Chapter 7

Johnson’s Choice: 1963–1965

President Johnson, for reasons which are totally unclear to me, had some kind of belief or conviction, I don't know how strong it was, that because President Kennedy had been in a sense responsible for Diem's demise, he in turn was assassinated himself. I mean, it was a strange and rather bizarre view he held. I don't know how convinced he was about it, but I've heard him say it, and it rather surprised me because I was wondering exactly how he'd put this together in his head.

That recollection of Richard Helms, whom Johnson eventually appointed as Director of Central Intelligence, however serious the President might have been, and however he might have put it together, is an extraordinary and haunting idea to have come from one of the least metaphysical of American Presidents.¹ In a sense, however, they were responsibilities which Johnson himself carried throughout his presidency. In the first place US involvement in the coup, even if it was only negative in that they knew but did not speak of it to Diem, had produced an air of complicity as well as a renewed stake in the successor government. Johnson had not approved of the coup but now had to live with its consequences, for better or for worse. As he also had to live with the consequences of Kennedy's assassination when he was catapulted from the comparative obscurity of the vice-presidency to assume the mantle and the legacy of America's youngest, and, so his supporters believed, most attractive president of the twentieth century. Johnson did not come out of, nor did he fit, the Kennedy mould. He was, essentially, an American rather than a world politician and where Truman, coming like Johnson, unexpectedly, to the presidency had suddenly attained international stature in the closing months of the Second World War, Johnson was more inclined to recreate the mood and opportunities of America in the recovery of the 1930s and the policies of his political hero before Roosevelt became an international statesman and leader of the free world.

Johnson's aspirations and achievements may be found in the inside covers of his memoirs, the extraordinary panorama of the ‘Landmark Laws of the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration’ with which the President and Congress ‘wrote a record of hope and opportunity for America’. His more limited knowledge of the world, almost paranoid perception – or, at least presentation – and natural exaggeration may be found in his map of Southeast Asia in 1965 where, on a given Djakarta-Hanoi-Peking-Pyongyang axis, communist pincers are shown to be closing from north and south.²

After the event Johnson and his team of writers went to some trouble to present Vietnam as part of the grand design of containment and the rejection of appeasement with which, by implication, Johnson had been associated since before Pearl Harbour. There was to be no doubt that, once the nation's pledge had been given, Johnson was not just a sunshine supporter, someone who would run for cover when the storm broke. ‘The protection of American interests in a revolutionary, nuclear world is not for men who want to throw in our hand every time we face a challenge.’³ Vietnam at the end of 1963 was the obvious challenge: both to US foreign policy and to its continuity. For Johnson it was an inherited problem; and at first it looked like a reflex announcement which suggested that it would be dealt with as the continuation of hereditary policies.

The first of Johnson's presidential decisions on Vietnam, that of 26 November 1963, was contained in National Security Action Memorandum 273 and was described in the Pentagon Papers as ‘an interim don't rock-the-boat document’. Before this reaffirmation of policies was issued – and the President had declared, publicly, to a joint session of Congress that the US would honour its commitments from West Berlin to South Vietnam – Johnson had talked to Ambassador Lodge who had been scheduled to meet President Kennedy in Washington. Lodge, perhaps most of all, assumed that the removal of Diem would allow the US to wipe the slate clean and to start again with an effective, responsible and popular régime in South Vietnam. His military counterpart, General Harkins, with whom Lodge was hardly on speaking terms, was worried about the upsurge of Viet Cong activity and the wholesale removal of Vietnamese province chiefs who had been appointed by and were presumably loyal to the old régime but, like Lodge, gave an optimistic account when the principal US policy makers had met in Honolulu on 20 November 1963.

