III
progress (n. prog′res or, esp. Brit., pro′gres), n. 1. movement toward a specific goal or a further stage. 2. development or cumulative improvement as of an individual or a civilization. 3. forward or onward movement in space or time.
stalemate (stal′mat′), n. v. -mat-ed, -mat-ing. -n. 1. Chess, a position in which a player cannot move any piece except his king and cannot move his king without putting it in check, the result being a draw. 2. any position or situation in which no action can be taken.
The Random House Dictionary of the English Language. The College Edition
In his January 1967 State of the Union address, the president spoke somewhat guardedly but nevertheless optimistically of the war against aggression in Vietnam. President Johnson assured the American public that General Westmoreland believed the enemy could no longer succeed on the battlefield. “I wish I could report to you that the conflict is almost over. This I cannot do. We face more cost, more loss, and more agony. For the end is not yet. I cannot promise you that it will come this year—or come next year. Our adversary still believes, I think, tonight that he can go on fighting longer than we can, and longer than we and our allies will be prepared to stand up and resist.”
The 1967 State of the Union message also provided Johnson with a forum to request that Congress pass a 6 percent tax surcharge in an effort to slow inflation without risking a recession. Only now were the twin effects of the 1964 tax cut and growing expenditures associated with the war threatening to undercut a period of sustained growth. Between 1964 and 1967, the GNP had increased by 7 percent per annum, while inflation and unemployment had remained low. But Johnson’s economists recognized that the costs of the war, which now totalled over $17 billion annually, would bring back inflationary pressure—unless a tax was implemented.
The president harbored grave private doubts concerning the politics of war and taxation. In his memoirs, The Vantage Point, Johnson explained, “I stuck to the middle ground, for I realized that my Presidency would require dealing simultaneously with major military crises abroad and urgently needed reforms at home. That course was not comfortable. It would have been easier in the short run to break out the flag for an all-out military effort, and perhaps easier still to abandon our commitment in Asia and concentrate on domestic tasks. But I was convinced that the middle ground was the right course for the United States. That was the fundamental approach of my administration, and I was not going to abandon it. Holding to it, however, eroded my popularity from two directions—with those who wanted to do more in the war and with those who wished to do more at home. And Presidential popularity is a major source of strength in gaining cooperation from Congress.”1
Questions on Enemy Strength
Within the CIA a cloudy picture of military progress was emerging from studies of enemy strength. A January 9 report from the CIA Office of National Estimates described the political health of South Vietnam as “precarious,” pacification of the countryside “spotty,” the fighting capabilities of the South Vietnamese “generally poor.” If this war was to be won with political reform and stability in the South, it would be a long road ahead. Moreover, Hanoi, not U.S. troop increments, controlled the rate of attrition in the South. “There is no evidence of a diminution of Communist will to continue the war.” Hanoi expected U.S. resolve to crumble once it became apparent that a viable political structure could not be created for winning mass support in South Vietnam. “We do not know how long the Communists will remain determined to persist,” noted the CIA report.
The CIA analysis documented the failure of Westmoreland’s strategy of attrition—there would be no imminent crossover point. Not only were the Communists still capable of fighting for at least another year, “they are probably determined to do so.” None of the Communist’s problems appeared to be critical. The report concluded, “Thus, from the purely military standpoint there are good reasons to believe that the Communists will persevere.”
The size of enemy forces was well on its way to becoming an official bureaucratic debate and source of controversy, not a conspiracy by MACV intelligence officers. On January 11, 1967, George Carver, special assistant for Vietnamese affairs, wrote to CIA Director Richard Helms that the MACV Order of Battle (OB) for the size of enemy strength was “far too low and should be raised, perhaps doubled.” Raising the OB figure to “a more realistic level would allow the intelligence community to make a better-informed appraisal of what we are up against and would enable it to grapple more effectively with such nuts and bolts problems as communist manpower allocations, desertion rates, casualty estimates, and logistics.”
The Order of Battle during the Vietnam war was an estimate of Communist capabilities to conduct military operations. It was an inexact process, arrived at by counting enemy defectors, prisoners, spies, captured documents, reconnaissance photos, etc., and was broken down into the following classifications:
Classification of Forces:
(1) Viet Cong (VC) Main Force (MF): Those military units which were directly subordinate to Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN), a Viet Cong Military Region, or sub-region.
