Jackie, Bobby, LBJ, Bob: Friends and Foes

Part Fourteen

At 7:10 PM on January 3, 1967, National Security Adviser Walt Rostow signed off on a memo to President Johnson classified “Literally Eyes Only,” in which he forwarded what he considered an “improbable” scenario.

“While recognizing all the reasons Hanoi might wish to sweat us out though 1968, I have come to believe it is conceivable if not probable that they are trying to get out of the war but don’t know how…,” he wrote. “I mean they cannot openly negotiate with us. They must have a deal which saves them minimal face with the NLF [Vietcong] and the Chinese to announce before negotiations are acknowledged…Be clear, I don’t give this very high odds, but I have had the nagging feeling they could well be a position of wanting to get out…I can even reconstruct the reasons for this view,” which apparently were based on hints that the leadership in Hanoi was not as united as it once was -- wishful thinking, it turned out.

Rostow then outlined a complex set of actions and responses in which intermediaries would open a secret channel for negotiations with the North Vietnamese.

Nothing came of this ploy and similar feints in 1967. One reason was that Rostow believed then, and to the end of the war and beyond, that the United States would prevail if it showed the determination and provided the resources.  Memos were circulated (sometimes selectively in fierce backchannel rivalries), military recommendations were made and debated, and top-level Tuesday lunches were held. A congressional investigation that summer made the case that bombing was being restricted and made out McNamara to be the focus of resistance, which he was.

McNamara’s opposition to unrestricted bombing was personal and largely on strategic grounds. Having been part of a bomb planner group in World War II, McNamara believed -- as he later told Errol Morris in The Fog of War -- that he could have been tried as a war criminal if the United States had lost the war because of the scale of civilian death he and others were responsible for in Japan and Germany. The limitations of air power was one of the factors in his belief that no matter what was being said publicly about military progress and no matter what Westmoreland’s kill ratios showed, the war was not being won. 

American power -- short of using nuclear weapons -- just could not offset South Vietnamese disarray and North Vietnamese determination.

The emerging disagreement between LBJ and McNamara over war strategy also may have had an essentially unacknowledged Kennedy component. Incidents that McNamara recounted in In Retrospect and emphasized in the editorial transcripts highlight this.

“Bobby had grown to be one of my best friends,” McNamara writes. “When I first met him, he had seemed a rough, tough character who believed that in politics the end justifies the means. But during the eight years I knew him, he grew thirty years in terms of his values and understanding of the world.” As for Jackie, as he always called her, she “did not represent the same political threat to the president as Bobby, but she thought no less deeply than her brother-in-law about the issues of the day.”

On the subject of Jackie, McNamara spoke to his editors of two episodes that are revealing and colorful. They also show the intensity of her feelings as the war progressed.

“Marg was out, and I went up there [New York], and I always – I think I probably went up commercial air. I never had security agents, and once in a while I used a government plane, in which case I would pay the commercial price…I stayed at the River Club and Jackie was up on 85th…There was a taxi strike, so I thought, ‘What the hell? Well, I’ll go on the bus.’

“So I didn’t know anything about Manhattan…I got on the bus. And it wasn’t too full, even in the midst of the taxi strike…We get up to 85th or wherever the bus stopped…so I go to the back of the bus to get out of the back door…The woman in front of me caught her heel in the step and stopped suddenly, and I bumped up against her, and the guy behind me bumped up against me.

Editor: These people did not recognize you as the secretary of defense?

McNamara: Oh hell no. And I’m walking along…I walked on about fifty steps and I thought, ‘My god, something’s missing.’ I reached in my pocket, my wallet was gone.”

Somehow, the evening unfolded, because at the restaurant, La Caravelle, McNamara seated Jackie, encountered a friend, whispered his problem, and borrowed enough money to pay for dinner and to fly back to Washington.

On another visit, in the Kennedy apartment, “We were talking about the war and she got so tense she could hardly speak. She was just obsessed with the killing that was going on.”

And then, said McNamara  Jackie, sitting next to him on a couch started pounding her fists on his chest demanding he do something.

Summarizing their relations, McNamara said, “She was a much more sensitive person than many people. She was not only glamorous – she was glamorous – but she was a much more sensitive person.”

(Whispers that McNamara and Jackie’s relationship might have gone beyond friendship never went further, but almost certainly reached Johnson.)

