V
We all make mistakes. But, as you know, the buck stops here.
President Johnson’s remarks to a delegation of Republican Congressmen visiting the White House, August 17, 1967.
Accompanied by Undersecretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Earle Wheeler, McNamara arrived on the morning of July 7, 1967, at Tan Son Nhut Airport, the major air base and commercial airport in South Vietnam, located on the outskirts of Saigon. The delegation immediately began ten hours of meetings in the air base’s “High Noon Conference Room.” MACV’s headquarter’s on the air base was referred to as “Pentagon East.” Two days of intensive briefings were followed by visits to combat zones, a tour of pacification programs in the Mekong Delta, and private meetings with Thieu and Ky.
While McNamara was assessing the situation in Vietnam, speculation was rampant back home that Westmoreland would get the troops he had requested. The front page of the July 8 New York Times reported, “Westmoreland asks M’Namara for more troops. Says US forces are slowly winning the war but must ‘step up the pressure.’” Indeed, the headline mirrored the private meeting during which Westmoreland insisted, “The war is not a stalemate. We are winning slowly but steadily. North Vietnam is paying a tremendous price with nothing to show for it in return.”1
McNamara returned to Washington voicing a new outlook, however temporary. During a July 12 secret meeting of the president’s principal foreign policy advisors, McNamara stated, “there is not a military stalemate” in Vietnam. During a July 19 Cabinet meeting McNamara again said, “there is no evidence of a stalemate.” President Johnson was clearly buoyed by McNamara’s news. During a private White House meeting with journalist Peter Lisagor, Johnson boasted, “We’ve begun to turn defeat into victory. I’m not distressed. There is no truth in the stalemate theory. The McNamara report this time was the best of his nine.”2
The president was soon presented with an important opportunity to dispel any claims of disharmony between his principal advisors. McNamara and Wheeler had just returned from Vietnam and presented their report to the president. General Westmoreland had also returned to the states in order to attend his mother’s funeral and had then flown to Washington for a meeting with the president. During a hastily called White House news conference from the second-floor private sitting room, the president pointed to General Wheeler, General Westmoreland, and Secretary McNamara, who were all seated on a sofa. “We have reached a meeting of minds,” declared President Johnson. Looking directly at his three principal advisors, LBJ asked each rhetorically, “The troops that General Westmoreland needs and requests, as we feel it necessary, will be supplied. Is that not true, General Westmoreland?” “Yes sir.” “General Wheeler?” “Yes, sir.” “Secretary McNamara?” “Yes, sir.”
President Johnson then explained to the assembled reporters that the exact number of troops would not be announced until it was ascertained how much of an additional commitment would be made by U.S. allies. For the moment the Reserves would not be mobilized. General Westmoreland told reporters that all reports of stalemate were “complete fiction” and “completely unrealistic.” Moreover, tremendous progress had been made—which had been easily observable to the secretary during his recent visit. Westmoreland likened the perception of the lack of progress in the war to the example of parents who sometimes could not see the growth of a child as much as visiting grandparents who could detect progress much more readily than those who saw the child every day. McNamara, like a visiting grandparent, had now seen real progress in Vietnam.
President Johnson also announced that he was sending two personal representatives, Clark Clifford, chairman of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and presidential consultant General Maxwell Taylor, on a tour of the allied nations involved in the war. The goal of the mission was to get commitments for additional support from Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, and South Korea.
