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

by David Halberstam

Sarris’ findings were absolutely wrong, they claimed, but even more important, they questioned the right of State even to produce such a report. State must not trespass onto the military’s area. After one particularly bitter assault by the military, when McNamara carried the ball and Hilsman received little support from his superiors, and when the report clearly was an embarrassment to Rusk, McNamara scribbled a note to Rusk saying: “Dean: If you promise me that the Department of State will not issue any more military appraisals without getting the approval of the Joint Chiefs, we will let this matter die. Bob.” (The note, so revealing of the period is now framed and hangs in the living room of one of the dissenters from that period.) Rusk was of course uneasy with this kind of estimate, anyway, not so much because it was pessimistic, since he had grave doubts himself, but because he was a strict chain-of-command man himself and did not like State’s getting into the Defense area; in a question involving the military he had an instinct to give primacy to Defense, and not to cause problems.

That particular meeting would not help Sarris’ career; he would be known thereafter by the military as the “coup-plotter,” and he would never rise in the Department. In 1969 one of the bright young State Department officers on Vietnam whose own career had been helped by Vietnam would find that a reporter was going to interview Sarris about the 1963 period. “Sarris?” he said. “Lew Sarris? Why him? He seems to me to be a pathetic figure; why, he sits in the very same office and does the very same thing that he did in 1962.” Which was true; he still sat there years later, still making the estimates, which were still rejected and disputed; others came and were usually wrong and had their careers advanced; Sarris was right and remained there. As for Hilsman, he was bouncy, full of himself then, but someone sitting there and watching the faces of McNamara and the military would think that this was a bright and bumptious young man, and hope for his own sake that his protectors stayed around to protect him.

As for McNamara, he held to his statistics, though much later, in 1967, he would change and convert to dovishness. When he did, he went through a personal crisis. He would confide to friends that if they had only known more about the enemy, more about the society, if there had only been more information, more intelligence about the other side, perhaps it would never have happened; though of course one reason there was so little knowledge about the enemy and the other side was that no one was as forceful as he was in blocking its entrance into the debates.

Nolting returned in mid-July for one last chance as ambassador. Those were very unhappy days. Nolting found Diem uncommunicative and unresponsive; Nolting, who had acquiesced to Diem on so many things in order to have money in the bank for just such an occasion as this, now found that he had little influence after all. If he was alienated from Diem, so he was separated from his own embassy. Trueheart he accused of disloyalty, but not just Trueheart, also Rufus Phillips in the strategic hamlet program, Mecklin at USIA, the AID (Agency for International Development) people, and many of the CIA people. His only allies now were the military people. The others in the embassy were sympathetic: they liked him personally, they knew how hard he had worked and the odds that had been against him, the personal sacrifice he had made, but it no longer worked, if indeed it had ever worked. Now that it had failed, everyone but Nolting accepted it, and there was a certain pain for him in watching his unwillingness to let go. His last days there were particularly painful; the Nhus, exploiting his loyalty, involved him in a bogus ceremony designed to identify them with the Americans. It was an Orwellian scene: all the strategic hamlets in the country had allegedly competed for the honor of being named after Nolting; they had written essays, describing what the ambassador had done for their country. The winning hamlet had been chosen. Nolting would now visit it. He tried to get out of it; the...

Later, when the principals gathered in Washington, there were second thoughts among some of them, particularly as each learned that some of the others had misgivings (it was a stunning example of how the domino theory worked if not with nations in Southeast Asia, then certainly with high government officials who wanted to sense which way the wind was blowing and did not want to be caught alone going against it).

At a high-level meeting on August 31, McNamara emphasized that the most important thing was to reopen channels of communication with the Diem government; Rusk talked again of the need to regird the anti-Communist forces, to get rid of the Nhus, and to prevent Diem from striking against his top military officers. At the meeting the burden of the case against the regime was borne by Paul Kattenburg, the young State Department officer who had worked in Vietnam for many years in the fifties. He was at this point chairman of the Interdepartmental Working Group on Vietnam and more than anyone in Washington knowledgeable about the country. The Vietnamese people loomed large in his assessments, and he had a real feeling for the fabric of the society there. He had once believed there was a right way to make our policy work; now he felt Diem was hopeless and had begun to doubt that it could be done at all. When Rusk suggested that there was no chance of the coup now, Kattenburg was not so sure, he thought it was almost too soon after one very inflexible policy, and that more time and more gestures were needed. He quoted Lodge as saying that if the Americans tried to live with the Diem regime, with what Lodge termed its sense of false promises, its bayonets on the streetcorners, then the United States would be forced out in six months. Then Kattenburg summed up; he had known Diem for ten years and the story had always been the same, one disappointment after another, always Diem had f...

Kattenburg was quickly challenged by Max Taylor. What did Kattenburg mean by “forced out of Vietnam in six months”? He answered that in six months, as it became more and more obvious that the Western side was losing the war, more and more Vietnamese would go over to the Vietcong (by the rules of the game set by McNamara, he was not allowed to say what he really thought, which was that the war was probably lost already, that the military’s optimistic estimates were illusory, that it was far later than anyone thought; State could not challenge Defense estimates). Nolting took issue with Kattenburg. Although he allowed as how Kattenburg knew the cities, and yes, this political protest was taking place in the cities, and Diem was slipping in the cities among the intelligentsia, but out in the countryside, where the war was being fought, it had little effect, out there the people faced reality, and out there we were winning the war. At which point Rusk added that what Kattenburg had said was speculative, and anyway, one thing was clear, we would not leave Vietnam until the war was over and won, and the United States would not support a coup. To this McNamara agreed.

