Disillusion and Delusion

Part Thirteen

The data Robert McNamara was using in his public presentations in 1966 and 1967 were diagrammed in an attrition calculation he devised and repeated, the belief that you could inflict so many casualties on the enemy that its strength would deteriorate. General William Westmoreland and his officers in Vietnam also adopted this rhetoric, measuring progress in the number of targets destroyed, the body counts, the traffic down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the POWs captured, the weapons seized, and something called the Hamlet Evaluation Survey -- all to make a case of progress with numbers that McNamara eventually came to understand were misleading.

Years later, in the 1980s, CBS News produced a documentary that accused Westmoreland of having systematically lied in his data. He sued the network. McNamara became entangled in explanations about how numbers gathered by the CIA could differ from those compiled by the U.S. military in Vietnam, based on who were considered combatants as distinct from village militias.

Part of the problem for McNamara was that the CBS producer of the documentary was the journalist George Crile, who, by his marriage to the daughter of the columnist Joe Alsop’s wife, had been accepted in Washington social circles that were McNamara’s friends even after the war, along with the Kennedys, a group known collectively as “the Georgetown set.” The tag team of Crile and the CBS correspondent Mike Wallace brought celebrity panache to a case that viewers found persuasive.

McNamara told his editors that he would say, if challenged in court testimony and under oath, “categorically…that I do not believe it was Westmoreland’s intention to deceive.”

This cultural confusion and obfuscation resulting from President Johnson’s hard-edge politics, combined with the determination of Westmoreland and the Joint Chiefs to show battlefield progress, came into conflict with the emerging sense among elites in the Cambridge-Washington corridor that the war would not be won. The result was that McNamara found himself in an awkward straddle because of his association with both groups.

The Westmoreland case was eventually settled without resolution, but the belief that McNamara was complicit if not responsible for offering up incorrect numbers never disappeared. Wallace was so upset by the trial that he had himself hospitalized for depression.

 McNamara’s certainty of presentation whenever he was asked to speak was a cover for his recognition that public opposition to the war was increasing – and in his own family, Marg and their offspring found it harder to balance their feelings about the war with McNamara’s perceived role in it. In Craig McNamara’s memoir, he recounts this dynamic that McNamara in his years of postwar reflection always wanted to deflect.

The index of In Retrospect shows very few references to Craig and his sisters Margy and Kathy, though the book does mention that Marg McNamara, his wife, and Craig developed severe ulcers. And when the subject of family came up in his extensive discussions with his editors, McNamara always said that he did not want to explore the topic. Craig’s book made the reason as clear as it could be. The dynamic was extremely complicated.

But father and son seemed to be close. When, many years after the war, Craig and his wife embarked on becoming walnut famers in California, McNamara provided the essential funding.

As 1966 progressed, LBJ’s declarations of righteous goals in Vietnam and the scale of the violence being used to support those goals were becoming irreconcilable. For his defense secretary to make the case that progress was being made and privately to recognize its weaknesses was a corrosive paradox – and enhanced what was Vietnam’s legacy of mistrust and repudiation of the country’s leadership.

In the spring a new round of Buddhist uprisings in the South, as McNamara writes, “underscored the Saigon government’s fragility and lack of popular appeal.” McNamara and John McNaughton, the Pentagon official the secretary most admired (he would have been McNamara’s chosen successor had he not been killed in a plane crash in 1967) drafted a “Possible ‘Fall-back’ Plan” based on the belief that “while the military situation is not going badly, the political situation is in ‘terminal sickness’ and even the military prognosis is of an escalating stalemate.”

At a White House meeting, McNamara recounts LBJ making an “elliptical remark about ‘being ready to make a terrible choice – perhaps take a stand in Thailand,” which indicated that Johnson was aware of the seriousness of the problem. “Looking back,” McNamara continues, “I deeply regret that I did not force a probing debate about whether it would ever be possible to forge a winning military effort on a foundation of political quicksand.”

