ABOUT SIX WEEKS AFTER arriving at Da Nang, Lieutenant Philip Caputo and seven of his men sat in a helicopter, holding their rifles between their knees. Below, the Toy Loan River snaked through lush green hillsides that stretched to the horizon. Caputo wondered how he was supposed to find the enemy out there. This would be his first day of combat.
When the marines had first arrived at Da Nang, the orders had been clear: “The U.S. Marine Force will not, repeat will not, engage in day-to-day actions against the Viet Cong.”
That lasted three weeks. With enemy forces advancing, the Joint Chiefs requested permission to broaden the mission from merely guarding the base to engaging in what was described as “limited offensive operations.” Johnson agreed.
The chopper landed in a grassy clearing and the men jumped out, ducking to keep their heads below the whirling blades. Other helicopters were landing nearby. Caputo quickly moved his men out of the open space and under the dense forest canopy. In an instant it was dark. As the helicopters lifted off, Caputo gathered his platoon and set out on one of the first American patrols of the Vietnam War.
Their mission was to march to a nearby village and conduct a search for Viet Cong fighters and weapons. Single file, the men walked along a narrow, muddy trail that wound alongside the river. On one side of them was thick forest; on the other was the brown river, and beyond that a tall tangle of elephant grass and bamboo. The only sounds were of the flowing water and creatures in the forest.
“It was not at all a tranquil silence,” Caputo recalled.
May 1965. U.S. soldiers on patrol in the Vietnamese jungle.
They marched for an hour. The air was so humid, it felt like walking underwater. As the trail twisted along the river, the patrol began to take on a nightmarish quality that would become all too familiar to soldiers in this war. The men felt surrounded, but did not know by what. There was a constant sense that something violent was about to happen—and the men wished it would happen, just to break the unbearable tension.
Suddenly, there was a burst of rifle fire from somewhere in the forest. The men dropped to the wet ground and fired back into the trees. Caputo could feel his heart hammering against the earth beneath him.
Then the enemy firing stopped. Caputo got his men up and they continued the march. This went on all morning—the rapid bursts of gunfire from the dark forest, and then the silence. It took the platoon four hours to cover the three miles from the landing zone to the tiny village they were supposed to search.
There were about twenty thatch huts along the dirt road. A few old men and women, a few mothers with young children. No young men. No weapons.
The return to the landing zone was a repeat of the morning’s march, stretches of quiet interrupted by bursts of bullets from unseen enemies. The Americans fired back, but couldn’t see if they were hitting anything.
“It was as if the trees were shooting at us,” Caputo remembered.
Late that afternoon, in uniforms so sweat soaked they looked black, with shoulders aching under the weight of their packs, the men jumped into helicopters and flew back to camp. They wondered if they had accomplished anything. They suspected they had not.
* * *
Daniel Ellsberg saw Patricia Marx almost every night that spring. Early in the morning, he’d drive from the apartment she was renting in Georgetown to work at the Pentagon.
But if Ellsberg’s personal life was finally looking up, the situation in Vietnam was getting worse. At his desk, Ellsberg read cables from General Westmoreland warning that communist forces were close to cutting the country in two along the central highlands. The marines at Da Nang were doing well, but there were far too few of them to make a real difference. Without help, the army of South Vietnam could not hold out much longer.
Lyndon Johnson appealed to North Vietnam, offering massive financial aid in exchange for leaving South Vietnam alone. Ho Chi Minh rejected the offer. The United States, he insisted, must stop the bombing and withdraw American troops from the South before any serious negotiation could begin.
The president was annoyed, but understood the reality. “If I were Ho Chi Minh, I would never negotiate,” he said privately. Ho’s forces were winning—why should he cut a deal?
Undated photograph of Daniel Ellsberg and President Lyndon Johnson at the White House.
As the pressure grew, Johnson’s angry outbursts became more frequent. In April, at a speech in Philadelphia, Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson sparked the president’s wrath by gently suggesting the United States might try harder to find a negotiated settlement in Vietnam. When Johnson read this, he asked Pearson to meet him at Camp David, the presidential retreat in rural Maryland. The moment Pearson showed up, Johnson gave him “the Treatment,” grabbing the startled prime minister by the lapels and shouting, “You don’t come here and piss on my rug!”
* * *
“Are we sure to win?” Daniel Ellsberg asked an audience of students. “No. But should we quit without trying?”
This was a new part of Ellsberg’s job—defending the war on college campuses. He wanted students to understand why it was vital for the United States to fight in Vietnam. “I saw our involvement in the context of a worldwide conflict with communism,” he said of his thinking at this time. “A Cold War perspective I shared with most of my fellow officials.”