(2) Viet Cong (VC) Local Force (LF): Those military units which were directly subordinate to a provincial or district party committee and which normally operated only within a specified VC province or district.
(3) North Vietnamese Army (NVA) Units: A unit formed, trained, and designated by North Vietnam as an NVA unit, and composed completely or primarily of North Vietnamese. At times, either VC or NVA units and individual replacements appeared in units that were predominantly NVA or VC at the command level.
(4) Irregulars: These were organized forces composed of guerrilla, self-defense, and secret self-defense elements subordinate to village and hamlet level VC organizations. These forces performed a wide variety of missions in the support of VC activities and, in fact, provided a training and mobilization base for the VC maneuver and combat support forces.
(a) Guerrillas: Guerrillas were full-time forces organized into squads and platoons which did not always stay in their home village or hamlet. Typical missions for guerrillas were collection of taxes, propaganda, protection of village party committees, and terrorist and sabotage activities.
(b) Self-Defense Force: A VC para-military structure responsible for the defense of hamlet and village areas controlled by the VC. These forces did not leave their home area, and they performed their duties on a part-time basis. Duties consisted of conducting propaganda, constructing fortifications, and defending home areas.
(c) Secret Self-Defense Force: A clandestine VC organization which performed the same general function in GVN controlled villages and hamlets as did the self-defense forces in VC controlled areas. Their operations involved intelligence collection as well as sabotage and propaganda activities.
On January 19, General Wheeler instructed members of the intelligence community with responsibility for collecting and analyzing OB figures to meet in Honolulu in order to standardize methods for developing and presenting statistics on the Order of Battle, infiltration trends, and estimates. These concerns certainly reached the president’s desk. Rostow wrote to LBJ on January 20, 1967 “as you know, a debate continues on the absolute size of the enemy order of battle in Viet Nam,” Rostow reported that “whatever the size, you should know that official statistics now show for the first time a net decline in both VC main force and North Vietnam army units for the fourth quarter of 1966. This is the first reversal of the upward trend since 1960.”
At the conference held in February in Honolulu, representatives from MACV, CIA, and other U.S. intelligence agencies agreed that major book increases in the numbers listed for MACV’s Order of Battle would be forthcoming. It was generally recognized that enemy strength for personnel in the Irregular and Political categories was much greater than MACV’s intelligence estimated showed. High priority was given to updating these new estimates.
General Wheeler soon cabled Admiral Sharp and General Westmoreland that he was becoming “increasingly concerned over the contradictory order of battle (OB) and infiltration statistics which are contained in the numerous documents currently being circulated throughout Washington.” Members of Congress, White House officials, and the press were starting to focus on these administrative discrepancies. Part of the problem involved an impression of precision, which did not actually exist in OB and infiltration figures. The fact was, however, that officials in Washington wanted consistent data on the war’s progress. “It was a very bad pressure,” recalled George Carver. “It came out of the White House.”
Relentless pressure continued to build from Washington for demonstrations of further progress in the field. But the data frequently undermined the assumption that the United States held the military initiative in Vietnam. When General Wheeler received General Westmoreland’s updated statistics on Battalion and Large-Size Enemy-Initiated Actions he cabled back to Westmoreland on March 11, “I have just been made aware of the figures you now report. If these figures should reach the public domain, they would, literally, blow the lid off of Washington. Please do whatever is necessary to insure these figures are not repeat not released to News Media or otherwise exposed to public knowledge. . . .”
The new figures showed dramatic increases in the number of enemy-initiated attacks. In another cable to Sharp and Westmoreland, General Wheeler wrote:
I must say I find this difficult to believe and certainly contrary to my own impression of how the war has been going during the past six to eight months. The implications are major and serious. Large-scale enemy initiatives have been used as a major element in assessing the status of the war for the President, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, Congress, and as well in Washington. These figures have been used to illustrate the success of our current strategy as well as over-all progress in Vietnam. Considerable emphasis has been placed on these particular statistics, since they provide a relatively straight-forward means of measuring the tempo of organized enemy combat initiative. (In cold fact, we have no other persuasive yardstick.) Your new figures change the picture drastically. ... I can only interpret the new figures to mean that, despite the force buildup, despite our many successful spoiling attacks and base area searches, and despite the heavy interdiction campaign in North Vietnam and Laos, VC/NVA combat capability and offensive activity throughout 1966 and now in 1967 has been increasing steadily, with the January 1967 level some two and one-half times above the average of the first three months in 1966.