It was at this meeting that planning had begun for a stepped-up programme of what has been described as ‘non-attributable hit-and-run’ raids against North Vietnam and the New York Times commentator, Hedrick Smith, goes on to assert: ‘In his first Vietnam policy document, on November 26, President Johnson gave his personal sanction to the planning for these operations.’⁴ Probably this may be inferred from the specific NSAM reference:

7.Planning should include different levels of possible increased activity, and in each instance there should be estimates on such factors as:

a) Resulting damage to North Vietnam;

b) Plausibility of denial;

c) Possible North Vietnamese retaliation;

d) Other international reaction⁵.

and, in any event, when McNamara was, once again, dispatched to Saigon on 20 December, the official US Navy historians record that he showed great interest in developing full capacity for early implementation of several actions contemplated under Operation Plan 34A. For more than a year the Kennedy administration, in Washington and in Saigon, had been considering how US motor torpedo boats could be used in coastal raids on North Vietnam; and on one occasion, in May 1962, an American submarine had apparently been used in a co-ordinated operation with South Vietnamese frogmen in an attempt to sink a North Vietnamese gunboat at its base in Qang Khe.⁶ Nothing much seems to have come of such operations but with the arrival of faster boats and a new and more amenable government in Saigon McNamara was able to report on 21 December that plans for a wide variety of covert sabotage and psychological operations against North Vietnam had been prepared from which ‘we should aim to select those that provide maximum pressure with minimum risk’.

Like Kennedy before him who, in turn, had inherited the Bay of Pigs operation from Eisenhower, Johnson had thus acquired and approved operational plans which, in themselves little more than pin pricks, would nevertheless become US-organized attacks against North Vietnam and the occasion for much more dramatic and momentous events in the Gulf of Tonkin. The new President had, as it were, been put in charge but had also become part of a machine that had been running for years and, as far as direction was concerned, was content, even after the event, to let it be described as ‘Steady On Course’. The practically simultaneous deaths of Diem and Kennedy, while they might have provided the opportunity for a major reassessment of US policies and objectives in Vietnam, in the event produced nothing of the kind although it has been suggested that if Kennedy had lived he would have withdrawn the US from Vietnam. After Diem's death and a certain opening up of South Vietnamese society and government many of the shortcomings in ‘performance’, hitherto concealed, became obvious; but whether or not that would have been enough to persuade Kennedy to change course is open to question. Certainly it was not enough to persuade Kennedy's advisers, most of whom stayed with Johnson, nor the great officers of state who, like Johnson, continued to believe in Kennedy's last public will and testament on Vietnam: that withdrawal would be a great mistake.⁷

For the next six months, from Kennedy's assassination in November 1963 to the drafting of a 30-day scenario in May 1964 showing how the US could simultaneously launch air attacks on North Vietnam and call for a conference on Vietnam, the problem for the US was, without overthrowing the North Vietnamese government or destroying the country, whether what the scenario described as ‘DRV-directed Viet Cong terrorism and resistance to pacification efforts in the South’ could be stopped. If the government of Vietnam was itself to prove more capable of dealing with the insurgency this would obviously be half the battle won and, just as Diem's government had become the scapegoat of almost everything that had gone wrong so the highest hopes were placed on the ability of his successor, General Minh, to turn things around. A month later, following McNamara's visit to Saigon in December, these hopes seemed to be vanishing but it would have been hard for any president to be sure that he was reading the right signals. Lodge and McNamara, for example, were like weather balloons blowing in opposite directions while McCone, the CIA Director, who could see no basis for optimistic forecasts in November, said he was a little less pessimistic in December than the Secretary of Defense. McNamara, on the basis of his report to Johnson on 21 December, seemed, in one sentence, to go from one end of the scale to the other: ‘running scared, hoping for the best’ but, in any event, preparing for more forceful moves if the situation did not show early signs of improvement.⁸

