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

by David Halberstam

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. If there were problems, the Administration would somehow glide around them, letting time rather than political candor or courage do the healing. It was a belief that if there were scars from the period (and both the Democratic party and the Department of State were deeply scarred), they were by now secret scars, and if there were victims, they were invisible victims. If one looked away and did not talk about them, somehow they would go away. Yet the truth was altogether different: the scars and the victims were real, and the McCarthy period had frozen American policies on China and Asia. The Kennedy Administration would in no way come to terms with the aberrations of those policies; it had not created them, as its advocates pointed out, but it did not undo them, either.

The failure to come to terms with China and with the McCarthy period was costly, because without looking realistically at China, the Administration could not look realistically at the rest of Southeast Asia. It was failures and frustrations over China which had involved the United States in Vietnam and changed American policy there in 1949; now, because it was not coming to terms with China, the Kennedy Administration would soon expand the Eisenhower Administration policy and commitment in Vietnam. Above all, John Kennedy did not want to revise America’s Asia policy (even in October 1963, with Vietnam falling apart, he told television interviewers that he did not want to cut off aid to Vietnam because that might start events comparable to those preceding the fall of China, and that was the last thing he wanted). Thus, because he did not look back on America’s China policy, it was easier for him, in 1961, to move forward in Vietnam.

(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.)

Kennan became known as the author of the containment policy, but he had been talking more about Russia than about Communists. He would eventually find his ideas being exploited, as it were, by his superiors, used as a justification for an increasing militarization of American foreign policy. He eventually broke with the other foreign policy architects because he thought they were too ideological and too military-oriented in their policies. He felt that the Communist world was much more nationalist in its origins than it was monolithic, and that we were creating our own demonology. His opinions in the early fifties represented the first truly major dissent within a largely consensus view of a nonconsensus world. The Kennan experience was not to be the last time that the national security principals would take the intelligence reporting of their own experts and exploit it out of context, de-emphasizing the issue of nationalism and exploiting the issue of Communism. The same thing happened during the Korean War, when the China experts predicted accurately what China would do, not based on Communist intentions but on Chinese history, and the last time would be during the Vietnam war, when again the experts predicted accurately Hanoi’s responses to American escalation.

As World War I had taken a decaying feudal Russian regime and finally destroyed it, bringing on the Communists, so Japan’s aggression against China, the first step in what was to become World War II, did the same thing to China: a fledgling semidemocratic government was trying to emerge from a dark and feudal past and was pushed beyond the point of cohesion, the Japanese catching Chiang Kai-shek when he might have moved into the modern era and frightening him back into the past, revealing more his weaknesses than his strengths. The embryo China of Chiang came apart, and the new China would not be that of Chiang and the Western powers, but of Mao Tse-tung and the Communists, a powerful modern antifeudal force touching the peasants and the age-old resentment against foreign intrusion, liberating powerful latent feelings in that great country. American policy had been to support Chiang, to try and use him as a force against the Japanese; later, as Chiang’s forces began to collapse and the Communists became a more viable force, we tried as best we could to reconcile the irreconcilable and get them to work together. The young American foreign service officers in China warned that we had to come to terms with the failure of Chiang’s order. 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 t...

By 1945 White knew that real civil war was inevitable, and when it came, Chiang would collapse and the Communists would win. White realized that this might affect the careers of some of his far-sighted friends in the foreign service when they reported developments as they saw them. He mentioned this to Raymond Ludden, one of the ablest of the young foreign service officers (they were so outstanding that Stilwell had simply taken the best of them from the embassy and attached them to his own staff): “You know something may happen because of this—a lot of people back home aren’t going to like the way it’s going.” And Ludden answered, “The duty of a foreign service officer is to report the truth as he sees it without adjusting it to American domestic considerations.” It was, White thought at the time, a wonderful answer. The sheer honesty and integrity of it moved him, but he was also made uneasy by it; wasn’t there a touch of innocence too? (There was: Ludden spent the rest of his career regarded by his superiors as being contaminated, and was moved around from different non-Asian post to post.) What White had begun to foresee in 1945 very quickly came true. As the China tragedy unfolded, many foreign service officers would have their careers destroyed, but of the group, John Paton Davies and John Stewart Service were the most distinguished, and as such they would suffer the most. Younger men a rank or two below them might quietly leave the Asian bureau and go to another are...