Another episode in early 1967 happened when Robert Kennedy, now a U.S. senator, traveled to Paris and returned with what to him, McNamara recalls, was “a legitimate North Vietnamese peace feeler.” The story appeared in Newsweek. When Johnson next met with Bobby, the president -- convinced that the leak had been a deliberate ploy by Kennedy -- said: “The war will be over this year, and when it is, I’ll destroy you and every one of your dove friends. You’ll be dead politically in six months.”

In his source notes for In Retrospect, McNamara writes, “Robert Kennedy reported this episode to me.”

Reflecting perhaps his own political naivete, McNamara insisted that “Johnson accepted my closeness to the Kennedys because he understood my loyalty to the presidency and to him. This was even true when he and I split irreconcilably over Vietnam.” Lady Bird’s diaries support the view that LBJ’s warm feelings for McNamara were genuine, but by the end of 1967, Johnson wanted to get rid of his secretary of defense.

Clark Clifford was also very close to the Kennedys, having represented Jackie in personal issues after the assassination — which he refused to discuss with his editors as he worked on his memoirs.  How this would have affected his dealings with LBJ is a mystery of personality that probably had more to do with these relationships than it is possible to discern from words and their assertions alone.

Clifford’s dignified, soothing mannerisms were always an asset to him in his dealings with people, including Johnson. In more than one instance, Clifford would assure Johnson that he had spoken to Bobby and could report that Kennedy would not actively undermine Johnson, when in fact he was determined to do so.

McNamara’s intensity and his publicly bumptious certainty meant that he was always in the limelight and assertive in making a case, even when he knew – increasingly – that it was wrong. This perception of McNamara defined his lasting reputation.

In March, Douglas Kiker, then the Washington columnist for The Atlantic Monthly, wrote a profile called “The Education of Robert McNamara,” which was especially colorful and insightful about the man he called the “second most powerful…and second most controversial” man in Washington.

“Washington reporters are sharply divided in their opinion of him,” Kiker reported. “Liberal columnists admire him and defend him. ‘He’s the biggest dove in the higher echelons of the Johnson Administration,’ says one. “He resisted the bombing of North Vietnam to the very end. He was chief advocate of the 1965 bombing pause. And he’s been arguing ever since that the bombing is not doing what it’s supposed to do. He’s dying to get this war over with.”

Pentagon reporters, Kiker went on, had a different opinion. “‘McNamara is a great national asset, but so is the hydrogen bomb,’ says one. ‘Both of them must be utilized – and contained. He has a basic disregard for people. He has a contempt for the press and the people’s right to know. He’s very authoritarian.” Kiker observed that “the biggest complaint is that McNamara has deliberately misled the press – and through them the American people – on Vietnam: that by imposing secrecy and juggling facts and figures, he has obscured the true facts concerning both the progress and the cost of the war.”

Kiker makes a list: In January 1962 McNamara described the situation in Vietnam as” encouraging.” In September 1963 it was “getting better and better.” In March 1964 it had “significantly improved.” In May, “excellent progress was being made.” By November 1965, the “United States had stopped losing the war.” By July 1966, he was “cautiously optimistic.”

This portrait of McNamara once again captures a central reason for the way history has framed the principals responsible for the war: Johnson, McNamara, Bundy, Rusk, Westmoreland, among others, collectively David Halberstam’s “the best and the brightest.” Their personalities were instrumental in apportioning blame for the debacle.

LBJ as president, was inevitably at the center – he was intense, volatile, and politically manipulative, whereas JFK had been, cool, young, and martyred. And because of his death, how President Kennedy would have dealt with the war can only be an unresolved question.

McNamara’s larger-than-life persona and his tendency to relate better to the swells than the hoi polloi was a paradox.  He prided himself on being a social iconoclast who lived in Ann Arbor rather than the Detroit suburbs where other auto industry big shots resided. He was an outdoorsman but was always comfortable with Washington’s elites – Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post and a social arbiter in the capital – was one of his closest friends and he was always welcome in her circle, even among those who considered his role in Vietnam reprehensible. This remained true years later when I worked with him on his books. A C-SPAN video of a book party for McNamara in 1999, hosted by Katharine Graham for another of his books, Argument Without End, about his post-war meetings with the Vietnamese communists, featured a cross-section of political figures and journalists, even as many of these people considered McNamara responsible for the Vietnam war’s mayhem.

Next Week: Part 15: McNamara in ‘67 “ A harrassed and puzzled look. No longer sprightly.”

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