Wheeler recognized the political implications of a military stalemate in Vietnam: “I cannot go to the President and tell him that, contrary to my reports and those of the other chiefs as to the progress of the war in which we have laid great stress upon the thesis you have seized the initiative from the enemy, the situation is such that we are not sure who has the initiative in South Vietnam. Moreover, the effect of surfacing this major and significant discrepancy would be dynamite, particularly coming on the heels of other recent statistical problems. I have discussed the whole problem with Secretary McNamara and we agree that urgent action is required.” This action involved trying to find new procedures for reporting progress in the war. “I believe we should do this promptly in view of the President’s intention to meet with Ambassador Lodge and you in the near future,” Wheeler concluded.2
Guam: Dramatizing Progress in March 1967
In preparation for the Guam conference on March 20 Lodge cabled Rusk, “I fully concur in the need to accelerate our present rate of progress and to dramatize what has been and should be achieved to meet the heavy pressures I know the president and you are under at home.”3 Two days before the conference an optimistic Rostow wrote to LBJ, “If victory is not in sight, it is on the way.”
The Guam meeting was intended to provide a dramatization of unity and support for the U.S. commitment in Vietnam. Joining the president at Guam were Generals Westmoreland and Wheeler, and Admiral Sharp, as well as Chief of State Thieu and Premier Ky, who presented LBJ with a draft copy of the new Vietnamese constitution fulfilling the pledge made at Honolulu. “Their proud looks at Guam said: We have done what we said we would, even though many people thought it was impossible,” Johnson later recalled.4Ky now promised Johnson that the constitution would be promulgated and that Vietnam would soon hold free elections. President Johnson must have thought that Ky was a man with two, not one, aces.
Changes in the civilian guard in Saigon were announced prior to the Guam meetings. Ellsworth Bunker was appointed to succeed Henry Cabot Lodge as United States ambassador, and Robert Komer, who held the title special assistant to the president, was named deputy to the commander of MACV with the rank of ambassador and was assigned responsibility for the pacification program. Bunker brought a distinguished public service record as ambassador to Argentina, Italy, and India, as well as the Organization of American States (OAS). He had been instrumental in forging a coalition government in Santa Domingo which eventually allowed the United States to withdraw its forces. The Komer appointment was met with dismay by officials in Washington if only because he was already known for his “sunny-side-up” views of the war. Saigon observers described Komer as “a Guildenstern at the court of Lyndon I—willing to please his President at all costs.” By 1968 even his friends referred to him as “blowtorch.”5
In preparation for an evening meeting between LBJ and Thieu and Ky, Walt Rostow suggested that the president emphasize the following points:
You are counting on these two great patriots to do the job. The war itself; the transition to constitutional government; the future of South View Nam as a nation; the capacity of the US to sustain the war—all these depend on unity among the Vietnamese military. . . . You have put a half million men in Southeast Asia. You intend to see this through. You are not going to sell out the people of South Viet Nam. And remember this: the US has been through many crises; our friends have emerged well—from Greece and Berlin to South Korea. We are shedding blood with them on their soil. We do not intend to give away the fruits of our effort at the conference table. They should do their job with confidence.6
The working notes and tape transcripts from the March 20–21, 1967, Guam meetings included a remarkable exchange between President Johnson and General Westmoreland. In February 1966 LBJ had demanded a “coonskin on the wall” by December 1966. Now, three months after the December deadline, the president asked his field commander, “Are they bringing in as many as they’re losing?” Westmoreland answered, “Up until now, no, sir. Their gains have exceeded their losses. However, if the present trend continues I think we might arrive at the cross-over point. Perhaps this month, or next month. And by the cross-over point I mean where their losses are greater than their gains.” Although the statistics he had sent to Wheeler earlier in the month proved the contrary, Westmoreland now maintained that the enemy’s 287,000-man order of battle was leveling off and as of March, had reached the crossover point of attriting more men than Hanoi could recruit or infiltrate each month.
