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

by David Halberstam

Under the British parliamentary system he would have faced the challenge of his peers, tough, sharp, examining, who feared neither him nor his office. But there was no comparable challenge at the White House, where no one really stands up to the President, where there is no equality, where no one tells the President he is wrong. For the Presidency is an awesome office, even with a mild inhabitant. It tends by its nature to inhibit dissent and opposition, and with a man like Johnson it was simply too much, too powerful an office occupied by too forceful a man (Johnson’s own style in the Senate of trying to take the mark of another man from the start to break him quickly was a quality which had served him, if not the others, well.

He had inherited the Kennedy people, who had always impressed him, but though they were the same men, they were used in a strikingly different way. Kennedy had been aware of the danger of isolation and the inhibitions the office placed on men, and he had deliberately confronted his senior people with young bright nonbureaucratic men from other parts of the bureaucracy, trying to challenge the existing assumptions; Kennedy did not view dissent as a personal challenge. Once Kennedy had played the diverse viewpoints against one another, once there had been an inner debate, he would use some of his own people to filter it down, to analyze it, and then finally make his decision.

rather than the previous Administration’s decision making, where a variety of opinions were sought and filtered down, this was a very structured one, a place where Rusk could feel much more at home, and headed by a man who liked to hold his decisions as close to him as possible and who had an obsession with consensus.

He seemed to embody the American officer of the era; he gave off vibrations of control and excellence and competence, and indeed he seemed to represent something that went even beyond him, the belief of the United States military that they were the best in the business.

This illusion tempted him, as it would eventually tempt other principals, to believe that they could control events and decisions, determine and check the flow. Which would not turn out to be entirely true: as ambassador he was the senior American only as long as there were no American troops; the moment the troops arrived the play would go to Westmoreland.

Ball had been a member of the Strategic Survey team which studied the effects of the Allied bombing on Germany during World War II, a study which revealed how surprisingly ineffective the bombing had been, that it had rallied German morale and spurred industrial production.

Even the subject of troops for perimeter defense was barely mentioned. It did not come up for a variety of reasons; for one thing it was not a subject that Lyndon Johnson wanted to hear. It

The idea was that if there were many incidents like this, the mutilation of Americans, the President would have to react and the American public simply would not stand for it; thus the first soldier becomes the rationale for the second soldier.

Indeed John McNaughton, his chief deputy on Vietnam in 1964 and like his boss a great quantifier, outlined the reasons for going into Vietnam and escalating, and assigned 70 percent not to save dominoes, but to avoid a humiliating American defeat; the second, and in McNamara’s eyes—though not Rusk’s—less important reason was to keep Vietnam and other adjacent territory from the Chinese, and to that McNaughton assigned 20 percent; and finally the official reason, the one for the high school history books, to aid the South Vietnamese so that they could have a better life was given 10 percent.

Mac Bundy and the others had all been partner to so precious little failure in their lives that there was always a sense that no matter what, it could be avoided, deflected, and this as much as anything else was the bane of George Ball’s existence in those weeks.

It reeked of expertise and professionalism, it all gave one a great sense of confidence.

For machismo was no small part of it. He had always been haunted by the idea that he would be judged as being insufficiently manly for the job, that he would lack courage at a crucial moment. More than a little insecure himself, he very much wanted to be seen as a man; it was a conscious thing. He was very much aware of machismo in himself and those around him, and at a moment like this he wanted the respect of men who were tough, real men, and they would turn out to be the hawks. He had always unconsciously divided the people around him between men and boys.

The doubters were not the people he respected; the men who were activists were hawks, and he took sustenance and reassurance that the real men were for going ahead. Of the doves, only George Ball really had his respect. Ball might be a dove, but there was nothing soft about him. He had made it in a tough and savage world of the big law

That atmosphere prevailed in many quarters, a belief in American industrial power and technological genius which had emerged during World War II. Later there would be a phrase for it. Fulbright, who was appalled by it, would call it “the arrogance of power.” We had power and the North Vietnamese did not; besides, they were small and yellow.

“Jesus,” said the general, “if we tell this to the people in Washington we’ll be out of the war tomorrow. We’ll have to revise it downward.”

States, as they had not tired of a war with France. It was also a policy ill conceived for that particular President, because Lyndon Johnson, once committed, was not a man for half measures, for a stalled, drawn-out war, for a war policy that his critics could quite correctly seize on as a no-win policy. So it was one more half measure, one more item in the long list of self-delusion on Vietnam. We would once again try to do something on the cheap, and yet, even though it was at a bargain-basement price, we would be conveying to Hanoi the intensity of our will and commitment, and they would thus quickly come to their senses. 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.

It was all right to lie and dissemble for the right causes. It was part of service, loyalty to the President, not to the nation, not to colleagues, it was a very special bureaucratic-corporate definition of integrity; you could do almost anything you wanted as long as it served your superior.

mcnamara

His credibility with reporters was very high because he had a reputation for working hard to give accurate information on State Department policy, whether good policy or bad.

There was of course a dual advantage in not defining the number of men and the mission: first, it permitted the principals themselves to keep the illusion that they were not going to war, and it permitted them not to come to terms with budget needs and the political needs. Thus, if the mission was not defined it did not exist, and if the number of troops was not set it could always be controlled. Second, if the figure was not decided upon and crystallized within the inner circle, it could not leak out to the press and to the Congress, where all kinds of enemies lurked and would seize upon it to beat him and to beat his Great Society program.

The men around Johnson served him poorly, but they served him poorly because he wanted them to.