Clifford and Taylor returned to Washington on August 6 and reported that the allies strongly supported increasing the pressure on the enemy. Clifford told reporters that some of the allies believed the war should be called “the war of Southeast Asia,” because that best approximated the stakes. Political satirist Russell Baker described the Clifford/Taylor mission as the famous “Jim Dandy report.” “The purpose of their journey,” he wrote, “which had been puzzling at first, emerged only upon their return to Washington with the report that the Johnson Administration’s conduct of the Vietnam war was just right. Vietnam’s neighboring states, they said, agreed that American bombing of North Vietnam was perfectly correct and Asian statesmen applauded the President’s over-all war policy with cries of ‘Jim Dandy!’ the traditional Oriental phrase for telling Westerners what they want to hear.”3
The trip had made a powerful impression on Clifford, and despite what he had told reporters, Clifford knew the allies were not really ready or anxious to ante up. Nor did they seem terribly troubled by the possibility of a Communist victory. “I returned home puzzled, troubled, concerned,” Clifford wrote two years later in “A Viet Nam Reappraisal.” “Was it possible that our assessment of the danger to the stability of Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific was exaggerated? Was it possible that those nations which were neighbors of Vietnam had a deeper perception of the tides of world events in 1967 than we?”4
There were certainly Jim Dandys within the president’s circle of advisors. Throughout July and August Rostow provided President Johnson with overwhelming documentation that the Communists faced serious manpower problems. The most observable trend according to Rostow was the “slow decline of the Viet Cong manpower pool—which has yielded stagnation or reduction in the size and effective strength of Viet Cong main force units and impairment of the Viet Cong infrastructure ...” Rostow added that he had spent time “reading literally hundreds of particular intelligence reports on the situation in the various provinces of South Vietnam.” These reports showed strain in VC morale and manpower and a weakening in military effectiveness, “but no definitive break in the resilient Viet Cong structure.”5
On July 26, Bunker’s weekly cable, which Rostow described in a covering memorandum to LBJ as “the most solid piece of analysis in a single place of progress in Vietnam,” arrived in the White House. “I do not want to appear to be over optimistic . . . ,” Bunker wrote. “I do not believe, however that there is any evidence that things are in a stalemate’ here or that we have lapsed into a static situation. I and my colleagues are all convinced that we are moving steadily ahead and moving in the right direction. I do think we need to do more intensive work in educating the press here and I intend to concentrate on this.”6
On August 7 Rostow reported to LBJ, “All the evidence we have indicates bombing North Viet Nam (and Laos) helps cut down the level of infiltration below the level it would otherwise attain.” There certainly was evidence to suggest otherwise, but Rostow, choosing to give Johnson only optimistic reports, said “all” not “some” of the evidence. Rostow concluded for the president, “The evidence is that the Viet Cong are having severe manpower problems in the south and facing real difficulties in maintaining both their guerrilla and their main-force units. ... All the evidence we have indicates that Hanoi does not now expect to win the war in the south on the battlefield. They are hanging on hoping that there will be a break in the will of the U.S. to continue the war.”
The public’s perception of the war, particularly of the lack of military progress, was creating additional burdens for the administration. The summer approval polls all showed a decline in support for the war and for LBJ’s handling of it. An August 2, 1967, cable from General Westmoreland to General Wheeler, General Harold K. Johnson, Army Chief of Staff, and Admiral Sharp reflected these concerns. It was necessary to orchestrate a public relations campaign to rally public support for the war, he told them. “Of course we must make haste carefully in order to avoid charges that the military establishment is conducting an organized propaganda campaign, either overt or covert.” The nation’s highest ranking military advisors believed the United States was winning the war. The public, on the other hand, was growing increasingly uneasy with the growing nature of U.S. commitment. The lack of major combat operations was creating a false impression of stalemate. “Nothing could be farther from the truth, of course. Every indicator belies either stalemate or loss of initiative.” Westmoreland explained that he had already taken steps to clarify military progress. “While we work on the nerve ends here we hope that careful attention will be paid to the roots there—the confused or unknowledgable pundits who serve as sources for each other.”7
In August President Johnson approved an additional 45–50,000 troops for General Westmoreland and imposed a new troop ceiling of 525,000. The evidence shows that LBJ chose reluctantly to push ahead his new threshold, but he breathed a sigh of relief when not forced to mobilize the Reserves. During this same period, General Johnson returned from a trip to Vietnam. Rostow wrote to LBJ, “I am told that he comes back with the most optimistic reports. Recommend that you have him give you his report in person. After meeting with him, you might wish to unleash him on the White House Press Corps.” Which was exactly what happened. General Johnson vigorously challenged the stalemate thesis and declared, “We’re winning the war.” The general told the press corps that “this was the first trip where I could see significant evidence of progress.” When asked whether the 45,000 troops recently approved by the president would be the “last increase,” the general replied, “This should be, with circumstances substantially as they are now, adequate to provide a degree of momentum that will see us through to a solution in Vietnam.”
An August 8 cable from General Wheeler to General Westmoreland illustrated the growing problems confronting the administration. The previous day’s New York Times had carried an article by correspondent R. W. Apple, “Vietnam, the Signs of Stalemate,” which quoted from an unidentified military source, “Every time Westy makes a speech about how good the South Vietnam army is, I want to ask him why he keeps calling for more Americans. His need for reinforcement is a measure of our failure with the Vietnamese.” Wheeler was repulsed by the quote: “On the assumption that the above extract is in fact a quote, I must say it is regrettable that a senior officer felt compelled to respond to a press query of this type and tragic that he was disloyal to his commander in the process.”
