidence of its own people, it will have met and passed a severe test. This is what we must help in, just as it was ineffectiveness, loss of popular confidence, and the prospect of defeat that were NSAM 2 6 3 AND NSAM 2 7 3

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decisive in shaping our relations to the Diem regime. [Emphasis added.] 49

Marguerite Higgins wrote, "In the fall of 1963 Washington went into the business of hiring and firing governments. We not only forgot the one overriding priority, the war effort, but also for the first time in history, conspired in the ouster of an ally in the middle of a common war against the Communist enemy, thus plunging the country and the war effort into a steep spiral of decline." 5 0 In recently declassified memoranda of conferences with the president, Bromley Smith records JFK's bewilderment at his new political dilemma: " T h e President asked how we could square recognition of the Vietnamese rebel government which had overthrown a constitutional government with our position of not recognizing the rebel government which had overthrown the constitutional government in Honduras." 5 1 What Kennedy Might Have Done: NSAM273

w h a t type of situation did Lyndon Baines Johnson inherit? O n November 23, 1963, the new president received an encouraging report from the State Department bearing on the "situation in Vietnam." Johnson learned "the outlook is hopeful. There is better assurance than under Diem that the war can be won. We are pulling out 1,000 American troops by the end of 1963. The main concern is whether the generals can hold together until victory has been achieved." In a briefing paper prepared by State for Johnson's upcoming meeting with Ambassador Lodge, the president was advised "to review with him the draft National Security Action Memorandum [273] emerging from the Honolulu meeting, which Mr. Bundy has initiated." 52 The principal provisions of NSAM 273 were: 1. that the withdrawal of forces announced on October 2 "remain as stated"; 2. that the U.S. should support the new government; 3. that U.S. efforts be fully unified, and that interdepartmental criticism be avoided; 4. that U.S. assistance programs be maintained at previous levels, and that special attention be given to the situation in the Delta; 5. that a plan be developed for incursions into Laos; 6. that steps be taken to improve U.S. relations with Cambodia;

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7- that a strong case on the external control and provisioning of the insurgency in Vietnam be developed for public presentation. During the November 24 meeting (which included Rusk, M c N a mara, George Ball, Bundy, and John McCone), Lodge reported that by February or March "we would see marked progress." Lodge also stated that "indications of withdrawal by 1965 encouraged the coup." McCone's notes of the meeting reveal that LBJ left little doubt that he did not favor the coup, but " n o w that it was done, we have to see that our objectives are accomplished." H e stated that "he was anxious to get along, win the war—he didn't want as much effort placed on so-called social reform." [Emphasis added.] 5 3 We do not know if Kennedy would have approved two points in N S A M 273: making military victory for the Vietnamese government a "central objective," or giving presidential authorization to contingency planning for military operations up to 50 kilometers inside Laos. A November 24 conversation between the assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs (Hilsman) and Ambassador Lodge shows that Lodge favored "beginning to think of retaliatory actions against North Viet-Nam unless they call off the Viet Cong." The actions in Laos "implied an eventual willingness to extend overt military action across the frontier of a country whose neutrality had been guaranteed by international agreement. . . . [To] make certain areas of Laos an integral part of the South Vietnamese theatre of military operations involved a risk he [Kennedy] would have preferred not to take." 5 4 In May 1963 the Joint Chiefs had directed the Pacific command to prepare a plan for "hit and run" operations against North Vietnam. O n September 9, 1963, this new plan (OPlan 34-63) was approved by the Joint Chiefs. President Kennedy had yet to approve OPlan, but it was discussed and approved at Honolulu on N o v e m ber 20, 1963, placed in N S A M 273, and sent to President Johnson on December 19, 1963, as OPlan 34A. It could certainly be argued that Kennedy would have authorized the same activities that J o h n son authorized, all things being equal. These "things" begin with the period following Diem's death in November 1963 and the November 1964 U.S. presidential election. Reporting from Saigon on December 21, 1963, Secretary McNamara noted that "the situation is very disturbing. Current trends, unless reversed in the next

NSAM 2 6 3 AND NSAM 2 7 3

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2—3 months, will lead to neutralization at best and most likely to a Communist-controlled state. T h e new government is the greatest source of concern." T h e Joint Chiefs immediately recommended punitive bombing against the North as a means of controlling the insurgency in the South. South Vietnam was described as occupying "the pivotal position . . . in our world-wide confrontation with the communists," and bolder military action was viewed as a prerequisite for obtaining stability in the South. O n March 17, 1964, the administration issued N S A M 288, which stated that "we seek an independent, non-communist South Vietnam. . . . Unless we can achieve this objective in South Vietnam, almost all of Southeast Asia will probably fall under Communist dominance." 5 5 By late 1964 the Viet C o n g were increasing their terrorist attacks and the first division-size battle of the war was under way at Binh Gia, forty miles east of Saigon. Only two days before the U.S. presidential election, the Viet C o n g attacked Bien Hoa airfield, killing four and wounding seventy-two Americans. President J o h n son instructed an interagency working group (chaired by William Bundy) to canvass all " n e w " options and to forward their plans to the National Security Council. T h e interagency group formulated three options: first, a continuation of covert operations, money to the South Vietnamese government, and controlled reprisals; the second was described as "fast/full squeeze"—controlled, rapid escalation against the North; and finally, "progressive squeeze and talk." O n December 1 the president approved the first option, but in doing so recognized that a clear provocation was necessary before proceeding with graduated reprisals. By now the president understood that the war would never be won by air power alone. Cabling Ambassador Taylor with the intent of "showing you the state of my thinking," President J o h n son observed that "I am now ready to look with great favor on that kind of increased American effort [ground troops]." 5 6 Johnson went to unusual lengths in communicating with Ambassador Taylor on the question of a U.S. policy response to a deteriorating political situation: Every time I get a military recommendation, it seems to me that it calls for a large scale bombing. I have never felt that this war will be won from the air, and it seems to me that what is much more needed and would be more effective is a larger and stronger use of rangers and special forces and marines, or other appropri194

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ate military strength on the ground and on the scene. I am ready to look with great favor on that kind of increased American effort, directed at the guerrillas and aimed to stiffen the aggressiveness of Vietnamese military units up and down the line. Any recommendation that you or General Westmoreland make in this sense will have immediate attention from me, although I know that it may involve the acceptance of larger American sacrifices. We have been building our strength to fight this kind of war ever since 1961, and I myself am ready to substantially increase the number of Americans in Vietnam if it is necessary to provide this kind of fighting force against the Viet Cong.

President Johnson concluded with a strong show of support for his ambassador: I know that you are the man on the spot and I know what a very heavy load you are carrying. I am grateful for it and I want you to know in turn that you have my complete confidence in the biggest and hardest job that we have overseas. But in this tough situation in which the final responsibility is mine and the stakes are very high indeed, I have wanted you to have this full and frank statement of the way I see it.

On January 6, Taylor cabled Johnson, "With regard to your feeling that this guerrilla war cannot be won from the air, I am in entire agreement if we are thinking in terms of physical destruction of the enemy."57 Ambassador Taylor's New Year's gift for the president was a series of cables bearing one central theme: "the situation in South Vietnam will continue to go downhill toward some form of political collapse unless new element or elements can be introduced." Ambassador Taylor now believed that even Diem had been better than the present chaos qua government of South Vietnam: Until the fall of Diem and the experience gained from the events of the following months, I doubt that anyone appreciated the magnitude of the centrifugal political forces which had been kept under control by his iron rule. The successive political upheavals and the accompanying turmoil which have followed Diem's demise upset all prior U.S. calculations as to the duration and outcome of the counter-insurgency in SVN and the future remains uncertain today. There is no adequate replacement for Diem in sight.

