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

by David Halberstam

Of all the privations and injustices suffered in undemocratic nations, lack of a free press is among the worst.

No one who goes to war believes once he is there that it is worth the cost to fight it by half measures. War is far too horrible a thing to drag out unnecessarily. It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through god-awful afflictions and heartache, to endure the dehumanizing experiences that are unavoidable in combat, for a cause that the country wouldn’t support over time and that our leaders so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay.

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. Their ability to calibrate this war was limited, their skills were tied to other wars in other places, and with very few exceptions they, like the French before them, tended to underestimate the bravery, strength, resilience, and the political dynamic which fed the indigenous force they were fighting.

Nineteen sixty-eight was one of those landmark years in which everything came to a head—or, as in this case, seemed to come apart, marked as it was by the withdrawal of the sitting President from the race, by two tragic assassinations, and by a political process which began in the snows of New Hampshire just as the Tet offensive took place and ended in violence in the streets of Chicago.

“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.

In addition, the particular nature of the President’s personal style, his ease and confidence with reporters, his considerable skill in utilizing television, and the terrible manner in which he was killed had created a remarkable myth about him.

The best thing about him, I thought, was his modernity, his lack of being burdened by myths of the past. Because I saw him as cool and skeptical it always struck me that he would not have sent combat troops into Vietnam. He was too skeptical, I think, for that: I believe that, in the last few months of his life, he had come to dislike the war, it was messy and our policy there was flawed and going nowhere, and he was wary of the optimism of his generals. In 1964 I think he wanted to put it on the back burner, run against Goldwater, beat him handily (which I think he expected to do) and then negotiate his way out.

Where our money went our rhetoric soon followed.

The anonymity was not entirely by chance, for he was the embodiment of the public servant-financier who is so secure in his job, the value of it, his right to do it, that he does not need to seek publicity, to see his face on the cover of a magazine or on television, to feel reassured. Discretion is better, anonymity is safer: his peers know him, know his role, know that he can get things done.

He lived in a world where young men made their way up the ladder by virtue not just of their own brilliance and ability but also of who their parents were, which phone calls from which old friends had preceded their appearance in an office.

Lovett himself would talk of those years in the late forties as almost miraculous ones, when the American executive branch and the Congress were as one, when the Marshall Plan, the Point Four program and NATO had come about and been approved.

The men of that era believed, to an uncommon degree, that their view of history had been confirmed; only a very few questioned it. One of their eggheads, George F. Kennan, became in the fifties increasingly disillusioned with the thrust of American policy, believing that those men had exaggerated Soviet intentions in Western Europe, and had similarly exaggerated their own role and NATO’s role in stopping them.

Well, he reconsidered, he knew McCloy was an independent Republican, and Dillon had served in a Republican Administration, but, he added, he did not know the politics of Black and Alexander at all (their real politics of course being business).

A Democrat has to run left of center to get the vote in the big northern cities, so don’t hold it against him if he’s left of center, because we won’t. We know his problems and what he has to do. So we won’t fight him there. But on foreign affairs, Luce continued, if he shows any sign of weakness toward the anti-Communist cause—or, as Luce decided to put it more positively—if he shows any weakness in defending the cause of the free world, we’ll turn on him.

For ever since he gained the nomination in Los Angeles, Kennedy had changed: he did not need the liberals that much; they had nowhere else to go. It was no longer Kennedy versus Humphrey or Stevenson; it was Kennedy versus Nixon. He turned to face different doubts and different suspicions.

That harsh New England tone, which at first had jarred others, seemed to soften a little at the very same time that the nation began to find it distinctive and began to listen for it.

Stevenson died in 1965, a year and a half after Kennedy, he seemed a forlorn and forgotten figure, humiliated by his final years; his people mourned the loss of Kennedy more than of Stevenson. It would only be later, as the full tragedy of the Vietnam war unfolded and a Stevenson disciple named Eugene McCarthy challenged Johnson, as humanist values seemed to be resurgent and regenerative against the rationalist values, and the liberal community looked back to see where it had gone wrong, that Stevenson would regain his constituency. Posthumously.

Rather, the main literature of the era was liberal (Schlesinger, Sorensen), and in it there is no note of how Kennedy manipulated the liberals and moved for the center, partly because of a reluctance to admit that it happened, a desire to see the Kennedy Administration as they would have it, and partly to claim Kennedy for history as liberal.

It was a glittering time. They literally swept into office, ready, moving, generating their style, their confidence—they were going to get America moving again. There was a sense that these were brilliant men, men of force, not cruel, not harsh, but men who acted rather than waited. There was no time to wait, history did not permit that luxury; if we waited it would all be past us.

In contrast, the new men were tough—“hard-nosed realists” was a phrase often used to define them, a description they themselves had selected. They had good war records; they were fond of pointing out that they were the generation which had fought the war, that they had been the company commanders, had borne the brunt of the war and lost their comrades. This gave them special preparation for the job ahead, it was the company commanders replacing the generals, and even here was seen virtue. Actually, most of it was a myth.

