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

by David Halberstam

In April the military arm of MACV was asked to do an estimate for Westmoreland on the enemy capacity for reinforcement; when the assignment was given, no one knew what the answer would be. But when Colonel William Crossen, one of the top intelligence officers, put it together he was appalled: the number of men that Hanoi could send down the trails without seriously damaging its defenses at home was quite astonishing. The North was very small but turned out to have a very large army. When Crossen came up with his final figure he could not believe it, so he checked it again, being even more conservative in the use of enemy figures, and still he was staggered by what he found; the other side had an amazing capacity and capability of reinforcing. When he brought the study to Westmoreland’s staff and showed the figure to a general there, he looked at it and said that it was impossible. Not impossible at all, answered Crossen, checked and double-checked. “Jesus,” said the general, “if we tell this to the people in Washington we’ll be out of the war tomorrow. We’ll have to revise it downward.” So Crossen’s figures were duly scaled down considerably, which was a good example of how the Army system worked, the staff intuitively protecting the commander from things he didn’t want to see and didn’t want to hear, never coming up with information which might challenge what a commander wanted to do at a given moment.