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May 30 - June 23, 2025
[I recommend] that we seize every opportunity to warn Washington that escalation may be the only alternative to inevitable neutralization.”
What is more, the evidence is powerful that they accepted this baleful interpretation, and that they were inclined to agree with David Nes’s assertion that “escalation may be the only alternative to inevitable neutralization.”
In February we find both the beginning of serious preliminary contingency planning for an escalation of the war into North Vietnam and, no less important, a near-obsessive concern on the part of senior American officials about de Gaulle and neutralization and about how the concept might win support among war-weary southern Vietnamese and the larger world community.
That this aversion to even considering any alternative to standing firm in Vietnam guided the thinking of all the principal elements in American decision making, including the chief executive himself, is beyond doubt.
Johnson hoped to postpone having to make that choice for as long as possible, ideally until after the November election. He therefore told many people of his preference for a third path between escalation and withdrawal.
Expanding the war always constituted a legitimate option for Lyndon Johnson and his chief Vietnam lieutenants in the winter and spring of 1964; disengagement never did.
Henry Cabot Lodge believed strongly in a program of expanded action against the North. In several key respects, his analysis of the war differed from that of his deputy, David Nes.
Whereas Nes saw the Vietcong as essentially an indigenous force, relying only marginally on outside support, Lodge emphasized the central role played by the government in Hanoi.
He realized now that the prediction he had made hours after Khanh took power had proven false—“the spurious notion of a neutralized Vietnam” had not, in fact, died. Indeed, the idea had continued to gain support among a South Vietnamese population weary of war and of government unresponsiveness.
The point is worth emphasizing: what concerned Henry Cabot Lodge in the late winter of 1964 was not so much those forces that might get the United States into a war but those that might keep it out of one.
(Just why the will should sap so easily Lodge evidently did not ask.)
It was a remarkable claim, this suggestion that de Gaulle was all but single-handedly destroying the will to win in South Vietnam, and it resonated with Lodge’s superiors in Washington. Indeed, the frequency with which Johnson and his top aides mentioned de Gaulle’s name in this period suggests just how much they worried about him and his influence.
the Canberra government showed a willingness to entertain the French proposals wholly missing in the Americans.
The presence of Rusk in Palm Springs may have had more than a little to do with the tenor of Johnson’s cable, because the secretary of state had been having his own apprehensions about the French policy and the apparent growth of neutralist sentiment in Vietnam. He voiced these concerns in the quadripartite
Vietnam thus was essentially a military problem for Rusk,
When journalists in the spring of 1964 began referring to Vietnam as “McNamara’s War,” Rusk did not mind at all.
Rusk saw no connection between the French failure to win in Southeast Asia and the efficacy and correctness of the American effort. He thought France a moribund and fading power that had been trying vainly to defend a colonial possession; the United States, in contrast, had no territorial or economic ambitions in the area and was merely doing its part in the global fight for freedom.
Fundamental questions were not on Dean Rusk’s mind in the early months of 1964. Staying the course was; upholding America’s commitment was.
In view of these oft- stated French claims, Bohlen found Lodge’s demand for a public clarification of French policy somewhat puzzling; true, de Gaulle had stated his prescription in rather vague, typically Gaullist terms, but about his fundamental views there could be no doubt.
The CIA reported on 28 February that war-weariness was endemic in the countryside, with growing numbers favoring neutralism, not because of any intrinsic attachment to the concept but because they perceived it as an end to the conflict.
Perhaps in order to encourage Paris, the Front released four French citizens they had held prisoner.
When Nguyen Khanh issued a public threat to break relations with France over de Gaulle’s sponsorship of neutralization, U.S. officials moved quickly to kill the idea, not because they disagreed with his assessment of the French leader’s plans but because they believed a break would do nothing but embolden Paris and the South Vietnamese neutralists to push still harder for such a solution. The roughly seventeen thousand French citizens still living in Vietnam would be infuriated by the move, and the chances for a French-supported neutralist coup would be that much greater.
The same Americans who had always believed that the war could only be won or lost in the South now began to argue that the Hanoi government’s role in the insurgency was crucial and that bombing, or the threat of bombing, could affect its willingness to support the NLF.
In early March the Policy Planning Council produced a lengthy—and prescient—study that concluded that bombing would not work because Hanoi’s determination was such that it would not be affected by even extensive physical destruction.
It was in any case moot to talk of North Vietnam’s reaction to any attack, Blackwell added, since the Vietcong could and would carry on very effectively even without northern assistance. Therefore, “the appalling risks which an American attack on North Vietnam would run would have been incurred to little purpose. I sincerely hope the American Government will think many times before committing themselves to such a disastrous policy.”
Lyndon Johnson had been annoyed by Douglas-Home’s refusal during the Washington talks to increase British aid to the GVN,30 but London’s clear opposition to bombing the North probably reinforced his determination to avoid any immediate expansion of the fighting if at all possible.
there could be no serious thought of removing him because away from Saigon he posed such a political threat to the president. In Johnson’s nightmare Lodge would run for the GOP nomination as the war effort disintegrated completely, whereupon Lodge would proclaim that Vietnam could have been saved if only the administration had followed his recommendations.