"Theodore H Wright, then a young Time reporter"

In particular, the pressure against some of the younger officials increased, motivated by the belief of one faction of the military that it could all be done on the cheap, China might have been saved with air power, without the Americans having to pay any real price (again the divisions would be remarkably similar to those which later followed in Vietnam).

To America, China was a special country, different from other countries. India could have fallen, or an African nation, and the reaction would not have been the same. For the American missionaries loved China; it was, by and large, more exciting than Peoria, had a better life style and did not lack for worthy pagans to be converted; add to that the special quality of China, a great culture, great food, great charm, and the special relationship was cemented. The Chinese were puritanical, clean, hard-working, reverent, cheerful, all the virtues Americans most admired. And so a myth had grown up, a myth not necessarily supported by the facts, of the very special U.S.-China relationship. We helped them and led them, and in turn they loved us. A myth fed by millions of pennies put in thousands of church plates by little children to support the missionaries in their work in this exotic land which was lusting for Christianity. 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. Thus, after a war filled with intensified propaganda, movies showing Japanese raping China, American fighting units saving Chinese, Chinese nurses saving wounded American pilots and, of course, falling in love with them, the fall of China was a shock. What had happened to the Chinese who loved us? It certified, as it wer...

The State Department knew the crunch was coming; in August 1949 it published its White Paper on China, a document designed to show that the fall of China was the fault of Chiang and that the United States had gone as far as an ally could go. What is remarkable about the White Paper in retrospect is the intelligence and quality of the reporting. It was written by very bright young men putting their assessments on the line; in that sense it would be a high-water mark for the Department. From then on young foreign service officers would learn their lessons and hedge their bets, and muddle their reporting.

The title of the three-part series was “Why We Lost China,” and it was not a serious bit of journalism, a view of a decaying feudal society, but rather a re-creation of the Chennault-Chiang line. It set the tone, though slightly loftier than some successors, for the conspiracy view of the fall of China: the blame was placed on the State Department. 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.

The Alsop articles emphasized the conspiratorial nature of events; they did not really raise the issue of treason, and they were all right if no one went further. Someone else would go further. The Alsop articles began the process of legitimizing the issue: twenty years later, both Davies and Service could single out the articles as a key to the turning point; the Post articles took the issue from the radical fringe and gave it a respectability where it would be adopted by a Republican party badly in need of issues. It would be valuable to the Republicans, but it would also be material for McCarthyism, and one of the darker chapters of this American century.

Not everybody made the distinction between foolishness and treason. It was not a particularly propitious time for distinctions, even those as unsubtle as this.

Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin. Tail gunner Joe. The accidental demagogue. How quickly he came and how quickly he disappeared, and how much he left behind.

forceful, physical, he was part Populist in a state where Populist roots went deep. There was a sense of shrewdness to him, a sense of the jugular on an issue, yet also a lack of seriousness, and an attention span of marked limitations. But the physical energy was there, it was part of him. There was a certain pathos too. Though he was playing this role, Joe the rugged fighter against all those sinister forces and effete Easterners, there was a feeling that more than anything he wanted to be accepted as one of the boys, to be good old Joe, to be the outsider welcomed in.

Four years after he was elected he was looking for an issue; he could not, after all, keep running against the Japanese. In January 1950 he found it. On January 7 he had dinner with some friends, all Catholics: William Roberts, an ex-Marine and a liberal adviser of Drew Pearson; Professor Charles Kraus, a political science instructor at Georgetown, also an ex-Marine; and Father Edmund Walsh, vice-president of Georgetown, regent of its very conservative school of foreign service, a man who had been at war with Communism for three decades and had just written a book on the Communists entitled Total Power. At the dinner in the Colony Restaurant, McCarthy outlined his problem; he needed an issue that would catch attention and excite the voters. What about the St. Lawrence Seaway, Roberts suggested. No sex appeal, said McCarthy. Then McCarthy talked about a national pension plan, $100 a month to everyone over sixty-five. Too utopian, the others argued (the mind boggles for a moment; suppose he had gone to pension plans instead of Communists. Would history have been different?). After dinner they moved from the restaurant to Roberts’ office. Father Walsh began to talk about his favorite subject, Communism. It was, he said, a major issue, and it would be increasingly important. As Walsh spoke, McCarthy picked him up on it. It sounded right; he had done a little of it himself once or twice, and the feedback had always been good. As McCarthy thought about it, he became excited; it ...

