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May 13, 2018 - May 30, 2020
Vietnam was far from front-page news and Americans still believed that their government told them the truth.51
John Kennedy bequeathed to Lyndon Johnson an advisory system that limited real influence to his inner circle and treated others, particularly the Joint Chiefs of Staff, more like a source of potential opposition than of useful advice.
As vice president, Johnson had quickly recognized McNamara’s talents. He once said of McNamara, “that man with the Sta-Comb hair is the best of the [Kennedy] lot.”37
His misrepresentation of his war experience for political benefit revealed a real propensity for lying.
The president was staking a large portion of his political reputation on his ability to bring defense spending under control and was anxious to squeeze the most political value out of McNamara’s reforms in the Pentagon.54 He noted that McNamara had “already shown realized savings of one billion dollars” and promised to “save four billion more by fiscal year 1967.”55
McNamara’s desire to please the boss and the president’s need for reassurance generated an immediate rapport between the two men.
Later, when the president wanted to conceal from the American public and Congress the costs of deepening American involvement in Vietnam, McNamara’s can-do attitude and talent for manipulating numbers and people would prove indispensable.
Taylor’s and McNamara’s willingness to render overly optimistic reports tailored to the president’s domestic political concerns would make the JCS chairman and the defense secretary as valuable to LBJ as they had been to his predecessor.
Although McNamara favored gradually intensifying the military effort, the JCS questioned the value of limited, covert action.
Covert operations appealed to McNamara and the president because they appeared to be low-cost. U.S.-sponsored action against the North, however, represented a shift in the nature of the American commitment to the war. The formation of Krulak’s committee bypassed the JCS and excluded the Chiefs from the planning process. LeMay recalled that “we in the military felt we were not in the decision-making process at all. Taylor might have been but we didn’t agree with Taylor in most cases.”83
Johnson, ever fearful of disloyalty, favored the policies of those he trusted most. He would place exceptional trust in Robert McNamara. McNamara’s personal philosophy complemented the president’s preoccupation with loyalty; he believed that the government of a large and powerful state could not “operate effectively if those in charge of the departments of the government express disagreement with decisions of the established head of that government.”
Despite their dissimilar backgrounds, the two men shared many of the same characteristics. Both exhibited an obsessive devotion to their work and neither hesitated to misrepresent the truth for the sake of political expediency.
Above all President Johnson needed reassurance. He wanted advisers who would tell him what he wanted to hear, who would find solutions even if there were none to be found. Bearers of bad news or those who expressed views that ran counter to his priorities would hold little sway.
The Chiefs were frustrated because the president’s objective in Vietnam seemed ambiguous to them, even though the need to combat communism and “win” in Vietnam seemed very clear.
Despite Taylor’s efforts, Johnson remained under pressure from Lodge, the JCS, and the press to clarify his Vietnam policy.
LBJ thought the press were “anti-Johnson” and were making a “concerted move to discredit him.”39 He found a sympathetic listener in McNamara. McNamara told the president that the New York Times editorial page was “influenced by Zionists” who were trying to make him look like a “warmonger.”
Traditional military experience mattered little to McNamara—even less in an era of nuclear deterrence and superpower competition.47 Admiral McDonald recalled that the defense secretary once said, “Oh, let’s stop doing it John Paul Jones’ way. Can’t you have an original thought for a change?” One of McNamara’s assistants told the admiral, “I know you military fellows have always been taught to get in there with both feet and get it over with, but this is a different kind of war.”
In keeping with McNamara’s views, Taylor told the Chiefs on March 2 that the White House intended to use South Vietnam as a “laboratory, not only for this war, but for any insurgency.”
Whereas the traditional objective of imposing one’s will on the enemy still pertained to flexible response, graduated pressure aimed to affect the enemy’s calculation of interests. Due to ambiguities in both strategic concepts, and to the evolving nature of graduated pressure, however, distinctions between the two were difficult to discern.
He divided future actions into three categories: border control operations, retaliatory actions, and graduated overt military actions by South Vietnamese and U.S. forces against North Vietnam.
McNamara’s concept of the use of force appealed to Johnson’s desire to avoid deepening American involvement in Vietnam until after the election.
Uninterested in the Chiefs’ advice, but unwilling to risk their disaffection, Johnson preserved a facade of consultation, concealed the finality of his decisions on Vietnam policy, and promised that more forceful actions against the North might be taken in the future. Preoccupied with the election and committed to taking only the minimum action necessary to keep South Vietnam from going Communist, he depended on McNamara and Taylor to provide him with advice consistent with that overwhelming priority. The president got the military advice he wanted.
He who permits himself to tell a lie often finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, til at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.
LeMay and Greene, saying that the French had failed to secure Vietnam with five hundred thousand men, believed that limited American military activities would be useless and urged that the war be expanded into the North.
McNamara was moving to sever all channels of communication between the JCS and the president.
McNamara did use such techniques and thought that his quantitative indices indicated progress.
General Johnson likened conferring with McNamara to a “mating dance of the turkeys,” in which participants “went through certain set procedures” but “solved no problems.”
The first group, under John McNaughton, developed a military plan based on the premise that actions would be designed to “hurt” but not to “destroy.” He hoped that such limited action would convince the North Vietnamese to desist from their support of the Viet Cong. The second group, under William Sullivan, recommended a vast expansion of the American military and civilian advisory effort to put a “tall American at every point of the stress and strain.” The third group, under NSC staff member Chester Cooper, analyzed possible enemy reactions to U.S. moves. The fourth, led by Under Secretary of
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The Chiefs gave their responses to the papers not directly to the president, but through the secretary of defense.
They questioned the idea of using military actions to send “messages,” which would waste both time and resources.
In many respects the American response to the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” seems, in retrospect, a rehearsal for Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the war after he defeated Goldwater in the presidential election.
When asked about Wheeler’s relationship with the president, Lt. Gen. Andrew Goodpaster recalled that Johnson had a way of “befriending” people and then using that friendship to exact acquiescence on controversial issues.