McNamara appears to have been beset by deep doubts even now, in early March 1964, as he boarded the plane for South Vietnam—deep doubts not merely about the outlook for the existing policy of providing aid and advisers to the GVN, but about the merits of going North.
(It speaks volumes about the mission’s aims that a draft of the report was completed well before the team even arrived in Saigon.)
The importance of NSAM 288 in laying the foundation for major escalation that followed a year later can scarcely be exaggerated,
“The decision to hold the line,” he wrote in the paper on 21 March, “lies at the end of a long reasoning process by which the administration has rejected all thought of a graceful withdrawal.”
“Your mission,” Johnson wrote, “is precisely for the purpose of knocking down the idea of neutralization wherever it rears its ugly head and that on this point I think that nothing is more important than to stop neutralist talk wherever we can and by whatever means we can.”
The veteran diplomat, no longer the proponent of early negotiations he had been early in the Kennedy years, urged Rusk to tell de Gaulle that his actions were looked on with great displeasure in Washington.
The United States was in a hopeless situation in Vietnam, Couve began, because it had mistaken a political conflict for a military one.
The secretary, as he was wont to do when the subject of a political settlement came up, pointed to the Laos agreements as evidence that neutralization would not work. Couve responded that it was the Vietnam conflict that had complicated the Laos situation. Besides, he added, Laos was no longer a Cold War crisis in the way that Vietnam was. On the most basic level, therefore, Laotian neutralization had been a success.
This unwillingness of America’s friends to see the importance of preserving an independent, noncommunist South Vietnam rankled Rusk more than perhaps any other issue during his entire tenure as secretary of state. (Angered by London’s policy, he once told a British journalist: “When the Russians invade Sussex, don’t expect us to come and help you.”)
Most people, envisioning a U.S. commitment that stayed more or less the same, supported the effort to preserve a noncommunist South Vietnam.
“A safe way must be found,” the paper declared, “to lessen rather than increase United States military involvement in a war that can never be won by military action alone.”
He assured readers that “no one close to the President can imagine his risking such military action as could turn Vietnam into another Korea.”
Others, however, saw the time for patience ending fast, saw the outlook as so grim that the United States would soon be faced with a critical choice: whether to drastically escalate the American presence in the war, thereby changing its very nature, or to move in the other direction, toward some form of negotiated withdrawal.2 Already in early March New York Times reporter David Halberstam wrote of this stark and looming choice, and in the succeeding weeks many others followed
Yet what is most striking is how few individuals and publications in the spring of 1964 were willing to go on record favoring escalation in Vietnam. Nixon’s calls for expanded action were echoed by virtually hone of his fellow Republican leaders, some of whom, indeed, wanted to pull out of Vietnam.
They were, to be sure, not a large group in absolute terms—the vast majority of Vietnam watchers in the press and on Capitol Hill still avoided casting the Vietnam options in dramatic either/or terms— but merely that they outnumbered the advocates of escalation is significant.
Growing numbers of senators were privately sympathetic to the thrust of what Morse and Gruening were saying—that Vietnam was not worth the loss of American lives, that the outlook in the war effort was exceedingly bleak, that avenues of disengagement should be actively explored. By late spring this group included Democrats Frank Church of Idaho, Allen Eilender of Louisiana, William Fulbright of Arkansas, Albert Gore of Tennessee, Mike Mansfield of Montana, John McClellan of Arkansas, George McGovern of South Dakota, Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, Richard Russell of Georgia, and (according to
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In December 1963 administration officials had worried that he might come out in opposition to the war.
In the academic community the respected political scientist Hans J. Morgenthau and the veteran Vietnam- watcher Bernard Fall, among others, became more vocal in opposing a military solution to what they perceived to be a civil conflict.
Then there was the New York Times, which had continued, despite administration pressure, to press in its editorials for a political solution to the conflict. U.S. officials were worried, as they had been the previous autumn—the amount of time they spent fretting about the Times’s pronouncements on the war throughout 1964 is graphic evidence of the respect they accorded the paper and its ability to shape elite opinion.17
To Lyndon Johnson, certainly, no one was as important.19 Little wonder, therefore, that Lippmann’s frequent pronouncements on the Vietnam issue during the first half of 1964 (he devoted more columns to it than to any other single issue) resulted in considerable consternation among American policymakers and to concerted efforts to persuade him to change his
It ended in 1966 and 1967 (by which time Johnson and Lippmann had broken completely) with the “Lippmann Project,” in which a team of aides combed through everything the columnist had written since the 1930s, looking for errors, inconsistencies, and failed predictions that could be used to publicly rebut his arguments.
“Well, what’s the French plan?” Bundy, in a belligerent mood, said as soon as Lippmann walked in the door. Startled, Lippmann replied that he did not answer questions posed in such a tone, and that Bundy was clearly not in the proper frame of mind to listen in any case.
The journalist left the Oval Office further convinced that Johnson was leaning toward a military solution.