The issues were drawn, false issues; the real issues were postwar fear and uncertainty. Around the country he flew, reckless and audacious, stopping long enough to make a new charge, to exhibit a new list, a good newsworthy press conference at the airport, hail-fellow well met with the reporters, and then on to the next stop, the emptiness of the charge never catching up with him, the American press exploited in its false sense of objectivity (if a high official said something, then it was news, if not fact, and the role of the reporter was to print it straight without commenting, without assaulting the credibility of the incredulous; that was objectivity). It was like a circus; he was always on the move, his figures varied, his work was erratic and sloppy, he seemed to have no genuine interest in any true nature of security. It sometimes seemed as if he too were surprised by the whole thing, how easy it was, how little resistance he met, and so he hurtled forward to newer, larger charges. But if they did not actually stick, and they did not, his charges had an equally damaging effect: they poisoned. Where there was smoke, there must be fire. He wouldn’t be saying those things unless there was something to it. And so the contamination remained after the facts, or lack of them, evaporated; long after the specifics had faded into obscurity, the stain remained. Not just of lowly people, but of Acheson, and even Marshall. Even the figure of the stature of Marshall, the most di...

The confluence and the mixing of these three events, the fall of China, the rise of McCarthy and the outbreak of the Korean War, would have a profound effect on American domestic politics, and consequently an equally significant effect on foreign policy. The Democratic Administration was on the defensive; a country could not be lost without serious political consequences; each new Administration became increasingly susceptible to blackmail from any small oligarchy which proclaimed itself anti-Communist.

The essence of good foreign policy is constant re-examination.

If the Eisenhower Administration followed an anti-Communism dependent on the nuclear threat and bombastic words, the Kennedy Administration—liberal, modern, lacking above all in self-doubt, with a high proportion of academics—would be pragmatic and assertive in its anti-Communism.

A remarkable hubris permeated this entire time. Nine years earlier Denis Brogan had written: “Probably the only people who have the historical sense of inevitable victory are the Americans.”

Lansdale wrote a lengthy and very pessimistic report critical of both the Americans and of Diem, but particularly of the former. This was important, because Lansdale was one of the men who had invented Diem, and you do not knock your own invention, but more significant, it was indicative of the Lansdale approach and that of other Good Americans, those sympathetic to Asians. They did not feel that it was deeply rooted historic forces pitted against us which were causing the problems, but rather a failure to supply the right people and the right techniques. Implicit in the Lansdale position was the belief that if the right Americans influenced Diem in the right way, Diem would respond. It was a form of limited can-doism. He recommended a new antibureaucratic team in the Lansdale mold: “Our U.S. Team in Vietnam should have a hard core of experienced Americans who know and really like Asians, dedicated people who are willing to risk their lives for the ideals of freedom, and who will try to influence and guide the Vietnamese towards U.S. policy objectives with the warm friendship and affection which our close alliance deserves. We should break the rules of personnel assignment, if necessary, to get such U.S. military and civilians to Vietnam.” What Lansdale was recommending was, of course, Lansdale.

