The Overview

Part Two

This series begins with the presidency of John F. Kennedy and continues year by year through the term of Lyndon B. Johnson.

Parts Three, Four, and Five cover 1961-63, the Kennedy years, during which the Cold War with the Soviet Union was at its height, but the tense and perilous face-offs in Berlin and Cuba did not lead to the conflagrations that were feared. The movement for civil rights featured nonviolent protest, conveying a sense of dignified determination to defy racism, even as those resistant to racial integration often employed violent means themselves.

Overall, the mood in the country seemed to be lifted by the dynamic, glamorous presence of Kennedy, his family, and his cohort. The period has been romanticized and sentimentalized by its violent climax. There is resonance in what Daniel Patrick Moynihan said to his friend, the columnist Mary McGrory, after Kennedy was killed and she commented: “We’ll never laugh again.”

“We’ll laugh again,” Moynihan replied, “but we’ll never be young again.”

While the outcome of the Vietnam conflict is indisputable, the looming and unanswerable question is what John F. Kennedy would have done if he had lived. The record of the Kennedy years shows that the humiliation of the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco in his first year in office, when the young president concluded that he had been misled by the CIA and the military, followed in 1962 by the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Kennedy overruled those who favored a military solution, likely would have meant that he would adhere to his belief that the war in Vietnam was up to the Vietnamese to wage – and not to be the object of American intervention on a vast scale.

Historians now generally agree that Kennedy was killed before he had made a conclusive decision about whether the U.S. would be out of Vietnam by 1965. Decades after the fact, McNamara was certain that this would have been Kennedy’s goal, but he never publicly went as far in his public statements as he did in sessions with his editors.

McNamara’s selection as secretary of defense was itself not predictable. He had only recently been named president of the Ford Motor Company in the fall of 1960, and did not know John Kennedy personally. When the president-elect offered him the job – on the recommendation of the Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith and former Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett, who admired McNamara’s demonstrated management skills and personality – McNamara said he was not qualified. But within days, the appointment was announced on the snowy steps of Kennedy’s residence in Georgetown.

Like Kennedy, McNamara was young, just forty-four when he took the reins at the Pentagon. He had no particular political affiliation (at the time of his appointment he was a registered Republican), but his manner exuded competence and confidence without arrogance – though, ironically, arrogance would later be considered his defining personality trait.

McNamara was not from the establishment elite, as was McGeorge Bundy, the new national security adviser. Though he had been to Harvard for graduate study, he spent his college years at the University of California at Berkeley. But over time McNamara grew so close to the Kennedy family that he was asked to be at Andrews Air Force Base when the president’s casket arrived from Dallas on the night of the assassination.

Parts Six Seven, and Eight cover the events of 1964 and the accession of Lyndon Johnson, who called himself “an accidental president.” Once powerful as the Senate majority leader, Johnson as vice president had been degraded politically and personally to the extent that he had intended to remove himself from the Kennedy ticket in 1964.

Yet suddenly he had the position and the power that he had sought for so long. From all accounts, he was resolved to be elected for a term in his own right in 1964 and use the power of the presidency to pursue what he called the “Great Society” – government programs that would make America the nation of its unfulfilled founding principles. McNamara and most of JFK’s senior leadership team made the transition to Johnson knowing that continuity was important after the shattering impact of Kennedy’s death.

One of McNamara’s strengths of character which had made him successful at Ford was understanding hierarchy and whose voice mattered most. So, as Johnson settled in McNamara made himself valuable, even in Johnson’s terms, indispensable.

On Vietnam, with the benefit of hindsight, 1964 was the year Johnson kept all the issues unresolved as he ran for president. And McNamara, knowing how badly things were going on the war front, went along with Johnson’s indecision, regardless of what he might have thought otherwise. Events in Vietnam -- the successes of the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese combined with the political fracas in Saigon, where coups and juntas prevailed -- was a distraction that was to be minimized at all costs during Johnson’s 1964 presidential campaign against Senator Barry Goldwater, who was an all-out war hawk.

The Tonkin Gulf dustups in August 1964, in which there was a flareup of naval exchanges and bombing raids followed by a congressional resolution authorizing Johnson to go to war as he saw fit, did not move the president off his insistence on maintaining the “status quo” for U.S. involvement in the conflict during the campaign.

Johnson’s landslide victory over Goldwater was a triumph of domestic politics and meant that the situation in Vietnam had to be confronted at last.

