McNamara in '67: "Harrassed. Puzzled. No Longer Sprightly."

Part Fifteen

As 1967 unfolded, the stress of hard work – Robert McNamara’s growing sense of the war’s inescapable trajectory, his differences with the Joint Chiefs on policy especially over bombing, Marg’s and Craig’s ulcers, and the pressure President Johnson put on himself and others – all this was becoming visible. In Retrospect quotes a diary entry by David Lilienthal, a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, saying that he had seen “a harassed and puzzled look in the no longer sprightly” secretary of defense.

Brian VanDeMark’s description of McNamara is especially vivid: “The intense strain of professional obligation and the agony born of guilt and destroyed illusions erupted to the surface in sudden and unexpected emotional outbursts,” he writes. “Jesus, it was an unbelievably stressful environment,” McNamara told VanDeMark and his editors. He was not the only official so affected. In In Retrospect, McNamara adds that Secretary of State Dean Rusk – whose stoic composure was a mask for his inner tensions and troubles within his family – would later write that he took to surviving on a diet of “aspirin, scotch, and four packs of Larks,” a brand of filtered cigarettes.

The transcripts of editorial sessions for In Retrospect convey the major shifts in mood through accounts of how memos came to be written, usually formal in style but generally clear in message. For every memo McNamara would share with the editors, we would urge him to describe the circumstances that led to them. The McNamara-Bundy “Fork in the Road” memo of January 1965, for example, had been a template for escalation after the circumspection of 1964.

Just as significant was a memo that McNamara sent to LBJ on May 19, 1967, his first written break with the president -- which he may not have himself recognized was happening.  The memo was lengthy, but its ultimate judgment came through unmistakably:

“The memorandum is written at a time when there appears to be no attractive course of action…”

“The Vietnam war is unpopular in this country…”

“The Army of South Vietnam is tired, passive and accommodation prone…”

“Hanoi’s attitude toward negotiations has never been soft nor open-minded….”

And then the peroration:

“There may be a limit beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the United States to go. The picture of the world’s greatest superpower…trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one…”

McNamara came down firmly against General Westmoreland’s latest recommendation of deploying as many as 200,000 additional American troops. “The war in Vietnam,” McNamara wrote, “is acquiring a momentum of its own that must be stopped.” Westmoreland’s request, he added, “could lead to a major national disaster.”

The reaction of Walt Rostow and others in war councils to the memo, McNamara reports, was “dangerously strong.” Whatever McNamara may have thought and argued over the coming months, the war would continue for six more years and spread to Cambodia.

“Could I have handled the issues confronting us with less pain to the president and, most of all, with greater effect in shortening the war?” McNamara asks in In Retrospect. “I now believe I could have had and should have. I did not see how to do so at the time.”

Lady Bird Johnson’s diaries reflect how LBJ was faring during this tumultuous year. She wrote in September 1967: “I simply did not want to face another campaign, to ask anybody for anything. Mainly the fear that haunts me is that if Lyndon were back in office for a four-year stretch – beginning when he was sixty years old – that bad health might overtake him…A physical or mental incapacitation would be unbearably painful for him to recognize, and for me to watch.”

The war was also seriously affecting LBJ’s Great Society initiatives; the scale of urban rioting that was sweeping the country was a clash between the promises of change and the realities of day-to-day life. The identification of Johnson with so much violence abroad and at home, instead of progressive reform, was emotionally devastating to him, Lady Bird could see the emotional damage, but she also knew that the only way to upend the narrative would be for Johnson not to run again. Her fervent and repeated hope that LBJ would make that decision was the theme that made her diaries so poignant to read years later.

While Vietnam was always at the center of events, the world continued to spin into trouble. In June 1967, a major war erupted between several Arab states and Israel, which Israel, to the astonishment of all, managed to win in six days. Israel’s seizure of Arab territories forever shifted the power dynamics in the region. The Six-Day War also turned the Middle East into another front for Cold War military and political competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, U.S. forces went on high-level alert for direct conflict with the Soviets – a moment echoing the sense of possible conflagration in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Decades later, long after the Soviet Union has disappeared, the conflict continues to resonate with shifting priorities that at times have been exceptionally dangerous to the Washington-Moscow balancing act.