The first move toward continuing the commitment had, however, been taken earlier without the Administration’s even being aware of how fateful a step it was taking. It was done in an attempt to avoid a real decision, but it would have long-range repercussions. This was the switching of ambassadors to Vietnam on March 15, 1961, when Elbridge Durbrow was replaced by Frederick E. Nolting, Jr. The Durbrow tour had not been a happy one; he had watched the beginning of the Vietcong pressure against Diem, and simultaneously the accelerated estrangement of Diem from friends, allies and reality. Their discussions had become longer and longer monologues, and then, as Durbrow insisted on interrupting and telling Diem how poorly things were going, their meetings became more and more infrequent. Durbrow was, if anything, a very conservative figure, but he had been told to be candid with Diem, and that candor was now becoming unpleasant; toward the end Durbrow suggested that Ngo Dinh Nhu be sent into exile as an ambassador to a foreign country. His pleas to Diem about governmental reform, about improving the quality of commanders, about broadening the base of the government, resembled nothing so much as the pleas of General Stilwell to Chiang Kai-shek to do the same thing, and they were met with the same lack of appreciation. By the end of his tour, Durbrow was virtually persona non grata. When the Administration decided to replace him, it did not change the policy; it did not doubt the ...

Fritz to his friends, who were numerous. A proper man of proper credentials. He had been a college teacher at one time, he came from a good Virginia family, and he had a good war record, Navy of course. He was part of that special group of relatively conservative Democrats from Virginia who play a major role in the foreign service and control much of its apparatus from the inside, who regard the foreign service as a gentleman’s calling, and feel they produce a particularly fine brand of gentleman. He had compiled a very good record, this hard-working, straight, somewhat unquestioning man. He was steady and solid, and he had been sponsored by everyone he had ever worked for. Before coming to Vietnam, he had been at NATO, where he was head of the political section, with rank of minister, thus the first deputy to the NATO ambassador. Vietnam was his first ambassadorial post; he had never been to Asia before, and his ideas of Communism had all been fashioned through his European experience. 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. Thus the price of the past was sending Europeanists like Nolting to Asia; the new ambassador, knowing nothing of Asia, soon asked for and received as his deputy chief of mission his prime deputy from NATO, William Trueheart, who had not been to Asia eit...

Nolting was, above all, a man of the surface. If Diem could have designed an ambassador for his country and his regime, he would have come up with Fritz Nolting. He was a fine example of the foreign service officer who commits himself only to the upper level of the host government and the society, not to the country itself. 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. There was no doubt that Nolting believed in what he was doing and saying. He had looked and listened, and had decided that Diem was the best anti-Communist around (there was, of course, no one else; Diem had systematically removed all other opposition—Communist, neutralist, anti-Communist). People who worried about the regime’s lack of appeal, of the growing isolation of the regime, were, in his words, taking their eyes off the ball. Stopping Communism was having your eyes on the ball. If civilians in Saigon discussed growing political resentment and repression he would assure all, including Washington, that he knew nothing of it, which was true, of course; no Vietnamese other than the family trusted him. He had forbidden members of the embassy staff to talk to any Vietnamese dissidents; if one did not hear it, it did not exist; if one did not see it, it never happened.

Duty instead of intelligence motivated Nolting. He was there to hold the line, not to question it. His policy was to build credit with Diem by agreeing to everything Diem wanted, hoping that one day he could cash in the due bills. It necessitated reassuring Diem constantly, by always giving in, always nodding affirmatively. There was a curious irony in this, because Americans always warned that Asians tended to tell you what you wanted to hear; now we had an American ambassador who told Asians what they wanted to hear. But the special significance of Fritz Nolting was that in the very choice of him, and his decision that yes, we could make it with Diem, we were binding ourselves into an old and dying commitment, without really coming to terms with what it meant.

Though Johnson was scheduled to visit a number of Asian countries, the key stop would be Vietnam. Curiously enough, it was not a stop that the Vice-President particularly wanted to make. Just as a year later he would balk when the President asked him to make a symbolic trip to Berlin—feeling somehow that he was being used, and that his career (and possibly his life) might be damaged—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.”

