Lyndon Johnson sent Robert McNamara back to Vietnam in July 1967 to assess General Westmoreland’s request for another huge deployment of troops – which McNamara had already said that he opposed in the May 19 memo. In their briefings, Westmoreland and his fellow generals insisted that American strength was turning around the conflict.
Brian VanDeMark writes that McNamara was, if not persuaded, then willing to reconsider the options one more time. The debate over additional deployment ended with a decision to add 45,000 troops. But that moment of optimism collided with demands in Congress for additional bombing, along with criticism, particularly of McNamara, for opposing the increase.
But even as McNamara was subject to criticism from the hawks in Congress and within the Johnson administration, he also had to contend with a growing anti-war movement among younger Americans, during what became known as the “Summer of Love” in 1967. This was followed in the fall by massive anti-war demonstrations at the Pentagon. Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, McNamara was being subjected to personal attacks from all sides as congressional demands for more air power and other hawkish criticisms were offset by increasingly vocal criticism from doves like Senator William Fulbright.
President Johnson also saw himself as a victim and complained to Rostow’s dovish deputy Francis Bator, as recounted by VanDeMark: “You doves think the pressures on me come from you…you are all wrong, The real pressures on me are on coming from people who want me to go North, mine the harbors, bomb Hanoi, get into a war with the Chinese – they’re crazies. That is where the real pressures are. I am the boy with his finger in the dike protecting you doves from the crazies.”
VanDeMark continued: “After he finished, Johnson walked around his desk, picked up a bumper sticker, and showed it to Bator, almost with tears in his eyes. The bumper sticker read: ‘All the Way with LeMay,” a reference to the now-retired Air Force chief of staff (and McNamara’s World War II commanding officer) Curtis LeMay, who advocated bombing North Vietnam “back to the stone age.” LeMay was extreme but far from alone in urging ferocity.
Policy confusion, work fatigue, family-related distress, and denunciations from Congress and anti-war activists were all grinding on McNamara. The Senate Armed Services Committee’s Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee, chaired by Senator John Stennis, held hearings in August 1967 that McNamara described as “one of the most stressful episodes in my life.”
How stress so depletes the body and judgment is one of the main – obvious perhaps but nonetheless central -- takeaways from the Vietnam-era record of McNamara and Johnson, the only two men responsible with a documented record that can be fully excavated.
In Road to Disaster, VanDeMark describes the mood as McNamara readied himself for the Stennis testimony: “McNamara’s opposition to intensifying the aerial assault…worsened the growing split between him and Johnson. During a Tuesday Lunch on August 8, McNamara opposed the Chiefs’ recommendation for increased air attacks around Hanoi and Haiphong, saying such actions risked Chinese intervention, threatened to kill hundreds of civilians, undercut the prospect of sparking negotiations, and were certain to inflame domestic protests.”
“It doesn’t look as though we have we have escalated enough to win,” Johnson insisted.
McNamara replied that the heavier bombing “would not necessarily mean that we would win.”
Johnson retorted: “We have got to do something to win.”
The president, growing impatient, told McNamara that he would face heat at the hearings.
“I am not worried about the heat,” McNamara replied, “as long as I know what we are doing is right.”
VanDeMark writes: “‘It was quite a scene,’ a White House aide recalled, both men going back and forth, tempers rising. Finally, Johnson told McNamara, in effect, you are on your own – I won’t pull the rug out from under you, but I am not accepting your argument, in just that way, right now.”
Describing his testimony, McNamara writes in In Retrospect, “I spent all day patiently and systematically … explaining the inherent limitations of bombing. I said we had learned that no amount of it … would allow us to win” -- except on a scale of destruction and death that would have exceeded Hiroshima and Nagasaki – though he did not say so explicitly.
“The subcommittee issued a unanimous report severely criticizing me for micromanaging the war,” McNamara writes.
The committee said: “We cannot, in good conscience, ask our ground forces to continue that fight in South Vietnam unless we are prepared to press the air war in the North in the most effective way possible…Logic and prudence requires that the decision be with the unanimous weight of professional military judgment.”
Immediately after McNamara finished his testimony, VanDeMark continues, Johnson called him and gave him “a full blast of presidential anger,” an aide recalled, and Johnson remarked to another aide, “I forgot he had only been president of Ford for one week” before Kennedy had appointed him defense secretary -- an exaggeration, although McNamara had only served a month in that post.
Johnson’s anger was less about the position McNamara had taken than that he had done it publicly. McNamara had never done that before. And the breach was serious.
McNamara disputes an account years later asserting that the Joint Chiefs had decided to protest McNamara’s position by resigning en masse. But, as contentious and divided as the air war debate had become, the record indicates that the major consequence of all the differences was that ultimately it was Johnson who would have had to resolve them in a way that his political instincts and insecurity about being commander-in-chief prevented him from doing.
As VanDeMark writes, “The accumulated anguish, frustration, and pressure on Robert McNamara reached the tipping point in early November 1967. After years of grappling with Vietnam and struggling to make American policy there work – a policy that he, more than anyone else had crafted and managed – the proud, self-assured man who had come to Washington… believing every problem had a solution, “finally bit the bullet,” as he later put it, and concluded that the massive American military effort in Vietnam could not succeed.”