Taylor nudged Johnson toward a favorable decision on air operations against the North. The ambassador recommended that the NSAM 263 AND NSAM 273

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United States "look for an occasion to begin air operations just as soon as we have satisfactorily compromised the current political situation in Saigon" (emphasis added). For the president's protection, however, Taylor recommended, "in order to assure yourself that we are missing no real bets in the political field, would you consider sending someone like Mac Bundy here for a few weeks." Bundy was the logical choice because he was "physically detached from the local scene" and possessed a degree of objectivity which an "old Vietnamese hand would lack." O n January 7, 1965, Taylor received a direct reply from the president: "First, let me thank you for your 2052 and related messages. It is an exceedingly helpful and thoughtful analysis of the situation, and it gives me the clearest understanding I have had of the situation as you see it and of the reasoning behind your recommendations." But the president was still not prepared to accept Taylor's proposal for a phase 2 air campaign against the North. Reprinted below is a first draft of the cable to Taylor (written by McGeorge Bundy), which illustrates Washington's thinking during this crucial period: We concur in your judgment that large new American forces are not now desirable for security or for direct combat roles. . . . We concur in your view that any action against the North should be designed for political and psychological results. We want to avoid destruction for its own sake and to minimize risk of rapid escalation. We agree with your implicit assessment that strength and clarity of U.S. commitment and determination are of major importance in political and even military balance in SVN. We are not certain that any course of action now open to us can produce necessary turn-around in South Vietnam in coming months, but we are convinced that it is of high importance to try. We are inclined to adopt a policy of prompt and clear reprisal, together with a readiness to start joint planning and execution on future military operations both within South Vietnam and against the North, but without present commitment as to the timing and scale of Phase II. [Emphasis added.] 58

O n January 14 Taylor was informed that "immediately following the occurrence of a spectacular enemy action you would propose to us what reprisal action you considered desirable," so that phase 2 bombing could begin. 59 I96

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Secretary of Defense McNamara and national security adviser McGeorge Bundy n o w saw the need to alter the basic U.S. policy directives toward Vietnam. Writing to the president, Bundy couched his observations within the framework of an advisory dilemma. Both he and McNamara had "reached the point where our obligations to you simply do not permit us to administer our present directives in silence and let you think we see real hope in t h e m . " McNamara and Bundy had requested an 11:30 a.m. meeting in order to discuss these problems with the president. What we want to say to you is that both of us are now pretty well convinced that our current policy can lead only to disastrous defeat. What we are doing now, essentially, is to wait and hope for a stable government. Our December directives make it very plain that wider action against the Communists will not take place unless we can get such a government. In the last six weeks that effort has been unsuccessful, and Bob and I are persuaded that there is no real hope of success in this area unless and until our own policy and priorities change. The underlying difficulties in Saigon arise from the spreading conviction that the future is without hope for anti-Communist policy. O u r best friends have been somewhat discouraged by our own inactivity in the face of major attacks on our own installations. The Vietnamese know just as well as we do that the Viet Cong are gaining in the countryside. Meanwhile, they see the enormous power of the United States withheld and they get little sense of firm and active U.S. policy. They feel that we are unwilling to take serious risks. In one sense, all of this is outrageous, in the light of all that we have done and all that we are ready to do if they will only pull up their socks. But it is a fact—or at least so McNamara and I now think. The basic directive says that we will not go further until there is a stable government, and no one has much hope that there is going to be a stable government while we sit still. The result is that we are pinned into a policy of first aid to squabbling politicos and passive reaction to events we do not try to control. O r so it seems. Bob and I believe that the worst course of action is to continue in this essentially passive role which can only lead to eventual defeat and an invitation to get out in humiliating circumstances. We see two alternatives. The first is to use our military power in the Far East and to force a change of Communist policy. The second is to deploy all our resources along a track of negotiation, aimed at salvaging what little can be preserved with no major addition to our present military risks. Bob and I tend to favor the first course, but we believe that both should be carefully studied and that alternative

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programs should be argued out before you. Both of us understand the very grave questions presented by any decision of this sort. We both recognize that the ultimate responsibility is not ours. Both of us fully supported your unwillingness, in earlier months, to move out of the middle course. We both agree that every effort should still be made to improve our operations on the ground and to prop up the authorities in South Vietnam as best we can. But we are both convinced that none of this is enough and that the time has come for harder choices. [Emphasis added.] 60

The memo was followed by a morning meeting during which the president decided that Bundy should go to South Vietnam and confer with Taylor. Bundy later wrote to the president, "This is as good a moment as any to say how much Bob and I valued your comments this morning in response to our memo, and how proud I am that you are willing to entrust this particular mission to me." 61 President Johnson soon cabled Taylor and offered a clear picture of his thinking in January 1965: "I am determined to make it clear to all the world that the U.S. will spare no effort and no sacrifice in doing its full part to turn back the communists in Vietnam."62 Conclusion

In November 1961 the number of U.S. servicemen in Vietnam stood at 948; by January 9, 1962, there would be 2,646, and by June 30, 5,579. By the end of 1962 it had risen to 11,300, and by the time of Kennedy's death in 1963, more than 16,000 U.S. military personnel would be in South Vietnam. Former assistant secretary of state William Bundy recalled that President Kennedy took the decision to raise the ante through a system of advisors, pilots, and supplementary military personnel. . . . In effect, it was decided that the United States would take those additional actions that appeared clearly required to meet the situation, not knowing for sure whether these actions would in fact prove to be adequate, trying—despite the obvious and always recognized effect of momentum and inertia—not to cross the bridge of still further action, and hoping strongly that what was being taken would prove sufficient.63

Returning to the two counterfactual premises: (1) without Kennedy's assassination the U.S. would have withdrawn from Vietnam by the end of 1965, and (2) had he lived, Kennedy would have made choices different from those made by Johnson between I98

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November 1963 and July 1965. I believe that both arguments are encased in uncertainty. T h e planning for a reduction in U.S. forces in the 1963 Comprehensive Plan was based on long-term projections and, even under the best of conditions politically and militarily, would not have begun until 1965 and been completed by 1968. T h e notes of President Kennedy's April 4, 1963, meeting with Robert Thompson reveal the premise on which the 1,000troop reduction would occur. 64 That reduction was not intended to be linked with any total withdrawal from Vietnam, especially a withdrawal that resulted in a Communist victory and a failure of President Kennedy's foreign policy during his final term in office. The second premise presupposes a set of circumstances created by Diem's and Kennedy's deaths and compounded by LBJ's opposition to the coup, as well as his inheritance of and maintenance of Kennedy's key advisers—McNamara, Rusk, and Bundy. We know that in July 1965 Lyndon Johnson chose to Americanize the war in Vietnam. Faced with the prospect of losing South Vietnam to the Communists, Lyndon Johnson committed major combat forces to Vietnam. "We had determined not to let that country fall under Communist rule as long as we could prevent it," wrote Johnson in his memoirs, The Vantage Point. Would Kennedy have acted differently in 1965? Perhaps, and here the interesting question turns on Robert McNamara and his relationship with both Kennedy and Johnson. McNamara's doubts about the war have been traced by others to 1963, but the record is clear that in November 1965, following the battle of la Drang Valley, the secretary possessed grave reservations, and he n o w pushed his case for a 37-day Christmas bombing pause. During a D e c e m ber 18, 1965, White House meeting, President Johnson asked McNamara, "Then, no matter what we do in the military field, there is no sure victory?" McNamara responded, "That's right. We have been too optimistic." 6 5 We can only speculate h o w President Kennedy might have responded to his secretary's statement, or we might even speculate that given their close personal relationship, McNamara was speaking for his deceased president. Yet, by O c t o ber 1966 the secretary was endorsing a program that would stabilize U.S. forces at 470,000 (with 10,000-20,000 devoted to construction of an infiltration barrier) in order to create more favorable conditions for negotiations. We will never know what might have been. We do know that NSAM 2 6 3 AND NSAM 2 7 3

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Kennedy's decisions made Vietnam an extraordinarily more difficult problem for his successor. During his nationwide interview (just two months before his assassination) with NBC's Chet H u n t ley, Kennedy was asked whether he planned to reduce aid to Vietnam: I don't think we think that would be helpful at this time. If you reduce your aid, it is possible you could have some effect upon the government structure there. O n the other hand, you might have a situation which could bring about a collapse. Strongly in our mind is what happened in the case of China at the end of World War II, where China was lost—a weak government became increasingly unable to control events. We don't want that. What I am concerned about is that Americans will get impatient and say, because they don't like events in Southeast Asia or they don't like the Government in Saigon, that we should withdraw. That only makes it easy for the Communists. I think we should stay. We should use our influence in as effective a way as we can, but we should not withdraw.

President Kennedy never questioned whether Vietnam was really a vital interest. Communism had to be contained; Vietnam was defined as a pivotal domino in U.S. global policy. T h e text of the speech prepared for delivery in Dallas provides ample evidence. T h e president had pursued a policy of doing just enough to satisfy the needs of the moment, and he bequeathed that legacy to his successors. That much, we now know, is history as it happened.

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Notes i.

Foreign Relations of the United States, ig6i-ig63, vol. 4: Vietnam, Aug.—Dec. ig6^ (Washington, D.C.: G P O , 1991), pp. 637-640. Foreign Relations of the United States is hereafter cited as FRUS.