With others, of course, he went to great pains to show that he was deeply involved in the inner decisions of the Administration, that he was the real insider. One day in early 1961 Russell Baker, then a Hill reporter for the New York Times, who knew Johnson well, had been coming out of the Senate when he was literally grabbed by Johnson (“You, I’ve been looking for you”) and pulled into his office. Baker then listened to an hour-and-a-half harangue about Washington, about how busy Lyndon Johnson was, how well things were going. There were these rumors going around that he wasn’t on the inside; well, Jackie had said to him just the other night at dinner as she put her hand on his, “Lyndon, you won’t desert us, will you?” They wanted him. It was pure Johnson, rich and larger than life, made more wonderful by the fact that if Baker did not believe it all, at least for the moment Johnson did. And in the middle of it, after some forty minutes, Baker noticed Johnson scribble something on a piece of paper; then he pushed a buzzer. A secretary came in, took the paper, disappeared and returned a few minutes later, handing the paper back to Johnson. He looked at it and crumpled it. Then the harangue continued for another fifty minutes. Finally, exhausted by this performance, Baker left and on the way he passed a friend named David Barnett, also a journalist. They nodded and went their separate ways, and the next day when Barnett ran into Baker, he asked whether Baker knew what Johns...

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. American purpose with Americans doing the right things could affect the destinies of these people. The Vietnamese were secondary, a small and unimportant people waiting to be told what to do by wiser, more subtle foreigners. If it was one more example of the can-do syndrome, it was similarly to stand as an example of the dangers of the game of commitment. Kennedy had sent Johnson to Vietnam as a sign of good will, as a means of reassuring a weak and unsatisfactory government of his commitment; the lasting effect, however, was not on the client state but on the proprietor, and in this case, most importantly, on the messenger himself, Lyndon Johnson; he had given our word. It not only committed the Kennedy Administration more deeply to Diem and Vietnam, attached Washington a little more firmly to the tar baby of Saigon, escalated the rhetoric, b...

When Ridgway left for Korea in December 1950, he had been Deputy Chief of Staff for over a year. During that period the State Department had on several occasions asked for increased military aid for the French, and each time Ridgway had bitterly opposed it. To him, it was like throwing money down a rathole, and a bad rathole at that. He did not have much sympathy for the French cause; after all, they had never sent their own draftees to Indochina—just mercenaries, as he called them. Part of his reasoning was very old-fashioned: he thought we were supposed to be an anticolonial power and this was a colonial war, absolutely contrary to the traditions we said we espoused. If Radford believed that politically we had to stop Red China from sweeping over the entire peninsula, then Ridgway was a man of different political convictions; he thought the region was important but not vital, and he believed in diversity; he did not think that the Communists could long hold control over such diverse peoples. They might try, he thought, but it would not work well. It could not be done. He was, in effect, a military extension of Kennan.

Now, in April 1954, with the pressure mounting, and knowing that bombing would lead to ground troops, Ridgway was very uneasy. He knew Radford wanted in, and he suspected Dulles wanted to test the New Look. Ridgway had always thought the New Look both foolish and dangerous. Wars were settled on the ground, and on the ground the losses were always borne by his people, U.S. Army foot soldiers and Marines. It was his job to protect his own men. So he sent an Army survey team to Indochina to determine the requirements for fighting a ground war there. What he wanted was the basic needs and logistics of it. He sent signalmen, medical men, engineers, logistics experts. What were the port facilities, the rail facilities, the road facilities? What was the climate like, which were the endemic diseases? How many men were needed? The answers were chilling: minimal, five divisions and up to ten divisions if we wanted to clear out the enemy (as opposed to six divisions in Korea), plus fifty-five engineering battalions, between 500,000 and 1,000,000 men, plus enormous construction costs. The country had nothing in the way of port facilities, railroads and highways, telephone lines. We would have to start virtually from scratch, at a tremendous cost. The United States would have to demand greater mobilization than in Korea, draft calls of 100,000 a month. Nor would the war be as easy as Korea, where the South Koreans had been an asset to the troops in the rear guard. It was more than like...

Whereas Eisenhower genuinely consulted the Congress, Johnson paid lip service to real consultation and manipulated the Congress. Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff had made a tough-minded, detailed estimate of what the cost of the war would be; eleven years later an all-out effort was made by almost everyone concerned to avoid determining and forecasting what the reality of intervention meant. In 1954 the advice of allies was genuinely sought; in 1965 the United States felt itself so powerful that it did not need allies, except as a means of showing more flags and gaining moral legitimacy for the U.S. cause. Eisenhower took the projected costs of a land war to his budget people with startling results; Johnson and McNamara would carefully shield accurate troop projections not only from the press and the Congress but from their own budgetary experts. The illusion of air-power advocates and their political allies that bombing could be separated from combat troops, which was allowed to exist in 1965, was demolished in 1954 by both Ridgway and Eisenhower.