Kennedy wanted to rebuild the Joint Chiefs with younger men who were, if not directly loyal to him, at least cut more in his mold; Taylor was willing to do the same thing. (Taylor and McNamara were pushing for younger officers, switching the criterion for promotion, leaving busted careers in their wake. Men who one day had been too young for their next assignment would wake up and find themselves too old for it.)

And then, of course, Taylor had to contend with an instinct (particularly among the Air Force and Navy people) to use force in any situation, and failing in the first dose of force, to use more force, then more force.

Now, with the problems of failure on Vietnam closing in, the urgency of what to do next, he would be in a different spot. Vietnam was a reflection of his military strategy (however incomplete) at this point; it was an experiment in a new kind of limited war. But if the Taylor-Rostow strategy failed, then what? Other generals would take over who were not so civilized, not so committed to the Administration, not so appalled by the specter of nuclear weapons. The Air Force, for instance, believed its weapons, its bombs, its nukes could do it all, and it was always ready to go. Thus the Air Force by itself, and with its friends on the Hill (since, of the three services, the Air Force required the most hardware, the biggest contracts, the closest links with industry, it had the most connections on the Hill), moved the center of the debate over a few notches to the right, which led generals like Taylor to believe that when they gave in a little on the use of force, the important thing was not so much that they were acquiescing, but that they were holding the line against something worse, protecting us from the Air Force with its nukes and missiles. So if Vietnam collapsed, it would pose this particular problem of what to do next. If limited force had failed, would there be more pressure for greater force? Taylor had been able to try out his own concept of the limited commitment to stop the brush-fire war by putting Paul Harkins there, not because Harkins was the ablest general a...

In September, with the bureaucracy as divided as ever, Kennedy decided to try and get information from both Lodge and Harkins on a long list of specific questions. The request was very much the President’s and he asked that Hilsman compose it. The cable itself reflected a vast amount of doubt about the progress of the war. Eventually the answers from both men came in: the Lodge report was thoroughly pessimistic, while the Harkins report was markedly upbeat, filled with assurance, but also bewildering because it seemed to be based on the debate in Washington rather than the situation in Saigon. In it, the puzzled White House aides found a reference by Harkins to an outgoing cable of Taylor’s. They checked out the number of the Taylor cable, but could find no record of it in the White House. Sensing that something was wrong, one of the White House aides called over to the Pentagon for a copy of the Taylor cable, giving the number, though being careful to call a low-ranking clerk, not someone in the Chairman’s office who might have understood the play. The young corporal was very co-operative and came up with the answer the aides wanted, a remarkably revealing cable from Taylor to Harkins explaining just how divided the bureaucracy was, what the struggle was about, saying that the Hilsman cable did not reflect what Kennedy wanted, that it was more Hilsmanish than Kennedyish, and then outlining which questions to answer and precisely how to answer them.

Later the civilians asked to have a set of cable machines in the White House so this sort of thing could be monitored, and the military readily agreed. The next day some fourteen machines were moved into the White House basement, grinding out millions of routine words per day, and the civilians knew that they were beaten by the sheer volume, that it was impossible to monitor it all. They surrendered and the machines were moved out, almost as quickly as they had been moved in.

It was Robert Kennedy who had been primarily responsible for the counterinsurgency enthusiasm. Toughness fascinated him; he was not at ease with an America which had flabby waistlines. The enemy both at home and abroad was determined; we had to match that determination. If he worked until midnight, and on driving home saw the lights on in the offices of Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters Union, then he turned around and drove back to his office. The standard by which he judged men was how tough they were. Early in the Administration, when he was overwhelmed with speaking requests and was turning almost all of them down, he had received one from a Polish group. He immediately seized on it: “Let’s do this one. I like the Poles, they’re tough.” He had been a major force in promoting the career of Maxwell Taylor and diminishing that of Chester Bowles; his relationship with Taylor was different from his relationship with other men in the Administration. With almost everyone else his questioning was hard and relentless; he did not really respect age or title. But with Taylor he was markedly uncritical; whatever Taylor said went through almost unchallenged. He was genuinely in awe of Taylor’s war record, the fact that he had dropped by parachute into Normandy and that he had run a special mission for Eisenhower behind the Italian lines. For Bobby Kennedy those were real credentials.