Westmoreland quickly cabled Wheeler and Sharp that it was “inconceivable to me that any general officer in Vietnam would make such a statement. Any general who is serving here or who has made an honest appraisal as a result of a professional visit could not come to the conclusion that a need for reinforcements is a measure of our failure with the Vietnamese. Progress is not a failure and by every measure there is increasing progress, as you know.” Westmoreland then attacked the messenger: “He [Apple] is pessimistic and suspicious . . . [He] still is convinced that we are not honest about casualties and are manipulating the figures. I have watched Apple become more critical and more argumentative during recent months. Barring some dramatic and irrefutable turn for the better here we can expect him to continue to play the role of doubter and critic. He is probably bucking for a Pulitzer Prize.”9
Finding a workable answer to the public debate over the question of a stalemate dominated the agenda. During one White House meeting the president asked his advisors, “What is the answer to the stalemate issue?” Wheeler responded that there was no stalemate, but the president persisted. “That’s not a good enough answer. McNamara gets ridiculed when he says it. I answered it today by saying it was pure communist propaganda. We should have some colorful general like MacArthur with his shirt neck open to go in there and say this is pure propaganda ... we have no songs, no parades, no bond drives and we can’t win the war otherwise.” President Johnson then instructed Walt Rostow to get “a colorful general to go to Saigon and argue with them [the press]. We’ve got to do something dramatic.”
The president also asked General Wheeler “How many in South Vietnam—12–15 million?” The declassified meeting notes detail the barren terrain of logic: Wheeler answered, “about 15 million and the Vietcong are about 4 million.” The president wondered aloud, “It seems like with all of the South Vietnamese and all the American troops, we could whip ‘em.”10
The Sick Society
Nothing symbolized the potential bankruptcy of a guns-and-butter policy more than the outbreak of racial violence in urban cities throughout America during the summer of 1967. Rioting in late July left 26 dead in Newark; 40 killed in Detroit, where for the first time in twenty-four years federal troops were needed to stop the rioters. Federal paratroopers ultimately restored order, arresting over 7000 looters and snipers. In the words of Senator J. William Fulbright, the Great Society had become a “sick society.” “Each war feeds on the other, and, although the President assures us that we have the resources to win both wars, in fact we are not winning either of them.” Johnson soon learned that the constituency that supported his Great Society did not support him on Vietnam.
That summer the president refused to abandon his guns-and-butter strategy. Instead, he renewed his request that Congress pass an across-the-board surtax, raising the amount to 10 percent, a request that pitted Johnson against House Ways and Means chairman, Wilbur Mills. In a battle between two politicians who had been tutored under the wings of former House Speaker Sam Rayburn, it was the president who came up empty. Mills insisted that any tax be accompanied by domestic program cuts of the same magnitude. Johnson resisted and no tax bill was reported out of committee in 1967.
LBJ’s political coalition in Congress and credibility with the general public began unraveling. The president’s overall job rating, as reported in the Gallup poll, dropped from 47 percent in mid-July to 39 percent in early August. His job rating on Vietnam showed 54 percent disapproval, an all-time high. In effect, the administration was now caught in a self-made trap.
Lobbying Democratic congressmen on August 8 for their support of the administration’s tax bill, the president emphasized that “the military situation and pacification are improving. Intelligence shows that we are moving up and Vietcong and North Vietnamese are moving down. Westmoreland has turned defeat into what we believe will be a victory. It’s only a matter now of will. . . . There is no stalemate. We are moving along. The kill ratio is 10 to 1.”
The meeting quickly turned vitriolic when New York Congressman Lester Wolff told Johnson, “Nobody sees the light at the end of the tunnel in Vietnam. We are the victims of a poor public relations program.” Wolff cited Congressman Gerald Ford’s criticisms that the United States was not using its strategic bombing effectively in the North. The president responded, “We are taking out half of the infiltration with our bombing, some reports show. We are reducing infiltration, but we haven’t stopped it. I am not going to do what Ford says, because we would be in a war with China tonight if we did. Much as we want it, there is no easy way out.”