Again blaming ‘undue reliance on distorted Vietnamese reporting’ what in effect McNamara was saying was that he had had no idea until then how bad things were. The strategic hamlet programme was foundering; the Vietnamese generals were preoccupied with politics; the government was indecisive; and if current trends were not reversed in the next two or three months they would lead to neutralization at best and more likely to a communist-controlled state. McNamara conceded that he might be overly pessimistic but presumably believed that ‘more forceful moves’ would somehow reverse the unfavourable trends. At this stage it is a moot point whether the frailties of South Vietnam could properly be ascribed to the North. The best guess, according to McNamara, was that between 1,000 and 1,500 Viet Cong cadres had entered South Vietnam from Laos in the first nine months of 1963 while the Mekong route was being used for heavier weapons and ammunition. Nevertheless, as far as the Joint Chiefs of Staff and their new Chairman, General Maxwell Taylor, were concerned if North Vietnamese support ceased ‘the character of the war in South Vietnam would be substantially and favourably altered’. Their solution to the problem was entirely military although the objective was political. South Vietnam, the pivot ‘in our world wide confrontation’ with the communists was, said Taylor, the first real test of our determination to defeat the communist wars of national liberation formula; and, in an open-ended version of the domino proposition, he argued that the effects of US failure would be felt in Africa and Latin America as well as in Asia. In order to convince the enemy of US determination ‘to see the Vietnam campaign through to a favourable conclusion’ it seemed that the US would have to prepare for an equally open-ended commitment and, putting aside many of its self-imposed restrictions, would have to prepare for whatever levels of activity might be required.

In practical terms Taylor wanted, first, to make the US military commander responsible for the total US programme in South Vietnam. Next, he wanted the government of Vietnam to turn over the tactical direction of the war to the US and then, on an ascending scale of aerial bombing, mining the sea approaches and commando raids on North Vietnam, with a final commitment if necessary of US forces in direct operations against the North; any or all of these actions would convince friend and foe alike that the US was determined to win. As he makes plain in his memoirs Taylor deplored the absence of what he called authoritative political guidance and in this case he may well have felt that by providing the means he was forcing the US to face up to the implications of their objectives in Vietnam.⁹ Although he said the Joint Chiefs were aware that the focus of the counter-insurgency battle lay in South Vietnam itself, and that the war ‘must certainly be fought and won primarily in the minds of the South Vietnamese people’, what in fact he was doing was to suggest that the US should fight a different war altogether or, rather, two wars. First, an American war, American style, against the communist forces in the South with at least the implication that US troops might be used and, certainly, that it would be fought under a US commander. Second, the US should co-ordinate the war against the North, and, again, the implication was that in the last resort it would have to be done by US forces. In all of this it would seem that the government of Vietnam was to play a marginal role and although it was on a much later occasion that Taylor signalled ‘Not much of a government is required for the GVN to play its role’ it could already be seen that it was in danger of becoming a secondary consideration.

THE KHANH COUP

A week after Taylor had sent his memorandum to the Secretary of Defense the government of South Vietnam collapsed. That is to say General Minh, who had succeeded Diem as head of state less than three months before, was himself succeeded by General Khanh in a coup which removed him and, as Taylor said, ‘the generals we knew best’. It may also be said that whatever hopes or expectations of increased political stability after the Diem upheaval collapsed with it as the Khanh coup, far more than the removal of Diem, revealed the essential political weakness of South Vietnam. In a New Year message a month before the coup General Minh had been assured by Ambassador Lodge, on Rusk's instructions, that he had the complete support of the US government as the leader of Vietnam. A month later the US had to pretend that, although he had been removed, it was an internal reorganization; that it may have been unwelcome; that, unlike the Diem affair, the US had had nothing whatever to do with it; but that it would now make the best of it.

In one respect at least the Khanh government may have been a great relief to the US. Whether or not he took it seriously, whether or not the Americans believed him and whether or not it was just a convenient excuse General Khanh had told the Americans that pro-French, pro-neutralist, generals were planning a palace coup after which they would call for the neutralization of South Vietnam. While all of this may have reflected fears that recent French initiatives – the belated and what for the US was very unwelcome French recognition of Communist China as well as calls for the neutralization of Southeast Asia – might be having their effect in South Vietnam, the striking thing when Khanh evidently made his intentions clear to Ambassador Lodge, was that the Ambassador's first thought was to protest to de Gaulle rather than to warn the GVN and in the event Lodge gave Washington 45 minutes' notice of Khanh's impending coup.¹⁰ For the moment, at any rate, the coup seemed to take care of the dangers of neutralism in South Vietnam but it was in response to a tentative suggestion of neutralization that arose within the US that Johnson's advisers defined their position and, in rejecting it, left practically no alternative than to plan for extended US commitments.