There were several qualities which set him apart from others in office. The first was total confidence in his relationship with the President. The second was an almost absolute insistence on being well and honestly briefed. The third was a capacity, indeed an instinct, to see world events not so much in terms of a great global chess game, but in human terms. As such he retained his common sense, it was at least as strong as his ideology (when others were talking about a surgical air strike against Cuba during the missile crisis, he said very simply that he did not want his brother to be the Tojo of the 1960s). Out of all of this came the final characteristic, the capacity to grow and change and to admit error. In 1962 he had stopped at the Saigon airport long enough to say that we would stay in Vietnam until we won, but he had also learned a very important lesson: that most of the official reporting was mythological. He was supposed to be briefed at the airport terminal by the top members of the mission, all of whom, in one another’s presence, assured him that everything was just fine, everything was on target. “Do you have any problems?” he asked. No, said everyone in unison, there were no problems. He looked at them somewhat shocked by the response. “No problems,” he said, “you’ve really got no problems? Does anyone here want to speak to me in private about his problems?” And then one by one they talked to him at length and it all came pouring out, a brief and instructiv...

As his skepticism grew about how well the war was going he would ask, “Do you think those people really want us there? Maybe we’re trying to do the wrong thing?” His common sense, among other sensibilities, was offended by it. Now in the early fall of 1963, sitting in these meetings, listening to one side say that it could not be done with Diem, and the other side say that there was no one but Diem, he was appalled. Perhaps, he said, this was the time to consider withdrawing. It was a brief moment, but he was focusing on the central question, which everyone else, for a variety of reasons, had avoided. Up to now the debate had always been on the peripheral questions, in large part because it was safer that way. By concentrating on Diem, the liberals could attack the policy without being necessarily accused of softness on Communism. Diem had proved himself illiberal, and that was why the policy was failing; going further than that was a tenuous thing and might arouse considerable opposition. A bureaucratic doubter could keep his bona fides only by saying that he was for the war and for South Vietnam; it was only Diem he was against. Perhaps it was symbolic that the first senior official who questioned the overall policy was Robert Kennedy, totally secure in his place in the Administration, and also secure in his credentials as an anti-Communist. The question he raised was not discussed; it was still too sensitive a point. Perhaps that was how he intended it, as a beginning, ...

Now it was Rufus Phillips’ turn, and his briefing was doubly important because it was the first informed frontal attack upon the military reporting, and also because it was given by a man who had a particularly good reputation in Vietnam, Lansdale’s own chosen legatee. If Lansdale had been the main figure of the Good Guy American philosophy in the fifties, Phillips was very much in his image. Recruited off the Yale campus by the CIA, he had been a part of the early Lansdale group, and had been in charge of having Vietnamese astrologers predict dark days for the Vietminh and happy days for Diem. 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. The Vietnamese now felt that their government had to change, and he agreed. As for General Krulak’s earlier statement that the political problems had not yet touched the Vietnamese officers, it was simply not true; but American officers were under direct orders not to talk to their Vietnamese counterparts about politics, and the Vietnamese knew this. So the testimony of American officers in the fi...

At this point Krulak interrupted him: the Americans in the field might not know about politics, but they knew whether or not the war was being won, and they said it was going well. Now Phillips made his direct attack on the military reporting. Yes, the war was going reasonably well in the areas north of Saigon, where there was little action. But in the Delta, where most of the fighting was taking place, it was going very badly. The Vietcong were taking over the Delta without a struggle; in the last few weeks, fifty hamlets had been overrun. What made this even worse, he said, was that the Buddhist crisis had not even reached the Delta yet. And, said Phillips, this was not the view just of his people, many Army officers felt the same way. In fact, Phillips had brought with him a report from the provincial adviser in Long An province, one of the most populated areas in the country. Phillips had stumbled on the report by accident: Earl Young, a civilian who was Phillips’ man there, had been reporting for some time that the Vietcong controlled 80 percent of this populous province. Young had told Phillips he was not alone in his pessimism; the provincial adviser (in this case an American major detailed to advising the province chief) agreed with him completely, and had in fact been reporting precisely this to MACV but had gotten no response from his superiors. The major had therefore turned over his reports to Earl Young, who turned them over to Rufus Phillips, who had suppleme...

Krulak immediately jumped Phillips. Phillips was putting his judgment ahead of General Harkins’, a senior military official, a man of seasoned judgment who had more people working for him, more information at his disposal, and who knew how to evaluate military reports. He, Krulak, would take General Harkins over Phillips any time (the implication in his voice was that Phillips was very young, thirty-three years old, at best a captain, and captains should not challenge generals). With Krulak going after Phillips, Harriman went after Krulak: Harriman said he was not surprised that Krulak was taking Harkins’ side—indeed he would be upset if he did not. Harriman said that he had known Krulak for several years and had always known him to be wrong, and was sorry to say it, but he considered Krulak a damn fool. When this storm had passed, Phillips finished: he wanted to say that despite what Krulak felt, the war was not being won militarily, and it was going badly....

In addition, in the turning around of Phillips, a bench mark had been passed. It was a symbol of Lansdale turning as well; the people who had invented Diem were now leading the assault against him. Too, it was a sign that the Good Guys, the Americans who thought there was a right way, a middle way of dealing with Vietnam if we had the right programs and did the right things, and who believed that the Vietnamese wanted us there, were beginning to despair. If they failed, and they were failing fast, desperate now to find, eight years later, some last-minute substitute for Diem, then there was a chance that American policy in Vietnam would be directed by people who felt we ought to be there whether t...