Parts Nine, Ten, and Eleven move on to the pivotal year of 1965, when the United States made a full commitment to the war in Vietnam, deploying combat forces and initiating a major bombing campaign. Between January and July, escalation proceeded apace, inextricably shifting the strategy from a war to be fought by the Vietnamese to the “American war.” While a complete victory over Hanoi would have been the desired triumph, the formula that had held on the divided Korean peninsula, with “a free and independent South Vietnam,” would likely have been acceptable as well.

Only days after Johnson’s inaugural, McNamara and Bundy submitted a memo to the president captioned “Fork in the Road.” The opening sentence was blunt: “Both of us are now pretty well convinced that our current policy can only lead to disastrous defeat.” A month later, the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign was underway, intended to stop North Vietnamese supplies to its Vietcong allies in the south and to bolster the South Vietnamese military morale. The bombing would continue with little letup until October 31, 1968.

On March 8, the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade arrived in Danang, the first deployment of a U.S. ground combat unit to Vietnam. In the months to follow, their mission was changed from base security to offensive operations.

All that spring and summer, there were meetings of national security officials and Pentagon leaders making plans and ultimately decisions to fundamentally alter the dynamic of the war, making it the “American war,” to be conducted with the partnership of South Vietnamese troops who were never really respected by their U.S. counterparts.

What was in Lyndon Johnson’s mind during those months seems contradictory and confusing. On February 11, Lady Bird recorded in her diary hearing the president say to his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, that he did not believe himself to be “qualified” to be commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

In late July, at Camp David, McNamara -- now considered an advocate of escalation even though he was skeptical about the bombing strategy -- was tasked by Johnson to debate with Clark Clifford, a presidential senior adviser without portfolio, on the plan submitted by General William Westmoreland in Saigon, for the deployment of 185,000 American troops by the end of the year.

McNamara argued in favor, Clifford against. Johnson’s aide Jack Valenti kept notes.

Privately, McGeorge Bundy concluded years later for his unfinished memoir that Johnson had already agreed to move forward with the added forces. The debates, Bundy said, were more of a political exercise than a strategic one.

And what was in McNamara’s mind?

McNamara had come to accept where the process was headed and was by instinct a supporter of the president’s prerogative to decide. He, like other senior advisers, accepted the proposition that withdrawal would lead to communist domination of Southeast Asia. It was the height of the Cold War, only fifteen years after the People’s Republic of China had intervened on behalf of communist North Korea during the Korean War, and so the concept of the U.S. giving up in Vietnam was inconceivable. It was also an era when national security thinking was centered on the “domino theory,” which asserted that the fall of any one country to communism would lead to a communist takeover of neighboring countries. This was the view of many of the so called “Wise Men” of venerable former foreign officials and of former President Dwight Eisenhower, the World War II hero whose expertise was thought beyond challenge.

While a negotiated settlement might emerge, the North Vietnamese, it came to be believed, had to be persuaded that the United States would use whatever force was necessary to persuade them to concede. The U.S. military even considered the possibility of nuclear weapons.

Parts Twelve and Thirteen take the story to 1966, the year of reckoning. A thirty-seven-day bombing pause, starting in December 1965 at McNamara’s instigation, had not had any results that would suggest negotiations with North Vietnam were possible.

The U.S. military was now deployed in force in Vietnam. McGeorge Bundy gave up his role at the National Security Council, recognizing that he no longer could work effectively with Johnson. He became president of the Ford Foundation and was never really held in judgment for his White House role. He was replaced by his deputy, Walt Rostow, who was a staunch advocate of waging all-out war.

The events of the year did not reverse the negative trends, despite the Johnson administration’s persistence in releasing misleading reports that claimed the war was going well. As the difference between upbeat official assessments and field reporting by journalists took hold in the public, what was called the “credibility gap” arose, which over the years would harden into a general public skepticism toward government pronouncements.  

LBJ’s legislative strengths on the domestic policy front, collectively known as the Great Society, were as formidable as his management of the war continued to be challenged by the enemy and on the home front. Senator William Fulbright, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, held nationally televised hearings that featured policy experts critical of the war. Questions began to be asked: How far could Johnson go in expanding the war further? How should the administration handle the growing anti-war movement?

The conflict became known as “McNamara’s war,” and the secretary of defense said that he had no problem with that. But he continued to believe at some level that despite the massive American commitment, the military and political weaknesses of the South Vietnamese were likely to prevent anything like a conventional battlefield victory.