If Ridgway was not consulted by President Johnson in 1965, perhaps it was because his views were already known. But in February 1968, when the great controversy raged over whether to limit intervention, he was called in by the President to discuss the war. And there was one moment which reflected the simplicity and toughness of mind which he and others had exhibited in 1954, and the fuzziness of the 1965 decision making. Ridgway was sitting talking with Johnson and Vice-President Humphrey when the phone rang. When Johnson picked it up, Ridgway turned to Humphrey and said there was one thing about the war which puzzled him. “What’s that?” Humphrey asked. “I have never known what the mission for General Westmoreland was,” Ridgway said. “That’s a good question,” said Humphrey. “Ask the President.” But when Johnson returned, he immediately got into one of his long monologues about his problems, pressures from every side, and the question was never asked.

Nothing, however, could have been more naÏve than Dulles’ statement that the United States would now enter Vietnam without a trace of colonialism, for the sides were already drawn. 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. The tradition of the old Vietnam had been loyalty to family alone; symbolically the Ngo Dinh Diem government was a family government, and by the time of his downfall Diem trusted only his family. From the very start, one Vietnam lived in the past and the other in the present.

This was reflected in the leadership. The North was led by a man who had expelled the foreigners, the South by a man who had been installed by foreigners. Ho Chi Minh had been in exile during the worst years of French colonialism because he could not speak openly and remain in Vietnam; Diem had gone into exile during the most passionate war of liberation because he did not approve of the Vietminh. Ho did not need foreign aid to hold power, his base had deep roots in the peasant society which had driven out foreigners. Diem could not have survived for a week without foreign aid; he was an American creation which fit American political needs and desires, not Vietnamese ones. By Vietnamese standards, there was little legitimacy; Die...

In the beginning there was little illusion about the legitimacy of the government, or the state, or its chances for survival. That illusion would come gradually, later on, for a commitment is a subtle thing, with a life of its own and a rhythm of its own. It may, as in the case of South Vietnam, begin as something desperately frail, when the chances for survival are negligible. For a while, oxygen is breathed in, mouth-to-mouth, at great effort but little cost, and then the very people who have been administering the oxygen, desperate to keep the commitment alive (not because they believe in any hopeful prognosis, but because they do not want to be charged with failing to try and give first aid), look up one day and find that there is indeed a faint pulse, that the patient is more alive than dead. But at this point they are not relieved of their responsibility; instead, for the first time the commitment really begins, and now they are charged with keeping it alive. It is a responsibility, it is real. Its death would mean genuine political repercussions.

Like water turning into ice, the illusion crystallized and became a reality, not because that which existed in South Vietnam was real, but because it became real in powerful men’s minds. Thus, what had never truly existed and was so terribly frail became firm, hard. A real country with a real constitution. An army dressed in fine, tight-fitting uniforms, and officers with lots of medals. A supreme court. A courageous President. Articles were written. “The Tough Miracle Man of Vietnam,” Life called him. “The bright spot in Asia,” the Saturday Evening Post said (“Two years ago at Geneva,” read the blurb for the latter, “South Vietnam was virtually sold down the river to the Communists. Today the spunky little Asian country is back on its feet thanks to a 'mandarin in a sharkskin suit who’s upsetting the Red timetable’ ”). A lobby for Diem began to emerge. Speeches were made in his honor. In 1956, in the modest words of Walter Robertson, Dulles’ Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs: “Among the factors that explain the remarkable rise of Free Vietnam from the shambles created by eight years of murderous civil and international war, the division of the country at Geneva, and the continuing menace of predatory Communism, there is in the first place the dedication, courage and resourcefulness of President Diem himself.” In all this there is a subtle change; the client state does not really come to life but the illusion does; as such, the proprietor state begins to...

The trouble was that after seven years, none of the American rhetoric, none of the gestures that the Americans were making to reassure Diem, had had any effect on the most important people in South Vietnam, the peasants.