Johnson reserved his harshest observations for those who wanted the shackles of restraint removed from the military. “Well, I want you to know that I believe in civilian government, and we will have civilian government as long as I am President. Second, what Ford has said is untrue. We don’t want to hit targets near China or targets in civilian areas or targets in ports. We get over the China border now even though there is a buffer zone. It doesn’t take long when jets fly at 1200 miles per hour. We have hit two ships. You know how emotions run in this country when ships are hit. Remember the Lusitania. We do not want to get the Soviet Union and China into this war.”
The Joint Chiefs had recommended 242 targets to be bombed in North Vietnam, and all but 39 that were in the buffer zone along the Chinese border had been authorized. Manifesting his distrust of the military, Johnson told his congressional visitors, “The generals are ready to bomb there but I’m not—there’s a difference in judgment.” According to Tom Johnson’s notes from the meeting, “We’d already hit two Russian ships in the Haiphong harbor, and feared that if we hit more, we’d get more trouble than we got gains. We’d bombed Hanoi within half a mile of Ho Chi Minh’s house. (The President pointed toward the Washington monument as he said, ‘That’s as close as those people down there, and him sitting there on his front porch.’) That was too close.”
McNamara Testifies on the Bombing Program
In August Secretary McNamara testified before Senator John Stennis’s subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee on the subject “Air War Against North Vietnam.” The secretary reported that on the operating target list used by the Joint Chiefs for planning attacks on fixed targets, only a handful of targets had been recommended against which strikes had not yet been authorized. The secretary repeated his long-held belief that bombing was never intended as a substitute for success in the South and expanding the target list would not shorten the war. McNamara told the Stennis subcommittee that bombing could not be expected to break the will of North Vietnam nor force Hanoi to the conference table. Instead, bombing had fortified the South in a time of need and increased the cost of the continued infiltration of men and supplies from North to South Vietnam.
Bombing needed to be considered as a supplement to and not as a substitute for counterinsurgency in the South, said McNamara. When evaluated within these limited objectives, the bombing campaign had been successful: Hanoi had paid a price for its aggression, morale in the South had clearly been bolstered, and infiltration hampered. Bombing North Vietnam out of the war would be accomplished only by the systematic annihilation of North Vietnamese population centers, a plan favored by some members of the Joint Chiefs and hawks in Congress but rejected by McNamara and the president. McNamara faced tough grilling by committee members, but he was merely voicing the president’s views. (In a revealing letter written in August 1967 to former British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson explained McNamara’s trauma: “Bob McNamara told me all about the situation a week ago. This report [to Congress] is the truth, but not the whole truth. Rather, a loyal lieutenant putting the best face on a poor situation. The fact is that the bombing of the North started as morale builder for the South when things were very bad there. We have now run out of targets but the Republican hawks keep calling for more which produces useless casualties and encourages some Air Force fire-eaters to urge population bombing. LBJ has not HST’s [Harry S. Truman] courage to say no to political pressures. . . .”)11
The Senate subcommittee included many hawks who felt that the military had been held down by handwringing civilian advisors; Senator Strom Thurmond actually accused McNamara of placating the Communists. This view was reflected in the subcommittee’s August report which charged that “diametrically opposed views” of the Joint Chiefs and Secretary McNamara had created the “unsatisfactory progress of the war.” The subcommittee faulted civilian control of the war which had rejected “the unanimous weight of professional military judgment.” The report criticized the policy of the civilian advisors: “It is not our intention to point a finger or to second guess those who determined this policy. But the cold fact is that this policy has not done the job and it has been contrary to the best military judgment. What is needed now is the hard decision to do whatever is necessary, take the risks that have to be taken, and apply the force that is required to see the job through.”
The subcommittee cited civilian control over bombing policy as the reason the air campaign had not achieved its objectives. The imposed doctrine of gradualism prevented U.S. forces from waging the air campaign to best calculate and achieve maximum results. The Senate subcommittee agreed with the JCS that the effects of the air campaign were cumulative; no one could predict which blow would be the crucial one. Every attack stretched enemy resources. No one knew which attack would break the enemy. But the committee had actually misdirected its hostility. McNamara was still the president’s agent. Responsibility for the limited bombing policy belonged with President Johnson.
