Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam

by Fredrik Logevall

The current situation among non-Communist forces gives all the appearances of a civil war within a civil war.”38

there can be no doubt that active supporters of the U.S. intervention were a small minority in South Vietnam at the start of 1965, smaller than at any time previously,

He also sought to caution Hanoi officials against escalating the war and to inquire about their terms for a negotiated settlement, which suggests that he and co-leader Leonid Brezhnev were no closer to resolving the vexing Vietnam dilemma that they and Nikita Khrushchev before them had long confronted.

in order to deter a world conflagration they had to constrain the North Vietnamese, but their need to compete with Beijing for the affection of Asian nationalists compelled them nevertheless to pledge assistance to Hanoi.

Washington’s superpower rival, the rival Americans deemed responsible for starting and perpetuating the Cold War, sought to restrain America’s enemy in Vietnam and to provide a face-saving means for a U.S. withdrawal.

At two o'clock in the morning on 7 February, mere hours before the Bundy party was scheduled to return to the United States and shortly after the end of a cease-fire to mark the Tet holiday, a company of Vietcong guerrillas launched an attack on a loosely guarded U.S. helicopter base and barracks near Pleiku in the Central Highlands. Eight Americans were killed, 126 were wounded, and ten U.S. aircraft were destroyed.

Bundy called the White House on a secure telephone line and recommended the prompt initiation of air raids against the North.

Only one man in the room rose up in opposition: majority leader Mike Mansfield.

Had there been any improvement in the Saigon political climate? Fulbright asked. “There will never be a stable government there,” Ball replied.

any negotiated U.S. withdrawal today would mean surrender on the installment plan.”

This assessment of the indigenous possibilities for a negotiated settlement was, to say the least, disingenuous: a “neutral, non-Communist force” under “Buddhist leadership” had emerged, and that was the problem.

Bundy mustered up words of support for the man whom he and other U.S. officials only hours earlier had discussed ousting: “We [in the Bundy team] believe that General Khanh, with all his faults, is by long odds the outstanding military man currently in sight—and the most impressive personality generally. We do not share the conclusion of Ambassador Taylor that he must somehow be removed from the military and political scene.”

And what if none of these things happened and the policy failed? It would still be worth doing, Bundy the “good doctor” declared, because it would “damp down the charge that we did not do all that we could have done,”

Each of the claims about the benefits of bombing North Vietnam went against the bulk of U.S. intelligence analysis dating back several months, as a clearly incredulous Thomas L. Hughes, of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, reminded George Ball the next day after reading the report and the annex.

Hubert Humphrey, who as vice president held one of only four statutory seats on the NSC (the president and the secretaries of state and defense were the others) had been in Minnesota for several days and had not been asked to come back for the meeting.

At the conclusion of it Bundy cautioned that “at the very best” the Vietnam struggle would be long, and that this fact should be made clear to the American people. Johnson refused.

In the weeks following the Pleiku incident, while the administration continued to try to manufacture consensus on the war, among audiences both at home and abroad, and continued to hide the direction of its policy, the advocates of diplomacy launched their most intensive effort to head off a full-scale war. These weeks in the late winter of 1965 represent the climax to our story, for it was then that the Johnson administration moved to implement the policy decisions that had been taking shape since early 1964 but only now had been formally adopted; and it was then that the hopes for an early diplomatic solution all but ended. What more than a few observers perceived at the time and what is crystal clear today is that by the early spring of 1965 the last chance to prevent another full-scale war in Indochina had passed.

By the time a settlement was reached, at the beginning of 1973, under terms no better than Washington could have had in 1963 or 1964 or 1965, fifty-eight thousand Americans, and between 1.5 and three million Vietnamese, lay dead.

Johnson, sometimes depicted in the literature as a restraining influence on U.S. decision making in this period, as a kind of lone dove in an inner circle of hawks, was in fact the biggest hawk of them all—not because he relished the idea of waging this war but because he, more than anyone, dreaded what would happen if he did not.

the most important ones, the Senate Democratic leadership and the British government, time and again in these critical weeks showed themselves unwilling to state publicly what they believed privately, to challenge the administration’s interpretation of the stakes, of the risks, of the costs.

Sato pledged support for current levels of U.S. assistance to South Vietnam but voiced strong opposition to American bombing attacks on the DRV, on the grounds that such attacks would fail to achieve their objectives and would send the wrong message to the peoples of Asia.

Wilson determined that he had to fly to Washington at once, to try to dissuade Johnson from going forward with escalation and, equally important, to show nervous Labour back-benchers and the British public that he was doing something to head off a major war. At 1:00 A.M. London time on 11 February, Wilson called Lord Harlech in Washington, and the ambassador agreed to call the White House to request authorization for a Wilson visit. An hour later, Harlech called back. He had spoken to McGeorge Bundy, who told him the president was strongly against a visit on the grounds that it would smack too much of desperation.

Johnson was unmoved. “I won’t tell you how to run Malaysia and you don’t tell us how to run Vietnam,”

“Desirable as the policy of consensus is for dealing with the great domestic issues—such as civil rights, labor and capital, the welfare state—for pressing problems in the realm of great power politics there must be a decision and choice,” the columnist maintained.

The same day in Rome, Pope Paul VI called for a negotiated settlement to the war sponsored and guaranteed by the UN.14

The Chiefs were far from confident that this program would work, stating merely that, although the plan “almost certainly would not lead Hanoi to restrain the Viet Cong … if the United States persevered in the face of threats and international pressures, and as the degree of damage inflicted on North Vietnam increased, the chances of a reduction in Viet Cong activity would rise.”