2. 3.

FRUS ig6i-ig63, vol. 4, pp. 371-379, document 181. See Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, ig6^ (Washington, D.C.: G P O , 1964), pp. 759-760. NSAM 273, Oct. 11, 1963, Special File, Kennedy Library, Boston. John M. Newman, JFK a n d Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power (New York: Warner Books, 1992), p. 446. Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 24.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 456. See James Fearon, "Counterfactuals and Hypothesis Testing in Political Science," World Politics 43 (1991): 169-195. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 442.

10. Philip Nash, "The Use of Counterfactuals in History: A Look at the Literature," SHAFR Newsletter, March 1991: 1-12. 11. H. Stuart Hughes, "The Historian and the Social Scientist," American Historical Review 66 (1), Oct. i960: 29. 12. R. B. Smith, The Struggle for South-East Asia, ig6i-ig6^, vol. 2: An International History of the Vietnam War (New York: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 193-194. 13. Ronald Steel, "Mr. Smith Goes to the Twilight Zone," New Republic, Feb. 3, 1992, pp. 3 0 - 3 2 . 14. Dean Rusk, As I Saw It (New York, W. W. Norton, 1990), pp. 440-442. 15. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 406; see chaps. 22 and 23. 16. Ibid. 17. Kenneth O'Donnell, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), P- 15. 18. Mansfield to Mrs. Esther McGuire, Sept. 28, 1970; Mansfield to Prof. Neil R. Paine, May 31, 1973; and Mansfield to John Nicolella, June 13, 1973; all in Gregory Allen Olsen, Mike Mansfield and Indochina: One Man's Rhetorical Odyssey (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997). 19. William Bundy, "Kennedy and Vietnam," in The Kennedy Presidency, ed. Kenneth W. Thompson (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985), pp. 241-284. 20. Edward O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman, eds., Robert Kennedy in His Own Words: The Unpublished Recollections of the Kennedy Years (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), pp. 4 0 0 - 4 0 1 . 21. Deborah Shapley, Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), p. 262. 22. Ellsberg, personal interview with author. 23. David Nyham, "We've Been a Policy State a Long Time," Boston Globe, June 24, 197324. See Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), p. 722. In Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 427.

NSAM 263 AND NSAM 273

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25. Fredrik Bengt Johan Logevall, "Fear to Negotiate: Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War, 1963-1965," Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, May 1993. 26. See James N . Giglio, The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991), pp. 255-288. 27. CPSVN, Jan. 25, 1963, and Feb. 4, 1963, FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 3: Vietnam, Jan.Aug. 1963, p. 38. 28. Ibid. 29. FRUS 1964-1968, vol. 1: Vietnam, 1964 (Washington, D.C.: G P O , 1992), pp. 1 4 8 149. 30. FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 3, April 4, 1963, document 79. 31. FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 4, document 167. 32. Revision of Military Comprehensive Plan, Nov. 20, 1963, FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 4, document 321. 33. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, pp. 4 3 2 - 4 3 3 . 34. R. B. Smith, Struggle for South-Fast Asia, pp. 179-180. 35. 36. 37. 38.

Phillip B. Davidson, Vietnam at War (San Francisco: Presidio Press, 1988), p. 302. Rusk, As I Saw It; see discussion on Vietnam. Frederick Nolting, From Trust to Tragedy (New York: Praeger, 1988), p. 95. Robert Reingold, "Kennedy's Role in History: Some Doubts," New York Times, Nov. 22, 1973. 39. David Anderson, ed., Shadow on the White House: Presidents and the Vietnam War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), p. 68. 40. McNamara-Taylor Report, Oct. 2, 1963, FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 4. 41. Ibid. 42. FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 4, p. 370, document 179. 43. Memorandum of Conversation, Oct. 29, 1963, FRUS 1961 — 1963, vol. 4, document 234. 44. Notes of Bromley Smith, Executive Secretary, National Security Council, Nov. 2, 1963, National Security Council History, Vietnam, LBJ Library. 45. Maxwell D. Taylor, Swords and Plowshares (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), p. 400. 46. B D M report, March 9, 1981, in Larry Berman, Planning a Tragedy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), p. 155. 47. William Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (Garden City: Doubleday, 1976), p. 91. Also, "Vietnam in Perspective," Retired Officer, Oct. 1978: 2 1 - 2 4 . 48. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 189. 49. Berman, Planning a Tragedy, p. 29. 50. Marguerite Higgins, Our Vietnam Nightmare (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 225. 51. Notes of Bromley Smith, Nov. 1. 52. See Newman, JFK and Vietnam, pp. 425—43 5. 53. FRUS 1961-1963, vol. 4, document 330. 54. R. B. Smith, Struggle for South-East Asia, p. 193. 55. FRUS 1961 — 1963, vol. 4, pp. 732-735. See Berman, Planning a Tragedy, pp. 2 7 - 2 8 . 56. Johnson to Taylor, cable, Jan. 27, 1965, 1549, N S C History, Troop Deployment, LBJ Library. According to McGeorge Bundy, "This is an important cable. . . . [It] is an LBJ effort to get attention to well-designed ground action and it also shows clearly the temper of readiness to go further inside South Vietnam that he shows steadily from here on for 3 years in spite of all contrary counsel. Along with other

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indicators I take this to show he was never swayed on this basic issue by Ball or anyone else." (Personal letter to the author, 1982.) 57. Taylor to Johnson, cable, Jan. 6, 1965 (includes cables 2052-2058), N S C History, Troop Deployment, LBJ Library. 58. Bundy to Taylor, cable, Jan. 28, 1965, Top Secret 1557, N S C History, Troop Deployment, LBJ Library. 59. Berman, Planning a Tragedy, p. 40. 60. Bundy to Johnson, Jan. 27, 1965, "Basic policy on Vietnam," LBJ Library. Bundy added, "You should know that Dean Rusk does not agree with us. He does not quarrel with our assertion that things are going very badly and that the situation is unraveling. He does not assert that this deterioration can be stopped. What he does say is that the consequences of both escalation and withdrawal are so bad that we simply must find a way of making our present policy work. This would be good if it was possible. Bob and I do not think it is." 61. Bundy to Johnson, Jan. 27, 1965, "Draft message to Max Taylor," LBJ Library. 62. Johnson to Taylor, cable, Jan. 27, 1965, 1549, NSC History, Troop Deployment, LBJ Library. 63. William Bundy, "Kennedy and Vietnam." 64. FRUS ig6i-ig63, vol. 3, April 4, 1963, document 79. 65. See Larry Berman, Lyndon Johnson's War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989).

NSAM 2 6 3 AND NSAM 2 7 3

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Turnabout? The Soviet Policy Dilemma in the Vietnamese Conflict

Hya V Gaiduk History likes mysteries. It is difficult to imagine any period in the history of mankind without secrets that pose to scholars the task of finding answers for them. Some secrets arise because, as years pass and documents disappear or are destroyed by time or human hands, it becomes more and more arduous to find evidence to support or refute arguments. This relates more to periods of history that are remote in time. But those w h o study historical events that took place ten, twenty, or thirty years ago encounter another kind of mystery, which arises because the documentary evidence is still unavailable to scholars by reason of restrictions imposed by the state or individual. The latter case is pertinent to the history of the Vietnam War. Only in the last several years have we gotten an o p portunity to study problems relating to the conflict in Indochina that at first glance appear local but have had a great impact on the situation in the world and the consequences of which influenced developments in various countries. There are still many questions confronting scholars w h o are interested in the history of the Vietnam War, some of them connected with the policy of the Soviet U n i o n toward this war and developments that affected the decisionmaking process in Moscow in those years. N o w we can obtain access to some documents previously classified and unavailable to historians. For example, it is possible to read material on the Vietnam War in the former Central C o m mittee Archive of the Communist Party of the Soviet U n i o n (CPSU). This greatly enhances our knowledge of this conflict. But these documents are not enough to make firm conclusions relating to top-level decisions. Unfortunately, documentary evidence of such a character is located in the presidential, or Kremlin, archive, and it may take many years before we will be able to study those materials. Nevertheless, documents in the former Central Committee Archive, and in the Storage Center for Contemporary Documents, give us the opportunity to reconstruct Soviet policy toward the