The meeting on March 21 began with General Westmoreland reviewing the enemy order of battle and troop strength. Westmoreland provided a corps by corps review and summarized the overall picture. The general noted progress and achievement but made the point that unless military pressure caused the Viet Cong to crumble and Hanoi to stop its support of southern insurgency, the war in Vietnam could go on indefinitely. Hanoi was still confident of victory and confident that the Communists would wear down the Free World’s will to continue the fight. General Westmoreland continued his case against any bombing pause. Also present at the meeting was Admiral Sharp, who argued that bombing had been successful in light of its limited objectives. “It had not stopped infiltration, but no one had ever thought it would. It had made Communist infiltration immensely more difficult and costly for the Communists and also exerted a constant pressure on the North Vietnamese regime.”7
The Guam conference illustrated the private doubts and disagreements amongst the president’s principal advisors. Writing to the president on March 22 Rostow warned “As you are undoubtedly aware, Gen. Westmoreland’s presentation at Guam was, evidently, designed to be conservative and non-promissory—which, given his responsibilities, is understandable. He repeated the infiltration estimate of 7,000 per month.” Rostow considered 7000 as an upper-end calculation, arrived at by “averaging over the twelve months of 1966 the maximum total of confirmed, probable, and possible; projecting forward at a rate which ignores the downward trend in quarterly totals since the first quarter of 1966.” Rostow anticipated a much more optimistic scenario and explained to the president that “I must confess that I am greatly impressed by the fact that the Chieu Hoi [desertion] figures have remained over 1,000 per week for 5 weeks. If that can be sustained for, say, 6 months, I find it hard to believe that the VC infrastructure can hold up.”8
Following the meeting in Guam, General Westmoreland forwarded to President Johnson a “minimum essential” and “optimum” force plan for American troop strength beyond the 470,000 already approved for 1967. The minimum plan would bring U.S. forces to a total of 550,500; the optimum force to 670,000. The troop request reflected both the debasement of McNamara’s call for the stabilization of U.S. forces in Vietnam, as well as a road map to endless escalation. Johnson ordered Wheeler and Westmoreland back to Washington for consultation.
April Consultations at Home
The April 1967 meeting of the principals revealed the slippery slope on which the credibility of the administration’s Vietnam policy rested, as well as the serious intramural divisions between the secretary of defense and the Joint Chiefs over the bombing program. The declassified transcripts also document a remarkably barren political base for the president. During their private White House meetings, General Westmoreland painted a much grimmer picture than he had the previous month for President Johnson. Without the additional forces, “we will not be in danger of being defeated, but it will be nip and tuck to oppose the reinforcements the enemy is capable of providing. In the final analysis, we are fighting a war of attrition in Southeast Asia. What is the next step? A second addition of 21/3 divisions, another 100,000 men, probably in FY 1969.” How much would be enough? “With the troops now in country, we are not going to lose, but progress will be slowed down. This is not an encouraging outlook, but it is a realistic one,” Westmoreland explained to his Commander in Chief.9
Westmoreland also told Johnson that enemy strength in South Vietnam totaled 285,000 men which was 2000 less than the number he reported in March. “It appears that last month we reached the crossover point. In areas excluding the two northern provinces, attrition will be greater than additions to the force.” The president then asked, “Where does it all end? When we add divisions, can’t the enemy add divisions? If so, where does it all end?” General Westmoreland answered:
The enemy has 8 divisions in South Vietnam. He has the capability of deploying 12 divisions, although he would have difficulty supporting all of these. He would be hard pressed to support more than 12 divisions. If we add 21/3 divisions, it is likely the enemy will react by adding troops. . .. With the present program of 470,000 men, we would be setting up a meat grinder. We would do a little better than hold our own. We would make progress, but we would have to use a fire brigade technique. Unless the will of the enemy was broken or unless there was unraveling of the VC structure, the war could go on for five years. If our forces were increased, that period could be reduced, although not necessarily in proportion to increases in strength. Other factors than increase in strength must, of course, be considered. We now have a professional US force. A non-professional force such as that which would result from fulfilling the requirement for 100,000 additional men by calling Reserves, will cause some degradation of morale, leadership and effectiveness. With a force level of 565,000 men, the war could well go on for three years. With the second increment of 21/3 divisions, leading to a total of 665,000 men, it could go on for two years.