If the military had had their estimates punctured by Phillips at the National Security Council meeting, then the MACV officials made sure that those who did the puncturing would live to regret it. None other than General Richard Stilwell would lead a subsequent investigation, which was designed not to find out whether or not the Phillips charges were true, but instead to find out how Phillips and Young had got hold of the Long An report. For a time there was serious talk at the highest levels of MACV of charging Phillips and Young with security violations; however, that idea was dropped after Ambassador Lodge defended them. But the major who had written the report ...

In August this reporter did a major survey of the deteriorating military situation in the Mekong Delta. I had been called by two friends who were senior advisers to Vietnamese divisions and who were appalled by the collapse of the ARVN and the appearance of formidable new Vietcong battalions sweeping almost without opposition throughout the Mekong Delta. My story was published and told of big new beefed-up battalions of 600 and 1,000 men, very well armed with captured American weapons. The article suggested that the war was being lost and that the high-level optimism about the Delta was comparable to the French optimism that preceded their debacle at Dienbienphu. The story staggered the President, who was an avid newspaper reader, and who took journalists seriously. He asked the military to comment on it, and word was sent through channels from Taylor to General Krulak to General Harkins that this was particularly important, that it was bad enough to be taking heat because of the Buddhist crisis, but if the President thought the war was going poorly as well, the whole game might be over. (The story in the New York Times was so similar to the briefing then being given at the Pentagon by Lieutenant Colonel John Vann that though Vann had been out of Vietnam for several months and had not talked to me, serious thought was given to court-martialing him.) The assignment was given not to MACV’s intelligence section, but to its most gifted general, Dick Stilwell, who thereupon, wi...

After some protests against the trip by Lodge (resulting in an announcement that McNamara was going to Saigon at Lodge’s request), McNamara and General Taylor left on September 23 for Saigon. One of the things they were to investigate was the possibility of cutting down some of the U.S. aid projects as a symbol of disenchantment with the Ngo family. Inadvertently some of these programs had already been cut off, by a bureaucratic fluke. Though some of the civilians, including Lodge, had argued for it, Kennedy had held the line; he had not been prepared to take this first step until he was more sure that the Vietnamese military was at least one step ahead of him and was ready to replace Diem. But in early September at one high-level meeting the principals had been talking about whether or not to cut off commodity aid, when David Bell, who was head of AID and who was not regularly a high-level player, said rather casually that there was no point in talking about cutting off commodity aid, he had already cut it off. “You’ve done what?” said a startled President of the United States. “Cut off commodity aid,” Bell answered. “Who the hell told you to do that?” asked the President, since this was no small action; it could easily bring down a government. “No one,” said Bell. “It’s an automatic policy. We do it whenever we have differences with a client government.” And so the President sat there shaking his head, looking at Bell and saying, “My God, do you know what you’ve done?” (...

The report said in a rather revealing reference to American policy: “Our policy is to seek to bring about the abandonment of Diem’s repression because of its effect on the popular will to resist.” (Repression for repression’s sake was permissible, but repression which hurt the war effort was regrettable.)

“Correct” relations between the United States and Diem should be maintained, along with the search for contacts for what was termed “alternative leadership,” something Lodge badly wanted and was already gearing up to do. The request was typical of the policy and the frustrations and divisions and dishonesty of it all; it said in effect that the United States should look elsewhere for leadership and away from Diem even though the war was being won, and that the war was the only important thing. It was an assessment that the civilians would live to regret, since it would later appear that they had switched governments and helped topple a government which was still winning the war. They knew that this judgment was false, but they had never challenged it, because of their own previous wishful thinking, because of their inability to control their own bureaucracy, and because, above all, of a belief that telling the truth to the American people was unimportant. They—both Kennedys, Rusk, Lodge, Harriman, Hilsman, Trueheart, Forrestal—knew the war was being lost, but they never got it down on paper or into their own statements, or into their briefings with congressional leaders. A lie had become a truth, and the policy makers were trapped in it; their policy was a failure, and they could not admit it.

Someone questioning Bill Bundy, still at the Defense Department, about the wording and the dangers inherent in it, got a shrug. “I’m under orders,” he said. Taylor, he told others, wanted the reference to the troop withdrawals left in as a means of pushing the Vietnamese. Hilsman, asking McNamara about the wording, found him brusque, almost rude, and later, Hilsman said, when McNamara read the statement publicly, it was as if he were reading an ultimatum. The President himself was unhappy about it, but was fatalistic; he could have leaned on them and pushed for more, but he had a sense of the delicacy of the whole thing, that he had moved one key player, McNamara, considerably with this one mission, and McNamara had in a limited sense moved Taylor (though without truly changing him or opening him up; it was as if McNamara had dragged a reluctant Taylor a few gradations on the calibration of attitude). So Kennedy knew that if he were having troubles with his bureaucracy in moving them a notch or two at a time, they in turn were having troubles with their bureaucracy. As everything about Vietnam was compromised, so too was this report by McNamara and Taylor, but Kennedy was not that worried. He knew Vietnam was bad and getting worse, that he was on his way to a first-class foreign policy problem, but he had a sense of being able to handle it, of having time, that time was somehow on his side. He could afford to move his people slowly; too forceful a shove would bring a count...