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Vietnam War and Soviet-American relations in that period on the basis of indirect evidence and facts or, when such evidence is not enough, at least to outline the possible ways of resolving a problem and to put forward a hypothesis more or less close to the truth. This is the case with respect to the problem of the evolution of Soviet policy toward the Indochina conflict during 1964, and the changes in the position of Moscow that resulted after the ouster of Khrushchev and the new leaders' coming to power at the Kremlin. T h e questions are why did such changes occur, and what arguments formed the basis of the decision of the Soviet leadership to reconsider its attitude toward the situation in Southeast Asia, in favor of supporting North Vietnam in its struggle against the South Vietnamese regime and for the unification of the country. But it is equally important to discover whether the removal of Khrushchev was the main reason for this turnabout or if there were other factors that determined the evolution of Soviet policy in that region of the world, and if Khrushchev had remained head of the Soviet state, whether such changes would not have taken place. O f course, in order to answer these questions we need to study the documents of the Politburo, but some materials I have found in the files of the former Central Committee Archive let me make the assumptions I am going to discuss now. The year of 1964 was significant in many respects. For the United States it was the year when the decision to escalate in Vietnam crystallized and became the necessary attribute of all contingency plans. T h e Johnson administration needed only a pretext serious enough to involve the country in a conflict that in the eyes of many was outside the security interests of the United States. For the North Vietnamese it was a time of increased infiltration into South Vietnam, coupled with the firm resolution to achieve the unification of the country even if the fight were to continue for many years. Also in 1964, the North Vietnamese alliance with China was finally shaped in the form of the military agreement signed in December, 1 and political understandings were worked out during numerous visits of the top leaders of Hanoi and Beijing. T h e year 1964 was also significant for the Soviet Union. To understand how, it is useful to trace the principal events that took place in Moscow from January through December.

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Historians characterize 1964 as the year of the lowest point in the history of S o v i e t - N o r t h Vietnamese relations. 2 They do have some basis for such a conclusion. Relations between the two countries deteriorated significantly during the last months of Khrushchev's tenure in spite of assurances to the contrary by both sides. T h e clear manifestation of that shift appeared during the visit of Le Duan as head of the North Vietnamese delegation to Moscow January 31—February 10, 1964. The purpose of this visit, for Hanoi, was evidently to probe the position of its Soviet counterpart, especially after the Ninth Plenum of the Lao D o n g Party, which revealed the strong pro-Chinese orientation of the leaders in Hanoi. The delegation prepared a seventy-three-page m e m o randum, which contained a detailed summary of the views of Hanoi on the questions of war, peace, the national liberation movement, and the unity of the world socialist system. Le Duan noted that he would like to touch on only those problems whose interpretation by the North Vietnamese differed from that of the Soviet "comrades." 3 In fact, the position of Hanoi seemed in sharp contrast to that of Moscow. T h e North Vietnamese ardently defended the activities of Beijing in the sphere of foreign policy and criticized the Soviet Union for its assistance to India in her conflict with China. They declared that the only way to avoid a world war while advancing the socialist cause was by means of the revolutionary struggle. T h e delegation rejected the policy of peaceful coexistence and supported the idea of sharing the secrets of nuclear weaponry with China. As concerned the role of the national liberation movement, Le Duan and his colleagues argued that the weakest link of imperialism and the source of the "revolutionary storms" were the colonial and dependent countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and if the socialist revolution was possible at all it would occur not in the industrial capitalist countries but in the countries of the Third World. Since the opportunities for peaceful transition to socialism were now null, it was necessary to prepare for a violent revolutionary struggle. The North Vietnamese spoke of the necessity to fight "revisionism" and to repair the split between the Soviet and Chinese c o m munists. At the same time they tried to stress that Hanoi had never published materials that criticized the policy of the Communist

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Party of the Soviet Union and that discussions critical of the Soviets had been held only inside the Central Committee of the Lao D o n g Party. 4 It was clear to Moscow that the heresy of Hanoi went too far. It might be possible for the USSR to reconcile itself with the North Vietnamese defense of China, but the Hanoi delegation argued that the principal role in the world revolutionary process belonged to national liberation movements, not to the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. They belittled the role of Moscow's support of the struggle in the Third World. Such views could not be tolerated by the Soviet leadership. T h e Soviets tried to make the North Vietnamese give up their erroneous views. Head of the Soviet delegation M . Suslov and his colleagues explained the position of the Moscow leadership on the most important questions. Khrushchev, w h o received the delegation, drew the attention of the "Vietnamese comrades" to the discrepancy between their declaration of sympathy toward the C P S U and the USSR and the activity of the Central Committee of the Lao D o n g Party. "Such activity," Khrushchev emphasized, "does not correspond to the interests of the socialist camp and the world communist movement." H e even mentioned the "grave consequences" of such behavior by the North Vietnamese. 5 Thus the visit of Le Duan did clarify the positions of the two countries, revealing serious differences of opinion on most questions. If Moscow was having second thoughts with respect to its involvement in the situation in Southeast Asia, that visit could only have intensified doubts on the part of the Soviet leaders. But the conclusion made by the Kremlin after the negotiations was surprisingly optimistic. As the telegram to the "friends" in France put it, " T h e behavior of the Vietnamese delegates, the tone of their presentations led us to conclude that the C P S U and other fraternal parties have the possibility to maintain and develop contacts with the Workers' Party of Vietnam." 6 In spite of all differences, the Soviet leaders, and probably Khrushchev himself, did not abandon the intention to get more influence in that region of the world. Moscow evidently was viewing developments in Indochina with apprehension. It did not want an aggravation of the situation there that would endanger all the recent achievements of the Soviet U n i o n in its relations with the West. But the Kremlin had no leverage to persuade the participants in the conflict to give up their 210

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irreconcilable plans toward each other. It could influence the situation passively, warning one side, reducing its support of the other, and hoping that the rivals would have enough c o m m o n sense to avoid a military conflict. I perceive, for example, the Soviet threat to resign as cochairman of the Geneva Conference, as well as Moscow's reaction to the Tonkin Gulf incidents, from this point of view. This picture will be clearer if we bear in mind an event that occurred just on the eve of those two incidents: the visit of the delegation of the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam to Moscow. This delegation was invited by the Soviet C o m mittee of Solidarity with the Asian and African Countries. During the visit NLF representatives submitted their request for Soviet assistance in the form of arms shipments (they asked for antiaircraft artillery and antitank guns) and financial support in the form of American dollars. Besides, the South Vietnamese announced that they were ready to open a permanent NLF mission in Moscow in December, in case the Soviets welcomed such a possibility. O n this occasion, the International Department of the Central Committee sent its recommendations to the Politburo. T h e department recommended confining the question of assistance to the NLF only to humanitarian aid, and to discuss the problem of arms shipments further with the governmental institutions of the D e m o cratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). O n the question of the permanent mission, the department suggested refraining from a definitive answer. Finally, it believed that it would not be expedient to receive this delegation in the Central Committee, since in this case it would be difficult to avoid questions on military assistance and money. 7 Secretary B. Ponomarev, w h o was responsible in the C e n tral Committee for problems of the international activity of the Communist Party, agreed with these recommendations. Several days later the Tonkin Gulf incidents occurred. Apparently they were an unpleasant surprise for Moscow. T h e danger of war became a reality, but the Kremlin tried to avoid hasty estimates and tried also to use this opportunity to convince President Johnson against involvement in the Indochina conflict. O n August 5, Khrushchev sent a letter to Johnson distinguished by very careful wording. T h e Soviet leader informed his American counterpart that he knew about the events in the Gulf of Tonkin "solely from those statements which have been made these days in T U R N A B O U T ? THE SOVIET POLICY DILEMMA