This was also the time that Ellsberg made the unsettling discovery that he was not quite the insider he’d thought he was. There were layers of secrets even he was not permitted to know.
In John McNaughton’s office at the Pentagon, there was a special bookcase where McNaughton kept his most sensitive cables and reports in three-ring binders. The bookcase had wheels, and each night, before he left, McNaughton would wheel it into a closet-sized safe and lock the door.
Ellsberg was permitted to enter the office and look in the binders. Most of them. There was one thick binder labeled “Vietnam: McNaughton Eyes Only.” Ellsberg disregarded that stamp on documents all the time, but in this case, his boss warned, the papersreally were off limits.
This was not easy for Ellsberg. He knew the combination to the safe. And he was dying to know what was in that binder. “I want to be the Einstein of political science,” he’d told Patricia on one of their early dates. “I want to understand how crises work, how governments react, everything.”
Night after night, he was alone in McNaughton’s suite with access to the prohibited documents. Night after night, he resisted temptation.
* * *
On June 7, Secretary of Defense McNamara got the news he had been dreading.
“The conflict in Southeast Asia is in the process of moving to a higher level,” General Westmoreland reported. The bombing and marines were not having any noticeable effect on enemy momentum. Westmoreland wanted to increase American troops in Vietnam to 200,000 in 1965, and that was just to prevent catastrophe. Many more would be needed in the near future.
“Of the thousands of cables I received during my seven years in the Defense Department, this one disturbed me the most,” McNamara later said. “We could no longer postpone a choice about which path to take.”
Should the United States commit to fighting a major ground war in Vietnam? It would prove to be one of the most important debates in American history, and it took place entirely in secret.
“The decision you face now, therefore, is crucial,” Assistant Secretary of State George Ball advised in a memo to President Johnson: “Once large numbers of U.S. troops are committed to direct combat they will begin to take heavy casualties in a war they are ill-equipped to fight in a non-cooperative if not downright hostile countryside.
“Once we suffer large casualties we will have started a well-nigh irreversible process. Our involvement will be so great that we cannot—without national humiliation—stop short of achieving our complete objectives. Of the two possibilities I think humiliation would be more likely than the achievement of our objectives—even after we had paid terrible costs.”
No one outside of Johnson’s inner circle saw this advice. In fact, this was one of the memos in the binder Daniel Ellsberg was ordered not to open.
Neither did the public learn that the Central Intelligence Agency was warning Johnson that even a large American ground force would probably be unable to stop the Communists from eventually taking over in Vietnam. Simply put, the enemy was willing to fight longer and take more losses. “Their staying power,” advised the CIA, “is inherently superior.”
Robert McNamara agreed that the situation was grim, the options limited. In his own top secret memo to Johnson, he outlined the three remaining alternatives.
Option one: “Cut our losses and withdraw.”
This would be humiliating, McNamara warned. It would be damaging to American prestige, because it would be viewed around the world as a defeat for the United States in the Cold War.
Option two: “Continue at about the present level.”
This would lead to a continually worsening situation in Vietnam. It wouldn’t really eliminate the need to make a decision, because the closer South Vietnam got to collapse, the more pressure there would be on the United States to intervene.
Option three: “Expand promptly and substantially the U.S. military pressure against the Viet Cong.”
This would prevent defeat in the short term, but at a substantial cost. McNamara bluntly listed the disadvantages: “risk of escalation, casualties will be high, and may be a long war without victory.”
To President Johnson, all three options looked lousy.
“He had no stomach for it, no heart for it,” Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson later said of her husband’s feelings about Vietnam. “It wasn’t the war he wanted. The one he wanted was on poverty and ignorance and disease, and that was worth putting your life into.”
Lady Bird Johnson knew the stress was reaching new heights when the president began pacing the White House halls at night. Night after night, in dressing gown and slippers, carrying a flashlight, Johnson would walk from his bedroom down to the situation room in the basement. There was nothing he could do at that hour. But it was more peaceful than the nightmares that tormented his sleep.
“I knew from the start that I was bound to be crucified either way I moved,” Johnson later said of the awful options remaining. If he committed to war in Vietnam, it would drain resources from the domestic programs he dreamed of crafting. But the alternative—that appeared even more terrifying.
“Losing the Great Society was a terrible thought,” he told an aide, “but not so terrible as the thought of being responsible for America’s losing a war to the Communists. Nothing could possibly be worse than that.”
When he finally went to bed, the nightmares returned.
“Every night when I fell asleep I would see myself tied to the ground in the middle of a long, open space,” Johnson later described. “In the distance, I could hear the voices of thousands of people. They were all shouting at me and running toward me: ‘Coward! Traitor! Weakling!’ They kept coming closer. They began throwing stones. At exactly that moment I would generally wake up, terribly shaken.”