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

by David Halberstam

His enthusiasm for bombing and for his own role had allowed him to withstand all the subsequent intelligence of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (not by chance were two of that survey’s chief members, John Kenneth Galbraith and George Ball, among the leading doves on Vietnam), which proved conclusively that the strategic bombing had not worked; on the contrary, it had intensified the will of the German population to resist (as it would in North Vietnam, binding the population to the Hanoi regime).

he wanted to find out more about the relationship of the government to the people, he wanted to know if the government was reaching the people, what the feeling was of people getting drafted, who could become an officer in the South Vietnamese army (ARVN) and who could not, what the local feeling was toward tax officials, how valid the case of the Vietcong was in rural areas.

The two men never discussed it on the trip, and Taylor never asked Lansdale why he wanted to look into these matters.

They were commanded by division, regimental and even battalion officers who had never heard shots fired in anger, who held their posts only because of loyalty to Diem, and who were under orders not to allow casualties because this would be considered a reflection against Diem himself, a sign that he was not as beloved and respected as he believed. Since the Vietcong leadership was perfectly willing to accept very high casualties for each individual political gain (“It is,” wrote one Vietcong soldier in his diary, “the duty of my generation to die for our country”), the outcome again and again was almost predetermined.

“Well, that may be true elsewhere in the world, Walt,” answered Ellsberg, “but there are very few countries in the world where the bright young officer class has the unique distinction of having fought against its own country’s independence and alongside the colonial army.”

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. The very presence of Caucasian troops was likely to turn quickly into a political disadvantage,

What was true, however, was that the presence of American reporters tended to open up an otherwise closed country; this was the price Diem paid for getting American aid.

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.

It did not matter whether the news was good or bad; the worse the news, the more you needed it. If things were going well you did not need a good intelligence system quite as much, events took care of themselves.

He had no problems, Harkins told Secretary McNamara in July 1962. No problems? Well, just one problem, he admitted, the American press. All along he steadfastly brushed aside the growing problems and warnings from the field in 1962.

And then, rather than getting a wink from Harkins, a we-all-know-the-rules-of-the-game smile, the American commander in Vietnam turned on Ladd and upbraided him for challenging the word of a Vietnamese officer. Of course the Vietnamese figures were accurate. Ladd looked at him for a long time and said simply, “I thought we were talking American to American.”

It was a typical Harriman act, both in professional and in personal life: whatever it is you’re interested in, find the source and learn all you can, let nothing stand in your way.

The experience left both Soviet officials and Harriman seeing beyond some of the stereotypes of the period, each side believing that the other could be talked to, and dealt with.

Thus a major dissenting view was blocked from a hearing at the highest level by Max Taylor, and thus the Army’s position on how well the war was going was protected (had Vann briefed, it would have been much harder for the high-level military to go into meetings with the President and claim that the war was going well). This charade was a microcosm of the way the high-level military destroyed dissenters, day after day in countless little ways, slanting the reporting lest the top level lose its antiseptic views, lest any germs of doubt reach the high level.

More and more effort went into public relations because it was easier to manipulate appearances and statements than it was to affect reality on the ground.

(significantly, whenever reporters came up with a story showing that something was grievously wrong, the instinct of the American mission was to assault the reporters and their credibility, not to find out whether or not in fact the story was right).

trumpian

that the capacity to control a policy involving the military is greatest before the policy is initiated, but once started, no matter how small the initial step, a policy has a life and a thrust of its own, it is an organic thing.

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

In Washington, the dominant figure on Vietnam was not Dean Rusk, but Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; it was he who dominated the action, the play, the terms by which success in Vietnam was determined. In the growing split between the civilians and the military over Vietnam, McNamara was allowed to be the referee. In contrast, the people from State who, like Harriman, were challenging the military’s estimates, were placed in the position of being adversaries.

This man, whose only real experience had been in dealing with the second largest automotive empire in the world, producing huge Western vehicles, was the last man to understand and measure the problems of a people looking for their political freedom.

Their chief lesson had been that you could control an organization by converting an abundance of facts and figures into meaningful data and then apply them to industrial production; these men were purveyors of what would be a new managerial art in American industry.

Thus the portrait of McNamara in those years at his desk, on planes, in Saigon, poring over page after page of data, each platoon, each squad, studying all those statistics. All lies. Talking

(Years later, when McNamara had turned against the war, he talked with John Vann, the lieutenant colonel who had left the Army in protest of the Harkins policies, and the one who had shown statistically how badly the war was going. McNamara asked Vann why he had been misinformed, and Vann bluntly told him it was his own fault. He should have insisted on his own itinerary. He should have traveled without accompanying brass, and he should have taken some time to find out who the better-informed people were and learned how to talk to them.)

It is not a particularly happy chapter in his life; he did not serve himself nor the country well; he was, there is no kinder or gentler word for it, a fool.

In early 1963, as his people in the Delta reported the breakdown there of the strategic hamlet program, Phillips had responded to their warnings, had visited the areas himself, and was horrified. Now, coming before the President, he was admitting the failures of his own program, in itself a remarkable moment in the American bureaucracy, a moment of intellectual honesty. He had known Diem and Nhu for ten years, he said, and they had gradually lost touch with the population and with reality.

fascinating insight into the way the military worked. 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.

This was a political war; one could not produce military answers.

Lyndon Johnson, who knew all the faults of some of the great men on the Hill, was markedly uncritical, and accepted judgments from them which he might have questioned from his own men.

Years later George Ball, who, having fought with Johnson on the war and lost, retained a considerable affection for him, would say of that period and Johnson’s relationship with the Kennedy luminaries that Johnson did not suffer from a poor education, he suffered from a belief that he had had a poor education.