They were men who reflected the post-Munich, post-McCarthy pragmatism of the age. One had to stop totalitarianism, and since the only thing the totalitarians understood was force, one had to be willing to use force. They justified each decision to use power by their own conviction that the Communists were worse, which justified our dirty tricks, our toughness.

Being above the petty factional and emotional fights of the bureaucracy, being of course neither a man of the right or of the left but disinterested and realistic, which meant that all things being equal, he was more a man of the status quo than anything else.

He was the first of a new kind of media candidate flashed daily into our consciousness by television during the campaign, and as such he had managed to stir the aspirations and excited millions of people. It had all been deliberately done; he had understood television and used it well, knowing that it was his medium, but it was done at a price. Millions of people watching this driving, handsome young man believed that he could change things, move things, that their personal problems would somehow be different, lighter, easier with his election.

A less quoted remark, underscoring the difficulties inherent in events outside his control, came when Carl Kaysen, a White House expert on disarmament, brought in the news that the Soviets had resumed atmospheric testing. The President’s reaction was simple and basic and reflected the frustrations of that year. “Fucked again,” he said.

So I’ve got a terrible problem. If he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts, until we remove those ideas we won’t get anywhere with him. So we have to act.” Then he told Reston that he would increase the military budget (which he did) and send another division to Germany (which he also did). He turned to Reston and said that the only place in the world where there was a real challenge was in Vietnam, and “now we have a problem in trying to make our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place.” (Ironically, a year later, after the Americans had begun their limited commitment to Vietnam, Khrushchev would tell Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson that the Americans were making a major mistake in Vietnam. “In South Vietnam,” he said, according to Thompson’s cable back to Washington, “the U.S. has stumbled into a bog. It will be mired there for a long time.”)

“Vietnam,” said Robert Kennedy, “Vietnam . . . We have thirty Vietnams a day here.” Thirty Vietnams. From the beginning it had been that way, a tiny issue overclouded by the great issues. It had risen to pre-eminence partly because of neglect and omission, a policy which had evolved not because a group of Westerners had sat down years before and determined what the future should be, but precisely because they had not.

But a decision was made at Potsdam on Vietnam, without any real consultation. It concerned the surrender; the British would accept the Japanese surrender below the 16th parallel, the Chinese above it. It appeared quite inconsequential at the time, but the matter of who accepts a surrender is a vital one; it determines who will control the turf and who will decide future legitimacy.

Truman, pushed by his military advisers who were wary of what anticolonialism might mean as far as the future of U.S. naval and air bases in Asia was concerned, urged that we go along with the British. There had been no prior discussion among the Americans (though later evidence would show that there had been a good deal of collusion beforehand between the French and the British on this issue). Having accepted the surrender, the British would permit the French to return, and all subsequent events would flow from this: the French would reassert their authority, they would smile politely at all American requests to deal with the indigenous population, but they would pay no attention; the Americans, after all, had given away the leverage, the French Indochina war would begin, and the Vietnamese would gain their freedom by force of arms.

The President hesitated a moment and then said—Well if we can get the proper pledge from France to assume for herself the obligations of a trustee, then I would agree to France retaining these colonies with the proviso that independence was the ultimate goal. I asked the President if he would settle for dominion status. He said no—it must be independence. He said that is to be the policy, and you can quote it in the State Department. This was to be the high-water mark of American governmental interest in pure anticolonialism in Indochina.

The very organization of the Department in those days was the basic problem for the Asian officers. Asia was not a separate area; instead the colonies were handled through the European nations, and concurrent jurisdiction was required for policy changes. That meant that on any serious question involving a territory supposedly emerging from colonialism, both the European and Asian divisions had to agree before the question could go to a higher official. Effectively this meant that the French people would concur with the French policy of returning to Indochina, the Asian people would oppose it vigorously and the question would go to the next level, where officials would bounce it back down, suggesting that everyone get together on this. The result, of course, was that this favored the status quo, and the European division.

The idea of Asian rebels standing up to a powerful Western army was preposterous at the time. No one had yet heard of political war, of Mao’s concept of fish swimming in the ocean of the people, of Asian guerrillas giving the European country the cities and strangling them by holding the countryside; of an army losing battle after battle but winning the people and thus the war. Instead the important thing in Washington was to strengthen France, and in Paris the important thing was to regain France’s tarnished greatness.

Once during the 1960 campaign against Nixon someone had asked Kennedy if he was exhausted, and he answered no, he was not, but he felt sorry for Nixon, he was sure Nixon was tired. “Why?” the friend asked. “Because I know who I am and I don’t have to worry about adapting and changing. All I have to do at each stop is be myself. But Nixon doesn’t know who he is, and so each time he makes a speech he has to decide which Nixon he is, and that will be very exhausting.”