Senator Mansfield, moving over many years from support to opposition, is one of the more reliable barometers of American opinion on the Vietnam experience. In early January 1964 he warned Johnson, ‘We are close to the point of no return in Vietnam’ and rather than fight another Korean War which might again involve China Mansfield thought there should be more emphasis on Vietnamese rather than US responsibilities and some sort of international effort to bring about a peaceful solution.¹¹ Whether France could be a key factor in bringing an end to the conflict between North and South Vietnam and whether at the same time, South Vietnam's control of its territory could be strengthened, might have been incompatible objectives which begged a number of further questions; but they were sufficient to require a refutation from Johnson's three principal civilian advisers on whom he would rely in framing his policy on Vietnam. McGeorge Bundy said the US should not be the first to quit in Saigon and warned Johnson that the political damage to Truman and Acheson from the fall of China arose because most Americans came to believe that ‘we could and should have done more than we did to prevent it’. Only when we were stronger in South Vietnam, said Bundy, could the US face negotiations. McNamara went further. Even on the existing ground rules, he said, and although the security situation was serious, ‘We can still win’, whereas any deal to divide or ‘neutralise’ South Vietnam would inevitably mean a new government in Saigon that would in short order become Communist-dominated. Because the stakes in preserving an anti-Communist South Vietnam were so high the US had to go on bending every effort to win and he was confident that the American people were by and large in favour of a policy of firmness and strength in such situations.¹²

Whether McNamara in fact had sufficient political acumen to make such a confident prediction perhaps turns on what he meant by ‘every effort’. It was a concept which Rusk, significantly, chose not to explore although the implications of relying on what the GVN could do were not very hopeful. ‘We believe the fight against the Vietcong can be won without major and direct US involvement provided the new South Vietnamese Government takes the proper political, economic and social actions to win the support of the rural people and uses its armed forces effectively.’¹³ What would happen if it did not was left unsaid. Three weeks later the Khanh coup again threw South Vietnam into political turmoil and the prospects of the government of Vietnam doing the right thing on their own seemed even more remote.

DEBATE AND DECISION IN HANOI

In one respect at least, however, Rusk was almost certainly right when he commented on Senator Mansfield's idea of a diplomatic offensive: it would not work until the North Vietnamese had become convinced that they could not succeed in destroying the Republic of Vietnam by guerrilla warfare. This, however, was almost the exact moment when the North Vietnamese became convinced that they would in fact have to increase their support for the revolution in the South; that, for the moment at least, the prospects of a general uprising against the new régime were almost as bleak as the prospects of the government's stability began to appear to the US; and that, although they would in the long run be able to take advantage of their political strength, the time had come to redress the military balance of power in South Vietnam.

It was a remarkable decision, both nationally and internationally, and for the government of North Vietnam demonstrated its ultimate commitment to the proposition that Vietnam was one and indivisible. One of the reasons, perhaps, why the Ninth Plenum of the Vietnamese Workers Party Central Committee meeting in Hanoi in December 1963 decided that it would begin to commit its own regular forces may have been that, although they would only be sent in small numbers, it was thought that they would be sufficient to tip the balance in favour of the revolutionary forces; and even if they did not they would make up for any lost momentum if some of the NLF believed that at least one of their objects had been achieved with the overthrow of Diem. Another reason to which this is linked is put forward by Duiker: if further destabilization could be effected in the South, and quickly, the US might be persuaded to disengage. Or, as perhaps some of the early American pessimists such as Senator Mansfield would have argued, there was no longer anything worth fighting for. A third possibility, again suggested by Duiker, is that ‘the inherited experience of the Party in leading the Vietnamese revolutionary movement’ really did add up to a belief that power grew out of the barrel of a gun.¹⁴ Having comprehensively defeated the forces of French colonialism with that culminating and remarkable set-piece battle at Dien Bien Phu, loosening the grip of the Americans, who were not nearly so well established, politically or economically, and had far less to lose, might not be impossible either.

