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May 8 - May 30, 2025
Normally, explained Rostow, the ideal ratio against guerrillas was 10 to 1, a figure which the United States would not be able to meet. But there were factors of fire power and of mobility, and each was given a factor of 3. Thus one needed only a ratio of 4 to 1.
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
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As I analyze the pros and cons of placing any considerable number of Marines in areas beyond those presently assigned I develop grave reservations as to wisdom and necessity of so doing. Such action would be step in reversing long-standing policy of avoiding commitment of ground combat forces in South Vietnam. Once this policy is breached, it will be very difficult to hold the line.
(he would not, as an aide noted, fire a man for incompetence but he would fire one for the suggestion of immorality);
It was the war which was unreasonable yet it was in his tour of command that events like My Lai took place;
When Neil Sheehan traveled with Westmoreland on his plane in the summer of 1966 he asked if Westmoreland was not worried by the enormity of civilian casualties which the bombing and shelling were causing in the South. “Yes,” said Westmoreland, “but it does deprive the enemy of the population, doesn’t it?”
he was so American, like all Americans in Vietnam he wanted the Vietnamese to be Americans, he saw them in American terms, he could never seem to see them as themselves.
Ridgway, needing more wheels for his division, immediately asked his division artillery commander, a particularly sharp young brigadier named Maxwell Taylor, to go and take a look
if he had to describe your personality he would probably do it in percentages).
in early 1967, Joe McGinniss, then just a young reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, would spend a day traveling with Westmoreland to the coastal town of Phan Thiet. There a young American officer startled McGinniss by giving an extraordinarily candid briefing on how bad the situation was, how incompetent the ARVN was. Westmoreland had demanded the briefing and the young American had been uneasy about giving it, apologizing for being so frank with a reporter present, but finally it had come pouring out: the ARVN soldiers were cowards, they refused to fight, they abused the population, in
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Taylor was trying to hold it down, and he was doing it in part in a very dangerous way; that is, he was challenging not the basic assumption of the war or the commitment but the assessment of Westmoreland of how serious the situation was; he was saying in effect it simply wasn’t that bad. This meant that if the situation deteriorated any further, he would have to sign on or have his arguments completely neutralized.
Since Taylor knew that Westmoreland would be submitting a major request for troops, he had already changed his position. From what was an essentially blanket opposition to the use of combat troops and a reluctant approval of even a security mission, he had continued to be eroded.
Rusk too was uneasy about the whole thing, uneasy about getting involved in a ground war, though similarly, being a great chain-of-command man, a great one to go with the man on the spot, a respecter of military expertise, very uneasy about not giving a commander what he wanted.
Disappointed over the loss of his two divisions, Westmoreland renewed an old request about something which had always bothered him, the area around Bien Hoa and Saigon,
that more might be coming down the trails. The bombing had failed, just as the counterinsurgency commitment had failed.
Sharp, Wheeler and Westmoreland wanted a grander, more aggressive strategy, but this was not the time to argue that. The thing to do was to get the troops in-country first, and then worry about strategy and use later.
Mac Bundy had shown a member of his staff some of the planning for the escalation, particularly the bombing, and the aide had been impressed by how thorough it all was, lots of details. Bundy asked the aide what he thought, and he answered that though he didn’t know anything about the military calculations, “the thing that bothers me is that no matter what we do to them, they live there and we don’t, and they know that someday we’ll go away and thus they know they can outlast us.” Bundy considered the answer for a moment. “That’s a good point,” he said.)
Taylor, the man who had been the architect of the counterinsurgency, of the small war in 1961, and who in 1964 and 1965 had opposed the use of combat troops, had in fact played exactly the role he did not intend to play. He had, by fighting to limit the troop escalation step by step, helped them to slide into it. The gap from each step to the next step always seemed relatively small, each step that had been exacted while he held back had simply made the next step a little easier, never too great. He had been a conduit, not a brake.
If they could go to about 80,000 without great pressure from the Vietcong, what would be next? And what were the guidelines to be, what was the strategy?
There was, he thought, much that was acceptable in Hanoi’s recently announced four points for negotiation.
Bill Bundy felt the same way, saw the dangers, but he, too, was unwilling to do the unthinkable, to cut our losses.
Ball suggested to Bundy that they work together on a major paper on how to extricate the United States from the growing quagmire. It was a crucial moment. Bundy desisted.
It was not Ball’s easiest time and McNamara was the problem for Ball in those days. He was the ripper.
Soon they would lose control, he said; soon we would be sending 200,000 to 250,000 men there. Then they would tear into him, McNamara the leader: It’s dirty pool; for Christ’s sake, George, we’re not talking about anything like that,
Ball would angrily dispatch his staff to come up with figures, to find out how McNamara had gotten them, and the staff would burrow away and occasionally find that one of the reasons that Ball did not have comparable figures was that they did not always exist. McNamara had invented them,
(Years later Westmoreland would describe this particular time as the point at which the Vietcong had won the war, but neither side realized it.)