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Washington, and from the reports of the news agencies and also from the statement. . . of the High C o m m a n d of the Vietnamese People's Army." 8 O f course, the Soviet premier argued, the Americans brought the navy into the gulf, "which cuts deeply in the territories of the DRV and the CPR," and this fact "under any circumstances cannot be viewed in any other way but as a military demonstration." But this was not so important to Khrushchev as the question, "Cui bono?" H e did not specify "those quarters and persons w h o do not conceal their desire to inflame the passions, to pour oil on the flame and whose militant frame of mind one should regard with great caution and restraint." This was obviously not President Johnson. Probably Khrushchev meant the Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, w h o , according to the Soviet mass media, instead of being sent "to a madhouse or a court," received the nomination and w h o "reflected the adventuristic position of the most chauvinistic and aggressive circles of American reaction." 9 It is apparent that Khrushchev may have meant the Chinese leaders as well, with their support of the struggle for the violent unification of Vietnam. If so, Khrushchev's appeal to President Johnson on their mutual responsibility, as the leaders of great powers, to keep peace and to ensure "that dangerous events whichever area of the globe they begin with, would not become first elements in the chain of ever more critical and maybe irreversible events," reflected a serious concern in the Kremlin over the course of events. The Soviet leader himself emphasized the degree of this concern in the last two paragraphs of his letter, where he confessed that it had been his own initiative to write to J o h n s o n — n o one asked him to do it—and where he expressed a hope that the United States would show "necessary composure and restraint" in dealing with the situation in that region of the globe. 10 A similar attitude toward the incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin was adopted by Soviet diplomats abroad. T h e State Department reported that the Soviet representative to the United Nations, Morozov, in his speech in the Security Council session, showed the "same general caution and restraint." H e referred to the lack of reliable information on the events in Southeast Asia and stressed, in this respect, the necessity to solicit information from Hanoi and to invite its representatives to the United Nations. T h e State Department came to the conclusion that "Moscow presumably hopes 212

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U.S. will be restrained from further military action during course of the U . N . discussion." n Another telegram was received from the American Embassy in Bonn. T h e embassy reported that according to a CBS correspondent, the Soviet TASS correspondents in Bonn invited several American journalists to discuss the incidents. D u r ing their conversations they stressed two points: "A) It was of decisive importance to ascertain facts of first attacks, in order to establish w h o was guilty party, and B) Soviet Union had no interest in getting involved in matter." "[The] implication was," the embassy argued, "that if North Vietnam attacks were bona fide, USSR would avoid heavy involvement." 1 2 The Americans came to the conclusion that the lines the Soviets had presented during the conversations were dictated from Moscow with the aim of disseminating them. But the restrained reaction of Moscow did not conceal its deep concern with respect to the worsening situation in Indochina. Perhaps the clashes in the Tonkin Gulf led the Kremlin to change its tactics with regard to the whole affair. The Soviet leadership became convinced that developments in Indochina sooner or later would lead to military conflict. At least, their information on the position of the North Vietnamese supported that notion. For instance, during a conversation between the Soviet ambassador to Cambodia K. Krutikov and the International Control Commission representative Spasovsky on June 5, 1964, Spasovsky (who visited Hanoi and had met with Prime Minister Pham Van Dong) informed the Soviet official that he thought the North Vietnamese were ready to fight the Americans and the Saigon regime until complete victory, even if it meant a struggle lasting many years. 13 N o r could the Soviets hope that the United States would abandon its plans to counter the efforts of Hanoi to overthrow the "Saigon puppets." Johnson's answer to Khrushchev's letter reflected U.S. determination. Johnson emphasized that his country "will always be prompt and firm in its positive reply to acts of aggression." 14 T h e position of the United States in its interpretation of "aggression" was well known to Moscow. T h e Soviet leaders were also worried by the reluctance of Hanoi to provide reliable information about its plans. In a number of reports sent to Moscow from the Soviet Embassy at various times, there were recurrent complaints that Hanoi officials concealed their purposes in the South. T h e Polish representative in the InterTURNABOUT? THE SOVIET POLICY DILEMMA

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national Control Commission, Maneli, in a conversation with Krutikov, drew his counterpart's attention to the fact that the Vietnamese were informing the Polish in Saigon, the Polish Embassy in Hanoi, and the Soviet diplomats differently. T h e Soviets received the most optimistic information and estimates, while the Polish representatives in Saigon were provided with the most precise and balanced facts, since it was absolutely clear that the latter were able to obtain the correct information themselves. 15 This practice of the North Vietnamese increased the risk that the Soviet Union would become entangled in a conflict they not only would not know about in advance but also would not have any leverage to influence. The risk was real. In the case of such an outcome as the U.S. invasion of the DRV, Moscow could not stand aside, since that would be fatal to its leading position in the communist world. Thus by the fall of 1964 the Soviet leaders had to face a dilemma: either abandon the DRV completely and occupy a position of n o n involvement in Indochina in any outcome whatever, or try to get some leverage and influence developments in the region in a favorable direction. T h e first alternative was unacceptable from all points of view. Such a step would devalue the image of the Soviet Union as a defender and supporter of the peoples w h o fight for their independence against the "imperialist oppressors," would compromise the Soviet position as a leader of the world c o m m u nist movement, and would undermine the reliability of Moscow as a strong ally in the eyes of the socialist countries. I need hardly mention that such a step would open the Soviet Union to the fierce criticism of the Chinese. All of this would be not only fatal for the geopolitical position of the country but was also inconceivable to the way of thinking in Moscow, formed as it had been by Cold War values and perceptions. So the only solution for the Soviet leadership was to attempt to fortify its position in relations with Hanoi and to obtain channels of influence in the face of C h i nese penetration there. The basis for this step already existed. Hanoi was interested in Soviet military assistance in its struggle in the South. China was evidently not able to satisfy all North Vietnamese needs in arms and equipment. A second factor useful to Moscow was the traditional distrust and suspicion of the Vietnamese toward their great northern neighbor. Although the pro-Chinese m o o d intensified greatly after 1961, there were always people in the governing 214

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circles of the DRV and the Lao D o n g Party whose attitude was at least reserved with regard to such strengthening of Chinese influence, and w h o were eager to find a counterweight to it. By the end of 1964 they had formed a faction in the Central C o m mittee, of course without legal registration. According to some sources, this faction included Le Duan as head, Pham Van Dong, and Vo Nguyen Giap. 16 Finally, it was important that many of H o Chi Minh's cadres had been trained in Moscow and were Soviet-oriented. It was true that many of them were removed from their posts as a result of the victory of the new orientation of Hanoi at the beginning of the sixties, but the Soviets could always count on their support. An initial move in the series of efforts of the Soviet Union to improve its relations with the DRV was the assignment of the new ambassador to Hanoi. In a report, "Soviet Relations with North Viet-Nam Strengthened in Last Quarter of 1964," the U.S. Information Agency noted, "What was needed in Hanoi was a man w h o thoroughly understood the situation, one w h o had experience in the area and one w h o retained the confidence of Kremlin leaders. Such a man was Ambassador Shcherbakov." 17 In fact, Ilia S. Shcherbakov fitted well that important j o b . A graduate of the Military Diplomatic Academy, he had occupied responsible positions in the Central Committee apparatus for a long time. In the fifties he was head of the section on China in the Central Committee department that supervised relations with foreign communist parties. O n February 20, 1963, Shcherbakov became a minister-counselor in the Soviet Embassy in Beijing. O n August 22, 1964, the Secretariat of the Central Committee approved his candidacy as the ambassador to Hanoi. T h e new ambassador possessed all the necessary qualifications for that post. Shcherbakov was, according to the same USIA report, "considered to be a leading expert on Communist China, [and] he had been a trusted Party official at central headquarters," which was a very useful combination in the Soviet bureaucracy at the time. Shcherbakov arrived in Hanoi on September 23 and found Soviet influence in the capital "at an all-time low." Contacts between the two countries were few. North Vietnamese officials were deeply disappointed by the weak diplomatic response of Moscow to the events in the Tonkin Gulf. In contrast, the rapprochement between China and the DRV led to the conclusion of their military T U R N A B O U T ? THE SOVIET POLICY DILEMMA

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agreement. Hanoi therefore prepared to sever its ties with the Soviet Union in this sphere. Soon the Soviet military attache in Hanoi was invited to the Vietnamese General Staff, where he was told that the DRV armed forces now had "their own views" on strategy and tactics in the region, which were different from those of the "Soviet comrades." The Ministry of Defense notified its Soviet counterpart that there was no need any longer for the Soviet military experts to stay in Vietnam, and as soon as the term of their business trip expired, they should leave. It was also stressed that they were not supposed to be replaced by other Soviet military experts. 18 Shcherbakov presented his credentials to the vice president of North Vietnam on September 26, and less than three weeks later a plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union removed Khrushchev. Leonid I. Brezhnev was to be secretary-general, with Alexei N . Kosygin as chairman of the Council of Ministers. Nikolai V Podgornyi would head the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. This change in power in Moscow did not alter Soviet tactics with respect to Southeast Asia, but only accelerated the search for ways to influence Hanoi's position. The new Soviet leadership, after declaring that the continuity in Soviet foreign policy would remain unbroken, made the next steps on the road of rapprochement with North Vietnam. O n November 10, a Cultural C o o p eration Agreement for 1965 was signed by the Soviet-Vietnam and Vietnam-Soviet Friendship Societies. O n November 17, Premier Kosygin sent a message of solidarity directly to the Central C o m mittee of the NLF. O f equal importance was Premier Pham Van Dong's courtesy visit in November for the forty-seventh anniversary of the October Revolution. This process reached a peak with the decision of the Politburo, on December 24, to open the permanent mission of the NLF in Moscow. All these moves were viewed in the West as signs of the process of amelioration of Soviet-North Vietnamese relations, and that estimate was correct. What was missed in the analytical reports of the American diplomats and other foreign-policy officials, as well as later in the books of historians and eyewitnesses, was that this process began before the Khrushchev ouster and thus cannot be associated only with the new leadership, although after October 14 (the day of Khrushchev's removal) it became more apparent. 2l6