MACV Confronts SNIE 14.3-67
Publication of the new intelligence estimate on enemy strength was scheduled for September 1. The CIA was insisting on the inclusion of 120,000 Self-Defense (SD) and Secret Self-Defense (SSD) forces in the new SNIE, for a total 435,350 Order of Battle. While MACV maintained that the SD and SSD did not belong in the overall total figure, CIA analysts saw the self-defense forces as defenders of their home areas by planting mines, booby traps, and grenades. When SD and SSD strength figures were included in the overall enemy strength, the total contradicted MACV’s overall strength figures, which had already been given to the press. The disagreement was politically charged and controversial since MACV could hardly be expected to endorse a new set of figures showing a larger Communist force at a time when Westmoreland was asking for more troops.
Pressure was now brought on the CIA to compromise with MACV. The NSC’s Robert Ginsburgh suggested to Rostow that Director Helms be told that it was “time to ‘bite the bullet.’” Including SD and SSD figures in an estimate of the enemy’s military capabilities made little sense to MACV analysts. These support groups operated in their own hamlets, were rarely armed, had no discipline, and possessed little military capability. An August 19 cable from Komer to Carver sided with MACV’s position: “I cannot see case for including vague estimates of low-grade part time hamlet self-defense groups, mostly weaponless, in new O/B.”12
On August 20, McNamara’s deputy, General Creighton Abrams, cabled General Wheeler expressing MACV’s opposition to surfacing any estimate that contained SD or SSD strength figures. “The press reaction to these inflated figures is of much greater concern. We have been projecting an image of success over the recent months, and properly so. Now, when we release the figure of 426–531,000, the newsmen will immediately seize on the point that the enemy force has increased about 120–130,000. All available caveats and explanations will not prevent the press from drawing an erroneous and gloomy conclusion as to the meaning of the increase.” On the same day, Westmoreland cabled Wheeler with a similar message: “I do not concur in the inclusion of strength figures for the self-defense and secret self-defense. It distorts the situation and makes no sense. No amount of caveats will prevent the erroneous conclusion that will result.”13
Johnson apparently liked MACV’s version of enemy strength. Meeting privately on August 24 with members of the press, the president referred to reports in his possession which showed “that the guerrilla infra-structure is on the verge of collapse. All I can say to that is that if there is a stalemate, as the press reports, then every single one of our men we have out there is wrong. Bunker and Westmoreland do not agree, nor does anybody else who works for us out there—and they have no other purpose than to report the facts. The reporting debate is not one that I can win. Nobody reports we have a stalemate, but this is one where I do not want to win the argument and lose the sale.” (Bunker’s weekly cable had advised Johnson, “General Westmoreland also reports progress in the very difficult but absolutely essential task of destroying the Viet Cong infrastructure which for many years has been working under deep cover in the villages and hamlets.”)14
The next day Westmoreland cabled Wheeler and Sharp reiterating his concern that the latest draft of SNIE 14.3–67 contained an enemy strength figure of 461,000 including self-defense, secret self-defense forces, and assault youth. “This command cannot support these latest NIE figures with the intelligence at hand.” Westmoreland requested that a team representing all Washington intelligence agencies concerned with the SNIE visit Vietnam “as soon as possible to develop a common and valid set of enemy strength statistics.”15
In order to resolve these statistical disagreements, George Carver went to Saigon with instructions from CIA Director Helms to reach agreement that would eliminate any appearance of dispute on this politically touchy subject. Records from an August 25 meeting of the Joint Chiefs reveal a similar preoccupation with public relations, and not with the numbers themselves. The chiefs discussed “sending a team to MACV to arrive at acceptable force figures and to coordinate the plan for release of information to the public. . . . The JCS fully appreciate the public release problem and view it as the major problem. While concerned about the figures, they consider them of lesser importance.”16
Ambassador Bunker also cabled Walt Rostow to voice what he regarded to be a “potentially serious problem created by the new NIE on verge of completion.” If the CIA estimate of enemy strength was published with an Order of Battle in the 430–490,000 range, the political implications would be devastating. “Despite all our success in grinding down VC/NVA here, CIA figures are used to show that they are really much stronger than ever. Despite all caveats, this is inevitable conclusion which most press would react,” Bunker said. “I intend to mention it to the President in my coming weekly. The Credibility gap would be enormous, and is quite inconsistent with all the hard evidence we have about growing enemy losses, declining VC recruitments and the like.”17
All work on the SNIE was suspended until these disagreements could be worked out. Everyone recognized the need to develop common and valid sets of statistics and to retain credibility in doing so. Yet most of those involved in the process recognized that the numbers were being manipulated for political purposes. Like the proverbial emperor with no clothes, President Johnson was about to be discovered stripped bare of all credibility.