PART II
“YOU WILL WRITE APOLOGY to peace-loving people of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam,” the prison guard demanded. “Confess your crimes. Promise never to bomb Vietnam again.”
Everett Alvarez said, “Heck, no.”
This is how the torture sessions always began.
“You have bad attitude!” the guard raged. “Do not forget you are air pirate and capitalist warmonger! You are criminal aggressor who has bombed and killed peaceful Vietnamese!”
When Alvarez refused to sign a confession shoved in his face, guards cuffed his hands behind his back. They pushed his head down while yanking his arms up, holding him in this excruciating position until he cried out. The louder he shouted, the harder they punched and kicked him.
By 1967 there were more than a hundred American prisoners held in camps in and around Hanoi. Alvarez knew the same thing was happening to the other pilots. He could hear their screams through the walls of his cell.
Guards forced James Stockdale’s badly healed broken leg into irons and left him until his limbs turned blue. Navy pilot John McCain, shot down in 1967, was held in solitary confinement for years, dragged out only for interrogations and beatings. The ability to communicate with other prisoners through the cement walls was the only thing that kept him sane.
The pilots became so adept with the tap code that they started inventing shortcuts, a kind of low-tech texting. The question on everyone’s mind became, “WN DO U TC WE GO HM.”
* * *
By the start of 1967, nearly 400,000 Americans were serving in Vietnam. More than six thousand American soldiers had been killed, and as the fighting intensified that year, the death toll rose sharply to nearly one thousand a month.
Every night on the television news, Americans watched film from the Vietnam War: falling bombs, firefights, burning villages, the wounded on stretchers, and body bags loaded onto planes for the long flight home. The president kept saying America was winning the war. But the images on the TV screen did not look like victory. For the first time, the American public’s approval of Johnson’s handling of the war slipped below 50 percent.
On April 15, more than 300,000 protestors gathered in New York City’s Central Park for what became the largest antiwar march yet in American history. Young men stood on boulders and held cigarette lighters to their draft cards while the crowd shouted:
“Resist! Resist!”
For many of the men running the war, the growing protests hit uncomfortably close to home. Robert McNamara’s teenage son Craig shocked his father by hanging a Viet Cong flag in his bedroom. Stevie Westmoreland, the general’s daughter, watched in horror as college students set flame to an effigy of her father. Nearly everywhere he went, President Johnson was confronted by protestors chanting:
“Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
Reluctant to face hostile voters, the president began to feel like a prisoner in the White House. The isolation only worsened what the press had begun calling the “credibility gap”—the gap between what Johnson was telling the public and what the public believed was really happening in Vietnam.
Asked by journalists why he didn’t just cut American losses and leave Vietnam, Johnson repeated a pledge he had made many times: “I’m not going to be the first American president to lose a war.”
In public, both Johnson and General Westmoreland continued to speak of steady and encouraging success in Vietnam. In private, the conversation was different. “This war could go on indefinitely,” Westmoreland told Johnson at a meeting in March.
Under the existing plan, U.S. forces in Vietnam would rise from 400,000 to 470,000 by the end of 1967. It wasn’t enough, Westmoreland reported. With 100,000 additional troops, or ideally 200,000, he believed he could begin to win the war of attrition.
“When we add divisions, can’t the enemy add divisions?” asked Johnson. “And if so, where does it all end?”
Yes, Westmoreland agreed, the Communists were likely to match American escalation. But with the requested reinforcements, the stalemate might be snapped.
This is when Robert McNamara broke with the policy of open-ended escalation. In a secret memo, he urged the president to deny Westmoreland’s request.
Johnson griped, “That military genius, McNamara, has gone dovish on me.”
The president grappled with the usual indecision. He was terrified of losing the war, and scared of sparking wider protests. As he’d done several times before, he compromised. He approved another fifty-five thousand troops, raising the total to 525,000. And as usual, he assured Americans he was giving military leaders everything they asked for.
“We are very sure that we are on the right track,” Johnson told the country.
* * *
By March of 1967, Daniel Ellsberg was finally well enough to travel. He decided it was time to leave Vietnam. On his way home, he called Patricia Marx from Europe and asked her to come join him.
She hadn’t heard from him in months, and was ticked that he had the nerve to expect her to drop everything and come running.
She said, “Bug off.”
Ellsberg continued on to Washington, D.C. He resigned his post at the State Department. Though still weak from his bout with hepatitis, he spent some time in the capital trying to share what he’d learned in Vietnam. His hope was to use his position as an insider to influence key decision makers. It did not go as planned.
“Dan, it looks very good,” Walt Rostow, Johnson’s national security advisor, told Ellsberg in a White House meeting. “The other side is near collapse. In my opinion, victory is very near.”
Ellsberg couldn’t believe what he was hearing. When he began to object, Rostow cut in—
“But Dan, you’ve got to see the latest charts. I’ve got them right here. The charts are very good.”
“Walt, I don’t want to see your charts,” Ellsberg said. “I’ve just come back from Vietnam. I’ve been there for two years.”
“No, you don’t understand. Victory is near. I’ll show you the charts. The charts are very good.”
“Walt, I don’t want to hear it. Victory is not near.”
“But, Dan,” insisted Rostow, “the charts are very good.”
Varying versions of the same scene played out in offices at the Pentagon and State Department. Former colleagues thought Ellsberg’s outlook was too negative. “He is in a very sour mood,” one official commented. “He has had hepatitis so I think that contributes to his attitude.”
“I was mad,” Ellsberg later conceded. “Maybe it was my liver.”
But there was more to it, of course. What really struck Ellsberg was that government leaders seemed to have learned nothing from three years of failure in Vietnam. Even more maddening was the lack of any sense of urgency to change course.
William Bundy, a top State Department official, told Ellsberg, “I don’t think we can have any movement till after the election.” Meaning the presidential election of 1968.
“But that’s a year away!” Ellsberg cried.
Bundy sighed and shook his head.
* * *
Robert McNamara, following a very different path, came to the same conclusion as Ellsberg about Vietnam.
“We had failed,” McNamara later wrote. “Why this failure? Could it have been prevented? What lessons could be drawn from our experiences that would enable others to avoid similar failures?”
In June McNamara asked his assistant, John McNaughton, to start collecting classified documents for future use by government officials and scholars. “Tell your researchers not to hold back,” he told McNaughton. “Let the chips fall where they may.”
This was the report that would become infamous as the Pentagon Papers, but at the time it had a less catchy name: “History of U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam.”
A Pentagon official named Mort Halperin took charge of forming teams to study the various eras of American involvement in Vietnam, dating back to 1945. He offered Ellsberg a job on the project. Ellsberg jumped at the chance to expand his knowledge of the war. It was made very clear that the entire contents of the study—the very existence of the study—was to be kept secret, even from the president. McNamara feared Johnson would kill the project if he knew of it.
He was probably right. The study was a secret history of the Vietnam War. And the documents revealed a vast discrepancy between what government officials had been saying publicly and what they knew to be true.
“You know,” McNamara said, referring to the growing pile of papers, “they could hang people for what’s in there.”