General Wheeler then informed the president that the chiefs had considered a “possible invasion of North Vietnam.” The bombing campaign had reached the point where all worthwhile fixed targets except the ports had been struck. According to Wheeler additional punitive action against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) by denying them access to the ports was necessary. When LBJ asked Wheeler, “What if we do not add the 21/3 divisions?” Wheeler provided an answer the president could not accept: “The momentum will die; in some areas the enemy will recapture the initiative. We won’t lose the war, but it will be a longer one.”
The next day, in the first address to a joint session of Congress by a battlefield commander, General Westmoreland chose his words carefully. Later he recalled in his book, A Soldier Reports, “I consciously avoided using the word ‘victory,’ for the national goal was not to win a military victory over North Vietnam.” The general emphasized in his speech that progress had been made in providing “the shield of security” for the development of a free and independent South Vietnam. Nevertheless, the lack of American resolve and patience could possibly undermine U.S. objectives: “In evaluating the enemy strategy it is evident to me that he believes our Achilles’ heel is our resolve. Your continued strong support is vital to the success of our mission. . . . Backed at home by resolve, confidence, patience, determination, and continued support, we will prevail in Vietnam over the Communist aggressor.”10
MACV’s request for additional forces met with skepticism within the Defense Department. Towards what specific goal were these extra forces needed? Was the United States merely trying to again avoid defeat or postpone an inevitable withdrawal? What analysis was available to assess the impact of 470,000 troops compared with 570,000 or 670,000? What forces or factors explained the staying power of the North Vietnamese? McNamara’s assistant Alain Enthoven warned the secretary that “we have hurt them with our bombing, and we can hurt them more. But we can’t hurt them so badly as to destroy their society or, more to the point, their hope, not only for regaining the material things they sacrifice today, but the whole of South Vietnam.”
North Vietnam was willing to endure all sacrifices in order to vindicate nationalism as a policy, noted Enthoven. Governmental stability in the South was woefully inept and Hanoi understood that the punishment it took would ultimately result in triumph against its aggressor. “Hanoi is betting that we’ll lose public support in the United States before we can build a nation in South Vietnam,” he continued. “We must do what we can to make sure that doesn’t happen. We must work on both problems together: slow the loss in public support; and speed the development of South Vietnam. Our horse must cross the finish first.”11
Crossing the finish line first posed serious problems. The July 1965 decision to Americanize the war had apparently eroded whatever incentives the South Vietnamese people may have held to help themselves. Opponents of escalation believed that the additional forces being requested by Westmoreland would not solve pacification problems; nor would they slow the horse carrying U.S. public opinion towards rejecting the war. Additional forces were not needed for military security and could not control the rate of attrition. No one could show what 200,000 more American troops would accomplish beyond increasing the enemy’s weekly losses by 400 a week. “In theory, we’d then wipe them out in 10 years,” Enthoven wrote McNamara.
It was now evident to Secretary McNamara that attriting the enemy’s manpower strength would ultimately fail as a military strategy as well as a presidential policy for political survival. “The point is that it didn’t add up,” recalled McNamara. “If you took the strength figures and the body count, the defections, the infiltration and what was happening to us, the whole thing didn’t make, didn’t add up. I tried to make it add up in, in a judgmental way rather than an arithmetic way. ... What I was trying to find out was how the hell the war went on year after year after year when we stopped the infiltration or shrunk it and when we had a very high body count and so on. It just didn’t make sense. And the fact is that it didn’t add up.”12
It didn’t add up because the enemy, and not the U.S. deployments, controlled the size of their losses. Enemy forces initiated over 90 percent of the company-sized fire fights; over 80 percent began with a well-organized enemy attack. The enemy’s losses rose and fell with their choice of whether or not to fight; they could hold their losses to about 2,000 a week regardless of U.S. force levels. Hanoi could prolong the war indefinitely by strategically controlling the rate of their losses.
President Johnson said no to Westmoreland’s 200,000 upper-limit request of April 1967. Yet the president’s reasoning bordered on the outer limits of logic. This remarkably experienced political man chose a slow and steady course that was lined with domestic political uncertainties. How long did President Johnson believe he could get away with building a Great Society at home and waging a war in Vietnam? Rostow later recalled, “The critical decision, for example, in April of ‘67 when he turned down the request for 200 thousand, was not made by any such arithmetic counting of the orders of battle. It was made on the basis ... about as follows: We’re now making slow, steady, attritional progress as of early ‘67 that was very clear. ... The judgment that was made there was, well, we’re making slow progress now . . . with the forces that we now plan and the extra forces are not needed.”13
The Question of Conspiracy?