It seems nevertheless to have been a traumatic decision which came at the end of a heated debate. In effect the Party recognized that North Vietnam, like the US, was about to commit itself to large-scale war in the South with all the unknown suffering which that might involve. Taking the Battle of Ap-Bac as a yardstick, and the demonstrated Viet Cong ability to defeat government forces, they realized that unless the US did decide to withdraw they would probably have to introduce their own fighting forces and if the Americans came in sufficient numbers, turning South Vietnam into a neo-colonial dependency, it would mean another bloody and protracted war, this time against the most powerful nation in the world. Such a daunting prospect alone would have prompted second thoughts but there were ideological differences as well which divided the Party. In general, it was the Chinese who supported the communist struggle in Vietnam and it was the Russians who, in spite of their formulation of wars of national liberation, did not. Not least of North Vietnam's problems therefore was how to avoid taking sides in the Sino-Soviet split: how not to alienate the USSR and how not, conversely, to become enthralled to China. Unmistakably, at least for the moment, they were going to lean to one side: far enough to produce ‘rightist deviation’ among a number of Party members, identified by Le Duan as mostly intellectuals – and even, reportedly, to a request from some PAVN (People's Army of Vietnam) officers for transfer to the USSR and to the Red Army.¹⁵

For the rest, however, there was the consoling argument that the US was ‘strategically vulnerable’ so that even if it did increase its commitment it would have its own problems to deal with. Each side, therefore, at this stage was preparing to do what was necessary to persuade the other that it could not win in South Vietnam and, as it happened, each side was prepared to raise its stakes in a process of reciprocal escalation. Nevertheless it is still somewhat surprising that the North Vietnamese decided to send regular formations to the South in 1964 and thus give the US the opportunity to present it as ‘foreign’ intervention although, with the equivalent of a full division of Americans in South Vietnam by the end of 1963, it is another moot point who and when began the intervention first.

Coming to its momentous decision to increase its contribution to revolution in the South may have been hard enough for North Vietnam; but while the commitment to South Vietnam was in no doubt it looked as if the US would also have to do more, if only to try to maintain some sort of stability for the government, and it would obviously be more difficult, politically, to go in deeper after it had already been announced that 1,000 US troops were to be withdrawn. Nevertheless, reporting from Saigon after the Khanh coup, Ambassador Lodge declared ‘Our side knows how to do it; we have the means with which to do it; we simply need to do it.’¹⁶ Was this true and, in any event, how was it to be done? Even if Lodge and the US military commander in Vietnam, General Harkins, were personally at odds they both managed to arrive at optimistic conclusions from disconcerting data. Thus, according to Harkins, in the last quarter of 1963 and in spite of political turbulence, a satisfactory tempo of operations was maintained: but they were not effective. Training programmes were ‘quantitatively satisfactory’: but had not developed combat aggressiveness or compensated for the lack of other motivations. In fact, ‘If the military aspects of the fourth quarter of calendar year 1963 were viewed in isolation, or could in any way be considered typical, the forecast will be pessimistic in nature and a complete reappraisal of US effort, approach, and even policy would be indicated.’¹⁷

From other points of view there were much more alarming forecasts although, in retrospect and if one accepts the otherwise gloomy CIA assessment that the ‘greatest single positive achievement during three months of post-Diem régime was measurable success of General Minh in establishing himself as popular leader’, it would seem as if, before the Khanh coup at the end of January, there had been a moment when a popular government might have had more success with positive and imaginative measures to secure support in the villages. On the other hand, with their vastly superior intelligence (one notes in passing that US military advisers working in intelligence were ‘rotated’ like everyone else after twelve months: the point at which most foreign intelligence officers began to be useful) and their ability to mount bigger operations with heavier weapons (one of the consequences of the Ninth Plenum seems to have been a standardization and improvement in weapons available in the South) the communist insurgents were doing well compared to the slow-moving and not very heroic ARVN forces; and with the Laotian and Cambodian frontiers practically open the entire pacification effort was compared ‘to mopping the floor before turning off the faucet’.

