McNaughton was not so sure. "The trouble with you, Forrestal," he once said, "is that you always think we can turn this thing off, and that we can get off of it whenever we want. But I wonder. I think if it was easy to get off of it, we would already have gotten off. I think it gets harder every day, each day we lose a little control, each decision that we make wrong, or don't make at all, makes the next decision a little harder because if we haven't stopped it today, then the reasons for not stopping it will still exist tomorrow, and we'll be in even deeper." Even as he spoke, Forrestal felt chilled, for McNaughton was not just challenging what was going on in Vietnam, there were lots of people in Washington who were doing that, what he was challenging was even more basic: the illusion of control, the illusion of options, the belief that whenever Washington really wanted to, it could pull itself together and handle Vietnam. He was challenging, then, not just the shabbiness and messiness of Vietnam, but the most sacred illusion of all, the capacity of Washington to control and manage foreign events. (368) (spring 1964)
Many on Daily Kos have read or are familiar with The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam's explanation of why the U.S. got involved in Vietnam and, to a lesser degree, why we lost. He tells the story in terms of the personalities of the leaders in Washington who made the critical decisions, and the book reads like a parable on the dangers of arrogance and self-deception. When reading it I took some excerpts which I thought made the most significant points (or, at times, things which I idiosyncratically found interesting), and many of these are very relevant to Iraq and the Middle East today.
The excerpts are quite long, but because they come from a 600 page book, I feel it isn't copyright violation.
--
Like almost all Americans who arrived in Vietnam, Harkins was ignorant of the past, and ignorant of the special kind of war he was fighting. To him, like so many Americans, the war had begun the moment he arrived; the past had never happened and need not be taken seriously. If the French had lost a war, they had fought it poorly; besides, they had made the mistake of being in a colonial war, fighting in order to stay, while we were fighting in order to go home. This was clear in our minds and it should be clear to the Vietnamese.
...
That the French statistics had also been very good right up until 1954, when they gave up, made no impression. The French had lost the war because of a lack of will (the French were known for that) and a lack of fire power; Americans lacked neither will nor fire power.
At an early intergovernmental meeting on the importance of psychological warfare, one of Harkins' key staffmen, Brigadier General Gerald Kelleher, quickly dismissed that theory. His job, he said, was to kill Vietcong. But the French, responded a political officer named Douglas Pike, had killed a lot of Vietcong and they had not won. "Didn't kill enough Vietcong," answered Kelleher. (185)
--
The French command, frustrated by the hit-and-run engagements with an adversary who was all-too-often invisible, had in early 1954 devised a trap which it intended to spring on an unsuspecting enemy. Since the Vietnamese, as General Marcel Le Carpentier had said, did not have colonels and generals and would not understand a sophisticated war, it would be easy to fool them. The idea was to use a French garrison as bait at an outpost in the highlands, have the Vietminh seize on it for a set-piece battle and mass their forces around it. Then when the Vietminh forces were massed, the French would strike, crush the enemy who had so long eluded them, and gain a major political and psychological victory, just as the peace talks were starting in Geneva. The name of the post where the trap was to be sprung was Dienbienphu.
With the kind of arrogance that Western generals could still retain after eight years of fighting a great infantry like the Vietminh, the French built their positions in the valley and left the high ground to the Vietminh, a move which violated the first cardinal rule of warfare: always take the high ground. An American officer who visited the site just before hte battle noticed this and asked what would happen if the Vietminh had artillery. Ah, he was assured by a French officer, they had no artillery, and even if they did, they would not know how to use it. But they did have artillery and they did know how to use it. On the first night of the battle the French artillery commander, shouting "It is all my fault, it is all my fault," committed suicide by throwing himself on a grenade. Westerners always learned the hard way in Indochina; respect for the enemy always came when it was too late. (137)
--
(Years later, when McNamara had turned against the war, he talked with John Vann, the lieutenant colonel who had left the Army in protest of the Harkins policies, and the one who had shown statistically how bad the war was going. McNamara asked Vann why he had been misinformed, and Vann bluntly told him it was his own fault. He should have insisted on his own itinerary. He should have travelled without accompanying brass, and he should have taken some time to find out who the better-informed people were and learned how to talk to them.) (249)
--
Though Bundy was a good teacher, he was not in the classic sense a great expert in foreign affairs, since he had not come up through the discipline. He was not particularly at ease with Ph.D. candidates, those men who might be more specialized in their knowledge than he. Yet, he was such a star of the government department that it was quickly decided that tenure must be awarded. The idea was advanced to President James Bryant Conant, who had been a distinguished member of the chemistry department before he took over the university. Conant was a little uneasy about endosring the recommendations; Bundy, it seemed, had never taken any graduate or undergraduate courses in government. Was that correct?
