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

by David Halberstam

the Chiefs of Staff did not recommend against the Laotian commitment; rather, they said that if we were to get involved, we should go in with a large force, and the use of force should be open-ended—thus the possible use of nuclear weapons was implicit. They wanted 250,000 men for the invasion.

it became clear that if the Chinese or the Soviets moved in combat troops, the main military contingency plan would be the use of nuclear weapons.

They had all been pushing hard, willing to commit troops, in effect go to war if necessary, but they had given little or no thought to what the other side might do.

He differed from the other high officials in understanding that the pluralism of the Communist world was a real thing, that it had changed, that the Communist world was in flux.

Harriman’s reaction when he heard of the remark was swift and devastating (he was not called “The Crocodile” for nothing), he decided that the man be transferred to . . . he thought for a minute and then chose . . . Afghanistan.

Eventually a neutralist agreement met with all the delegates’ approval,

Neither he nor his people had invested the kind of sacrifice and commitment to the struggle that the Vietcong had in South Vietnam; the force and dynamism of the Indochinese guerrilla movement had never really touched Laos. A major Communist power, such as the Soviet Union, could in fact serve as a broker for an agreement, which it could not do in Vietnam, where the indigenous Communist force was all that mattered. (This led to a misconception in Washington: a belief that the Russians, if they wanted to, could control and negotiate events in Vietnam as they did in Laos, and that eventually the Russians would help us out.)

Johnson, of course, already knew of the accords, and Forrestal arrived to find that the meeting had been arranged so that Forrestal would get there about ten minutes after Johnson’s masseur had arrived. Forrestal began to discuss the accords, only to find himself blocked again and again by the masseur. Forrestal spoke, the masseur chopped, Forrestal spoke, the masseur rubbed. For ten minutes Forrestal tried to explain the agreement and found no way of getting Johnson’s attention; it was, Forrestal thought at the time, and even more so later, Johnson’s way of showing contempt for the Laotian accords.

It was almost as if the colonialists’ lack of style offended him the most, and this was not surprising, because the thirty-fifth President of the United States paid great attention to style;

Someone like John Kenneth Galbraith could note that he had never met a man who took such a great pleasure in simply being himself and had as little insecurity as Kennedy (which allowed him to accept the failure of the Bay of Pigs, without trying to pass the blame).

If Joe Kennedy’s daughters had been sent to the very best Catholic schools, the better to retain the parochialism and tradition in order to pass it on to his grandchildren, his sons had been educated exactly for the opposite reasons—to shed it. There would be no Holy Cross, or Fordham, or Georgetown Law School in their lives.

George Kennan, Kennedy’s ambassador to Yugoslavia, and the most cerebral member of the foreign service himself, would never be so impressed as when Kocá Popovic, the Yugoslav foreign minister, visited Washington and met with Kennedy. Instead of being filled with the usual East-West rhetoric and debate, the conversation began with Kennedy leaning over toward Popovic and asking in a particularly disarming way, “Mr. Minister, you are a Marxist and the Marxist doctrine has had certain clear ideas about how things were to develop in this world. When you look over things that have happened in the years since the Russian Revolution, does it seem to you that the way the world has been developing is the way that Marx envisaged it or do you see variations here or any divergencies from Marxist predictions . . .?”

in the universities, in the journals and in the intellectual circles it was generally held that the real action was in determining the role America played in the world, rather than redefining America domestically.

Kennedy was in no rush to take the political heat for what might be a peripheral issue. Not that he thought Davies was a victim of anything but gross misjustice. He told White House aides that he wanted, while in office, to clear two people, J. Robert Oppenheimer and John Paton Davies, and he wanted Charlie Chaplin to perform once more in this country. He got only as far as Oppenheimer, whom he gave the Fermi Award; Davies and Chaplin would have to wait.

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.

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.

His opinions in the early fifties represented the first truly major dissent within a largely consensus view of a nonconsensus world.

the Japanese catching Chiang Kai-shek when he might have moved into the modern era and frightening him back into the past,

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.

