The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

No one who goes to war believes once he is there that it is worth the cost to fight it by half measures.

No other national endeavor requires as much unshakable resolve as war. If the nation and the government lack that resolve, it is criminal to expect men in the field to carry it alone.

His generals, I suggested, were like all Western generals before them, starting with the French: not so much in the wrong war, but on the wrong planet.

What the American army at the highest levels lost in Vietnam, my close friend and colleague Charlie Mohr told me years later, in the best summation of that time, was its intellectual integrity. I

The basic question behind the book was why men who were said to be the ablest to serve in government in this century had been the architects of what struck me as likely to be the worst tragedy since the Civil War.

from the Ford Motor Company, McNamara. “Well, Lyndon,” Mister Sam answered, “you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.” It is my favorite story in the book, for it underlines the weakness of the Kennedy team, the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal facility which the team exuded, and true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience. Wisdom for a few of them came after Vietnam.

An administration which flaunted its intellectual superiority and its superior academic credentials made the most critical of decisions with virtually no input from anyone who had any expertise on the recent history of that part of the world, and it in no way factored in the entire experience of the French Indochina War.

The fear generated in those days lasted a long time, and Vietnam was to be something of an instant replay after China.

The truth, in sharp contrast, was that all those critical decisions were primarily driven by considerations of domestic politics, and by political fears of the consequences of looking weak in a forthcoming domestic election.

Those years would show, in the American system, how when a question of the use of force arose in government, the advocates of force were always better organized, seemed more numerous and seemed to have both logic and fear on their side, and that in fending them off in his own government, a President would need all the help he possibly could get, not the least of which should be a powerful Secretary of State.

He had used it again and again, moving swiftly through small towns in the New Hampshire winter, closing each speech with the quote from Robert Frost: “. . . But I have promises to keep,/And miles to go before I sleep,/And miles to go before I sleep.” History summoned them, it summoned us: there was little time to lose.

So they carried with them an exciting sense of American elitism, a sense that the best men had been summoned forth from the country to harness this dream to a new American nationalism, bringing a new, strong, dynamic spirit to our historic role in world affairs, not necessarily to bring the American dream to reality here at home, but to bring it to reality elsewhere in the world. It was heady stuff, defining the American dream and giving it a new sense of purpose, taking American life, which had grown too materialistic and complacent, and giving it a new and grander mission.

He had made a hobby of studying the American Civil War and he had always been disturbed by the passions which it had unleashed in the country, the tensions and angers just below the surface, the thin fabric of the society which held it all together, so easy to rend.

for if those years had any central theme, if there was anything that bound the men, their followers and their subordinates together, it was the belief that sheer intelligence and rationality could answer and solve anything.

McGeorge Bundy, then, was the finest example of a special elite, a certain breed of men whose continuity is among themselves. They are linked to one another rather than to the country; in their minds they become responsible for the country but not responsive to it.

It was a story which would repeat itself in Vietnam: of Chiang, as would later be true for many years of Diem, it would be said that he was too weak to rule and too strong to be overthrown. His forces were corrupt, his generals held title on the basis of nepotism and loyalty, his best troops never fought; faced by mounting terrible pressures, he turned inward to listen to the gentle words of trusted family and sycophants. It was the sign of a dying order.

It was natural for a confused country to look for scapegoats and conspiracies; it was easier than admitting that there were things outside your control and that the world was an imperfect place in which to live.

The real strength of McCarthy was not his own force or brilliance, it was the acquiescence of those who should have known better.

It was axiomatic that those who knew most about Asian nationalism were not allowed to serve in their chosen area (they were contaminated by their past), and if they had not left the foreign service they had at least switched to another desk.

If you get along with the government and pass on its version of reality, then you are doing your job. It was not his job to ask questions; it was his job to get things done.

It was a fine example of the hardening American view of the time, looking at Vietnam through the prism of American experience, American needs and American capacities. American purpose with Americans doing the right things could affect the destinies of these people.

Westerners always learned the hard way in Indochina; respect for the enemy always came when it was too late.

Eisenhower himself was more than ambivalent. He had been elected as a peace candidate, for one thing, and he was particularly reluctant to get into a land war in Asia; he had been elected in large part because of national fatigue with just such an enterprise.

The Vietminh were supremely confident that they could gain ascendancy in the South either through elections or through subversion and guerrilla warfare. They were a modern force, and the one opposing them in the South was feudal. By now they were the heroes of their people: they had driven out the French and stirred the powerful feelings of nationalism in the country. During the war the Vietminh had done more than expel the French. They had taken Vietnamese society, which under colonial rule had been so fragmented and distrustful, where only loyalty to family counted, and given it a broader cause and meaning, until that which bound them together was more powerful than that which divided them. This, then, had made them a nation in the true sense. In the South the reverse was true. The men who formed the government in the South were men whom Westerners would deal with, men who were safe precisely because they had done nothing for their country during this war; they had either fought side by side with the French or profiteered on the war, or, as in the case of Ngo Dinh Diem, stayed outside the country, unable to choose between the two sides. In the South the old feudal order still existed, soon to be preserved by the conservative force of American aid; in the South that which divided the various political groups from one another was more powerful than that which bound them together.