‘THE MOST CRITICAL SITUATION’

Thus, with a Special National Intelligence Estimate concluding that unless there was a marked improvement in the effectiveness of the GVN and its armed forces there was only an even chance that it would survive ‘during the next few weeks or months’, it is not surprising that the Pentagon Papers analyst in turn concluded ‘As winter drew to an end in February–March 1964, it was recognised, as it had never been fully recognised before, that the situation in Vietnam was deteriorating so rapidly that the dimensions and kinds of efforts so far invested could not hope to reverse the trend.’¹⁸ When McNamara and Taylor were once again sent out to Saigon they had been told ‘RVN faces the most critical situation in nearly ten years of existence’. When they came back after a visit that included deliberate and ostentatious endorsement of General Khanh (Johnson had said he wanted photos of Khanh triumphant, physically supported by Taylor and McNamara, on the front pages of the world press) McNamara's recommendations were adopted word for word in the National Security Action Memorandum (288) which defined US policy. Presumably, as the recommendations were based on the analysis, this was approved as well and it was, probably, the most portentous official US statement on Vietnam since the 1950s. It seemed in fact to echo Taylor in that it was now the fate of all Southeast Asia which turned on whether the US preserved an independent non-communist Vietnam and how the US was seen to respond in this test case of its capacity to meet a communist war of liberation. In his analysis McNamara was walking a tight-rope between pessimism and optimism. Forty per cent of the countryside was under VC control or predominant influence; but the ‘military tools and concepts of the GVN/US effort are generally sound and adequate’. The Khanh government was of ‘uncertain viability’; on the other hand it had ‘a good grasp’ of the basic elements of rooting out the Vietcong'. ‘Additions in US personnel’ were not indicated under current policy but the Vietnamese armed forces would have to be increased by at least 50,000 men and the para-military forces totally reorganized.

Essentially the recommendations were for a middle course, between the extremes of ‘neutralisation’ and direct military action against North Vietnam, both of which were rejected and while many of them seem sensible enough and undramatic in themselves there were two underlying features that were in fact of overwhelming importance. First, ‘The US at all levels must continue to make it emphatically clear that we are prepared to furnish assistance and support for as long as it takes to bring the insurgency under control.’ Second, and perhaps less obvious, was that most of the recommendations, in so far as they were designed to support pacification and a new programme for national mobilization in South Vietnam, would have needed years to have had effect. On both counts therefore the US just as much as North Vietnam, was committing itself to protracted war but one which, unlike Vietnam, would be on a time-scale that was largely outside US experience in the 19th and 20th centuries.

WAR PLANS

Unless, that is, a way could be found that would persuade North Vietnam that the revolution would not succeed in the South. This was something which McNamara considered in his memorandum but in practical terms he said it would be directed toward ‘collapsing the morale and the self-assurance of the Vietcong cadres now operating in South Vietnam and bolstering the morale of the Khanh regime’. The conditions for ‘new and significant pressures against North Vietnam’ were, first, if the Khanh government took hold vigorously: inspiring confidence, whether or not it made noteworthy progress or, second, if there was hard information on significantly increased arms supply from the North (it is interesting to note that at this stage there was apparently no anticipation of regular PAVN forces). Khanh himself did not at that stage favour overt actions against the North either so it looked as if the retaliatory actions and ‘Graduated Overt Military Pressure’ would depend upon the discovery of ‘significantly’ more or better weapons supplied by the North. But apart from interrupting the supply it was not clear how attacking the North would either ‘accelerate the realisation of pacification’ or ‘denigrate’ the morale of the Viet Cong forces.

It was nevertheless on these unexamined assumptions that contingency planning on 30 days' notice for attack on North Vietnam took off. Since the beginning of the year, according to the chairman of the Interagency Task Force on Vietnam, there had been constant suggestions from one of the President's advisers, Walt Rostow, about bombing the North¹⁹ and this was the course favoured by the JCS as well. Either this would get North Vietnam to the conference table or it would warn them to reduce their support for the Viet Cong. Rostow's assumption, reinforced by his experience as an economic historian, was that North Vietnam now had an economy – power stations, railroads, even factories – that was vulnerable to air attack and if they were threatened they would be forced to weigh up the destruction against their dogmatic but expendable objective of revolution in the South: ‘Ho Chi Minh is no longer a guerilla leader with nothing to lose’.

