Fork in the Road

Part Nine (See below for a direct link to the remarkable audio of McNamara and his editors working on "In Retrospect.")

President Lyndon Johnson’s inaugural on a cold January 20, 1965, in Washington should have been the pinnacle of his ascendance to power and glory, his life objectives. But his demeanor was solemn.

LBJ apparently realized, observers said, that he would now have to balance his “Great Society” ambitions with the deteriorating situation in Vietnam. The options for delay had run out.

After a year of sustained and inconclusive deliberations the issue was being framed in two ways.

On one side was this perspective: The South Vietnamese would have to show a capacity to wage a successful war against North Vietnam and the Vietcong, as President Kennedy believed. Absent that, the United States should proceed with a gradual withdrawal of advisers and absorb the political consequences, even if that meant that the dreaded “dominos” would fall.

The earlier deliberations over neutrality for Laos and the decision to use diplomacy over force in the Cuban missile crisis had persuaded JFK, from the evidence in Robert McNamara’s reflections, that there were alternatives to using air power or combat troops to forestall what would still eventually be a defeat.

As McNamara told his editors: “You can’t create a nation by military means.” He went on: “Kennedy believed two things that I don’t think others may have accepted when he said them – and he didn’t put it quite as forcefully as I’m going to…There are two absolute fundamental requirements to save Vietnam. One is political stability, and the other is a South Vietnamese capacity to defend themselves.”

The opposing view, expressed by, among others, former President Eisenhower, was that the United States could not allow a communist takeover in another Asian country. They rejected the analogy of Vietnam to a neutralized Laos or to the stable if uneasy ceasefire on the Korean peninsula. Instead, they were convinced that Chinese and Soviet support for the North Vietnamese was a significant threat to America’s role in the world.

Ultimately Johnson came to reluctantly accept that American “boys” would have to be deployed to defeat the enemy. And in the first six months of 1965, McNamara and McGeorge Bundy joined Dean Rusk in reaching the same conclusion, and the Joint Chiefs began to implement the ground and air strategy.

Moreover, Johnson may well have also felt that his landslide victory over Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election had given him the leeway to use force that he expected – and was told – would turn around the situation.

On January 27, 1965, just days after the inauguration, McNamara and Bundy delivered a memorandum to the president that portrayed the situation in Vietnam in stark terms: a moment of choosing had come, and Johnson had to decide whether to proceed with a direct U.S. military intervention or a withdrawal of American advisers, leading to a negotiated resolution to the conflict. It became known as the “Fork in the Road” memo.

As McNamara later told his editors, “In early January, the Vietcong mauled two elite South Vietnamese units in major battles. Combined with intelligence reports the North Vietnamese army regulars had begun entering the South…South Vietnam seemed on the brink of total collapse. These events made me conclude, painfully and reluctantly, that the time had come to change course.”

Still, while the memo presented withdrawal and negotiations as an option, McNamara and Bundy told the president that they favored increasing military engagement.

McNamara and Bundy might still have moved toward the Kennedy approach if Johnson had made that choice. He was the president and they were advisers, as both would later insist in explanation.

One of the most striking discoveries in accounts of the period comes in Lady Bird Johnson’s diaries, her regular and very private description of what went on day to day.

On February 11, in the midst of a chatty report on her activities, she wrote:

“While Lyndon and [Vice President] Hubert [Humphrey] were talking I was startled to hear him say something I had heard so often but did not really expect to come out of his mouth in front of anyone else. ‘I’m not temperamentally equipped to be Commander-in-Chief,’ he said. They were talking about the crisis in Vietnam and the long nights with phone calls about planes going out and casualties, the necessity of giving orders, that would produce, God knows what cataclysmic results.

“He said, ‘I’m too sentimental to give the orders!’ Somehow I could not wish him not to hurt when he gives the orders.”

When Humphrey turned out in the parlance, of the time, to be a “dove” on the war, LBJ excluded him from the deliberations, perhaps recognizing that his vice president knew more about the president’s distress than he wanted to share with others. Humphrey had endorsed a memo written with Thomas Hughes, a former aide who was at the State Department, calling for withdrawal which landed without impact.

As a former vice president himself, LBJ knew what it meant to be frozen out of presidential decision making. Still, he never gave Humphrey the influence he craved.

When the Pentagon Papers (the study of the war commissioned by McNamara) were published in 1971, they would show that any grasp of Vietnamese history and culture by the leading decision makers was too superficial to be useful in deliberations and decisions. Leslie Gelb, who was the leader of the Pentagon task force that compiled the papers, told me – we were friends – that the real revelations in them were not state secrets but the scale of ignorance that prevailed at the time. He also said that when he delivered a set of the papers to McNamara’s office at the World Bank, one of the very few copies that were made before they went public, his sense was that McNamara set them aside. Gelb didn’t know whether McNamara ever read them. Nor were they a major factor as McNamara worked on his memoirs, according to the transcripts of multiple editorial sessions.

Between the “Fork in the Road” memo and July 1965, the United States launched the “Rolling Thunder” air campaign, which over the ensuing years dropped the largest amount of bombs in history on the enemy. The Johnson administration also authorized the deployment of 175,000 combat troops to South Vietnam.