From the very start, one Vietnam lived in the past and the other in the present.

The resulting Taylor-Rostow report would significantly deepen the American involvement in Vietnam from the low-level (and incompetent) advisory commitment of the Eisenhower years (geared up for a traditional border-crossing war that would never come) to the nearly 20,000 support and advisory troops there at the time President Kennedy was killed. It was one of the crucial turning points in the American involvement, and Kennedy, by his very choice of the two men who had the greatest vested interest in fighting some kind of limited antiguerrilla war, had loaded the dice.

Thus Taylor was recommending something that would also be a constant in Vietnam, a gesture, a move on our part that would open-end the war, leaving the other side to decide how wide to make the war. This attitude was based on an underestimation of the seriousness and intent of the other side, and on the assumption that if we showed our determination, Hanoi would not contest us.

the crucial difference between Korea and Vietnam: the very nature of the war. The former was a conventional war with a traditional border crossing by a uniformed enemy massing his troops; the latter was a political war conducted by guerrillas and feeding on subversion. There was no uniformed, massed enemy to use power against; the enemy was first and foremost political, which meant that the support of the population made the guerrillas’ way possible.

Thus one of the lessons for civilians who thought they could run small wars with great control was that to harness the military, you had to harness them completely; that once in, even partially, everything began to work in their favor.

The only thing wrong was that the war was not being won; it was, in fact, not even being fought. The ARVN was a replica of the past, was even more arrogant now than ever. All the old mistakes were being repeated in the field; the army still systematically enraged the population by running giant sweeps through peasant villages, with its soldiers stealing chickens and ducks.

Finally, they were living where the war was taking place, and they thought it was a serious business, sending young men out to die, and if you were willing to do it, you also had to be willing to fight for their doubts and put your career on the line.

That attitude of Diem and Nhu was an important reflection of the difference between the way they regarded Communism and the way the society did. The population was simply not that anti-Communist; it resented the force unleashed on it more than it feared the enemy it was allegedly being saved from.

In government it is always easier to go forward with a program that does not work than to stop it altogether and admit failure.

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.

Since any real indices and truly factual estimates of the war would immediately have shown its bankruptcy, the McNamara trips became part of a vast unwitting and elaborate charade, the institutionalizing and legitimizing of a hopeless lie. Those trips seemed to symbolize the foolishness and hopelessness of it all, particularly if McNamara represented the best of the society.

Loyalty was not to the President of the United States, to truth or integrity, or even to subordinate officers risking their lives; loyalty was to uniform, and more specifically, to immediate superior and career.

For if Vietnam is a major Greek tragedy, it is compiled of many minor scenes which come together in one great epic.

For the truth was that despite the Democratic desire to blame Dulles for the commitment to Southeast Asia, the creation of South Vietnam, and the invention of Diem, the roots of the change in American policy actually predated Eisenhower’s coming to power. The really crucial decisions were made at the tail end of the Truman years, with Acheson as Secretary of State and Rusk as his principal deputy for Asia. This was the period when the United States went from a position of neutrality toward both sides in the Indochina war to a position of massive military and economic aid to the French. The real architect of the American commitment to Vietnam, of bringing containment to that area and using Western European perceptions in the underdeveloped world, was not John Foster Dulles, it was Dean Acheson.

In May 1950 Acheson made his decision; again it was not based upon what was good for the Vietnamese or what the needs were on the scene. It was a dual decision; it reflected, first, the general intensifying of the Cold War, and the consequent greater inability to make a distinction between any two parts of the Communist world; second, and perhaps more important in the case of Acheson, it was, like the original Potsdam agreement, a reflection of Indochina as a peripheral area, unimportant in terms of the real world and relationships with European allies.

It was not nationalism which was being fought there, he told them, it was Communism. The two were incompatible; you cannot be both a Communist and a nationalist. It was all very simple, he said.

For it was not American arms and American bravery or even American determination that failed in Vietnam, it was American political estimates, both of this country and of the enemy, and that was the job of State, and in particular of the Assistant Secretary.

The temper of the times was very special, notable for a kind of national timidity and dishonor.

Perhaps the greatest illusion was the idea that we cared more for what was going on than they did, that we would pay a higher price, that they would feel the threshold of pain before we did. It was of course an obvious lie; but the principals had, in their desire not to come to real decisions, painted themselves into a corner where lie followed lie.

Lyndon Johnson had lost it all, and so had the rest of them; they had, for all their brilliance and hubris and sense of themselves, been unwilling to look to and learn from the past and they had been swept forward by their belief in the importance of anti-Communism (and the dangers of not paying sufficient homage to it) and by the sense of power and glory, omnipotence and omniscience of America in this century. They were America, and they had been ready for what the world offered, the challenges posed.

Thus the war, rather than setting the precedent of what the United States had done in the past and would continue to do in the future in the world, had symbolized to growing numbers of Americans what the United States must never do again.