This was the background for another memo from McNamara to the president on November 1, which went well beyond the May 19 memo in establishing that McNamara no longer could be in a leadership role for the war. He advocated capping troop deployments; stopping the bombing in hopes, at last, of getting into meaningful negotiations with Hanoi; and turning the fighting over to the South Vietnamese – which the Nixon administration would later call “Vietnamization.”
In the editorial sessions for the book, McNamara castigated himself for not taking his advocacy to its logical conclusion: a U.S. withdrawal and full acceptance of the reality that had been John F. Kennedy’s belief and, at core, McNamara’s as well. The United States could not win a war that the South Vietnamese were unable or unwilling to wage themselves. The Stennis hearings in August and the massive demonstrations at the Pentagon in October (which surprisingly went off without serious violence) framed the situation: Hawks demanding more war, protestors demanding the end.
In the vortex were the president, privately in such despair that Lady Bird’s hopes that he would not run again were foremost in her diaries, and McNamara, who could no longer reconcile his role as an adviser to the president with whom he was at a breaking point on Vietnam – the singular link the two men had.
By continuing to present American military force in Vietnam as essential to defeating communism, the fact that vast numbers of civilians and soldiers were being killed was not an argument for accepting defeat. Disputes over tactics and strategy are the narrative texts of memos and the reflections contained in McNamara’s memoir, which is why his remorse was interpreted so widely as regret for himself rather than for the war’s victims.
So why did McNamara initiate the moves which led to his departure from the Johnson administration?
“What was in my mind…I felt that [Johnson] was not prepared to accept my conclusions which were that we could not achieve our objective militarily, that we would have to change our objective…I can no longer have influence on him and I no longer, therefore, need to feel that for me to leave is walking away from my responsibility. If I can’t be influential and I can’t change my judgment on what to do and I can’t get him to do it, then I should leave. I mean it’s that cycle of judgment.”
No American officials were publicly advocating an end to the war for the sake of the lives of Vietnamese people. The case for victory was to preserve the credibility of American power and resistance to communism.
The publication of In Retrospect ignited rage because McNamara had revealed that he had reached his judgment on the war in 1966 and 1967 but he would never say so in public, remaining silent about the war until his book was released in 1995.
After leaving the administration, McNamara acknowledged, “I just turned off.” He rationalized this with the position that he could not publicly challenge his successors on policies that he had been so involved in devising. He could not and would not turn on Johnson personally, nor would he openly dispute the strategies of General Westmoreland and the Joint Chiefs. As Julia Sweig relates in her book on Lady Bird’s diaries: “McNamara was being eased out by the president even as the defense secretary felt a growing pull to resign. Still, the Johnsons adored him. Lady Bird had ‘seldom felt as sorry for’ Lyndon, and McNamara’s departure caused ‘great loneliness and separation’ for them both.”
Johnson never responded to McNamara’s November 1 memo. He did again convene the Wise Men – the outside advisers including Dean Acheson, Clark Clifford, and now McGeorge Bundy, who, not aware how far McNamara’s disillusion had extended, after consideration endorsed staying the course in the war.
But the endgame was proceeding.
Several unseen maneuvers intersected. McNamara showed interest in the presidency of the World Bank, a position that the American president could fill. Johnson, deploying his political touch, brokered the appointment, successfully avoiding the need to confront McNamara directly.
Clark Clifford was then identified as McNamara’s successor at the Pentagon, with the handover to happen in the first quarter of 1968.
McNamara’s resignation as secretary of defense was announced on November 29, 1967, and he would officially leave the job at the end of February.
In the meantime, all hell broke loose in Asia during January 1968. North Korea seized the USS Pueblo spy ship on January 23 and held the crew for eleven months, an excruciating embarrassment.
On January 30, the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese army launched the Tet offensive across the South, which in the tumult seemed an enormous show of force and a display of U.S. and South Vietnamese weakness. That is not actually what it turned out to be -- the offensive was repulsed -- but that was certainly the way it looked at the time. At this time of turmoil, the Pentagon was in transition.
The outgoing secretary of defense was widely considered at the edge or beyond a mental and physical breakdown, and LBJ was equally an emotional mess, which he would reveal in taped conversations and in the misery that Lady Bird witnessed nightly.
It was in a February 5 phone call with the Washington Star’s Jack Horner that Johnson vented his frustrations:
“I don’t admit this is a communist victory and I don’t think anybody but a goddamn communist admits it. That’s what I think. And I think they’re just using us, just playing games around us. And nearly everybody I talk to tries to find out what’s wrong with our boys, our country, our leadership, our men. Our president’s a liar, Westmoreland’s no good, anybody that differs with them. When McNamara leaves, why he becomes a hero! He was the goddamnnest screwball as long as he’s in there.”
Here's the link for the website page where people can watch the C-SPANinterview online : www.c-span.org/video/?536661-1/author-peter-8osnos-lbj-robert-mcnamara-vietnam-war.
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
Korea was a stalemate -- and essentially has been since the war ended in a truce in 1953.
The pressure they mention is because there was, unlike today, a working mainstream press not necessarily compliant with power.