On the mainland itself a brilliant group of young State Department officers were reporting the events with great insight, warning of the coming collapse of Chiang. The word “courageous” comes to mind to describe their reporting; but it was not applicable at the time. They were simply doing their job, reporting and forecasting as accurately as they could, which was very accurately indeed.

Vincent had been the foremost bureaucratic protector of the China and Asian experts, and the highest-level advocate at State of the colonized, pleading their case with fervor. (When he sat down to a dinner sometime in the late forties, he found himself introduced by the wife of the Dutch ambassador as “Mr. Vincent—you know, darling, the man who lost Indonesia for us.”)

“Butterworth,” Marshall said to him, “we must not get sucked in. I would need five hundred thousand men to begin with, and it would be just the beginning.”

Acheson separated Service by sundown. It was a decision made by the Truman Administration, though there is no reference to it in Acheson’s long treatment of the McCarthy period in his Present at the Creation.

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.

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.

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.

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?).

By 1961 the schism in the Communist world was clearly apparent: Khrushchev had removed his technicians and engineers from China.

Walt Rostow, Bundy’s deputy, thought the old Administration had overlooked the possibilities in the underdeveloped world, the rich potential for conflict and thus a rich potential for victory.

Rostow in particular was fascinated by the possibility of television sets in the thatch hutches of the world, believing that somehow this could be the breakthrough.

In October 1961 the entire White House press corps was transported to Fort Bragg to watch a special demonstration put on by Kennedy’s favored Special Forces (after his death the special warfare school would become the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School), and it turned into a real whiz-bang day. There were ambushes, counterambushes and demonstrations in snake-meat eating, all topped off by a Buck Rogers show: a soldier with a rocket on his back who flew over water to land on the other side.

Part of it was his natural style, part of it was his belief that it did not help to seem too bright. His intimates could watch him speak in private with considerable insight, and then, with the arrival of an outsider, switch to his low-key, folksy approach.

and dollars, and by 1954 the Americans were more committed to the cause in Indochina than an exhausted France.

had in early 1954 devised a trap which it intended to spring on an unsuspecting enemy. Since the Vietnamese, as General Marcel Le Carpentier had said, did not have colonels and generals and would not understand a sophisticated war, it would be easy to fool them. The idea was to use a French garrison as bait at an outpost in the highlands, have the Vietminh seize on it for a set-piece battle and mass their forces around it. Then when the Vietminh forces were massed, the French would strike, crush the enemy who had so long eluded them, and gain a major political and psychological victory, just as peace talks were starting in Geneva. The name of the post where the trap was to be sprung was Dienbienphu.

the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, its commanders all former French officers and noncoms, resembled the French troops which had gone through the countryside in the daytime, using far too much fire power, and stealing and looting from the peasants; at night when the ARVN troops were gone, the Vietcong re-entered the villages and spread their skilled political propaganda, against which Diem was particularly impotent.

(He knew Rostow was aggressive on the subject of the war and that Taylor was committed to the idea of counterinsurgency. Thus in effect he was likely to get something along the lines of the report he received.

was one of the crucial turning points in the American involvement, and Kennedy, by his very choice of the two men who had the greatest vested interest in fighting some kind of limited antiguerrilla war, had loaded the dice.

Even their names expressed a radical newcomer’s almost naÏve love of America. Walt Whitman Rostow, Eugene Victor Rostow, Ralph Waldo Rostow

Rostow was always eager, hard-working, and in contrast to Bundy, extremely considerate of others. Even during the heights of the great struggles of 1968 in the attempt to turn around the war policy, when he was one of the last total defenders of the policy, many of his critics found it hard to dislike him personally.

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?”

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).

Alsop found not one but two North Vietnamese regular regiments, one in the country, the other on the border preparing to enter (some four and a half years before they actually entered the country and battle):

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.

It was a case of an institution automatically wanting to expand and to feed itself.

What was true was that the President was uneasy with the pressure he was already feeling from the men around him.

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

Taylor found South Vietnam “not an excessively difficult or unpleasant place to operate.”

It shows a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the war (there was no discussion of the serious political problems of the war in Taylor’s cables).

On the whole, opposition to sending troops was frail. On November 8 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, reflecting the pressures from his Pentagon constituency, signed on.