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May 8 - May 30, 2025
because he was acceptable to all factions. Independence and ability, rather than being the good corporate man, he felt, should bring success in government, and besides, he simply was not constituted to be a good, obedient corporate figure.
so now he began, first by writing a memo to Rusk, McNarama and Bundy expressing his doubts, and expecting that Bundy would pass the memo on to the President. But to Ball’s surprise the memo did not reach Johnson, so the next time Ball passed his memo to Bill Moyers, the bright young assistant of Johnson’s who showed his own doubts on Vietnam largely by encouraging other doubters to speak and by trying to put doubters in touch with one another. Moyers passed the memo to the President,
He was in effect choosing to see that which everyone had decided not to see.
And to Ball, the arguments of Mac Bundy and Taylor that we must bomb to shore up the morale of the South Vietnamese because the government was so frail that it would otherwise collapse was foolishness of a high order. It was all the more reason not to commit the power and reputation of the United States to something that weak.
He pointed out that we did not necessarily control the rate, the intensity and the scale of the war.
Ball made his dissent, and he made it powerfully, and if he was not changing the men around him he was certainly affecting the President, touching those doubts which already existed in the President’s mind.
Sometime in the fall of 1964 Joe Alsop feared that he was, and set out to help clarify the way for the President. Hearing that George Ball was making a major dissent on Vietnam, Alsop wrote on November 23 that Ball’s “knowledge of Asia could be comfortably contained in a fairly small thimble.”
A majority of President Johnson’s chief advisers are certainly on the do-something side and the more able and courageous appear to favor doing something pretty drastic.
In Washington, Walter Lippmann would read those columns with a sick feeling and tell friends that if Johnson went to war in Vietnam, at least 50 percent of the responsibility would be Alsop’s;
The group had been instructed to come up with various options, but those concerning negotiation had been moved aside, and the options were all ones of force (there had been one proposal of the civilians, which was a fraudulent use of force, and was based on the instability in Saigon and the fear of McCarthyism here at home. It was to launch a short, intense bombing campaign, show that it had no effect on the South, then to blame the South for its own instabilities and to get out. It was in effect a flash of power and a retreat. The Chiefs immediately vetoed it).
In the final recommendation to the working group, the experts forcefully challenged the Rostow thesis that Hanoi would succumb to the bombing in order to protect its new and hard-won industrial bases.
With this Ball finished; he had given the pure Rusk line, a view that he could not in his own heart disagree with more.
But De Gaulle interrupted him: it was hopeless, and France would not be part of any escalation; the United States would fight alone.
De Gaulle smiled and said, “Are you finished?” “Yes,” answered Goldberg. “No one has asked me my opinion, but there are some things I would like to say. First of all, you must pull out,” the French leader said. “But won’t it go Communist?” Goldberg asked, playing his part. “Yes, it will go Communist,” answered De Gaulle. “But isn’t that against us?” said Goldberg. “Yes,” answered De Gaulle. “But it will be a messy kind of Communism.”
Those damn conservatives are going to sit in Congress and they’re going to use this war as a way of opposing my Great Society legislation. People like Stennis and Gross. They hate this stuff, they don’t want to help the poor and the Negroes but they’re afraid to be against it at a time like this when there’s been all this prosperity. But the war, oh, they’ll like the war.
know what they’ll say, they’ll say they’re not against it, not against the poor, but we have this job to do, beating the Communists. We beat the Communists first, then we can look around and maybe give something to the poor.”
In Saigon in early 1965 the CIA completed two massive intelligence estimates on the situation in Vietnam and the possibilities for the future. The man in charge of them for the Agency was an experienced analyst who had spent more than ten years working on the country and who had been consistently prophetic about events. Now in his estimates he predicted that the Vietcong, and in particular the North Vietnamese, had an enormous capacity to escalate if the United States bombed. Not only that, but on the basis of everything known about them in the past, their responses to Western pressure, it was
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This explained Taylor’s fury two weeks later when Nguyen Khanh and the young Turks, including Air Marshal Ky, dissolved the High National Council, a group of civilian elders, and made a large number of political arrests during the night.