Both Robert McNamara and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin credit the “hotline” that was put in place after the Cuban missile crisis with providing a means of useful communications during the 1967 Middle East war and thereafter that prevented Arab-Israeli fighting from instigating direct superpower confrontation. “The episode,” McNamara concludes in In Retrospect, reflects “how delicate U.S.-Soviet relations remained around the world in the midst of the Cold War. It partially explains the [Joint] chiefs’ feelings about the necessity of ‘prevailing’ in Indochina. And it illustrates the numerous other pressing issues that prevented us from devoting full attention to Vietnam.”

Soviet-Israeli ties were broken during the 1967 war and remained fraught thereafter because of the tangled issues around immigration of Soviet Jews and the complexities of the USSR’s support for Arab hostility to Israel amid the continuing upheavals in the Middle East. Restoring relations in the mid-1980s, Dobrynin writes, “essentially amounted to admitting that the Soviet Union made a mistake by breaking them in 1967.”

In June, shortly after the Arab-Israeli war, Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin met in Glassboro, New Jersey, notable as another occasion when the two superpowers grappled for a way to offset their opposing alliances in war zones, with the recognition that war between them could lead to global annihilation. Dobrynin writes that the positions of the U.S. and North Vietnam were fundamentally incompatible, so the sides “seemed locked in a tragic spiral, although I was able to encourage important military limits to it: I raised the issue of atomic warfare in Vietnam, and I was assured by … the president’s entourage that Johnson had completely ruled out the use of tactical nuclear weapons or an invasion of North Vietnam. Moscow knew about these private assurances although they were never made officially.”

This tacit restraint by the Americans on how far to go against the Vietnamese communists added another aspect to the many controversies about the U.S. role in Vietnam, and increasingly about McNamara’s place in shaping it.

Another benchmark of the Vietnam era was what became known as the “Pentagon Papers” after they appeared in The New York Times in June 1971. In 1967, McNamara had tasked John McNaughton, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, to prepare a comprehensive “study” of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The scholarly term “study” was lost in what became a crisis over the documents’ being leaked and subsequently published. They were invariably portrayed as a revelation of secrets rather than what they were, a documentary aggregation of how and why policies were set and decisions made.

McNaughton was killed in a plane crash that summer, and the project was managed to its completion in 1969 by one of  his deputies, Leslie Gelb, who went on to be a prizewinning columnist for the New York Times and president of the Council on Foreign Relations and an acute and acerbic observer of Washington’s power struggles. He may also have been one of the very few people who read all seven thousand pages of what comprised the narrative. Gelb came to believe that McNamara could never bear to read them.

One night in 1971, after the papers had begun to appear in the Times, Bob and Marg were having dinner at the home of the Times’s influential Washington columnist James Reston -- an insight into McNamara’s ready acceptance in Washington’s inner social circles after his time at the Pentagon. Reston reported that the paper was refusing to stop publication as the Nixon administration demanded. The resulting case went to the Supreme Court which permitted publication in the Times, the Washington Post, and eventually other newspapers as well.

Whatever care may have gone into to the preparation of the papers, all that was publicly absorbed was the scandal, including, according to McNamara, a conspiracy trope that he had ordered the study conducted in order to undermine Johnson’s likely reelection campaign in 1968 against Bobby Kennedy. Rather than credit McNamara with the concept of studying history, the papers added another strand to a narrative of failure.

Years later, when the papers were again being discussed, Gelb would repeat that what the papers revealed was not so much mendacity and sinister design but the enormous consequences of U.S. ignorance and mishap. One example he would cite was a letter written by the Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh to President Harry S. Truman in 1947 about a possible relationship with the United States. Gelb told me that Ho’s letter was waylaid by the CIA and never reached the president.

In any case, the Pentagon Papers added to the overwhelming consensus that was emerging that the United States was doomed in Vietnam because of its self-inflicted blunders and misjudgments.

Next Week Part 16 The Break

On September 15 at 8 and 11 PM (EDT), C-SPAN will air on its Q-A program an interview in which host Peter Slen and I discuss “LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail. It will then be posted on c-span.org.

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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.