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

by David Halberstam

The President came over to Nes, and suddenly the treatment was very physical, giant arms and hands bearing down on Nes’s slim arms and shoulders, flesh squeezed, physical and psychic messages imparted.

Deputy Chiefs of Mission who clash with four-star generals almost always lose, no matter how good their case.

Harriman felt if he was not operative in government he would soon die.

He had created deep-seated hostilities in Rusk, hostilities which now surfaced; and it turned out that enemies of Rusk’s were also enemies of Johnson’s,

concentrating his affection on the top-level people only, the President, his brother, Mac Bundy, McNamara, and showing his rude and brusque side to the others, such as Johnson,

Harriman quickly moved to make himself the unofficial minister in charge of peace, knowing that though they were not yet ready for it, when the policies failed, they would need to negotiate,

Those men had surfaced too quickly on Vietnam and fought on what turned out to be a peripheral issue, namely, whether or not to go with Diem, not whether to stay in Vietnam or get out.

Significantly, the only important doubter who stayed in the inner circle was George Ball, the Undersecretary of State. One of the reasons why he remained a player in 1964 and 1965 was that he had not interested himself in Vietnam very much in 1963 and had not been an important player during the Diem struggle of that year.

unscarred by earlier skirmishes, he was still around to fight in 1964.

though there was dissent and debate, some of it serious and forceful, in late 1964 and 1965 over whether to bomb, and whether to send combat troops to Vietnam, it never reached the ferocity of the preliminary struggle of 1963, when the real divisions within the Kennedy Administration emerged and when men fought on Vietnam with absolutely everything they had, not as gentlemen, but as players who intended to win and to destroy their opposition in the process.

Thus by late 1964 the possibilities of great debates were ebbing, and they had diminished the selection of the various players. Nowhere would the difference show more markedly than in the choice of the new Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs.

If anyone should have made the principals uncomfortable in their determination to go ahead and use force, it was a strong and uncompromising Assistant Secretary.

Davies could be quite witty as well

In 1966 Bill Bundy, then Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, tried to put Davies on an advisory panel of Asian experts; Rusk rejected him.

Mac’s younger brother? No, he would get tired of telling people, he was not Mac’s younger brother, he was Mac’s older brother. What was it Lyndon called him?

Johnson respected Bill Bundy but did not like him, spotting in him that supercilious quality

Johnson would call him “that other Bundy.” That other Bundy.

he liked brains for brains’ sake, whereas Bill had made his way up through the more closed profession of the inner bureaucracy, particularly the CIA, where connections and birthrights were far more important.

There were two points McCarthy used against Bundy, the first being a brief period of time in 1940 when Bundy was an employee of the Library of Congress and for four months belonged to a group called the United Public Workers of America. The second was more dramatic, McCarthy’s desire to question Bundy on $400 that Bundy had contributed to the defense fund of Alger Hiss.

We had some knowledge of the Sacco-Vanzetti case in my family

the latter being a reference to his great-uncle A. Lawrence Lowell, who had upheld the Sacco-Vanzetti decision, and whose reputation was thereupon tarnished.)

He read quickly, and if anything, too quickly; there were those around him who believe that in 1967 he misread Hanoi’s answer to the San Antonio formula because he read it too quickly and was preconditioned to think that they were never going to respond.

He had such good manners and came from such a fine tradition, yet he was the classic mandarin, abusive and rough on those who worked for him, obsequious to those above him, with almost no such thing as an equal relationship.

He did not bring his subordinates into the play at all, and would brook no faintheartedness; in fact, it was believed by the fall of 1964 that real doubters on Vietnam could not serve in his section.

When doubts arose among some of the younger men, he would stop them, they would not go further.

So, foolishly, they stayed there, until in November the Vietcong did blow them up,

(Acheson, hearing people say that they did not know what Rusk was thinking during crucial meetings, would respond, “Did it ever occur to you that he wasn’t thinking?”),

Don’t knock the war in Vietnam, it may not be much but it’s the only war we have.