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T h e second element that was overlooked by the Western analysts and researchers is the principal aim the Soviets tried to achieve in their relations with North Vietnam. Lists of aims allegedly pursued by the Soviet Union in its rapprochement with Hanoi usually mention the need to get more influence over developments in Indochina to outweigh Beijing's position there, the wish to restore the Soviet image as a supporter of national liberation movements in the eyes of allies and rivals, the necessity to strengthen the Soviet position vis-a-vis Chinese criticism, and the requirement to regain a more even balance between policy toward the West and relations with foreign communist regimes and parties. All of these seem accurate. But there has been no mention of another purpose, which, as later developments showed, became the primary concern of the Soviet leadership. Let me cite a document, probably one of the first signed by the new Soviet ambassador to Hanoi. This is a top-secret information letter, " O n the Political Situation in South Vietnam and the Position of the DRV," November 19, 1964. This letter gives a thorough analysis of the situation in Indochina and perspectives of developments there, in connection with the policy of the DRV and based on the views of Hanoi leaders on the problems of the struggle for the unification of the country. The situation in November was characterized as an equilibrium of forces. Both sides, the letter noted, were searching for a way out, and what was more, the United States, although it was not easy for them to resolve this problem, might be inclined to negotiations. As concerned the DRV and NLF, they officially declared their wish to resolve the problem of unification peacefully, but in reality they were extending their military operations to get advantages in case such negotiations would occur. Then, "in the present situation, on our side it would be more proper to mobilize further world opinion for the soonest political settlement of the South Vietnam problem on the basis of the Geneva Accords." 1 9 T h e letter drew attention to the North Vietnamese leaders' plans for intensification of military operations in the South. Hanoi was sure, the embassy emphasized, "that the socialist countries, particularly China, will render thorough assistance to the DRV. And the USSR will not be able to remain aside, and there will be requests to Moscow for aid that is considered, as before, very important." The embassy viewed the situation in South Vietnam as very comT U R N A B O U T ? THE SOVIET POLICY DILEMMA

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plicated and remarked that many people there were afraid of the "absorption" of South Vietnam by the DRV and of the " c o m m u nization" of the South. Let me emphasize the final wording of the embassy's argument: " T h e Embassy believes that in the present situation it is necessary to pay most attention to searching for ways of political settlement in Vietnam as well as in Indochina." It seems the desire for political settlement was the primary concern of Moscow, because only in that case did the Soviets have minimal risk in the conflict in Southeast Asia. Unfortunately in 1964 neither the United States nor particularly North Vietnam was ready for such settlement. It took more than three years of bloody war to begin the process of peaceful solution of the conflict, and five more years to sign the peace treaty that terminated the United States' involvement in the conflict in this remote part of the world.

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Notes i.

Information of the G R U (Main Intelligence Administration) for the International Department of the CPSU Central Committee on North Vietnam-Chinese military cooperation, July 14, 1967, f. 5, op. 59, d. 416, p. 120, Storage Center for Contemporary Documents, Moscow. Storage Center hereafter cited as SCCD.

2.

See, for example, Daniel S. Papp, Vietnam: The Viewfrom Moscow, Peking, and Washington (Jefferson, N . C . : McFarland, 1981).

3.

Telegram to the Soviet ambassador in Paris, March 14, 1964, f. 4, op. 18, d. 582, Secretariat-95/462g, S C C D . Ibid., pp. 2 - 3 . Ibid., p. 5.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Ibid. International Department of the CPSU Central Committee, July 25, 1964, f 5, op. 50, d. 631, pp. 163-164, S C C D . Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964—1968, vol. 1: Vietnam, 1964 (Washington, D.C.: G P O , 1992) [hereafter cited as FRUS 1964], pp. 636-638. "Mirovaia Ekonomika i Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniia" (The World Economy and International Relations), Pravda, July 20, 1964.

10. FRUS 1964, pp. 636-638. 11. State Department telegram, Aug. 5, 1964, V-23, G. Porter Donation, box 1, Folder "Vietnam 1964—1966," National Security Archive, Washington, D . C . 12. Telegram from the American Embassy in Bonn, Aug. 7, 1964, V-23, G. Porter Donation, box 1, Folder "Vietnam 1964-1966," National Security Archive. 13. Memorandum of conversation between K. Krutikov and Spasovsky, June 5, 1964, f. 5, op. 50, d. 631, p. 131, SCCD. 14. FRUS 1964, p. 648. 15. Memorandum of conversation between Krutikov and Maneli, June 21 and 22, 1963, f 5, op. 50, d. 521, p. 57, SCCD. 16. Memorandum to the CPSU Central Committee, " O n the Situation in Indochina and Some Questions of O u r Policy in This Region," by Pravda correspondent I. Shchedrov, [1966], f. 5, op. 58, d. 264, p. 96, SCCD. This document has a resolution by B. Ponomarev: "Please, familiarize yourselves with the memorandum and work out suggestions on the questions which demand conclusions and action. 18. VII." 17. USIA Report, April 1965, V-16, G. M. Kahin Donation, Box 4, National Security Archive. 18. Soviet Embassy Information Letter, " O n the Political Situation in South Vietnam and the Position of the DRV," Nov. 19, 1964, f. 5, op. 50, d. 631, p. 253, SCCD. 19. Ibid., pp. 234-254.

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Contributors L A R R Y B E R M A N is a Princeton Ph.D. and a professor of political science at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Berman has written extensively on the modern presidency, including Lyndon Johnson's War: The Road to Stalemate and Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam. H e has won the Bernath Lecture Prize, given annually by the Organization of American Historians for work contributing most to our understanding of foreign relations. R O B E R T A. D I V I N E , a Yale Ph.D., has been publishing, editing, and teaching in the field of diplomatic history since 1954. His works include The Illusion of Neutrality, The Reluctant Belligerent: American Entry into World War II, Eisenhower and the Cold War, and Since 1945: Politics and Diplomacy in Recent American History. Dr. Divine has edited three volumes of essays on the Johnson administration and is editor of the Pelican History of the United States. H e is Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. W I L L I A M J . D U I K E R has a Ph.D. from Georgetown University. A former foreign service officer, he is professor of East Asian history at Pennsylvania State University. His published works include The Rise of Nationalism in Vietnam, The Comintern and Vietnamese Communism, and The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam. Dr. Duiker lectures at the Foreign Service Institute and is at work on a biography of H o Chi Minh. ILYA V. G A I D U K holds a Ph.D. in history from the Institute of General History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Dr. Gaiduk has written on George F. Kennan and Soviet-American relations and has participated in programs of cooperation between American scholars and the National Committee of the historians of the Soviet Union. His most recent work is The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War. L L O Y D C . G A R D N E R is the Charles and Mary Beard Professor of History at Rutgers University. Born in Delaware, Ohio, he studied at Ohio Wesleyan University and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he received a Ph.D. in history. H e has been a Woodrow Wilson fellow, a Guggenheim fellow, and a Fulbright

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exchange professor. In addition to a great many articles, he has written and edited more than a dozen books dealing with American diplomatic history. His most recent book is Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam. W I L L I A M C O N R A D G I B B O N S holds a P h . D . from Princeton.