Returning from Washington to Saigon, General Westmoreland was briefed by MACV intelligence officer Kelly Robinson. The briefing officer reported that some MACV analysts also believed that enemy strength for the political cadres (quasi-military and self-defense militia) category in the Order of Battle was higher than the official estimates Westmoreland had just used to brief the president. According to Robinson, Westmoreland expressed “shock” and “concern” and repeatedly said “what am I going to tell the press?” When Westmoreland had the estimate confirmed he bemoaned, “What am I going to tell Congress? What is the press going to do with this? What am I going to tell the President?”
At the center of Sam Adams’s charge, made in the CBS documentary, that General Westmoreland conspired against President Johnson by withholding the actual size of the enemy’s order of battle was the subsequent decision by General Westmoreland to remove self-defense and secret self-defense forces as well as political cadre from the official North Vietnamese Order of Battle on the grounds they constituted no military threat. While CIA analysts believed that these groups constituted important components of the enemy’s overall military strength and served as a source of manpower for main-force units, General Westmoreland believed these groups did not belong in an estimate of armed strength, and he chose not to forward his reasoning to Washington because, “the people in Washington were not sophisticated enough to understand and evaluate this thing and neither was the media.”
The official MACV Order of Battle for May 15, 1967, listed enemy strength at 292,000, but many CIA analysts believed that the figure was in the half-million range. If the CIA was correct, how could MACV and the president claim progress in the war of attrition? How could the crossover point have been reached if the size of the enemy was really 500,000, not 285,000? On May 23, 1967, the CIA prepared and distributed on a classified basis an official memorandum entitled “The Vietnam Situation: An Analysis and Estimate,” which stated in part that the Viet Cong paramilitary and political structure was considerably larger than carried in the official U.S. Order of Battle. Rostow, McNamara, and Rusk knew about this memo, LBJ did not.
Expanding the Bombing?
On May 4, 1967, McGeorge Bundy, who since leaving government to direct the Ford Foundation had offered regular counsel to LBJ, wrote in favor of limiting the bombing of North Vietnam (adding the personal disclaimer, “but you know me too well to mistake this for a sudden switch to appeasement”).
Bundy now maintained that bombing would not bring the United States any closer to a political solution and, of more concern, American public opinion had become “increasingly uneasy about Vietnam because there appear to be no defined limits to the levels of force and danger that may lie ahead.” The irony of U.S. policy vis-à-vis the political debate in the United States was that Johnson’s decisions constituted restraint, not mindless escalation. Nevertheless, fear of what the next move would be worried people. “But the caution and restraint of the top men are better known to the few than to the many. There is also obvious pressure from the military for further reinforcements in the South, although General Westmoreland has been a model of discipline in his public pronouncements. One may guess, therefore, that the President will soon be confronted with requests for 100,000–200,000 more troops and for authority to close the harbor in Haiphong. Such recommendations are inevitable, in the framework of strictly military analysis.”
Bundy urged LBJ to reject such recommendations and to place a publicly stated ceiling on the level of American participation in Vietnam, SO long as there was no further escalation on the enemy side. Bundy echoed arguments being marshalled in the chambers of the Defense Department: Further intensifications of bombing in the North or major increases in U.S. troops in the South were not good ways for bringing the war to a satisfactory conclusion. Uncertainty about the future size of the war was having destructive effects on the national will.
Bundy maintained that major troop reinforcements offered diminishing political and military returns. “I think there is no one on earth who could win an argument that an active deployment of some 500,000 men, firmly supported by tactical bombing in both South and North Vietnam, represented an undercommitment at this time,” he argued. “I would not want to be the politician, or, the general, who whined about such a limitation.”
Bundy focused on the need to improve pacification programs and the overall effort in the South. “This war will have no end as long as it merely pits foreign troops against Communists. In the end, it is safety in the villages that is the object of the war.” The forces currently deployed were sufficient to punish Communist aggression. “But where the requirement of 1965 was for proof of the American effort, the requirement of 1967 is for re-emphasis upon the role of the Vietnamese themselves, always with our advice and support.”