Westmoreland asked for a major American troop commitment, and for freedom to use the troops as he saw fit. He was asking for immediate U.S. reinforcements totaling thirty-five battalions; in addition, he named nine other battalions that he might soon want. This became known within the bureaucracy as Westmoreland’s forty-four-battalion request.
The Westmoreland package would take them to 200,000, and it would be open-ended. There was of course some hope that the 200,000 might do it. The President hoped so.
They had inched their way across the Rubicon without even admitting it.
next day he decided to speak openly about it; he knew he was acting on his own and taking an enormous risk—in effect, putting his job on the line—and that his protection from above might be minimal. He knew exactly what was at stake, but he also felt very strongly that it was the right thing to do, that if there was any kind of right to know, it extended to decisions on how American troops were used. It was, on McCloskey’s part, a personal act of courage.
Johnson saw around him confirmation of the soundness, the wisdom and the decency of what he was doing, even among his most trusted friends, like Abe Fortas. Particularly Abe Fortas.
“Justice Fortas, who is not a dove.” Proofreaders being what they are, the story came out as “Justice Fortas, who is a dove.”
Listen, he added, Truman and Acheson had never been effective from the time of the fall of China.
the Dominican Republic, hell, he had sent a few troops in there and he had put out the fire in a few days. Hardly a shot fired. Look what had happened in the Dominican, when American boys had gone ashore.
Only one man would be able to change him, to dissent and retain his respect—and even that was a tenuous balancing act which virtually destroyed one of his oldest friendships, and that was Clark Clifford in 1968.
Finally, and above all, he feared that it would cost him the Great Society, that his enemies in Congress would seize on the war as a means of denying him his social legislation. It was his oft-repeated theme, that his enemies were lying in wait to steal his Great Society.
(just as later McNamara would reluctantly give increments that he didn’t want because otherwise he would be denying a commander his necessary troops; each finally would have a deterrent against the other).
with budget needs and the political needs. Thus, if the mission was not defined it did not exist, and if the number of troops was not set it could always be controlled. Second, if the figure was not decided upon and crystallized within the inner circle, it could not leak out to the press and to the Congress,
The Administration, Bundy recounted, did not tell the military what to do and how to do it; there was in his words a “premium put on imprecision,” and the political and military leaders did not speak candidly to each other.
It was a startling admission, because it was specifically Bundy’s job to make sure that differences like these did not exist.
And Wheeler answered yes, we would have to keep a major force there, for perhaps as long as twenty or thirty years.
then Clifford, an old-style man who delights in almost purple oratory, paused and said, almost melodramatically, “I see catastrophe ahead for my country.”
McNamara did return to Washington on July 20 and did report immediately to the President saying that the President had three options. The first was to withdraw under conditions which would be humiliating, the second to continue at the present level of about 75,000, which would mean that the United States might be faced with equally harsh decisions in the near future, or finally a sharp increase in the U.S. military pressure against the Vietcong in the South. This last was, he said, “the course involving the best odds of the best outcome with the most acceptable cost to the United States.”
There was some talk of putting together a major speech outlining the gist of the decisions: that we were entering a major war, that it might be a long war, and that it would demand great American tenacity and endurance. At Defense some of the young civilians had been uneasy with the covert way the decision making had been going, and it was agreed that a speech should be written. The speech put the blame mostly on China for her aggressive policies, and it ended: “They are watching us to see whether we have the determination and resolution to stick with it. They are betting that we don’t have
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was not what the President was looking for; he was afraid of being too overt with his policy of scaring the Congress and the press. Instead he decided that he would make public only 50,000 of the agreed-upon 100,000 to 125,000.
The Senate Majority Leader had all along expressed doubts; he knew too much about the French experience to want to see a U.S. entry. His own sense of the problem was that things were worse than we realized and that an American presence would work against us. He strongly opposed sending troops. He thought there was growing discontent in the country about the war, and that it would divide rather than unite the country. He hoped deeply and desperately that there was some other course of action, but if this was the President’s decision, he would support him loyally.
“Nor would surrender in Vietnam bring peace, because we learned from Hitler at Munich that success only feeds the appetite of aggression.
When McNamara returned in late July, he had not only brought back the battalion request, but he had also brought back the estimate that Westmoreland would probably need another 100,000
One of the great illusions of the war for both the French and the Americans was that they could control the rate of the war; in reality the other side always did. It could escalate or de-escalate the tempo by deciding how many of its own men to send into battle at a given time.
“It’ll mean a deficit, Mr. President.” In a way, thought one man present at the meeting, any idea of intervening in Indochina died at that moment.