As momentum for escalation increased the main proponent of restraint was George Ball, who was Rusk’s deputy at the State Department. In memos and meetings, he argued that bombs and combat presence would not work, given the factors on the battlefield and in North Vietnam. Supporting Ball was Clark Clifford, who had no official position in the administration but was an adviser to LBJ, using his reputation and experience to make a case whenever he had the opportunity.

In Counsel to the President, Clifford includes a letter he wrote to Johnson on May 17, 1965:

“I wish to make one major point.

“I believe our ground forces in South Vietnam should be kept to a minimum consistent with the protection of our installations and property in that country. My concern is that a substantial buildup of U.S. ground troops would be construed by the Communists, and by the world, as a determination on our part to win the war on the ground.

“This could be a quagmire. It could turn into an open ended commitment on our part that would take more and more ground troops, without a realistic hope of ultimate victory.”

Clifford says he did not get a reply.

As their editor, I never tried to have McNamara and Clifford reconcile their positions, which not surprisingly differed in their sense of impact. McNamara carried the responsibility of overseeing the Pentagon whereas Clifford’s role as an adviser would have no direct consequences, even if he wanted to think that it did.

On June 21, there was a meeting in the Cabinet Room that included all the official advisers and, in the afternoon, Clifford. (Historians say that Clifford’s account of the session elevates his presence beyond what the transcript of the session shows it to be. The gist, however, is correct.)

“Everyone in the room seemed deeply aware,” Clifford recounts, “that we were facing -- belatedly in my opinion – a momentous decision. Westmoreland had requested thirty-two additional American combat battalions – 100,000 more men by the end of the year, more in 1966, plus an intensification of the bombing of the North and a partial mobilization of the National Guard and the Reserves…

“When I entered, George Ball was speaking. ‘We can’t win,’ he said. … ‘The war will be long and protracted, with heavy casualties. The most we can hope for is a messy conclusion…’

“One by one, the other senior members of the Administration lined up against Ball.”

Ball had submitted a lengthy memo arguing against American intervention. In McNamara’s view, one factor that contributed to the memo’s weakness was that it stopped short of saying that withdrawal with all of its fallout was better than staying:

“[Ball] couldn’t bring himself to say in that sixty-two-page memo, ‘I accept that getting out will lead to all these [global political] problems, but that’s better than the problems we’ll face staying in.’ That memo doesn’t say that.”

On July 25 at Camp David, LBJ convened McNamara, Clifford, and several of his closest personal advisers like Jack Valenti and Bill Moyers for the weekend. There was a meeting of principals portrayed as a final argument for and against the full mandate for escalation. McNamara was to argue for and Clifford against the expansion.

Valenti took notes. Moyers’s view was that as press secretary, he was not a policy proponent.

When it was over, LBJ went off by himself. Clifford believed that this was when the president finally and conclusively decided to go all in, whatever it would take. I asked Clifford in an editorial session how it felt to be on the losing side of so consequential a debate. As a litigator, he said, it was his role to make his argument, accept the outcome and move on.

(Clifford’s book Counsel to the President was published in 1991, before he was indicted in a banking scandal – though he was never tried. By the mid-1990s, McNamara’s description of Clifford’s role in the Vietnam deliberations had a tone of condescension, in contrast to Clifford’s own depiction, which had emphasized his gravitas.)

As the war progressed, Clifford became an advocate of more military pressure to prevail. By the fall of 1967, Clifford had concluded that that the United States should find a way to disengage. Once he became secretary of defense he began to press for negotiated withdrawal and peace talks.

McGeorge Bundy, working with Gordon Goldstein, describes that period and those deliberations with a somewhat different emphasis. In Lessons in Disaster, Bundy recounts his relative “passivity” as the argument progressed as his “worst failure.” Quoting from a draft fragment written by Bundy, Goldstein conveys that the former national security adviser felt that he was wrong “not to press the study of the prospects of success, of one side’s strength and one side’s weakness, especially in 1965. Not to examine what could be done to make the best of a bad business while not escalating.”

Goldstein adds that this was the essential irony of Bundy’s role in the Johnson White House: “In response to the crisis in Vietnam, the administration’s preeminent intellectual demonstrated a fundamental lack of rigor in his analysis of the ends and means of American strategy.”

Bundy had, if anything, a more limited view of his role in the process. By the spring of 1965, he said, he considered himself a “staff officer who knows the big decision is made and is working to help in its execution.”

That view encompasses another aspect of the 1965 deliberations: Johnson’s use of his consultations with his advisers as a means of showing that he was considering all sides of the case, while actually and privately coming to accept Westmoreland’s – and by now, McNamara’s – plan for expanding troop strength.

While Clifford’s account presents the Camp David session as climactic, it was in fact only the last piece of LBJ’s balancing of something he had already concluded he had to do in way that would in his own mind justify reversing his stance from 1964, as a candidate, with the decisions he was making in 1965. Of that period, McNamara writes in a closing sentence of his chapter on escalation decisions, “We were sinking into quicksand.”

Those decisions and the way they were presented to the American public shaped the rest of the Vietnam war, and in its way, as important, they created a lasting breach with the American people over trust in government. Inherent suspicion of the messages and motives that have come from succeeding administrations are a corrosive factor in political debates and democratic principles.

Next Week: Part Ten Escalation

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.