Bundy then raised the political context that constrained LBJ’s choices. Hanoi was going to do everything possible to keep its position intact until after the 1968 elections. Having held on for so long they were bound to keep on fighting. “Since only atomic bombs could really knock them out (an invasion of North Vietnam would not do it in two years, and is of course ruled out on other grounds), they have it in their power to ‘prove’ that military escalation does not bring peace—at least over the next two years. They will surely do just that. However much they may be hurting, they are not going to do us any favors before November 1968.”14
President Johnson was already boxed in, and the bombing program became the focus of intense public and congressional scrutiny. Uncertainty about what to do next in Vietnam threatened to derail administration policy. It was unlikely that a dramatic escalation in the intensity of bombing would bring the enemy to the conference table. Any evaluation of the bombing campaign needed to be understood within the context of the limited U.S. goals. Bombing electrical power plants in the North was not going to affect Ho’s strategy in the South; Ho was not going to change his long-term policy on the basis of losses from the air in North Vietnam. The original rationale for the bombing had been its value for southern morale and its relation to infiltration from the North. The United States bombers had started to hit power plants because, in Bundy’s opinion “we have ‘run out’ of other targets.”
The president was torn with respect to his military commanders. The president often repeated his mentor Sam Rayburn’s observation that political leaders ought to accept military advice otherwise a lot of money had been wasted training commanders at West Point. On the other hand, he held a deeply rooted suspicion that the military mind knew only how to bomb and escalate. The president needed to take control of the key discussions involving policy in Vietnam. Johnson instructed Secretary McNamara to get General Wheeler’s response to Bundy’s May 4 memorandum. In a memo directly to LBJ, Wheeler took issue with Bundy’s narrow justification for the bombing. Not only was bombing important for its value to southern morale and its relation to northern infiltration, but bombing caused North Vietnam to “pay a price for its continued aggression against South Vietnam.”
Wheeler took the initiative in recommending a series of actions against Haiphong harbor, which were opposed by Bundy and McNamara. “As a matter of cold fact,” Wheeler wrote to LBJ, “the Haiphong port is the single most vulnerable and important point in the lines of communications system of North Vietnam.” During the first quarter of 1967 general cargo deliveries through Haiphong had set new records. “Unless and until we find some means of constructing and reducing the flow of war-supporting material through Haiphong, the North Vietnamese will continue to be able to support their war effort both in North Vietnam and in South Vietnam.”
The recommendation to strike Haiphong Harbor was a major change in the chiefs’ military action program. They had previously rejected mining the ports and coastal waters on grounds that North Vietnam might in turn mine Tonkin Gulf or close the channel to Saigon. Moreover, China might use mining the ports as justification for taking military action in South China or along the Taiwan Strait. In addition, the USSR had moved 535,000 tons of goods into North Vietnam by sea. Would the Soviets move militarily to open the ports? Would they provide China with floating mines and Cruise missiles? Wasn’t the primary purpose of the bombing to stop infiltration into South Vietnam and to punish the enemy with strategic attacks on military targets in their heartland?
Moreover, the Joint Chiefs’ recommendation for mining the ports was accompanied by two ambitious proposals: the first was to attack enemy infiltration at the source by expanding covert operations into Laos; the second was to seed clouds over Laos in order to induce heavy rains which would disrupt infiltration. But General Wheeler warned President Johnson that, should the plan become operational and news of its existence leak out, “international and domestic reaction, asking whether this is a new form of warfare akin to biological and nuclear warfare, might be great.”15
The president was facing grim prospects ahead; his choices offered very little opportunity for improving either the military situation in Vietnam or his political base at home. The U.S. military effort had frustrated hopes for a Communist victory, but U.S. objectives in the South were stalemated. The bombing campaign and over 425,000 U.S. troops had not brought the enemy to the conference table. Moreover, the bombing campaign had reached the point where all worthwhile fixed targets except the ports had been struck. Progress had been made, but the war was no closer to an end point. North Vietnamese infiltration into South Vietnam continued at the high rate of approximately 8000 a month. The president was now being asked to authorize the mining of Haiphong Harbor. Had the prophets of gloom been correct? Was escalation merely a replacement for critical analysis that might identify the failure of policy? How could the present active deployment of troops and bombing not be enough to accomplish the limited objectives in Vietnam?