After a long career in government service, he is a visiting professor at George Mason University. Dr. Gibbons is the author of the monumental five-volume study, published simultaneously by the Government Printing Office and by Princeton, The U. S. Government and the Vietnam War, of which the fifth volume is about to appear. T E D G I T T I N G E R is a Vietnam veteran and chief of special projects at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library. G E O R G E C . H E R R I N G is a University of Virginia P h . D . H e

edited The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of the Pentagon Papers and is the author ofAmerica's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975. Dr. Herring is a professor of history at the University of Kentucky. J O H N M . N E W M A N has a Ph.D. from George Washington U n i versity. A long-time intelligence analyst for various national security entities, he is the author ofJFK and Vietnam. Dr. N e w m a n specializes in East Asian studies and has published extensively on that subject. H e is associate professor of history at the University of Maryland. J O H N P R A D O S holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from Columbia University. H e has written and lectured extensively on national security, intelligence, military history, and simulation theory. H e is the author of the award-winning books The Soviet Estimate and Combined Fleet Decoded, and his four books on Vietnam subjects include The Hidden History of the Vietnam War. B R I A N V A N D E M A R K , a U C L A Ph.D., teaches history at the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. Author of Into the Quagmire: Lyndon Johnson and the Escalation of the Vietnam War, he served as research assistant on Clark Clifford's autobiography, Counsel to the President, and most recently as a collaborator on R o b ert S. McNamara's Vietnam memoir, In Retrospect.

CONTRIBUTORS

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Index i,ooo-man troop withdrawal, 136— 139, 158-174; origins of, 152 — I53nn.49,50, I54n.53, 186; accelerated, 164; not a ploy to pressure Diem, 169; becomes a "meaningless paper drill," 186; not part of a general withdrawal, 199 Aggression from the North: The Record of North Vietnam's Campaign to Conquer South Vietnam, 5 8 Anderson, David, 16 Anderson, George, 101 Ap Bac, 163 appeasement, 8 9 - 9 0 August 24 cable, 130-131 Baldwin, Hanson, 115^35 Ball, George, 96, 120, 126 B D M study, 190 Betts, Richard, 8 6 - 8 7 Bien Hoa attack, 72 Black, Eugene, 43 Bowles, Chester, 44 Brown and Root, 46, 4 8 - 4 9 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 20 Bundy, McGeorge: stresses continuity of Vietnam policy, 38; recommends escalation after the Pleiku incident, 95; and the 1,000-man troop withdrawal, 136, 137, 165; drafts NSAM 273: 141, 172-173; tells LBJ Vietnam policy is failing, 197-198 Bundy, William, 122, 140; doubts JFK intended to withdraw, 183; recommends course of action, 194; summarizes JFK's policy, 198 Central Intelligence Agency. See CIA China: angers the DRV, 82n.28, 209-211; allies with the DRV, 208

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Chomsky, Noam, 174 CIA: supports Diem, I5in.45 coercive diplomacy, 92—98 Colby, William, 150^45 Cold War: relationship of Vietnam to, 11—22; provides models for a divided Vietnam, 29 Comprehensive Plan for South Vietnam, 152—153^49, i$$n.66; provisions of, 185 Cooper, Chester, 166-167 Corcoran, Thomas, 46 credibility gap, 57n.45 credibility issue, 20, 27, 28, 32,93 Cuban missile crisis, 20, 94—95; and the Joint Chiefs, 101; distracts JFK, 162-163 Dallek, Robert, 49 Davidson, Phillip, 187 Democratic Republic of Vietnam: long-range goals of, 58-59; strategic planning of, 58-79; and Khrushchev's road to socialism, 60; commits to armed struggle, 60; heartened by the Laos Accords, 63; misses chance at a negotiated settlement, 65; ignores Laos Accords, 65; and the Buddhist crisis and Diem coup, 6 6 - 6 7 ; December 1963 plenum of, 6 8 - 6 9 ; begins infiltrating regular troops south, 68, 70; hopes to forestall U.S. intervention in 1964, 7 0 - 7 1 , 8in.i9; March 1965 plenum of, 7 2 - 7 3 ; misreads U.S. intentions in 1965, 73; matches U.S. escalation in !965, 77; seeks the aid of China and the USSR, 7 7 - 7 8 ; December 1965 plenum of, 78; seeks to dominate Southeast Asia, 128; signs military agreement with

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China, 208; quarrels with USSR, 209-211; traditional distrust of China, 214-215; disappointed at Soviet response to Tonkin Gulf incidents, 215; rejects Soviet military advice, 216; rapprochement with the USSR, 216-217; : 964 plans of, 218 deterrence theory, 9 1 - 9 8 Diem coup: effects of, 139-140, 190—191; in the McNamaraTaylor report, 188 — 189; responsibility for, 190-192. See also Ngo Dinh Diem D i e n B i e n P h u , 15-16 Dirksen, Everett, 4 3 - 4 4 domino theory: origins of, 13; and Rusk, 14; and McNamara, 19-20; and the Kennedy administration, 26; critique of, 9 0 - 9 1 ; in NSAM 288:194 Dulles, John Foster, 15 — 16 Eisenhower, 14-17, 25; warns Kennedy on Laos, 27; develops counterinsurgency program, 62; and the Munich analogy, 89 Ellsberg, Daniel, 86-87; and the "stalemate machine," 97; avers JFK would have withdrawn, 184 escalation dominance, 9 1 - 9 2 , 93; U.S. fails to achieve, 95 First Cavalry Division, 76 "flexible response" doctrine, 30 "fork in the road" memorandum, 197-198 Forrestal, Michael, 127-129; avers JFK was talking about withdrawal, 184 Four Points of Pham Van Dong, 74-75 Fulbright, William, 43 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 162 Gardner, Lloyd, 14, 15 Gelb, Leslie, 86-87, 153^50, 187

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general offensive and uprising, 7^,75 Goldschmidt, Arthur "Tex," 4 1 - 4 3 Goldwater, Barry, 212 Goodpaster, Andrew, n o Goodwin, Richard, 3 8 Greene, Daniel, 16 Group 559, 61 Guam conference, 53 Gulf of Tonkin incidents, 69—70; and the USSR, 211-213 Halberstam, David, 85, 113 Halperin, Morton, 90 Harkins, Paul, 140 Harriman, Averell, 133 helicopters, impact of, 65, i n Herring, George, 22 Higgins, Marguerite, 192 Hilsman, Roger, 127, 130, 149^36; seeks to pressure Diem, 132 — 133, i5on.42; on the 1,000-man troop withdrawal, 138-139 H o Chi Minh: as viewed by the Kennedy administration, 30; advocates patient approach, 59; and the USSR and China, 8in. 17 H o Chi Minh Trail, 65 Honolulu conference ofJuly 1962, I52n.49, 182 Honolulu conference of November 1963, 140-144, i54n.65, 172 Hughes, H. Stuart: on counterfactuals, 180 interagency working group, 194 intrawar deterrence, 91 Job Corps, 55n.i9 Johnson, Harold, 107; considers resigning, 112, n 6 n . 4 i Johnson, Lady Bird, 45 Johnson, Lyndon B.: Johns H o p kins speech, 37, 53, 74; and the Munich analogy, 37; continues JFK policies, 38, 119; as a populist, 40, 4 5 - 4 7 , 51-52, 102;

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and intellectuals, 40; and the Third World, 40—41; on the development of rivers, 42; relationship with FDR, 45; and Brown and Root, 46, 4 8 - 4 9 ; finances of, 49, 56m36; and the Sputnik challenge, 50—52; James Rowe advises, 51; considers escalation in 1965, 71, 107-108; begins Rolling Thunder and commits first combat troops, 72-73; approves escalation of July 1965, 76; ambivalent toward the military, 102-103; rejects advice to "bomb, bomb, bomb," 106, 194-195; puts Vietnam aside in 1963, 120; visits Ngo Dinh Diem, 122-124; opposes Diem coup, 131; approves NSAM 273: 144; early views on Vietnam, 147ml.2,3; reverses JFK policy, 15 8 — 174; determined to win in Vietnam, 202-203n. 56; warns Moscow of U.S. determination, 212 Joint Chiefs of Staff: recommend escalation in 1961, 92, 100-113; and the Kennedy administration, 100-102; LBJ pacifies, 104-105; Time magazine characterizes, 105; disagree on the bombing, 106— 107; disagree on strategy, 109; predict long, costly war, n o Kattenburg, Paul, 90 Kaysen, Carl, 125 Kearns, Doris, 52 Kennedy, John F.: Vietnam policy outlined, 1 7 - 2 1 , 34; Cold War rhetoric of, 18; and wars of national liberation, 18-19; and the Cuban missile crisis, 20—21; American University speech of, 21; assumptions on Vietnam, 24— 35; criticizes French policy, 25; and the domino theory, 26, 131 — 132, i5on.39, 181; inaugural