Simply to start bombing the North however would need some considerable justification and explanation even if, in the spring and early summer of 1964, there were signs of support. Congressman, later President, Ford, for example, had deplored a reluctance on the part of Administration officials to commit US forces to combat for a Vietnam-US victory; and Senator Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who was later to turn so violently against the war and against Johnson, reckoned that the only options open were to help the South Vietnamese win the war or else to expand it.²⁰ Either course seemed to lead to attacks on North Vietnam and when McNamara and Taylor met in an informal, unrecorded session with the Foreign Relations Committee at the end of March Taylor already had an outline of three ways in which force could be applied to North Vietnam: border control operations, a selective programme of retaliation, and an escalation of military pressure. Questioned by the Senators, particularly about the US forces this would seem to involve, McNamara implied that extra ground forces would not be required: the US would attack by air.

Although, in the peculiar circumstances that were reported to them, Congress later gave almost unanimous support to the President in the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, this was not something which Johnson and his advisers could have taken for granted. Senator Morse, for example, one of only two Senators and Congressmen to vote against the resolution, told the Senate in March ‘We should never have gone in. We should never have stayed in. We should get out.’ And Senator Gruening, who was the other one who voted against it, was equally unequivocal: ‘The war in South Vietnam is not and never has been a US war.’ There were, of course, Senators who took the opposing view – that the war must be carried to its source in North Vietnam – but the necessity for unmistakable (and undeniable) Congressional support had already occurred to the Administration. A couple of days after the critical remarks of Morse and Gruening the State Department's Vietnam Committee, which was looking at ‘Alternatives for Imposition of Measured Pressure Against North Vietnam’ had before it as a vital part of the scenario a draft Congressional resolution. The problem, however, was to find an occasion, and a time, when it could be introduced. If the US Administration was thinking about attacking North Vietnam, for however long and however strong the attacks might be, and even if it was only to restore peace or allow the government of Vietnam to suppress what might then revert to indigenous revolution, it would probably require the functional equivalent of a declaration of war. It was arguable that the President as Commander-in-Chief already had the inherent power to commit US forces but even if Congressional sensitivity about what US military advisers were actually doing in Vietnam was not that much in evidence the Administration needed the financial support of the lower house and it would at least be prudent to enlist the Senate as well in such a potentially momentous decision.²¹

Two months later the problem was still there, expressed on this occasion in a message from Rusk to Ambassador Lodge in Saigon on 21 May 1964.

On the basis of my talks with Congressional leaders and committees and a sensing of public concern about Southeast Asia, I am convinced that the American people will do what has to be done if there is something to support. The prospect that we might strike the North, with all of the attendant risks, only to lose the South is most uninviting.²²

In the interval Rusk had paid his first visit to Vietnam where he had encountered – and to some extent countered – General Khanh's new-found enthusiasm for an attack on the North. After Rusk had returned to Washington, political stability in the South seemed to have slipped once again and Khanh was casting around desperately for remedies: evacuating two million people from Saigon, suspending civil rights (someone seems to have told him that is what Lincoln did in the Civil War) or even declaring war against North Vietnam. With this last point Lodge appeared to sympathize but it was agreed in Washington that when McNamara was in Saigon a week later he was to tell Khanh that the US had no intention either of supporting or undertaking the military objective of rolling back Communist control in North Vietnam.

This, of course, did not rule out the lesser objective of persuading North Vietnam, in Khanh's words, not to interfere in South Vietnam's internal affairs: to which was added the idea of punishing the North if it continued to do so. This simple calculus of ‘carrot and stick’ as Lodge called it had been considered during Rusk's visit to Saigon in April and involved a secret ultimatum to be delivered in Hanoi by a third party (Canada was suggested) in which North Vietnam was to be told to call off its support for the Viet Cong. In return the US would make food imports available but if it failed to comply it would suffer punitive strikes to which the US would not admit publicly. In order to provide what Lodge called a ‘saleable package’ which Ho could in turn present to his people Lodge thought it might be necessary to withdraw some Americans from South Vietnam but although the idea of a Canadian intermediary was followed up, the offer of troop withdrawal seems not to have been made nor, if it had, would one have expected anything to have come of it.