They were lieutenants at best, these young kids, running around playing at governing a country. All the veneer, the idea that they were really sovereign, had disappeared and he treated them as he really felt, that they were junior officers in a kids’ army, and he read them out. “Do all of you understand English? I told you all clearly at General Westmoreland’s dinner we Americans were tired of coups. Apparently I wasted my words. Maybe this is because something is wrong with my French because you evidently didn’t understand.
In regard to recommendations for large-scale bombing: I have never felt that this war will be won from the air and it seems to me that what is much more needed and would be more effective is a larger and stronger use of rangers and Special Forces and Marines
even this late he was dubious about the bombing and he was not recommending combat troops; what he was suggesting was in fact more of the same, more irregular American units trying to stop guerrillas.
the decision makers were men from the successful areas of American life, they believed in the capacity of American production and technology to satisfy human needs; therefore the deprivation by bombing would have effect. It was particularly hard for them as a group to understand how very little effect something like bombing would have on revolutionary Asian Communist-nationalists, other than to make them more determined.
the bombing allowed them a rationale for thinking that it was not war, it was just bombing, a way increasingly in their own minds, of not going to war.
Walt was not exactly a joke, but he was not entirely a serious figure, either,
In discussing Vietnam, he was capable of telling aides that there was something worse than physical enslavement, that there was enslavement of the mind the way the Communists practiced it.
The Vietcong had recently captured two Americans, a captain and a sergeant, and had committed appalling atrocities against them, which was unusual because in the past, atrocities had been used regularly against the South Vietnamese but not against Americans.
John McNaughton, his chief deputy on Vietnam in 1964 and like his boss a great quantifier, outlined the reasons for going into Vietnam and escalating, and assigned 70 percent not to save dominoes, but to avoid a humiliating American defeat; the second, and in McNamara’s eyes—though not Rusk’s—less important reason was to keep Vietnam and other adjacent territory from the Chinese, and to that McNaughton assigned 20 percent; and finally the official reason, the one for the high school history books, to aid the South Vietnamese so that they could have a better life was given 10 percent.
McNamara had doubts about the bombing in his mind, but those doubts were not reflected in the meetings.
McNamara may have realized that there was an enormous element of chance to what he was proposing, that he was only for it 60-40, but it seemed at the meetings that he was for it 100 percent. There was never anyone better at a meeting; it was a performance, really—programmed, brilliantly prepared, the right points fed in, in just the right way. It was done without emotion, that was a key point, it always seemed so objective and clear; and yet it carried conviction. Conviction and certitude without emotion. When he finished everyone knew what to do. The modern man.
When Johnson first came in, their mix had not been very good at all. Johnson had regarded the White House staff as something of a hostile area, not without cause, since the Bundy group had felt a certain contempt, the attitude being: How do you keep him at bay, how do you placate him without telling him anything and without violating the Constitution?
the Intelligence and Research people at State were opposed to the trip for reasons of their own; Hanoi, they pointed out in a memo, knew that a bombing campaign was being considered by the Americans and that the Bundy trip was related to it. Thus Hanoi would view the Bundy trip as a real fact-finding trip and would try to influence Bundy’s decision by showing that it did not fear bombing, and the way it would do this was by provoking some kind of incident while Bundy was in Vietnam. The same memo noted that of the three places which housed planes, Tan Son Nhut, Bien Hoa and Pleiku, Tan Son
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INR had been right, no one was going to push them around or threaten them.
Why was he so surprised? It was and would continue to be a rare emotional response; for weeks after when someone questioned what they were doing with the bombing, the words would pour out, boys dying in their tents, we had to do something, we can’t just sit by, we had to protect our boys.