Before he went to Saigon, Lodge had prepared himself fully in Washington, including long talks with Madame Nhu’s parents, who were highly critical of their daughter’s politics (her father, Tran Van Chuong, was ambassador to the United States and had resigned, along with the embassy staff, after the crackdown on the pagodas). Lodge felt that all the charges against the Ngo family were true, that Nhu could not be separated from Diem, that the war was being lost, that since there was going to be a coup anyway, the U.S. position should be to neither encourage it (except perhaps slightly; that is, by not discouraging it) nor thwart it. He predicted, accurately, to Washington, that Diem would make a request for U.S. help, and that the U.S. attitude should be that its capacities were far less than Diem’s. By mid-October Lodge had convinced the White House, which was in a receptive mood, that a coup was going to take place, led by the generals, unless the Americans openly betrayed them. He thought that it was all for the better, that the chances of a new government being far more effective than the old were at least even. In that he was right; in Saigon at least three major plots were still brewing, plus a counterplot by Ngo Dinh Nhu; it was no longer a question of a coup, but of which coup.

On November 1 the Saigon embassy and CIA predicted in their early reports to Washington that a coup would come that day; MACV, which was supposed to be the best-informed on what the Vietnamese military were doing, dissented and said it would not come (when the coup did take place, MACV called up the embassy and asked to have the cable killed).

In Washington almost everyone concerned had seen the coup against Diem as somewhat inevitable. Taylor, reflecting the position he and Harkins had created, had been the most reluctant. But there was one other figure strongly opposed to it, who had rumbled about it, disliked it and would have fought it, had he exercised the power. He did not exercise the power, and neither his opinion nor his opposition was taken very seriously; perhaps had the issue involved legislation on the Hill or a conflict in Texas politics the others might have paid serious attention to his dissent, but not in the field of foreign affairs, where he was considered particularly inept. His name was Lyndon B. Johnson. He had hated the coup against Diem from the very beginning. All this talk about coups. Cops-and-robbers stuff, he said, coups and assassinations. Why, he and Ralph Yarborough had their differences down in Texas but they didn’t go around plotting against each other, murdering each other. “Otto Passman and I, we have our differences, God knows he can slow up a lot of God’s good work for mankind,” he said, “but I don’t plan his overthrow.” In the summer, as others challenged the regime, Johnson had occasionally attended meetings and had defended it. The important thing, he had said, was to get on with winning the war. He felt genuine admiration for Diem as a man. Oh, he had his problems, but “in Texas we say that it’s better to deal with the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.” When ...

As summer ended and it became a question of going before the Senate with the treaty, the Administration was far from confident about congressional support (later the 80-19 vote would imply that it had been a piece of cake all along; the truth was that the balance had seemed quite fragile at the start, and a vote near the two thirds needed for ratification was really no victory; it was almost an incitement to enemies as much as a change in the Cold War).

Limited test ban treaty

For a brief moment after Diem’s death, Vietnamese officers were able to report honestly about what had happened in the war, what the situation was. The embassy was staggered under the impact of what was coming in from the field; the situation was far worse than it had expected, even in some of the more pessimistic quarters. There was, it turned out, no strategic hamlet program in the Delta to speak of; in many areas where the embassy had been reasonably confident, it turned out there had been few incidents precisely because the Vietcong totally controlled an area and did not need to launch any attacks. (As the reports came in, the Harkins-MACV line would immediately change to accept negative aspects of the reporting and claim that it had been going very well until the coup, but since then, the government had completely fallen apart and the war had started to go badly.)

He never delivered the report; in San Francisco he heard the news of the assassination in Dallas, and that Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Lodge asked the new President if he should simply return to Saigon; no, said Johnson, they ought to talk anyway. And so they met, and the message, that it was all bad in Vietnam, that hard decisions were ahead and not very far ahead, was delivered to a brand-new President, unsure of himself, unsure of the men around him, unsure of his relationship to the country, and the country’s acceptance of him. He was above all unsure of himself in foreign affairs, more suspicious of the world around him and of enemies than his predecessors.

(A few weeks later a group of reporters gathered to have dinner with Johnson at the home of Phil Potter of the Baltimore Sun, an old Johnson friend. The reporters asked various questions. Russell Baker, one of them, asked what the first thing was that had gone through Johnson’s mind as the shots were fired and Rufus Youngblood threw himself on Johnson. “That the Communists had done it,” Johnson said, and Baker would remember being shocked by the reply, it had seemed so primitive.)

If Vietnam was to be saved, Lodge said, it was Johnson who would have to make the tough decisions. “I am not going to lose Vietnam,” the new President answered. “I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.” Lodge then asked him what kind of political support he had. “I don’t think Congress wants us to let the Communists take over Vietnam,” Johnson answered. It was the first sign. There would not be many more for a while, but it was an instant response and an important one. But hard decisions on Vietnam were the last thing he wanted right away; he wanted first to help the nation (and himself) absorb the psychic shock it had just gone through (which he did by a whirlwind of activity), to establish as much continuity as possible, to hold on to the Kennedy men, not just the big Kennedy men at first, but all of them. (“I need you more than he did,” he would say, pressing them, pushing them, imploring them to stay. He invited the White House people, not just Bundy but many of them, to lunch, a friendly swim first, then everyone was marched over to the swimming pool, stripped down naked in a tiny dressing room, with the result that Robert Komer was ...