Dean Rusk, on the other hand, was arguing that “the situation has reached the point where North Vietnam cannot succeed.” Walt Rostow added, “Mr. President, you can smell it all over: Hanoi’s operation backed by the Chicoms [Chinese communists] is no longer being regarded as the wave of the future…We’re not in, but we’re moving.”

As McNamara met with his editors and drafted chapters about the events in 1965, 1966, and 1967, he would return again and again to the factor that he came to understand underlay American determination to beat back communism – the Cold War itself:

“The major lesson of the whole damn thing is we misjudged the magnitude of the communist threat, both the Soviet and Chinese threat. We misjudged them…we overstated it…it welded the West together, it brought unity that we wouldn’t have had…And we didn’t search out contrary views.”

Another irony of the period, as described by Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in In Confidence, was that in his interactions with Dean Rusk and consultations with top officials in the Kremlin, the point was always being made that the conflict in Vietnam should not mean that the United States and Soviet Union were in direct confrontation or conflict themselves or that they would be. Even though it was at war with what it contended were proxies for Moscow and Beijing, the United States also wanted to maintain outreach to the Soviets and later to Beijing (as when Nixon in 1972 traveled to China in February and then to the USSR the following June).

“Some specific questions in Soviet-American relations were solved or at least explored,” Dobrynin writes. “Both governments resumed their confidential exchanges of messages and examined such ideas as the use of nuclear energy for mining and earth-moving projects, and the peaceful exploration of the moon and outer space. After a long delay we signed an agreement at the end of 1966 opening direct air traffic between the two countries.”

Dobrynin also writes that the replacement of McGeorge Bundy with his deputy Walt Rostow had put an unequivocal advocate of escalation into the inner circle supporting the Joint Chiefs, who while divided among themselves on what should be done kept pressing for more commitment from their respective services.

“Johnson in fact was beginning to realize that unless the war ended in 1967,” Dobrynin asserts, “he could hardly count on being reelected for another term; as the war widened, so did opposition to it across the country.”

The nationally televised Senate hearings chaired by Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas in 1966 had an enormous impact on public opinion. “Fulbright explained to me,” Dobrynin writes, “that was why the president felt that greater military pressure had to be applied to North Vietnam to force it to settle. The columnist Walter Lippmann, who increasingly and bitterly challenged the president’s war policies, told me at lunch in his home early in June that Johnson and Rusk were no longer interested in a peaceful settlement now and were pinning their hopes on a military solution to end the war before the 1968 elections.”

A June 1966 Gallup poll cited by Brian VanDeMark in his book Road to Disaster showed that support for the U.S. role in Vietnam had fallen by 20 percent over the previous year, to 47 percent, while opposition had nearly doubled to 35 percent. “And 66 percent of the country, “VanDeMark writes, “said they had lost confidence in Johnson’s leadership on Vietnam. Johnson privately called the results ‘disastrous.’”

A CIA appraisal of the effect of Rolling Thunder’s impact after a full year of the bombing campaign said that for all its thousands of sorties against military and economic targets, the “resulting damage was relatively light, in good measure reflecting the restricted nature of the air campaign.” Over the next year, the bombing restraints would become a major factor in applying pressure to Johnson, as hawks in Congress and at the Pentagon were demanding ever more escalation.

Even though McNamara was skeptical about the efficacy of air power to achieve the administration’s goals in Vietnam, and even though he despaired privately over the political situation – which were the subject of regular discussion in newspaper columns and Georgetown dinner parties -- he became the focus of criticism from inside the administration and in Congress, as the publicly identified architect of a war he himself thought was being lost. McNamara, it was believed, was trying to have it both ways.

The deployment of more troops, the extension of the bombing, the failure to make any headway on negotiations, the hardliners in ascendency in Washington and Hanoi, continuing political disarray, disaffection and corruption in South Vietnam -- all these factors made 1966 the year that the United States went all in on the war and also the year when the template for failure in the years ahead was set.

Next Week: Part 14 Bobby, Jackie, LBJ, Bob: Friends and Foes.

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.