Did we have to bomb the North, particularly when Kosygin was there? Did we really have to retaliate? Might this not lead to a larger war, possibly a war with China? It might, Mansfield argued, draw China and Russia closer together and heal their growing split.
Thompson himself was wary of the bombing; he had assisted George Ball on some of his memos against such a policy, in particular warning that it might drive the Soviet Union together with the Chinese, and that it was a very dangerous game. Now at the meeting he again expressed his doubts about bombing, but he did say that if we bombed within certain limits, the Soviets would not move against us. Which was all they needed to hear. He also warned against bombing in certain areas which might bring in the Chinese, and along with Ball, he was effective in setting some of the bombing limits.
retaliatory tit-for-tat raids were authorized against the North.
Using what appeared to be imitation Kennedy rhetoric, he said: “We love peace. We shall do all we can in order to preserve it for ourselves and all mankind. But we love liberty the more and we shall take up any challenge, we shall answer any threat. We shall pay any price to make certain that freedom shall not perish from this earth.” Which was pretty strong and heady stuff for an attack which was basically little different from any other Vietcong attack over the last four years of the war.
Mac had come down with the hawks and had come down very hard.
The prospect in Vietnam is grim. The energy and persistence of the Vietcong are astonishing. They can appear anywhere—and at almost any time. They have accepted extraordinary losses and they come back for more. They show skill in their sneak attacks and ferocity when cornered. Yet this weary country does not want them to win.
it would have been out of character, for he was not, like Ball, a loner, not a man to lay his body down on the railroad tracks for something like this, an almost lost cause, and an almost lost cause in Asia,
In 1964 Stevenson and his friend Clayton Fritchey were talking about government in general and began to wonder how many Cabinet officers had resigned during this century. Fritchey decided to look it up, and then asked Stevenson what his guess was. Stevenson said he had no idea. “One,” said Fritchey. “Who?” asked Stevenson. “William Jennings Bryan,” answered Fritchey.
A few friends like Dick Russell were warning him not to go ahead, that it would never work; Russell had an intuitive sense that it was all going to be more difficult and complicated than the experts were saying, but his doubts were written off as essentially conservative and isolationist, and it was easily rationalized that Russell, like Fulbright, did not care about colored people.
If anything, doubts about Pleiku and the bombing, doubts expressed clearly and forcefully, helped remove one other dovish voice from further participation, and that was the Vice-President of the United States, a man whom the liberals had eagerly accepted during the convention as their representative in the Administration.
the time of Pleiku he was called in for one of the smaller meetings, and he expressed himself forcefully, perhaps too forcefully, it would seem in retrospect, against the bombing, particularly bombing when Kosygin was in Hanoi.
it was in effect the Humphrey staff, having lost their own man, now trying to stand up to the Johnson policies. But Humphrey had not slept for two days and it all came unwound;
The one general who might have had comparable prestige, Max Taylor, was wearing civilian clothes, and his cables during that period were careful to separate bombing from ground troops, the reverse of what Ridgway had done some ten years earlier.
in the intelligence community the men most knowledgeable about Vietnam knew that it would not work even to this degree, and that the very incidents which had finally provoked it, the bombings, Pleiku and Qui Nhon, were a sure sign from the North that Hanoi would never capitulate, never negotiate in the face of bombing pressure. Thus the very acts which helped initiate the bombing were evidence from the other side that the avowed purpose of it would not work.
It was a small request, just two battalions, and the mission was minor too, simply to provide security. But it was the beginning; it was the first time American combat units would arrive as units, and there was a sense among many in Washington and Saigon at the time that it was not the end either in numbers or in the extent of the mission, that both would soon be expanded, and that the man who had ordered the troops knew this better than anyone. And they were right.
Bill Depuy, one of those men who played a major role all through Vietnam and were virtually unknown to the public. Depuy was one of the Army intellectuals.
He believed that massive fire power and American mobility were the answer, that the enemy simply could not stand up in the face of it.