John Kennedy was dead. His legacy was a mixed one. He had come in at the latter part of the Cold War; at the beginning he had not challenged it, though he had, in the last part of his Administration, begun to temper it. On Vietnam his record was more than cloudy. More than any other member of his Administration, he knew the dangers of a deep U.S. involvement, the limits of what Caucasian troops could achieve on Vietnamese soil, and yet he had significantly deepened that involvement. He had escalated the number of Americans there to 16,900 at the time of his death, with more than 70 dead (each dead American became one more rationale for more dead Americans); more important, he had markedly escalated the rhetoric and the rationale for being there. Although he seriously questioned the wisdom of a combat commitment, and at the end had grave doubts about the viability of the counterinsurgency program, whether we should be there at all, he had never shown those doubts in public, from the rostrum of the bully pulpit. The only thing he had expressed doubts about was the Diem regime, that and little more. His successor had to deal not so much with Kennedy’s inner doubts so carefully and cautiously expressed, but with his public statements, all supportive of the importance and significance of Vietnam. In addition, his speeches and programs had raised the importance of Vietnam in American minds; his commitment had, by the publicity his Administration gave it, become that much more vi...

He had always feared the combat-troop idea; the French, he said repeatedly, had not been able to deal with the Vietnamese with 300,000 men, how could we? This was a political war; one could not produce military answers.

And certainly he had been burned in the past. He knew the limits of force, and he knew the limits of what the generals recommended, and the limits of institutional wisdom. What was it he had said to Harriman at the time of Laos: It’s political, if they don’t want me to go to war in Cuba ninety miles from home, how can I go to war 12,000 miles away? And yet, and yet . . . More skeptical, more subtle than his public pronouncements, he had nonetheless failed to deal with Vietnam as a political problem. His response, if not combat troops, had been highly operational and functional and programmatic. He had worked to conceal the truth about Vietnam from the public and had markedly increased the American commitment, and he had severely limited the hand of a fresh, unsure successor. And he had passed on to that successor the brilliant, activist can-do Kennedy team, a team somewhat tempered in the past by Kennedy’s own skepticism, but which now found itself harnessed to the classic can-do President. He had deepened the commitment there, and he had, in a way, always known better. He had preached, both in his book and in his speeches, about the importance of political courage, but his Administration had been reasonably free from acts of courage, such as turning around the irrationality of the China policy. In this most crucial area the record was largely one of timidity.

So it was a lost year; opportunities were lost for possible political negotiation, of re-evaluation of American attitudes, of perhaps convincing the American public that it wasn’t worth it, that the Vietnamese themselves did not care that much about the war. Instead of that, they held the line. They did not think time was working against them and decided not to deal with Vietnam in 1964, but to keep their options open. They would not be entrapped, they would make their decisions carefully and in their own time (they were above all functional, operational, tactical men, not really intellectuals, and tactical men think in terms of options, while intellectuals less so; intellectuals might think in terms of the sweep of history and might believe that twelve months would make little difference in Vietnam, that if the sweep of history was bad in 1964, it would probably, if anything, be a good deal worse in 1965). They could, they thought, control events, but it was all an illusion.

Above all, there was no real investigation of what kind of a deal might be worked out with Hanoi and the Vietcong, what neutralization might mean. So a year for political exploration was lost, and the reason for this was to be found in the character and outlook of the Secretary of State of the United States, a man who believed in force, who believed in the commitment, who believed that the proper role for the State Department would come after the military had turned the war around and State was charged with negotiating a sound peace, and who believed that the Secretary should defer to the President, should not be a strong figure in his own right. Where a Harriman or a Ball might have seized the initiative, might have begun his own explorations for peace, might have decided that politically Vietnam was hopeless, and therefore militarily as well, Rusk was content to wait, to let events come to him. He was convinced that the military estimates were accurate, that the generals could achieve what they said they could. He was a forceful, determined, hard-working, intelligent man who was in charge of the political aspects of American policy, and he would have made a very great Secretary of Defense, it was his natural constituency. He did not push negotiations in that period because he did not believe in them, and he feared that the very idea of negotiations would make the weak fabric of Saigon even weaker.

Dean Rusk hated to challenge the military on its needs and its requests because he feared a State-Defense split such as had existed between Dean Acheson and Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, and he would do almost anything to avoid it. In particular, he did not like to be out front on a policy, and he was content to let McNamara surge into the vacuum of leadership, poach on his terrain. All of this was the bane of his subordinates at State, who again and again, when they heard of some projected Defense policy for Vietnam, would go to Rusk and protest it, trying to get him to intervene, to limit it all. Very rarely would they succeed even to the extent of getting Rusk to call McNamara and bring the matter up, and when he did even this, he was usually brushed aside by an assertive and confident McNamara. Thus in 1965 when State heard that the military was about to use massive B-52 bombing raids on Vietnam, subordinates went to Rusk and pleaded with him to block the bombing; its effect in Vietnam was dubious and its effect throughout the rest of the world was likely to be disastrous. They had argued forcefully with him and finally Rusk had picked up the phone and called McNamara. They listened as Rusk relayed their doubts: “Bob, some of the boys here are uneasy about it.” Was it really necessary, he asked, he hated to bother McNamara on a question like this . . . Then Rusk was silent and they could almost visualize McNamara at the other end crisply reassuring Rusk. And then...

