The Morrison Moment and Beyond

Part Eleven

On the battlefield, the impact of American forces was being felt in direct conflict with the Vietcong. Even Bernard Fall, an eminent French expert on Vietnam (considered a particular sage by many press pundits, including I. F. Stone, whose weekly newsletter was a leader in challenging American forecasts of the war), wrote in Newsweek that U.S. power might make a decisive difference – an opinion he would later abandon, soon before his death two years later, when he was killed by a roadside bomb in Vietnam.

And the effect of the escalation on the ground turned out to be short-lived. In the summer and fall of 1965, Robert McNamara writes in In Retrospect, “reality collided with expectations. We no sooner had begun to carry out the plan to increase dramatically U.S. forces in Vietnam than it became clear there was reason to question the strategy on which the plan was based. Slowly, the sobering, frustrating limitations of military operations became painfully apparent. I had always been confident that every problem could be solved, but now I found myself confronting one – involving national pride and human life – that could not.

“My sense of the war gradually shifted from concern to skepticism to frustration to anguish. It shifted not because of growing fatigue, as was sometimes alleged, but because of my increasing anxiety that more and more people were being killed and we simply were not accomplishing our goals.”

Strikingly in all the documentation of this period, the issue of the war’s morality – the deaths of so many South Vietnamese civilians – was never the overriding concern. Criticism of the war inside the administration was about tactics and strategy – and the political costs of giving up – not about how to justify so much violence for a worst-case projection of the risks of communism across Asia.

On November 2 came another pivotal event in the wartime narrative, the self-immolation of Norman Morrison, a young Quaker, father of three, in front of the Pentagon and just yards from McNamara’s office window. Campus teach-ins and commentary in the press opposing escalation had little of the emotional impact of Morrison’s death – an echo of the Buddhist monks’ immolations that preceded the ouster of Diem in November 1963. Morrison’s family released a statement that he had given his life “over the great loss of life and human suffering caused by the war in Vietnam.”

McNamara writes: “I reacted to the horror of his action by bottling up my emotions and avoided talking them with anyone -- even my family. I knew Marg and our three children shared many of Morrison’s feelings about the war…And I believed I understood and shared some of his thoughts. There was much Marg and I and the children should have talked about, yet at moments like this I often turn inward instead – it is a grave weakness. The episode created tension at home that only deepened as dissent and criticism of the war continued to grow.”

In May 2022, McNamara’s son, Craig, published a book called Because Our Fathers Lied: A Memoir of Truth and Family, from Vietnam to Today. The title implies more malice than Robert McNamara, by his own account, intended. His personality and his official role led him and others around LBJ – including the president himself – repeatedly to sublimate moral judgment to strategy.

There were other ironies that autumn. Clashes in Kashmir, in which the Chinese-backed Pakistanis took up arms against Soviet-aligned India highlighted the split between the two major communist powers. And in Indonesia, the Communist Party (supported by China) launched an unsuccessful coup; as many as a half million party members were massacred. Suharto, an independent nationalist, came to power.

After the failed coup, McNamara recalled, a “bellicose and aggressive” speech by the Chinese defense minister, Lin Biao, “seemed to us a clear expression of the basis for the domino theory,” even though the foreign policy expert George F. Kennan argued that China had “suffered an enormous reverse in Indonesia…one of great significance and one that rather confines any realistic hopes they may have for expansion of their authority.” Kennan’s misunderstood Cold War advocacy of “containment” of Soviet power (he felt that the USSR could be contained because of its post-World War II weaknesses, not because of its strengths) had become the justification for the anti-communist crusades around the world. At a Senate hearing in February 1966, Kennan testified that there were now fewer dominoes in Asia to fall. “Kennan’s point failed to catch our attention and thus influence our actions,” McNamara writes.