"That's right," the representative of the government department said.
"Are you sure that's right" asked the puzzled Conant.
"I'm sure," the professor answered.
"Well," Conant sighed, "all I can say is that it couldn't have happened in Chemistry." (57)
--
[John Carter Vincent was Chief of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs, and protector of smart China experts, through September 1947]
"I know John Carter Vincent and there is no substance to this," Acheson said at the time. (A few years later, when McCarthy brought loyalty charges against Vincent, by then in Switzerland, his defense counsel would have a good deal of difficulty getting Vincent to prepare his case. "He took the attitude that if things had reached this point, if even he could be considered a Communist, the hell with it; the world was going to the dogs and there was nothing to be done about it. So all he wanted to do was go off and play golf," recalled his counsel, Bernard Fensterwald, Jr.) (113)
---
He could handle the military. That, of course, was the basis of his legend. Washington was filled was stories of McNamara browbeating the military, forcing them to reconsider, taking their pet projects away from them. Later, as his reputation dimmed and the defense budget grew (it was not just Vietnam, it was other projects as well), some of those who had been part of that Administration suspected that he had in no real way handled the military, but rather, that he had brought them kicking and screaming and protesting to the zenith of their power. At the very least, it turned out that he had controlled the military only as long as we were not in a real war and that the best way for civilians to harness generals was to stay out of wars. That wisdom would come later. (214)
--
On how many fronts could he fight? If he had tried to turn the country around on chemical and biological warfare, for instance, Senator Russell surely would have opened hearings. Did you want a fight on everything? By holding them off on the B-70, a bomber which no one needed, he almost caused a constitutional crisis, with the Congress passing the money that the executive branch did not want to spend. He was constantly fighting with the Chiefs, but also deciding how much each point was worth. On the test-ban treaty McNamara virtually locked them into a room for a week to fight it out with them. He made them promise that once he had broken an argument they could not go back to it, because he felt that arguing with the Chiefs was a lot like arguing with your mother-in-law; you win a point and go on to the next point only to find that they are back at the first. So, for a week, hour after hour, he went through every objection they had, breaking them down point by point, until finally he won. He read his victory as a conversion. His aides felt differently, however, and as one said later, it was virtually a case of going along with him or resigning. But how many issues were worth this much effort, particularly since many of these fights were not his by tradition? It should have been the Secretary of State, not the Secretary of Defense, who was fighting for a nuclear-test ban treaty. (245)
--
(one of the problems with him [McNamara] on the war, a friend would later note, was that though he thought the military knew nothing about hardware and about weapons systems, he did think they knew something about running wars). (247)
--
If at that time the Republican party with its triple tongue of Rockefeller-Nixon-Goldwater was not furnishing the country with intelligent, informed, thoughtful analysis of the war, and it was not, then no matter, because the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, reluctantly or no, had become the center of opposition. The opposition to the war, kindled there, would help turn the country and particularly the crucial liberal-egghead wing of the Democratic party against the war, and would lead, to a very considerable degree, to Lyndon Johnson's withdrawal from the 1968 race. And if the Senate and Fulbright had been noted for their lack of assertiveness in the serious quesitoning of American foreign policy, then that era ended with the Tonkin Resolution. A new age would dawn, in which all the major assumptions of American foreign policy would be challenged, and Bill Fulbright, the least likely adversary for Johnson, feeling personally betrayed, would become the leader of a hostile and bitter opposition which no longer believed anything emanating from the WHite House. (420)
--
Oh, to run against Barry Goldwater, he of the quick tongue and the quick atomic trigger. It was not that he actually advocated nuclear war, it was just that he talked about nuclear war so much that seemed to be advocating it (reporters covering Goldwater noted that in one thirty-minute speech alone, Goldwater mentioned nuclear weapons, war, and devastation twenty-six times). (424)
--
At one of the intermissions he began a running dialogue with Mac Bundy which reflected his own frustration and his belief (and later the military's belief) that bombing should be used all-out against the North, that if we bombed we should bomb to level them, and Bundy's view (the civilians' belief, which would surface in 1964 and again in 1967) that there was a limited amount that bombing could do. We were, LeMay said, swatting at the flies, when we should really be going after the source, the manure piles. Bundy deflected that one, and LeMay continued: they had targets, oil depots, ports, dikes, and if they existed and we were their enemy and we were enemy enough to fight them and to die, we should tear it all down. "We should bomb them into the Stone Age."
