All-In is Not Enough

Part Twelve

By January 1966, the United States was all-in on the war, by land, air, and sea. The Kennedy-era belief that South Vietnam could and would win its own battle had been replaced, decisively, with a strategy of American war power that in time would overwhelm the communist forces and somehow enable South Vietnam to become a bastion of democratic freedom in Asia.

Over the course of the next year, the military effort would be disappointing, at least to those who recognized that the data being compiled missed the essential point: that the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong were not yet losing the war and the South Vietnamese-U.S. alliance was not making the necessary gains.

The North Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh, who had once identified himself with principles of the American revolution, had now become a party figurehead, and Hanoi’s strategic and political strategy was now set by another communist official, Le Duan, whose name was so unfamiliar that Robert McNamara had to spell it out for Lyndon Johnson over the phone. At the same time, General Vo Nguyen Giap, the military mastermind, had lost influence to two other generals, Van Tien Dung and Hoang Van Thai, neither of whom were disposed to compromise.

In the ensuing months, there were hints of possible negotiations, approaches to which McNamara always wanted to give some credence. Still, these initiatives went nowhere. The bombing pause over the 1965 Christmas holidays ended without effect. The historian George Herring wrote years later, in his book LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War, that “McNamara’s influence began to wane” after the bombing halt ended:

“The secretary of defense had pushed the pause and accompanying peace initiative and LBJ, grudgingly and against his better judgment, had endorsed it…Moreover, the once indomitable secretary of defense was increasingly skeptical that the war could be won militarily…At some point late in his tenure, he was cut off from some information because of his growing opposition to the war and his suspected ties to dovish Senator Robert Kennedy.”

In In Retrospect, McNamara writes, “I wish Herring were right” and then asserts that while he “grew increasingly skeptical … of our ability to achieve our political objectives in Vietnam through military means, … this did not diminish my involvement in the shaping of Vietnam policy.”

In reality, Herring’s appraisal was correct in describing the trajectory of McNamara’s thinking and his stature with Johnson in 1966 and into 1967.

Having launched his Great Society programs and achieved historic civil rights triumphs in Congress, LBJ wanted to link these domestic political successes with military achievements in Vietnam. In a speech at Freedom House in New York on February 23, 1966, Johnson said:

“Men who believe they can change their destinies will change their destinies. Armed with that belief they will be willing – yes, they will be eager – to make the sacrifices that freedom demands…to become that is within them to become, to cast off the yoke of discrimination and disease; to the freedom to hope and to build on that hope, lives of integrity and well-being.

“That is what our struggle in Vietnam is about tonight. This is what our struggle for equal rights in this country is all about. We seek to create that climate, at home and abroad, where unlettered men can learn, where deprived children can grow, where hopeless millions can be inspired to change the terms of their existence for the better…

“Whether in the cities and hamlets of Vietnam, or in the ghettoes of our own cities, the struggle is the same. That struggle is to end the violence against the human mind and body, so that the work of peace may be done, and the fruits of freedom may be won.”

In her diaries, Lady Bird Johnson expressed a different message, as Julia Sweig points out. “She also worried about the emotional toll on Lyndon,” Sweig observes, “for whom the responsibility of returning two hundred thousand American boys to safety made him feel, she thought, their collective loss even more strongly than the boys’ own mothers.”  

Barely more than a year after the inauguration, Lady Bird recorded the following: “I count the months and the weeks until the time I have set [to exit the presidency], but I have not the force of character, and not even really the desire, to try to make Lyndon work less hard.”

Another factor of consequence in 1966 was the departure of McGeorge Bundy. He and McNamara, each in his own way, had brought intellectual luster to the White House, along with their connections to the country’s elites, which offset the intense rough-and-tumble of Johnson’s political instincts. Although they were instrumental in devising the administration’s policies in Vietnam, they could nominally identify themselves as simply developing strategy plans rather than manipulating Congress and public opinion. Those were the tactics that fostered the cynicism necessary for advisers who knew that shaping perceptions of progress was their main mission.

 Bundy’s departure to the Ford Foundation for the most part ended his Vietnam-related reputation – although conspiracies emerged about the foundation’s connections with the CIA, never proven. Only in his never-finished memoir did Bundy’s regrets surface. He described his departure to his coauthor, Gordon Goldstein, not as a break with Johnson on policy, but as differences over how that policy was presented to the public. “Once the choice of 1965 was made,” Bundy recalled, “I supported it, in and out of office.” Instead, he said, he was opposed “to the way the Administration, and in particular the President himself, did and did not explain” the escalation in the war.

“It was the president’s lack of transparency,” Goldstein writes, “that angered Bundy rather than the strategy to Americanize the war – a strategy he privately questioned with McNamara but otherwise publicly endorsed. As Bundy struggled to explain in one of his fragments, ‘You must make it plain that while you wanted choices spelled out to the public, you yourself were in favor of ground combat reinforcement in 1965. You did also favor a real examination of alternatives, which did not happen.’”

McNamara, for his part, became fixated on data, a consequence of his personality and his experience and training in graduate school at Harvard and in the business world. Regarding the war in Vietnam, this meant a focus on the numbers of enemy dead and the pace of airstrikes, among other indices increasingly seen as coldly technocratic – and therefore inhumane. This stain proved to be indelible for the rest of McNamara’s life.

Even McNamara’s public displays of remorse, his tears when his memoir was published, were dismissed as insincere or mocked in editorial cartoons that turned what was coming from his eyes into missiles.

Errol Morris’s presentation of McNamara in his Oscar-winning documentary The Fog of War was criticized in early reviews for letting the former secretary of defense off too easily. The closing scene of the film is an epilogue in which Morris asks McNamara whether he would specifically apologize for the war. Set off from the rest of the film (I always wondered, privately, whether it had been added after those initial reviews, which I could not confirm), the setting shows McNamara talking to Morris in a car rather than a studio.

Morris: After you left the Johnson administration, why didn’t you speak out against the Vietnam war?

McNamara: I’m not going to say any more than I have. These are the kind of questions that get me in trouble. You don’t know what I know about how inflammatory my words can appear. A lot of people misunderstand the war, misunderstand me. A lot of people think I’m a son of a bitch.

Morris: Do you feel in any way responsible? Do you feel guilty?

McNamara: I don’t want to go further with this discussion. It just opens up more controversy. I don’t want to add anything to Vietnam. It is so complex that anything I say will require additions and qualifications.

Morris: Is it the feeling that you’re damned if you do, and if you don’t, no matter what?

McNamara: Yeah, that’s right. And I’d rather be damned if I don’t.

Next Week: Part Thirteen Disillusion and Delusions

I have now heard from a number of people who have listened to the audio that they find it extraordinary. To hear McNamara explaining in detail and under my questioning why he believed Kennedy would have withdrawn and LBJ used 1964 to stall on making decisions about the war among other matters is, the word all use, is “fascinating.” So below is a direct link to the audio. A click will connect you and a second click will download it.

https://gofile.me/6Psdh/u0tEooeA9

To read previous installments in this series go to www.platformbooksllc.net. There is an archive of earlier pieces and a link to sources, acknowledgements.