McNamara’s next major initiative in policy came in an options memo he sent the president in November, after another trip to Vietnam. On leaving Saigon, he remarked to reporters: “We have stopped losing the war…But despite the fact that we’ve had that success, … [the Vietcong and North Vietnamese] have more than offset the very heavy losses which they have suffered. The level of infiltration has increased, and I think this represents a clear decision on the part of Hanoi to…raise the level of conflict.”

In his memo, McNamara offered President Johnson two options – essentially the same choices that he and Bundy had been putting forward all year – more escalation, fulfilling General William Westmoreland’s request for a sharp increase in force power; or a renewed effort at finding a path to negotiation. Back in the spring, Dean Rusk had surprised the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, with what Dobrynin in his memoir In Confidence called a “peace feeler…in the most tentative, unofficial, and personal manner.”

As a diplomat, Dobrynin, whose time in Washington encompassed six presidential administrations, dealt primarily with Rusk, and he characterized those exchanges as serious but civil disagreement. At a State Department reception in May, Rusk, “emphasizing that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union should be enslaved by its own partners” in Vietnam, “gave me to understand that our countries might join forces (without publicizing it) to reach a stage-by-stage settlement.”

Dobrynin elaborated: “Suppose, he said, a confidential agreement on Vietnam could be reached privately between Washington and Moscow. The United States would not regard it as a challenge if the Soviet Union simultaneously gave North Vietnam a solemn military guarantee against American bombardment. On the whole, the developments might look like a compromise reached in the face of imminent confrontation between the two superpowers. This, among other things, would be a major setback for China.”

Rusk even suggested, according to Dobrynin, that “air raids against North Vietnam” could be halted for “a limited probation period.”

In Moscow, the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, after a short period of consideration made it clear that there would be no negotiation.

That also was to be the view in Washington when McNamara again put forward a negotiation notion in November. But the idea of a bombing halt, which was called a “pause,” did gain support – perhaps because Rusk, one of the administration’s hawks, said he was behind it, perhaps because of his interactions with Dobrynin.

In December, while LBJ was at his Texas ranch recovering from gall bladder surgery, McNamara directly pressed the concept of a Christmas pause. McNamara reports in In Retrospect that he had grown “more and more convinced that we ought definitely to think of some action other than military action as the only program. … I personally believe we should go ahead and raise our budgets, raise our strengths [and] increase our deployments out there to gradually meet Westmoreland’s requirements. But I think if we do that by itself, it’s suicide and we ought definitely to accompany it – or even, perhaps, precede it – by some other action.”

In an exchange in the Cabinet Room on December 17, McNamara said, “A military solution to the problem is not certain – one out of three or one in two. Ultimately we must find…a diplomatic solution.

Johnson responded, “Then no matter what we do in the military field, there is no sure victory?”

“That’s right,” McNamara answered. “We have been too optimistic…”

To which Rusk said, “I’m more optimistic, but I can’t prove it.”

A month earlier, Dobrynin had told Bundy at a lunch “that if the United States stopped bombing for two to three weeks, Moscow “would use its influence to get Hanoi to negotiate.”

The bombing pause began on December 22 and was extended on a day-to-day basis. Rusk put forward a fourteen-point program soliciting North Vietnam to begin negotiations without preconditions.

Almost as soon as the bombing was stopped, the Joint Chiefs urged a resumption. And when no sign emerged of a change in Hanoi’s refusal to negotiate, Johnson ordered the resumption of air attacks at the end of January 1966. McNamara quotes a Harris poll at the time that said that “the vast majority of Americans would support an immediate escalation of the war – including all out bombings of North Vietnam and increasing U.S. troop commitments to 500,000 men.”

Could the outcome of the pause have been any different? The North Vietnamese had refused to engage in negotiations. The Johnson administration was, as always, divided and therefore confused. With the Harris poll in mind, the United States went ahead and met the further demands for escalation.

So, 1966 would be the year of an all-out U.S. war effort, once again in pursuit of military objectives that Johnson and McNamara understood were unlikely to meet the requirements of success.

Next Week Part 12 All-in Is Not Enough

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.