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address of, 27; and unconventional warfare, 30; and Laos, 31, 62-64, 128-130; and the strategic hamlet program, 65; and Maxwell Taylor, 100—101; vows to stand in Southeast Asia, 1 2 4 125, 1 2 7 - 1 2 8 , 1 8 1 - 1 8 2 , 200;

and NSAM 273: 143, I55n.68; secretly intends withdrawal, 158-174; and NSAM i n : 1 6 0 161; rejects neutralist solution, 162; reiterates U.S. policy in RVN, 178; tells O'Donnell he will withdraw, 182—183; world view of, 188; and the Diem coup, 190-192; policy summarized by W. Bundy, 198 Kennedy, Robert: on the domino theory, 132, 183-184; denies JFK would have withdrawn, 183 — 184; opposes Diem coup, 189 Kennedy administration: characterized, 25; view of Third World, 26; views on Ngo Dinh Diem, 29-30, 32 — 33, 130-131; views on Ho Chi Minh, 30; temporizing character of, 31-32; seeks to quantify progress in Vietnam, 3 3; and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1 0 0 102

Khrushchev, Nikita: and wars of national liberation, 18, 26; ridicules the idea of a neutral "third force," 26; warns the DRV, 210; and the Tonkin Gulf incidents, 211-212; criticizes Goldwater, 212

Korea, 109 Kosygin, Alexei: visits Hanoi, 75 Krulak, Victor, 66, 146 Krulak-Mendenhall report, 66 Laos, 128-130; and Eisenhower, 27; distracts Kennedy, 31, 62—64 Laos Accords: ignored by Hanoi, 65 Le Duan: advocates armed struggle, 59-60; strategy for unifying Viet-

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nam, 59—79; elected first secretary, 61, 8on.4; hopes to avoid provoking the U.S., 63; criticizes Khrushchev and praises Mao tseTung, 68—69; rules out negotiations, 75; seeks the aid of China and the USSR, 7 7 - 7 8 ; rejects Chinese advice, 78; vows to meet any U.S. challenge, 79; biography of, 8on.3; visits Moscow, 209; pro-Soviet views of, 215 LeMay, Curtis, 101, 102 Lemnitzer, Lyman, 101 Lilienthal, David, 44, 53 "limited war," 71, 8in.2i Lippman, Walter, 43, 130 Lodge, Henry Cabot: meets with LBJ, 119-121; at the Honolulu conference of November 1963, 140 Logevall, Fredrik, 184 Lower Colorado River Authority, 42, 46 MACV: misleads JFK, 162-164 Manning, Robert, 121 Mansfield, Michael: refutes O ' D o n nell account, 183 massive retaliation, 15 McCone, John: guarded analysis by, 120—121; opposes Diem coup, 133; remands 1962 NIE, 163 McConnell, John, 105 McNamara, Robert S.: sees Vietnam as a test case, 19; and the domino theory, 19—20; recommends partial mobilization, 108; in the 1963 meeting with Lodge, 120; opposes Diem coup, 133; at the Honolulu conference of November 1963, urges stronger action, 141; December 1963 report of, 146; and the 1,000-man troop withdrawal, 153^49; on NSAM 273: I56n.7i; dissembles on 1,000-man troop withdrawal, 164-167; asserts JFK would have

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withdrawn, 166; justifies withdrawal, 171; tells LBJ Vietnam policy is failing, 197—198; begins to doubt sure victory, 199. See also McNamara-Taylor report McNamara-Taylor report, 134-135, 165; and JFK, 170-171, 188-189 Mekong River project, 3 8—44 Mendenhall, Joseph, 66 Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. See MACV Miller, Robert, 146 missile gap, 17, 18 mobilization: recommended by McNamara, 108 models. See political science models Morse, Wayne, 184 Moyers, William, 53 Munich analogy, 28; and LBJ, 37; detailed discussion of, 88-90; and Eisenhower, 89 Nathan, James, 21 National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam: sends delegation to Moscow, 21; founded, 62 National Security Action M e m o randa. See NSAM 5 2 - N S A M 288 National Youth Administration, 45; Job Corps modeled after, 55m 19 New Deal: legacy of, 51 — 52 Newman, John, 15 5m 68, 180 Ngo Dinh Diem: and the Kennedy administration, 29—30, 3 2 - 3 3 ; negotiates with Hanoi, 67; LBJ visits, 122-124; rejects idea of U S . troops in 1961, 123; U.S. debate over, 132-139, 177. See also Diem coup Nguyen Cao Ky: takes control, 76 Nguyen Chi Thanh, 71; tactics of, 77 Nixon, Richard, 191 NLF. See National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam Nolting, Frederick, 187-188 North Vietnam. See Democratic Republic of Vietnam

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NSAM 52: 121-122 NSAM i n : 126, 160-161 NSAM 263: 137-138,169-174, 177-200; Taylor suggests need for, 138; one purpose of, 187 NSAM 273: first draft of, 141-144, 155 — 1561111.68,71; crucial alteration of, 172-173, 177-200; provisions of, 192—193 NSAM 288: 194 O'Donnell, Kenneth: asserts JFK would have withdrawn, 182—183 OPlan 34A: and coercive diplomacy, 93; origins of, 145-146, 15611.71, 15701.76,77, 193 Osgood, Robert, 90, 9 2 - 9 3 Palmer, Bruce, 107 Pathet Lao, 65 Patterson, Thomas, 20 PAVN. See People's Army of Vietnam People's Army of Vietnam: begins infiltrating to the south, 68, 70 Pham Van Dong, 73, 215 Pleiku incident, 95 political science models, 86—88 Porter, Gareth, 70 Republican Party: and "rollback" policy, 15-16 Republic of Vietnam: insurgency begins in, 61; conditions in, in 1962-1963, 66, 187; situation deteriorates in 1964—1965, 71; following the Diem coup, 144— H5 Rolling Thunder, 72 Rostow, Walt, 89-90, 94 Rowe, James, 51 Rusk, Dean: and the domino theory, 14; on the consequences of losing in Vietnam, 20; and U.S. credibility, 20, 2 7 - 2 8 ; and the Munich analogy, 90; opposes Diem coup, 133; opposes use of U.S. troops,

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133; fears necessity of escalation, 167; cited on JFK, 181; opposes both withdrawal and escalation, 203n.6o Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur, 20 Scott, Peter Dale, 179 Seaborn, J. Blair, 69 Shapley, Deborah, 165, 184 Shcherbakov, Ilia S., 215-217 Sheehan, Neil, 85 signals: in coercive diplomacy, 94-95 Smith, R. B., 187 Sorensen, Theodore, 17; on JFK's firmness in Vietnam, 125-126, 140

South, U.S.: a model for LBJ's policy in Southeast Asia, 4 2 - 4 3 ; political coalition with the West, 47-48 South Vietnam. See Republic of Vietnam "special war," 71, 8in.2i Sputnik, 17, 5 0 - 5 2 Stone, Oliver, 179 strategic hamlet program, 33, 65 Sullivan, William, 135, 165 Summers, Harry, 174 Taylor, Maxwell: recommends escalation, 93; and Kennedy, 100— 101; suspected by Joint Chiefs, 102; characterized, 103; opposes use of U S . ground troops, 133; and NSAM 263: 138; report of December 1963, 145; and the 1,000-man troop withdrawal, i53n.5o; on the effects of the Diem coup, 190; recommends bombing in 1963, 194; favors bombing reprisals in 1964, but LBJ is reluctant, 195 Tennessee Valley Authority: model for the Mekong River project, 38,42 Tet offensive, 95

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"third force," 26 Thompson, Llewellyn, 19 Thompson, Robert G. K., 152^49 Truman, Harry S., 13-14, 25 Truong Chinh, 60 U Nyun, 4 1 - 4 2 USSR, 207-218; alarmed by situation in Southeast Asia, 210-211; and the Tonkin Gulf incidents, 211-213; suspects DRV has hidden agenda but decides to persevere, 213-214; Khrushchev ousted, 216; rapprochement with DRV, 217-218 Valenti, Jack, 38 Vance, Cyrus, 20 VanDeMark, Brian, 21

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Vann, John Paul, 85 Vo Nguyen Giap, 215 wars of national liberation, 18 — 19, 209-210

Webb, James, 57n.46 Webb, Walter Prescott, 4 7 - 4 8 , 50; and the space program, 52 Weisberger, Bernard, 89 Westmoreland, William: requests forty-four battalions, 107—108; on the Diem coup, 191 Wheeler, Earle: characterized, 103; leadership of, 105 — 106 white paper of February 1965, 78-79 Wirtz, Alvin, 48 withdrawal from SVN: detailed early planning for, 152-153n.49

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