As 1964 progressed and ended, it became apparent that the Cuban missile crisis had been the test run for Vietnam, that the Vietnam planning was derivative from the missile-crisis planning: enough force but not too much force, plenty of options, careful communication to the other side to let him know what you were doing, allowing him to back down.

Robert Kennedy had ambitions of his own, and by the spring of 1964 he was openly campaigning for the Vice-Presidency, precisely the position Lyndon Johnson did not have in mind for him (a landslide victory against Goldwater would become less of a personal triumph if there was a Kennedy on the ticket. The press, which was Eastern and pro-Kennedy, would give Robert Kennedy considerable credit for the victory).

he asked the people around him to start thinking in terms of a congressional resolution. This would protect him from the pressures on the right, and would force Goldwater to support whatever the President was doing on Vietnam, or isolate him even further.

The general’s view of revolution was nothing short of remarkable; if an SDS member had formulated it for him, it could not have been more perfect for the radical left.

Bundy’s connections with the inner Kennedy group were badly shattered).

At the end of July he got his way; an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin provided the factor of patriotism that he had sought for his congressional resolution.

in reality it had begun back in January, when the President and his top advisers gave permission to General Krulak and the restless JCS to go ahead and plan a series of covert activities against the North under the general code name of 34A.

Fulbright had argued against it, had not only argued that it would fail, which was easy enough to say, but he had gone beyond this, and being a public man, entered the rarest of arguments, an argument against it on moral grounds, that it was precisely our reluctance to do things like this which differentiated us from the Soviet Union and made us special, made it worth being a democracy.

The United States had, however, helped remove this possibility in 1954 by encouraging the Catholics to go South—using loudspeakers which claimed, in Vietnamese, that the Virgin Mary had gone South and it was time to join her. This had created a somewhat more anti-Communist society in the South, perpetuating an illusion of anti-Communism there, essentially a transplanted anti-Communism,

it had also removed from the North any real possibility of internal subversion).

an American destroyer named the Maddox was on its way toward the same coast, its mission to play games with the North Vietnamese radar, to provoke the radar system.

At this time the Americans could pinpoint more accurately where the other side’s radar installations were located, just in case there was ever a need to have them charted.

Whether there had been an attack was somewhat unclear

So in a way it had begun. We had shown ourselves in an act of war. We had perhaps committed ourselves more than we knew.

Morse, who had fought lonely and successful battles against Dulles on resolutions over Quemoy and Matsu, had a particularly good reputation as a man willing to go it alone on an issue of conscience; his sources within the bureaucracy were far better than those of the average senator.

the night of August 4, while the second Tonkin incident was beginning to wind down and American planes were already on their mission, Morse received an anonymous phone call from someone at the Pentagon who was reasonably high up and who obviously knew a good deal about destroyers. The caller told Morse that he understood that the Oregon senator was going to oppose the forthcoming resolution.

In that case he should ask the Secretary of Defense two questions. He should ask to see the Maddox’s log (which would place the ship closer to shore than the alleged site of the incident reflected), an...

Nelson, warned and primed by a very bright young member of his staff, Gar Alperovitz, who would later become a major revisionist historian of the Cold War, was extremely uneasy.

“Everyone I have heard has said that the last thing we want to do is become involved in a land war in Asia;

Morse, with Gruening the only two senators to vote against the resolution, said: “I believe that history will record that we have made a great mistake in subverting and circumventing the Constitution of the United States . . . by means of this resolution. As I argued earlier today at great length, we are in effect giving the President . . . warmaking powers in the absence of a declaration of war. I believe that to be a historic mistake.” He was right, of course.

The opposition to the war, kindled there, would help turn the country and particularly the crucial liberal-egghead wing of the Democratic party against the war,

the lack of legal authority for the war continued to bother not just the critics of the war but the President as well, and in 1965, as the escalation mounted, he turned to Nicholas Katzenbach, the Attorney General, and asked, “Don’t I need more authority for what I’m doing?” Katzenbach assured him that he did not, that on a legal basis he had all the authority he needed with the Tonkin Resolution.