(For a long time he had even refused to concede that a major insurgency was going on, since the very admission would have shown that his government was not perfect. Since he believed in his own rectitude, there could not be an insurgency against him.)

All of these major responses of the Kennedy Administration in the first year were based on two major premises: first, that the Communists were indeed a harsh and formidable enemy (if it was not a monolith, it was still treated as one) and that relaxation of tensions could only come once the Administration had proven its toughness, and second, that Kennedy’s political problems at home were primarily from the right and the center, that the left could be handled, indeed that it had nowhere else to go, and that it must accept the Administration’s private statements of good will and bide its time for the good liberal things which might one day come. The latter attitude, the belief in the essential political weakness of the liberal-left, encouraged the Administration in some of its harder-line activities and limited its inclination to look for diversity within the Communist world. If there were changes within the Communist world, Washington believed they were certainly not changes immediately apparent to most Americans, and this was politically crucial to the Administration. The Administration still felt itself under pressure to prove its own worth to centrists and conservative Americans, and it believed that liberal-left Americans would simply have to accept the Kennedy proposition that the Administration was by far the best they could hope for. Most of the key moves by Kennedy in 1961 reflected this attitude, including not just the decisions which followed the forthcoming Tayl...

Thus, in 1971, after the New York Times had published the Pentagon documents, which made many in those Administrations look very foolish, not the least of them Walt Rostow, who told a Times editor yes, he would write an article for the Op-Ed page, and then almost benignly added that he was concerned about one thing. It was not the printing of the Papers [he could understand that], but the split in the Establishment. The Establishment was very small, which was necessary, and it was in charge of a country which was very young and which could not make the right decisions itself, and thus unity within the Establishment was very important. They must stick together, they must not be divided, America needed the Times in the Establishment, that was the important point, and now they must work to heal the breach, to bring the Times back.)

If there was one other thing that bothered Walt’s colleagues on the professional level, it was the firmness of his belief in his own ideas (at a given time), a lack of healthy skepticism about them, a lack of reflectiveness and open-mindedness. His great strength was also his great weakness: a capacity to see patterns where previously none existed, to pull together diverse ideas and acts into patterns and theories. It was this which made him intellectually interesting and challenging but which made him dangerous as well because, some felt, he did not know when he had gone too far, when to stop, when the pattern was flimsier than he thought. If some doubted his wisdom, few doubted his enthusiasm, the energy of both the mind and the body, that Walt really wanted to use his mind. During the early days of his tour as head of the Policy Planning Council at State he went off to Latin America for a brief trip. On his return he announced to the startled assemblage of the Council that he now knew how you get to understand Latin Americans: you begin by understanding that in the first place they are Asians. “Oh, for God’s sake, Walt,” someone in the room told him, “why are you talking about something you know nothing about?”

Lucian Pye, a professor of political science at MIT, walked into a seminar, shuffled papers for a minute, looked at his class and finally said, “You know, you don’t sleep quite so well any more when you know some of the people going to Washington.”

There was an additional reason why Rostow did not fear confrontation in Vietnam, and that was an almost mystic belief in air power. He was convinced, indeed he knew, that we had an unbeatable weapon, that we could always fall back, even if reluctantly, on our real might, which was the gleaming force and potential of the U.S. Air Force. Perhaps all men tend to be frozen in certain attitudes which have been shaped by important experiences in their formative years; for young Rostow, one of the crucial experiences had been picking bombing targets in Europe. It had been a stirring time, a time when he was of great service to his country. He had believed in strategic bombing, in the vital, all-important role it played in bringing victory during World War II, that it had broken the back of the German war machine. 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). Rostow remained uniquely oblivious to counterarguments about bombing; if anything, he believed that we had not used enough of it against the German oil depots and electric gri...

What came as a greater surprise was Taylor’s view of what this war was all about. He assigned Lansdale the task of looking into the possibility and cost of erecting a huge fence which would run the length of the country and stop infiltration. For years, Lansdale, along with other knowledgeable Americans in Vietnam, had mocked the French Expeditionary Forces for their preoccupation with static outposts, what the Americans considered a Maginot Line mentality; now as he took the assignment from Taylor he thought to himself, Here we are, trying to create our own Maginot Line. It was, he thought as the mission progressed, all like that, trying to refit conventional ideas for an unconventional war. What it would amount to, he thought, was taking an army that was dubious in battle and making it more mobile, avoiding the real social and political causes for its military failures.