Many of his critics, the ones in the Kennedy Administration, talked about his imminent departure and denigrated him, but they left after their two years, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes not so voluntarily, to write their books, while Rusk remained. Always the professional. It was an important part of him, that foreign affairs was a profession and he was a professional, a serious man doing serious things. He had studied at it all those years, apprenticed at it under the great men, Marshall, Acheson, Lovett, worked his way up in State, where his rise was nothing less than meteoric (his detractors forgot that at a time right after World War II when the competition at State was ferocious, Rusk rose more quickly than anyone else in the Department). Then he was briefly out of government, went into the shadow-cabinet world of the foundations, and then back to Washington, back to the beloved profession, a chance to hold the torch passed not so much by Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy as by Marshall, Acheson and Lovett, hold it and pass it on to someone else, eight years later, with the world in the same condition, probably not any better, but hopefully no worse, that was all he asked, he would say. No better, no worse.

Foreign affairs was something special, it was filled with pitfalls for well-meaning idealists. A brief scene: 1962. The Soviets had apparently resumed testing. Kennedy was trying to decide whether to test again. Adlai Stevenson asked what would happen if the United States did not test. Jerome Wiesner answered that American weapons were better, so that if there was a delay in the resumption of testing, what he called a benefit of the doubt delay, it would not make much difference. Then Stevenson (would-be Secretary of State, the man for whom in 1960 Rusk had served as the Scarsdale chairman of “Citizens for Stevenson,” Rusk’s highest political office) said that perhaps the United States ought to take a small risk in the strategic balance on a question like this, that it ought to try for moral leadership. Rusk interjected at this point: “I wouldn’t make the smallest concession for moral leadership. It’s much overrated.” A young White House aide remembered the conversation, which shocked him, and from then on always thought of Rusk in that context; he thought that when Rusk died that should be inscribed on his tombstone, his epitaph.

A controlled man. Always patient. An extremely good diplomat in at least the limited sense of the word, that is, being diplomatic with other human beings. He would go up to the United Nations every year to meet the vast hordes of foreign ministers come to the opening session, meeting with each one, handling them well, believing that his aides, who thought that this particularly thankless task should go to an underling, were wrong (just as he thought they were wrong in 1962 when he refused to forgo presiding at one of the two huge diplomatic dinners given by the Secretary of State each year to go to Nassau, where Kennedy was meeting with Harold Macmillan to discuss U.S. and European nuclear defense systems. He sent George Ball in his place, instead of going to Nassau himself and letting Ball handle the dinner, which gave McNamara a chance to play too large—and clumsy—a role at Nassau. Those who knew the role of the Secretary believed, first, that it was all too typical of his deference to Defense, and second, that Rusk, more cautious, more thoughtful and more reflective than McNamara, might have stopped the decisions of Nassau, decisions which encouraged De Gaulle to go it alone in Europe and keep England out of the Common Market). When he met all the foreign ministers, he gave each equal time, showing the physical stamina of an old workhorse, great endurance, and always that control. Never, if possible, public or private nakedness of man or spirit or ideas, even at what ma...

He was a modest man: a symbol, in personal style, with the control and the sense of the adversity of life, the discipline needed to meet that adversity, of a passing era. You played by the rules of the game and the rules were very strict, you did not indulge the whim of your own personality, you served at the whim and will of those above you. Dean Rusk did not, so to speak, do his thing. He was the product of an era, and a particularly poor area and harsh culture where exactly the opposite behavior was respected and cherished: the compromising and sacrificing of your own will and desire and prejudices for the good of others, the good of a larger force. Sacrifice was important, and the very act of sacrifice was its own reward. All this was a part of him; he was, the men around him thought, a true Calvinist.

Rusk was, in his way, something of a hired hand to these great institutions. His upbringing had taught him to serve, not to question (which immediately set him apart from many of the Kennedy people who had been propelled by their propensity to question everything around them). Once, in an interview in Georgia, Rusk talked of the traits instilled in him by a Calvinist father. He defined it as a “sense of the importance of right and wrong which was something that was before us all the time. I think there was a sense of propriety, a sense of constitutional order, a sense of each playing his part in the general scheme of things, with a good deal of faith and confidence, with a passionate interest in education . . .” He did not question these institutions; they had become what they were not by happenstance but because wise men who had thought a long time had deliberately fashioned them that way; nor did he severely question their current attitudes, which again had not arisen by happenstance; indeed he found American and Western institutions admirable in contrast to the disorder which existed in the rest of the world. He was part of that generation which felt gratitude for what was offered him.