Parts Fourteen, Fifteen, and Sixteen recount the events of 1967, when McNamara came to terms with the prospect of failure. He could no longer make the case that more troops would ever be enough. The possibility of a negotiated settlement was considered, and some forays were made without results. In April of that year, Martin Luther King delivered a sermon at Riverside Church in New York opposing the war, complicating the relationship that he and others had developed with Johnson on civil rights.

By the end of the year, McNamara had decided to resign. His own relations with LBJ were now tense.

While the taped record is not clear, a complicating issue was McNamara’s closeness to the Kennedy family. Robert Kennedy and Johnson detested each other for a number of reasons, political and personal. McNamara was also close to Jackie Kennedy, a true friendship as distinct from Johnson’s fawning efforts to reach out to her. And she was deeply opposed to the war.

Johnson devised the means to have McNamara appointed president of the World Bank, a move so deft that the secretary of defense could always maintain that he never really knew if he had been fired or if he had quit.

As Part Seventeen shows, by 1968 Johnson was finished with McNamara, calling him a “screwball” in a call with a reporter. He named Clark Clifford as McNamara’s successor, finally persuading the reluctant counselor to put his impeccable reputation to the test in policy. Clifford had the extraordinary ability to smooth talk in all situations, including dealing with Johnson’s belief that Robert Kennedy, now in the Senate, was intent on driving him from office and restoring the Kennedy name to the presidency.

Clifford’s own views on the war had evolved from his initial skepticism, and he was now considered a supporter of whatever was necessary. As soon as taking office, however, Clifford understood just how badly things were trending. His advice to Johnson soon became very much the same as McNamara’s had been.

The word in Washington was that McNamara was at his wit’s end, near a breakdown. When he was emotionally overcome at his retirement ceremony and unable to speak, that perception was widely accepted.

McNamara insisted that this was not the case. His tendency to weep when he was under certain forms of stress or after he had been drinking a bit was a behavioral tic that enabled his critics, ultimately, to mock his statements of regret about the war three decades later.

After setbacks in Vietnam, most notably the Tet offensive, and with Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy announcing their candidacies for the Democratic presidential nomination, LBJ realized that he could not continue his reelection campaign.

And so, on March 31, he announced to a stunned nation that he would not run. Despite having committed himself to a search for peace, Johnson did not make any significant changes in strategy that might have led to negotiations – either in the bombing campaign or troop tactics. Violence soon convulsed America at home as well. On April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated, followed by nationwide riots. And on June 5, Kennedy was shot; he died the next day.

After leaving the Pentagon, McNamara went on a vacation trip to Colorado with his wife before starting at the World Bank. Johnson was now a lame duck with a crushed morale. Their failed partnership was now complete.

And as Part Eighteen relates, the war would go on. The devastation of Vietnam and the bombing of the North would wreak havoc, but not submission. The war would spread into Cambodia and, largely unnoticed continue in Laos. A great many more American soldiers would be killed, wounded, or captured. The Pentagon Papers, initiated by McNamara, would reveal the scale of ignorance and duplicity that were so much a factor in the way the conflict unfolded on the battlefield and on American public attitudes.

Johnson’s will was broken, and he died on January 22, 1973, the week his successor, Richard Nixon, was claiming that United States had achieved “peace with honor” in Vietnam, in the words of his aide Henry Kissinger. The last American GIs and prisoners of war would leave the country in a matter of weeks.

One of the eternal debates in history is whether individuals shape events or whether it is the events that define the people involved in them.

The LBJ-McNamara relationship between 1963 and 1968 demonstrates how the personalities and character of these two men delivered an outcome neither of them actually wanted.

The tragedy was traceable to errors of judgment – choices in matters tactical, strategic, and practical.

But above all neither Johnson nor McNamara seemed to accept the moral implications of the conflict, that killing so many people because of a perceived need to defeat an ideology in a country they did not know or understand would defame them forever in history.

Johnson was destroyed by his failure – and by the consequences for his noble intentions on civil rights and poverty.

McNamara was doing his duty to the presidency as he saw it. But throughout his seven years as secretary of defense and for decades after, the way he carried himself – his slicked-back hair and his declaratory manner of speech – obscured the emotion beneath. And when it did show, it came across as self-pity.

They were not by nature evil men, but even though they knew and recognized that the mission in Vietnam encompassed evil, they were unable to end it. Robert McNamara did his best at explaining what had gone wrong. It would never be seen as enough.

Next Week Part Three: JFK and McNamara

Sources and Acknowedgements and the audio of McNamara working with his editors can be found at www.platformbooksllc.net.