Never, if possible, public or private nakedness of man or spirit or ideas, even at what many thought his greatest triumph, an appearance before a House committee considering civil rights legislation when he startled everyone by giving very strong testimony (“If I were a Negro I think I might rise up”)—one of his finest moments, the committee applauding, the press applauding, his aides proud, delighted.

morning and as I was leaving his office, he said, 'Mr. Rusk, you’ve earned your pay today.’ So I took that lesson from the greatest man I’ve ever known. If you have very good people it isn’t necessary to compliment them. They know how good they are.”

The British said they could not bail out the Greek economic situation, which was near collapse, nor could they underwrite the modernization of the Turkish army. Reading

There had to be a moral for him here: if you are wrong on the hawkish side of an event you are all right; if you are accurate on the dovish side you are in trouble).

(Johnson himself did not take the domino theory seriously; he was far more worried about the loss of a country to the Communists and what this would do to him in terms of domestic politics, though this could not be expressed so bluntly in an official paper.)

Basically the study showed that the bombing would fail because the North was motivated by factors which were not affected by physical change and physical damage.

if you threatened the North with escalation you would soon know whether or not it would work because they would have to respond before you started (that is, they would never fold their hand under duress and go to the bargaining table, because once there, all the United States would have to do was threaten once more to start bombing and they would have to concede more).

Therefore, when the long-delayed decisions on the bombing were made a year later, the principals did not go back to the old Bob Johnson paper, because new things had happened, one did not go back to an old paper.

Thus, without attracting much attention, without anyone commenting on it, the men who had been the greatest doubters on Vietnam, who were more politically oriented in their view of the war than militarily, were moved out, and the bureaucracy was moved back to a position where it had been in 1961, more the old Dulles policies on Asia than anyone realized.

His children grew up uncorrupted by the plush, air-conditioned alienation of American middle-class life (when the family returned to America in 1964 Mrs. Davies believed her children were better for the hardness of their life. The family seemed to have traditional values and a strong sense of loyalty at a time when the children of most of their friends were on some kind of drugs).

But the education further developed an already identifiable quality in him; it taught the students to think in terms of civilizations, not just in terms of governments. After all, governments come and go, but civilizations linger on. There were certain values, beliefs, qualities which would prevail, no matter what the outward form of the government. These

Liberal Democrats, by now co-opted by the Kennedys, could not effectively protest the drift of the Vietnam policy without criticizing at least by implication their own people.

But in particular, out of all of this would come the sense that we had been attacked, and we were the victims.

The day after all the meetings, while the impact was still just settling, McGeorge Bundy gathered the White House staff together and said that the President had decided to go for a congressional resolution calling for a general posture in Southeast Asia. Thus if anything more serious happened during the forthcoming election, he would have the resolution in his hip pocket, and he would be able to deal with both Hanoi and the Congress, one a sure adversary, the other a potential one. After

Fulbright turned him down and decided to ram the resolution through in a crisis atmosphere with patriotism a key factor; at a joint meeting of the Foreign Relations and the Armed Services committees, where both McNamara and Rusk testified for forty minutes, Fulbright was a friend of the White House. Morse alone asked unfriendly questions and cast the only dissenting vote.

For the existing political structure still believed that America was threatened from without, while an increasing number of educated, articulate Americans felt the dangers were from within. The politicians in Washington were responding to issues which no longer affected large numbers of the people, and as a corollary, increasing numbers of people were bothered about elements of their life which were not defined as political issues. The gap between the politicians and the public, particularly an articulate educated minority, was growing, and nothing would widen it like the war in Vietnam. The government itself was still geared up to hold the lines in the Cold War, but a particularly influential part of the citizenry believed that it was a thing of the past, that the arms race was futile and destructive, that the enemy was really bigness, technology and the government itself. Liberals had always grown up thinking big and powerful government was good; now for a variety of reasons they were moving back from that position. So there were stirrings in the land; they had not surfaced as political forces and it would have taken a uniquely sensitive political figure to both perceive them and incorporate them into his policies.

So the first time Greene spoke up, it was on the subject of Vietnam. Johnson did not like what he was saying; Greene was very hawkish and said he thought too little force was being used, and Johnson began interrupting him: “Speak up! Speak up! I can’t hear what you’re saying. Speak up!” Greene waited deliberately; then he looked up at Johnson and said in his carefully controlled voice, “You can hear what I’m saying and so can everyone else in this room,” and calmly continued to speak. Greene noticed that from then on, whenever he appeared at the White House, Johnson seemed to solicit his advice and opinion, and marked him down for a bully, though of course not many men would enter the National Security Council with the same sense of confidence in himself as the Commandant of the Marine Corps. (General Greene was not the only person who sensed this; Gene McCarthy in 1967 told friends that he thought Johnson was a bully, and that if the early primaries were not good, he would come apart rather than fight back.)

(he could say of Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, a constant critic of the oil-depletion allowance, that Douglas would understand it just a bit better if there were a few oil wells in Cook County).

He could thus, for example, keep the military on a long-enough leash to allow them to plan their new weapons systems, and on a short-enough leash to have them keep coming back for more.

At first these anecdotes enlivened the White House press corps and made for fine after-dinner stories; later, as the pressure of Vietnam mounted and the President’s credibility problems centered on greater issues, they would not seem so amusing.

It is at its best when a President identifies what he is and what he seeks as openly as possible, and then slowly bends public opinion toward it. If the President is found manipulating or pressuring a lower figure, putting too much pressure on a congressman, it can easily, and rather damagingly, backfire.