The Ball-Thompson memorandum thus did not raise too many hackles among senior officials; it seemed to allow for an indefinite delay in any move to negotiations.

the most significant effort aimed at stopping and reversing the move to war came from none other than Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

With Hughes’s help, Humphrey produced a document that detailed his fears of escalation and his reasons for believing that extrication was possible in domestic political terms.

The result was a tour de force, a memorandum that must rank as one of the most incisive and prescient memos ever written on the prospect of an Americanized war in Vietnam.

The public, Humphrey noted, “simply can’t understand why we would run grave risks to support a country which is totally unable to put its house in order.”

That was unlikely, Eisenhower responded, and regardless, it should not deter the administration from acting. »He said he hoped the United States could avoid becoming overdeployed in Indochina but that ground troops should be sent if necessary, and he counseled Johnson to use any weapons available to turn the war effort around—even tactical nuclear weapons, he suggested, deserved serious consideration.

He said that all he meant was that we must use the tools of diplomacy. I said I fully agreed, as long as it was understood that one of the major tools of diplomacy was the Seventh Fleet.

In one, titled “Washington Still Rejects Any Vietnam Negotiations,” reporter Max Frankel examined the growing pressure for a diplomatic solution and the continued White House intransigence on the issue. “In Congress, in the diplomatic corps, in the mail reaching Washington, there is more and more talk in favor of ‘negotiations’ over Vietnam,” Frankel wrote. “But the Administration continued today to shun the word or any other suggestion that it might wish to bargain for peace.”

On 17 February Rusk had received a memorandum from Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy on the pros and cons of an early U.S. “talking initiative.” In it Bundy noted that Wilson was restive and that U Thant, as well as the Indian and Canadian governments, was agitating for negotiations. The Soviet Union, Bundy continued, likewise appeared to favor an immediate conference. The pressure was mounting on the administration to reciprocate in some way, and a U.S. initiative for talks might be necessary. Bundy reasoned that the talks would be preliminary and would last for a considerable period of time, during which military action would be continued to improve the U.S./GVN bargaining position. “On balance,” he concluded, “I would strongly favor an early initiative.”41 Adlai Stevenson favored one as well.

Robert McNamara and George Ball appear to have thought along similar lines.

Was McNamara looking for a way to gain the United States an early exit from Vietnam? Probably not, but he was more sympathetic to pursuing the diplomatic route than the other members of Johnson’s inner circle—a

McGeorge Bundy continued in the weeks after his Vietnam trip to advocate the same pro-escalation, antinegotiation posture he had adhered to before

The sycophantic side of Bundy came to the fore in these weeks,

Hubert Humphrey’s memo of 17 February only infuriated LBJ and caused him to stop listening to the vice president’s counsel on Vietnam. When Humphrey, not fully appreciating Johnson’s ire, two weeks later gave him another cautionary memorandum, LBJ responded: “We don’t need all these memos.” From that point on, the vice president of the United States, the nation’s second-ranking public official, was banished from all Vietnam policy discussions.

Only after many months and after changing his tune and demonstrating utter devotion to the war effort was Humphrey allowed back into the picture.

after another briefing for lawmakers on 18 February, Johnson cornered Frank Church and for an hour berated him for advocating a negotiated American withdrawal from Vietnam.

Johnson’s complete disavowal of negotiations distinguished him not only from some within his administration but also from a majority of those outside it. One survey of congressional attitudes in mid February revealed that the basics of the Church-McGovern position on the war were publicly shared by at least twenty Senate Democrats, and privately by as many as twenty-five more—a total, that is, of well over half of the party’s senators.

Mansfield indeed publicly praised Johnson’s handling of the war, even as he privately continued to urge the president to pursue a face-saving negotiated withdrawal.

In mid March on NBC's Meet the Press William Fulbright defended the air strikes and said a public debate in Congress would be dangerous.

A few days later a Louis Harris survey reported that 83 percent of Americans supported the bombings but also that 75 percent favored asking for negotiations to end the war.

When James Reston of the New York Times took a two-thousand- mile trip through some of the southern and middle Atlantic states at the beginning of March to survey Americans, he found a striking degree of nonengagement with the issues of the war, and willingness to leave the weighty decisions to the president.

Maxwell Taylor continued to fear that Khanh intended to negotiate a settlement with the NLF, and the ambassador began courting ambitious ARVN officers in an attempt to promote a coup. Sensing danger, Khanh moved to install a civilian ally, Phan Huy Quat, as prime minister. Though the effort succeeded, Khanh himself was ousted a few days later by a group headed by Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky. Ky, who a few months later would distinguish himself by expressing admiration for Adolf Hitler, would now be the de facto major power in Saigon.

On the nineteenth, U.S. planes attacked enemy-held areas in Bindinh province in the South, the first air attack on Vietcong forces in which no South Vietnamese airmen were involved.63 The assault, carried out by waves of F-100s and B-57S, would last a week and would be expanded to targets throughout the South. On the twenty-sixth, the White House, after minimal discussion and over Maxwell Taylor’s strong objections, agreed to William Westmoreland’s request for two battalions of marines to guard the airbase at Danang, thus introducing the first U.S. ground troops to the war. Neither Congress nor the South Vietnamese government was consulted about the decision.

On 2 March, six days before the marines would splash ashore, more than one hundred American planes hit targets inside North Vietnam. It was the first attack carried out not in retaliation, and it marked the start of Rolling Thunder.64