"Maybe," answered Bundy, "they're already there."
But LeMay was still not satisfied, and he seemed restless and irritated. "I don't understand it," he said. "Here we are at the height of our power. The most powerful nation in the world. And yet we're afraid to use that power, we lack the will. In the last thirty years we've lost Estonia. Latvia. Lithuania. Poland. Czechoslovakia. Hungary. Bulgaria. China . . ."
"Some people," said Bundy, "don't think we ever had them."
LeMay, with a wave of the cigar, a quick flick of the ash: "Some people think we did." (462)
--
Ball was a devotee of traditional nineteenth-century power politics; he felt that power is real, something that is almost tangible and has to be dealt with: thus, stay out of Vietnam; do not dissipate power in a situation where it is not applicable; nothing destroys power more than the misuse of it. (493)
--
(In a blunter sequel to this, in June 1966, the administration sent Arthur Goldberg, once again the dissenter within the government, to France, giving Goldberg strict instructions to tell De Gaulle the American position, but he was under no circumstances to ask De Gaulle's opinion, instructions which fazed neither Goldberg nor, of course, De Gaulle. So Goldberg gave once more the complicated and fragile rationale for American policy, and when he was through, De Gaulle smiled and said, "Are you finished?" "Yes," answered Goldberg. "No one has aksed me my opinion, but there are some things I would like to say. First of all, you must pull out," the French leader said. "But won't it go Gommunist?" Goldberg asked, playing his part. "Yes, it will go Communist," answered De Gaulle. "But isn't that against us?" said Goldberg. "Yes," answered De Gaulle. "But it will be a messy kind of Communism." A hint of racism, Goldberg thought. "Not a Russian or even a Chinese kind of Communism. An Asian kind. It will be more of a problem for them than for us." (506)
--
They had turned to the bombing out of their own desperation, because what they were doing no longer worked and because bombing was the easiest thing. It was the kind of power which America wielded most easily, the greatest technological superpower poised against this preposterously small and weak country. ("Raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country," Lyndon Johnson called it during the great debates, complaining to John McCone of the CIA about the lack of information coming out of Hanoi. Wasn't there someone working in the interior of their government who would slip out with a stolen paper saying what they were going to do? "I thought you guys had people everywhere, that you knew everything, and now you don't even know anything about a raggedy-ass little fourth rate country. All you have to do is get some Chinese coolies from a San Francisco laundry shop and drop them over there and use them. Get them to drop their answers in a bottle and put the bottle in the Pacific..." (512)
--
"We're just not as pessimistic as you are," [Mac] Bundy told him. But what, Hughes asked, if the North Vietnamese retaliate by matching the American air escalation with their own ground escalation? Hughes would long remember the answer and the cool smile: "We just don't think that's going to happen." Just suppose it happens, Hughes persisted, just make an assumption of the worst thing that could happen. "We can't assume what we don't believe," Bundy answered, chilling Hughes so much that five years later he could recall every word of the conversation. (528)
--
(Indeed, a few months earlier Mac Bundy had shown a member of his staff some of the planning for the escalation, particularly the bombing, and the aide has been impressed by how thorough it all was, lots of details. Bundy asked the aide what he thought, and he answered that though he didn't know anything about the military calculations, "the thing that bothers me is that no matter what we do to them, they live there and we don't, and they know that someday we'll have to go away and thus they know they can outlast us." Bundy considered the answer for a moment. "That's a good point," he said. (578)
--
Add to it the fact that one side was a nation with the nationalist element of unity, and the Communist element of control, that the bombing helped unite its people, that its leadership was able and popular, that its people were lean and tough and believed in their mission, which was to unify the country and drive the foreigners out, that there were no free newspapers, no television sets, no congressional dissent, and that this war was not only the top priority, it was the only priority they had. (619)
--
In despair and frustration over the war, in 1967 he ordered a massive study of all the papers on Vietnam, going back to the 1940s, a study which became known as the Pentagon Papers. When it was handed in he read parts of it. "You know," he told a friend, "they could hang people for what's in there." (633)
--