It was in fact the real beginning of the credibility gap; and Johnson was a part of it and so were all his top advisers. They knew they had decided on the larger figure, that it was a quantum jump, and that they were being party to a major deception of the American people, that many more far-reaching decisions had been made than they were admitting.

Yet in making the budget, McNamara made the arbitrary assumption that the war would be over by June 30, 1967. It was in direct contradiction to the estimates he was getting from Westmoreland (and in direct contradiction to his own private estimates for Johnson at the time) but it was a plausible assumption for planning.

One part of the government was lying to another part. Thus was the fatal decision made not to go for a tax increase, a decision made in early 1966 which resulted in the subsequent runaway inflation. Instead of being marginal, the deficit for fiscal 1967 turned out to be a whopping $9.8 billion. At the same time in early 1966 McNamara kept meeting with the Council of Economic Advisers, and the Council kept pressing him to go for a tax increase.

It was not the war which destroyed the economy, but the essentially dishonest way in which it was handled.

At first the critics were told that they should not be critics because it was not really going to be a war and it would be brief, anyway; then, when it became clear that it was a war, they were told not to be critics because it hurt our boys and helped the other side.

He was, sadly, open-minded when things went well, and increasingly close-minded when things went poorly, as they now were about to do. In

In the past, Dean Acheson had warned him that the one thing a President should never do is let his ego get between him and his office. By

Knowing that the party did not want to go to its right wing after the Goldwater debacle and that the liberal wing had vulnerable candidates, Nixon busied himself in 1966 speaking all over the country for Republican congressional candidates, building up due bills among them and among local Republican chairmen, due bills which he intended to cash in during 1968 in what struck him as what would be a less than futile run against Lyndon Johnson.)

Some of his generals were sick of what was to them the half-hearted quality of the whole thing, the attempt to win on the cheap. General Wallace Greene told some reporters at a background briefing that the war was in fact stalemated in Vietnam, that we needed mobilization and were paying too light a price. We needed to get on with the job. Six hundred thousand men would do it. “In 1964 I told them it would take four hundred thousand men and they all thought I was crazy,” he said. “I was wrong. We needed six hundred thousand men.”

The Tet offensive began in earnest on January 31 and it would be felt for weeks; but within two days of its beginning, on February 2, Johnson held a press conference saying that the offensive was a failure, that the Administration had known all about it, in fact the Administration had the full order of Hanoi’s battle. It was demonstrably untrue, and the public was aware of it. Rostow

The threatened dominoes, Clifford discovered, did not seem to take the threat as seriously as we did. Since he was a man of compelling common sense, this offended his sense of reality and proportion.

Slowly, cautiously, painfully, Clifford forced Johnson to turn and look honestly at the war; it was an act of friendship for which Johnson could never forgive him.

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.

Maxwell Taylor was the key military figure in all the estimates, and his projections—that the war would be short, that the bombing would be a major asset—had proven to be false, but he had never adjusted his views to those failures; there was no sense of remorse, nor concern on why they had failed to estimate correctly. Rather, even in his memoirs, the blame was placed on those elements of the society which had undermined support for the war; when his book was finished, friends, looking at the galleys, cautioned him to tone down criticism of the press.

The faults, it seemed, were not theirs, the fault was with this country which was not worthy of them.

The war changed all that; it not only tarnished his personal reputation so that his endorsement of an idea or a candidate had to be done covertly, but it saw a major challenge to the right of the elite to rule.

He contented himself with telling audiences that he had a plan to end the war, even touching his breast pocket as if the plan were right there in the jacket—implying that to say what was in it might jeopardize secrecy. The truth was that he had no plan at all. Throughout the campaign his unwillingness to develop a serious substantive policy on Vietnam, which was, after all, the issue tearing the country apart, was the bane of some of his younger staff members.

nixon

Support of the President was patriotic; criticism of him and his policies was not.

They soon became believers in their policy, and thus began to listen only to others who were believers (they began to believe, in addition, that only they were privy to the truth in reports from Saigon, that the secret messages from the Saigon embassy, rather than being the words of committed, embattled men, were the words of cool, objective observers). Doubters were soon filtered out; the Kissinger staff soon lost most of the talented Asian experts that had come in with him at the start of the Administration.

But the Nixon Administration, like the Johnson Administration before it, did not control events, and did not control the rate of the war; and though it could give Thieu air power, it could not give him what he really needed, which was a genuine, indigenous political legitimacy.

At key points in 1964 and 1965 when journalistic reporting from Saigon had been particularly pessimistic, it was the argument of those in government, like Bill Bundy, that if outsiders could only see the secret cable traffic they would know how well things were going and how well they were likely to go. Quite the reverse was true; if the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the press and the public had known of the extent of the intelligence community’s doubts, there would have been a genuine uproar about going to war.)

So it became very quickly not a book about Vietnam, but a book about America, and in particular about power and success in America, what the country was, who the leadership was, how they got ahead, what their perceptions were about themselves, about the country and about their mission.

The American optimism of the period was clearly mindless; the Vietcong were infinitely stronger and more subtle than the government, their sense of the people far truer. For dissenting this much from the requisite optimism we became of course prime targets of the Administration and the embassy. At first my journalistic colleagues and I traced most of the faults to the Diem regime itself; however, the more I reported, the longer I stayed and the deeper I probed, the more I felt that despite the self-evident failings of the Ngo family regime, the sickness went far deeper, that all the failings of the American-Diem side grew out of the French Indochina war, in which the other side had captured the nationalism of the country and become a genuinely revolutionary force.