Rusk remembered going to the funeral of his grandmother as a little boy. Funerals for some families in those days were noisy affairs, the deceased mourned loudly, the love and loss measured by the amount of weeping and moaning. The Rusk family was different; it asked the mourners not to cry, and the neighbors, puzzled, asked why and a member of the Rusk family answered, “We feel it inside.” We feel it inside. Some fifty years later Dean Rusk would, perhaps not surprisingly, cable his ambassadors to stop using the word feel in their cables; he was not interested in what they felt. When he was assaulted by the Kennedy people, by the liberals, by the intelligentsia, pilloried, he always turned the other cheek. We feel it inside. Endure pain, endure insult, it is right to do so: if you have been faithful to your beliefs and your heritage, then all will right itself. Rusk and Dulles, both moralists; Dulles spouting his moralism publicly, almost flagrantly, preaching it from his international rostrum; Rusk feeling it perhaps even more deeply, keeping it inside.

As a young boy he had dreams that took him beyond Cherokee County; even then he was fascinated by the military. During World War I Dean, not yet ten years old, and Roger would cut out pictures of soldiers from newspapers and paste them on cardboard. Thousands of them, Roger would recall. Roger and Dean would dig thirty-foot trenches and follow all the battle plans. “There wasn’t a rich kid in town who had as many soldiers as we did,” said Roger Rusk, adding, “What people don’t understand about Dean is how deep are his military inclinations. It’s part of our Anglo-Saxon heritage. The South always had a military disposition.” That tradition is very real. The South is filled with minor and major military academies, and produces an abnormally high percentage of career officers and Medal of Honor winners. This was also part of Rusk’s life (both his grandfathers had fought in the Civil War, though on the Confederate side, and later when he had to fill in his security forms and was asked to list any relatives who had tried to overthrow the government of the United States, he would put down both their names).

In a nation so large and so diverse there are few ways of quantifying intelligence or success or ability, so those few that exist are immediately magnified, titles become particularly important; all Rhodes scholars become brilliant, as all ex-Marines are tough. To make it in America, to rise, there has to be some sort of propellant; sheer talent helps, but except in very rare instances, talent is not enough. Money helps, family ties and connections help; for someone without these the way to the power elite can seem too far, too hopeless to challenge. The connection is often a Rhodes scholarship. It is a booster shot that young men are not unaware of, that will make the rest of their lives a good deal easier. Doors will open more readily, invitations will arrive, the phone will ring (thus one young applicant brought before the Rhodes committee was asked at the end of his interview what he would choose for the epitaph on his tombstone. He quickly answered, “Rhodes scholar,” and got his grant).

He also spent a semester in Germany and watched Hitler coming to power. The most lasting memory of those Oxford years was a belief that the best-educated and most elite young men of England with their Oxford Union had given Germany the wrong impression, signaling that England would not fight; it was, he would tell friends later, the worst possible indication, and England might have been better served if the signal had reflected something closer to the heart and determination of the average workingman. The lesson was that the upper class was a little spoiled and faddish, that intellectuals and elites were not entirely to be trusted, that there was often greater shrewdness and wisdom in the mainstream.

Dean rusk

In the short-tempered world of New Delhi, where we both needed and hated the British, Rusk was the good guy, the man who handled the touchy tempers; he was smooth where Stilwell was abrasive. You talked with Rusk and you knew he was for the same things you were for. He hated the racism of the British, the arrogance of the colonialist, but in a divided atmosphere, he was someone everyone could talk to. He was the good soldier who was also a good diplomat, and these were not qualities which were lost upon that supreme soldier-diplomat George Catlett Marshall, public servant personified. No one grasped like Marshall the vast complexities of the war, and the political problems as well; he was also aware of the coming of the United States as a superpower and of the future decline of the British, aware of the need to harness the British potential and yet to understand their limits without offending them. It was not by chance that he had reached down and chosen Dwight D. Eisenhower, that general who was the most subtle politician, as his Supreme Commander in Europe, a man brilliant at synthesizing the work of others, extracting their best qualities, and controlling his own anger (so good, in fact, at controlling his own rages when need be that years later, when Joe McCarthy slandered George Marshall and called him a traitor, Ike, fine diplomat, good pol, for the good of the party and the Republican crusade, swallowed his pride and loyalty and excised criticism of McCarthy and def...

Rusk was a brilliant expositor; he had a genius for putting down brief, cogent and forceful prose on paper—a rare and much needed quality in government. There was no descriptive, flowery writing, but brief, incisive action cables for men who, already overburdened by words, had too little time. He had been virtually discovered as a writer through the cables he sent back from that theater, and after a while, in the nerve ends of the Pentagon, people began to talk about this young officer out there. General George (Abe) Lincoln, a West Point man who was also a Rhodes scholar and a key man in that special underground world of military intellectuals teaching at the Point, spotting talent, making sure that it was promoted into key slots, had been impressed by the Rusk cables and he asked a friend who this Rusk was, he seemed like a hell of a man. “You don’t know Rusk?” the other officer answered. “I thought you were at Oxford together. Why, Rusk is a Rhodes scholar.” Then Lincoln, who was a talent scout for Marshall, began to pay closer attention and Rusk became singled out. Lincoln soon decided that Rusk’s reports were the best there were, which was quite an accolade, since the competition was very stiff; Bedell Smith, after all, was writing for Ike from Europe. Toward the end of the war Lincoln decided that they would need Rusk on some of the upcoming political problems, so he persuaded the Delhi headquarters to let Rusk come back to join a very special political-military grou...