Instead of being filled with the usual East-West rhetoric and debate, the conversation began with Kennedy leaning over toward Popovic and asking in a particularly disarming way, “Mr. Minister, you are a Marxist and the Marxist doctrine has had certain clear ideas about how things were to develop in this world. When you look over things that have happened in the years since the Russian Revolution, does it seem to you that the way the world has been developing is the way that Marx envisaged it or do you see variations here or any divergencies from Marxist predictions . . .?”

All of this was part of one of the great illusions of the country and the Administration in 1961, the belief that the McCarthy period had come and gone without the country paying any real price, that the Administration and the nation could continue without challenging or coming to terms with the political and policy aberrations of that period.

Two events would change the American perceptions, and equally important in this case, the disposition to perceive nuances. (Many things, after all, were perceptible, if one wanted to see them, but the seeing involved increasing risk. It became better not to see the shades of difference—the fact, for instance, that Ho, although a Communist, might also be primarily Vietnamese and under no orders from Moscow.) The first event was the hardening of the Cold War as tensions in Europe grew; the second was the fall of China, which sent deep psychic shock waves into the American political structure. These events, coupled with the Korean War and the coming of Senator Joseph McCarthy, would markedly change the American perceptions of international Communism, and more important, change the disposition of high political figures to discern subtleties within the Communist world.

Forrestal asked Smith, our ambassador to the USSR, if the Russians wanted war. Smith answered by quoting Stalin as saying the Russians did not want war, “but the Americans want it even less than we do and that makes our position stronger”).

China was good; the Chinese were very different from us, and yet they were like us; what could be at once more romantic, yet safer. The Japanese were bad, more suspicious and could not be trusted. The Chinese were good and could be trusted.

It certified, as it were, an even harder peace, it necessitated the reorientation of our demonology (from the wartime of Good Russians, Bad Germans and Good Chinese, Bad Japanese to the postwar period of Good Germans, Bad Russians, Good Japanese, Bad Chinese). It caught this country psychologically unprepared. 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 title is worth remembering: “Why We Lost China.” China was ours, and it was something to lose; it was an assumption which was to haunt foreign policy makers for years to come. Countries were ours, we could lose them; a President was faced with the blackmail of losing a country.

Johnson was so unenthusiastic about going to Saigon that Kennedy had to coax him into it. “Don’t worry, Lyndon,” he said. “If anything happens to you, Sam Rayburn and I will give you the biggest funeral Austin, Texas, ever saw.”

Johnson reported to the President that Communism must be and could be stopped in Southeast Asia (“The battle against Communism must be joined in Southeast Asia with strength and determination to achieve success there”) and that even Vietnam could be saved (“if we move quickly and wisely. We must have a coordination of purpose in our country team, diplomatic and military. The most important thing is imaginative, creative American management of our military aid program”). 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.

But the high point of it had passed, the emotional pitch had been reached when there were white men trapped in that garrison, about to be overrun by yellow men. The pressure thereafter would be more abstract.

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. (We made this last mistake repeatedly, from the Taylor mission right through to the incursion in 1969 in Cambodia and in 1971 in Laos, and we were always wrong; the enemy was always more serious about his own country than we were about it.)

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. Once activated, even in a small way at first, they would soon dominate the play. Their particular power with the Hill and with hawkish journalists, their stronger hold on patriotic-machismo arguments (in decision making they proposed the manhood positions, their opponents the softer, or sissy, positions), their particular certitude, made them far more powerful players than men raising doubts. The illusion would always be of civilian control; the reality would be of a relentlessly growing military domination of policy, intelligence, aims, objectives and means, with the civilians, the very ones who thought they could control the military (and who were often in private quite contemptuous of the military mind), conceding step by step, without even knowing they were losing.

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 body count might be a misleading indicator did not penetrate the command; large stacks of dead Vietcong were taken as signs of success. 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.

The Vietnamese officers may have been slow to learn how to fight the Vietcong, but they were quick to master the art of what pleased the Americans, not the least of which was the art of briefing.

He was seventy at the time. “Averell looks terrific,” a friend told Marie Harriman that year. “You’d look terrific too,” she answered, “if you did nothing but play polo until you were forty years old.” He was unique in many ways; he brought with him so much history, so many ties to great figures of the past that the young men who had taken office could not imagine that he would be able to function at their level and speed. They soon learned that it was they who were hard pressed to function at his level and speed and intensity.

Rusk addressed his team, saying that Harold Wilson was in town and that it looked as if he was going to win the election and become Prime Minister, and perhaps they had better do something for him. Did anyone know where he was staying? No one knew, so Rusk dispatched Ball to call the British embassy and find out. Ball left, came back white-faced a few minutes later, and whispered to Rusk, “He’s Averell’s house guest.” Harriman, sitting there, never moved a muscle.)

Harkins pushed hard for the virtually unrestricted use of it, but there was an element in it as an antipersonnel weapon that appalled Kennedy. It was a weapon which somehow seemed to be particularly antihuman, and he hated photographs of what it had done to people. He would talk with a certain fatalism to his staff about the pressure on him to use it. Now they want to use it on villages, he would say. They tell me that it won’t hurt anyone, but if no one will be hurt by it, what do they want it for?