Escalation

Part 10

Beginning with the initial decisions on a bombing strategy and deployment in February 1965, President Lyndon Johnson chose not to tell the American people what he knew to be the case: that the war was entering a very different stage. That month McGeorge Bundy had delivered a memo to the president following his first trip to Vietnam, where he was shocked by an attack in the Highlands in which some American advisers were killed. In Bundy’s memo, as Robert McNamara recalled, the message was this:

“At its very best the struggle in Vietnam will be long. It seems to us important that this fundamental fact be made clear and our understanding of it be made clear to our own people.”

In his book, McNamara adds: “As I will relate, it was not.”

He went on to recount that “President Johnson finally decided on February 19 that regular strikes against the North would begin, but he again refused Mac’s advice to announce the decision publicly.” At the time polls showed that a significant majority of Americans supported the war policies, without knowing they were being changed. “These numbers, McNamara writes, “changed dramatically over the next three years, as Johnson’s continued lack of candor steadily diminished popular faith in his credibility and leadership.”

McNamara recalls that with majority support in the country for escalation, LBJ had the opportunity to be forthcoming with the public, as he was urged to do by liberals among his advisers, including Douglas Cater, formerly an editor at The Reporter magazine, and John Gardner, his secretary of health, education and welfare.

“Those two guys are liberals, and they said to Johnson,… ‘Mr. President, you’ve got to expose more…the people are with you. Take them into your confidence. They want you to do what you want to do.’”

Johnson’s successes in closing deals on Capitol Hill tended toward backroom bargaining and tradeoffs, which was different from publicly explaining the decision to fight a losing war. McNamara’s told his editors that the reason for his own contributions to misleading the public was:

“For me to go public and say we weren’t winning…for anybody – if the president went public and said, ‘We’re not winning,’ because it was a fact in the midst of a war, that is a hell of a thing to say.”

Moreover, he added when the escalation began, the military in particular, were predicating its recommendations on the assumption that with enough force victory would be possible, if not certain. McNamara may well have thought the generals could be right, even though he clearly doubted they were.

In a speech at Johns Hopkins University on April 7, 1965, answering his own rhetorical question, “Why are we in South Vietnam?” Johnson reiterated American promises to support the Saigon government, a pledge made by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy and the commitment to “strengthen world order” against Communist incursions.

He said that in response to stepped-up attacks in South Vietnam, air strikes were underway – but he did not mention ground deployments. “This is not a change of purpose. It is a change in what we believe that purpose requires.”

And LBJ quoted scripture: “We must say in Southeast Asia as we did in Europe in the words of the Bible: ‘Hitherto shalt thou come but no further.’”

McNamara, Bundy, and Clark Clifford, each in his way, attribute Johnson’s vagueness and prevarications to aspects of his character. For as long as possible, he did not want Vietnam to undermine his Great Society agenda, either by warning the public about trouble ahead or going to Congress with requests for the real costs that the war would entail.

When McNamara urged LBJ to raise taxes to meet the additional costs of war, the president told his defense secretary that he just didn’t understand politics. Which was, of course, the case.

McNamara also concluded, as he told his editors, that Johnson believed that “the end justifies the means” and if he was able to succeed in his domestic reforms and reverse the slide in Vietnam, his lack of candor about the war would be overlooked or forgotten.

Johnson also believed that if he were to announce incremental, if open ended, moves in the war, he would come under pressure from conservatives -- the “hawks” -- to go further and faster. Ironically, Johnson’s politically motivated effort to order not too much escalation – or to do so too publicly – would lead to battlefield frustration and his political demise.

While there were minor feints aimed at a diplomatic approach with North Vietnam, none of which came to anything, Johnson was also stymied he said, by the absence of any plan to end the war by negotiations, without victory or defeat. At one meeting in July, he said, as quoted by Clifford, “This war is like a prizefight. Our right hand is our military power, but our left hand must be peace proposals. Every time you move troops move forward, you should move diplomats forward too. I want this done. The Generals want more and more from me. They want to go farther and farther. But State has to supply me with something, too.”

Rusk, who heard the complaint, did not reply. George Ball’s counsel, with Clifford’s support, had been rejected.

In Lessons in Disaster, Gordon Goldstein writes of McGeorge Bundy, “Frustrated by a deteriorating relationship with President Johnson” -- in ways other than the Vietnam issues -- “he was on the precipice of resigning as national security adviser.” Bundy then agreed to appear on a prime-time television debate on CBS on the evening of June 21, without telling Johnson.

On the program, Bundy fared poorly in defending the administration’s Vietnam policy before a panel of five respected scholars. As a consequence, he found himself in the untenable and ultimately unsustainable position of falling out with his peers and then with Johnson. After that – as Vietnam controversies in the administration, teach-ins on campuses and a distraction of political upheaval in the Dominican Republic went on – Bundy became essentially irrelevant in real decision making.

When he finally left to join the Ford Foundation in 1966, he was replaced by Walt Rostow, his deputy, an unequivocal hawk, who was to stay until the end of LBJ’s term.

The top echelons of the military, from all historical accounts, continued to be divided over strategy and was never really able, then or later, to reach conclusions that were as clear as they should have been.

H. R. McMaster’s book Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam, published in 1997, is devastating in its criticism: “The failing were many and reinforcing arrogance, weakness, lying in pursuit of self- interest and above all, the abdication of responsibility to the American people.” A career army officer who later rose to the rank of lieutenant general (and briefly served as Donald Trump’s national security adviser), he calls his chapter about the Joint Chiefs in July 1965 “Five Silent Men.”

LBJ’s emotional trajectory comes through his own copious transcribed record, but Lady Bird Johnson’s diaries, as described in more than one hundred hours of her tapes and Julia Sweig’s book Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight, comes as close as possible to portraying her husband’s downward spin as the war progressed.

Before the Camp David weekend in July, she wrote about her sleep problems as Lyndon faced the decisions that he would have to make on Vietnam: “For an extraordinarily healthy, tough, reasonably happy person, sleeping is becoming the hardest thing for me to do, particularly when I feel that I have not played my role well, that I have been a hindrance.”

Sweig writes that Lady Bird could not console her husband, hoping that a Camp David weekend with some relaxation along with the policy discussion might help. “She’d seen time and again,” Sweig writes, “how the release of tension that comes with a difficult decision could ease Lyndon’s torment, self-doubt and depression.”

It is of course unknowable whether in those months of 1965, as Johnson was coming to his fateful decision to send in troops and bombers, he might have made a different choice. He was being pressured to do so by all and sundry – often with conflicting and confusing advice -- and even though his telephone tapes often expressed frustration and doubts that escalation could ultimately succeed, he went ahead.

As McNamara underscored to his editors:

“The divisions among us and the unresolvable nature of our objectives continued though and beyond my departure from the Pentagon.”

An exaggerated belief in the Soviet and Chinese threat to American power, ignorance about the true nature of the conflict and competing egos and strategies of military, civilian and political advisers, combined with LBJ’s own deeply embedded ambitions for domestic change and his insecurities about appearing weak in a foreign conflict, were the toxic brew that produced the Vietnam debacle, which now everywhere is deemed a tragedy.

Next Week: Part Eleven Opposition Forms

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.