But generally Rusk bore the brunt of it well. He did not complain. He was a proud man and at times it seemed as if he took sustenance from the criticism. In the great clubs of New York and Washington his old friends, his sponsors, men like Lovett and McCloy, were worried about Dean being the target of all the nation's anger. One day McCloy stopped Lovett and said that he wished Dean would fight back, answer his critics or yell for help-they would like to get in the fight and help him. But Lovett, who knew Rusk well, said that Dean would never do that, he was too proud. Yet proud or not, at the end the taste, which should have been so good--eight years at the job that he and every other serious young man coveted--was sour, and he was exhausted financially, physically, and spiritually. At the small farewell party for him given by some State Department reporters, the atmosphere was suitably pleasant; these men who had covered Rusk for that long recognized in him qualities of grace, decency, and modesty which were not always obvious from a distance. And Rusk, who had always held together so well, finally broke. He went over to British correspondent Louis Heren and asked why the British had not sent any troops to Vietnam. Rusk knew of course well enough, as they had all known from the start, this was a war that no one else had wanted, that except for a genuine effort by the Australians and a semimercenary effort by the Koreans, it was virtually a unilateral war. As gently as possible, Heren began to stumble through the usual rationalizations when Rusk, whose own allegiance, whose own lessons of mutal security were derived from England, suddenly cut him off. "All we needed was one regiment. The Black Watch would have done. Just one regiment, but you wouldn't. Well, don't expect us to save you again. They can invade Sussex and we wouldn't do a damn thing about it." (635)
--
He had a great capacity not to see what he did not choose to see; in Washington at a dinner given for Everett Martin, a distinguished Newsweek reported expelled from Vietnam for the pessimism of his reporting in late 1967, Rostow managed to pass the entire evening without ever acknowledging that Martin had been in Vietnam. Within the bureaucracy the word went out among those who briefed him that if they wanted to get his attention they had to bait their news with sugar, get the positive information in first, and then before he could turn off, quickly slip in the darker evidence. (Once in 1967 after a somewhat pessimistic briefing by John Vann, Rostow, slightly shaken, said "But you do admit that it'll all be over in six months." "Oh," said Vann somewhat airily, "I think we can hold out longer than that.") (637)
--
But a dovish Secretary of Defense in control of a military empire was a political problem for Johnson. It meant that his own house was divided, almost openly so after the Stennis hearings. McNamara annoyed the Chiefs, caused problems on the Hill, and was a constant reminder to Johnson himself that perhaps it did not work, that it was all lies. By mid-1967 Johnson had turned on McNamara (it was not enough that McNamara's earlier 1965 projections had been wrong; what was worse was that he was now trying to act on a new set of calculations); the President still described his Defense Secretary as brilliant, but there was a new sarcastic touch to it. In mid-1967, when McNamara proposed getting negotiations started, Johnson took the proposals, handed them to an aide, and said, "You've never seen such a lot of shit." Clearly, McNamara was no longer an asset, he was a man caught between conflicting loyalties, and Johnson was aware of his very close relationship with Robert Kennedy. Nineteen sixty-eight being a political year, Lyndon Johnson was not about to enter a campaign with a vital member of his official family publicly dissenting on the most important issue. Without checking with McNamara, Johnson announced in November 1967 that his Secretary of Defense was going to the World Bank. The move came as a surprise to the Secretary and he did not know whether or not he had been fired. The answer was that he had been. (645)
--
(Once asked by a reporter when his own doubts about Vietnam had begun, Warnke said, "At the beginning, in 1961. I could never understand why a smart politican like Jack Kennedy was always talking about being against insurgencies when we should obviously have tried to be for them.") (651)
--
(Daniel Ellsberg symoblized the conversion--or reconversion--of the Defense intellectuals, though of course there were others. But Ellsberg seemed to dramatize the great currents of an era. At Harvard he had seemed at first the normal humanist student; serving as president of the literary magazine, more humanist and aesthete than warrior. But he had gone from Harvard to the Marine Corps and had drifted, during the years of the fifties, into the world of defense studies and theories, believing that the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union was the key to the survival of all values. He had ended up in Washington in the Kennedy years, one of the bright stars in John McNaughton's constellation of young intellectuals, and had done some of the early planning on the war. In 1965 he went on assignment to Vietnam and gradually turned against the war, year by year both his doubts and his outspokenness had grown. In 1969 he publicly criticized President Nixon's policies on Vietnam, statements which expedited his departure from Rand, and which were picked up in the New York Times. An old friend named John Smail read in the Times of Ellsberg's statements and wrote asking: "Are you the Dan Ellsberg I used to know in college?" Ellsberg answered back, in what was an epitaph for many in that era, "I haven't been for a long time, but I am again.") (652)