The Joint Chiefs wanted to put some troops into South Vietnam, not so much to engage in combat as to show American firmness (not realizing, of course, that in the particular rhythm of the war, if the Americans upped the ante, so would Hanoi and the Vietcong). Presumably the number would be low, though it was not specified. There was surprisingly little discussion of whether or not the troops would go into combat, though the impression was given that they would not, that they would be there to prevent combat rather than join it, to show our intent to Hanoi and to the Communists, thus automatically de-escalating the other side’s intentions in the area. As much as anything else, this proposal reflected JCS needs elsewhere. At that point it wanted to build up forces, particularly in the depleted strategic reserve, and if troops were ticketed, being used, in fact, in Southeast Asia, that fact would be a powerful bit of evidence for more troops needed at home. In addition, the JCS liked the idea of the precedent involved. It wanted to have a foot in the door in Vietnam; just in case the war grew larger, it would be ready. There would be a logistic base in Saigon, and the legal rights would be cleared for more. You could start with a small commitment; it was always easy to increase it. It was a case of an institution automatically wanting to expand and to feed itself. All institutions do their thing; in the case of the military and generals, wanting troops is their thing.

The Vietcong troops were well led, and believed deeply in their cause; in contrast, the government troops were made of the same raw material but their leadership was bad. 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. As in China, it was a modern army against a feudal one, though this was not perceived by Western eyes, particularly Western military eyes, which saw that the ARVN was well equipped, with radios, airplanes, artillery and fighter planes, and that the Vietcong had virtually nothing, except light infantry pieces. Western observers believed the reverse, believed that the ARVN was a legitimate and real army, and that the Vietcong, more often than not wearing only black pajamas, not even uniformed, were the fake army, the unreal one—why, they did not even seem to have a chain of command. It was ironic; the United States had created an army in its own image, an army which existed primarily on paper,...

Because the Taylor-Rostow mission profoundly changed and escalated the American commitment to Vietnam, and because all news reports at the time said that Taylor had recommended against combat troops, it is easy to underestimate the report. The fact is that Taylor, the dominant figure of the trip—he wrote the crucial report to Kennedy himself—did recommend combat troops. He recommended that up to 8,000 be sent, that more be sent if necessary, and most important, that the job could not be done without them. The recommendations shocked Kennedy to such an extent that Taylor’s report was closely guarded and in some cases called back (even people as directly concerned with the decision making as Walter McConaughy, the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, did not know that Taylor had recommended troops). What was made public was part of the report, the recommendations for the advisory and support part of the mission, and the recommendations for reform and broadening of Diem’s government. In contrast, Taylor’s actual cables barely mentioned reform; they dealt primarily with military problems and were extremely conventional in attitude.

The Taylor cables also outlined the dangers: our strategic reserve was already weak and we would be engaging U.S. prestige. If the first increment failed, it would be difficult to “resist the pressure to reinforce,” and if the ultimate mission were the closing of the border and the cleaning up of the insurgents, “there is no limit to our possible commitment,” unless “we attacked the source in the North.” It might increase tensions “and risk escalation into a major war in Asia.” Yet for all these drawbacks, Taylor reported, nothing would be so reassuring to the government and the people of South Vietnam as the introduction of U.S. troops (a crucial departure, the American assumption here, that the government and the people of South Vietnam were as one, that what Diem wanted was what “the people” wanted; a quick assumption which haunted American policy makers throughout the crisis). It would not have to be a large force, but it must be more than a token. It must be significant. It would help morale because it would show resistance to a Communist takeover.

These troops would not be used to clear the jungles and forests of Vietnam, a task still left to ARVN, but they could fight to protect themselves and the areas in which they lived, and they would give CINCPAC an advance party for SEATO planning (something in there for everybody). As part of the general reserve, they could be employed against main-force VC units, so in effect their use would depend on how eager the other side was to contest our presence. 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.)