The US at this point was obviously about to enter the unknown in the next stages of its policy. No one knew what it would take to stop North Vietnam (nor, in a sense, to ‘start’ South Vietnam) and even less could the consequences be predicted. Rusk, during his Saigon visit, had discussed the possibilities of Chinese intervention and, according to the Pentagon Papers commentator ‘There was speculation whether the use of nuclear weapons against North Vietnam would bring in the Russians.’²³ On a somewhat less apocalyptic but almost as alarming a note ‘Bundy (William) conjectured, for argument's sake, that nukes used in wholly unpopulated areas solely for purposes of interdiction might have a different significance than if otherwise’. The argument does not seem to have been pursued but the question remained: how could North Vietnam be prevented from supporting the southern insurgency and how could the Administration secure popular support for whatever it was it decided to do?

In addition to its Vietnam problems the US was confronted with another: what to do about Laos where things started to fall apart after a major communist offensive in May. By then, however, there were four separate groups in Washington engaged in plans and exercises which ranged from total administrative re-organization – and large-scale US bureaucratic intervention – in South Vietnam to the theory and practice of hurting but not destroying the North. One group was trying to predict ‘enemy’ reactions and another was drafting alternative forms of a Congressional resolution which would validate whatever was to be done. On 23 May the group that was working on military plans completed its ‘Scenario for Strikes on North Vietnam’ which assumed that whatever the US did in South Vietnam would not prevent further deterioration there together with Lodge's rather more dubious assumption that firm action against the North was the only way to make a significant improvement in South Vietnam's self-defence. Assuming, further, that the time for action had arrived the scenario began with a recommendation that any conference on Laos or Vietnam should be postponed ‘until D-Day’ and, after the initial warning to Hanoi, proceeded with a joint Congressional resolution, allied consultation, Khanh's demand that North Vietnam should stop its aggression, and then, using that as the cover, the US would simultaneously attack North Vietnam by air, call for a conference on Vietnam, and go to the UN.

Presumably something similar had been drafted before Britain, France and Israel attacked Egypt in 1956, but this ingenious sequence of events that was to take place over 30 days was a part of US contingency planning rather than an operational directive. Nevertheless many of the proposals found their way into the ‘Basic Recommendation and Projected Course of Action on South-East Asia’ memorandum of the National Security Council's Executive Committee, sent to the President on 25 May, with its conclusion which could have been a paraphrase of Eden's announcement of the Suez operations: ‘This peace-keeping theme will have been at the centre of the whole enterprise from the beginning.’ There were risks, of escalation toward major land war or the use of nuclear weapons, as well as Viet Cong responses which would lose South Vietnam to neutralism and so eventually to communism, but it was ‘the hope and best estimate of most of your advisers that a decision of this kind can be executed without bringing a major military reply from Red China, and still less from the Soviet Union’.²⁴ Having touched on many of the same issues as the ‘30 Day’ scenario and based on the proposition that the US could not tolerate the loss of Southeast Asia to communism the Committee had this to say on the matter of a Congressional resolution:

We agree that no such resolution should be sought until Civil Rights is off the Senate calendar, and we believe that the preceding stages can be conducted in such a way as to leave a free choice on the timing of such a resolution. Some of us recommend that we aim at presenting and passing the resolution between the passage of Civil Rights and the convening of the Republican convention. Others believe that delay may be to our advantage and that we could as well handle the matter later in the summer, in spite of domestic politics.

TONKIN GULF

Between then and November the actions of the US in Vietnam would, increasingly, have to be considered in the context of US politics in an election year. If the Administration was going to organize some sort of attacks on North Vietnam it would be important to have the Congressional resolution; but while this had already been drafted there had been no obvious occasion, no dramatic event or atrocity, which would have ensured overwhelming support had it been presented. Then again there was the question of how long it would take for an attack to produce useful results. Would North Vietnam be deterred? What would happen in the South? When the next conference took place at Honolulu at the beginning of June 1964 between McNamara, Rusk (who had stopped off briefly in Saigon), Lodge, and the new American Military Commander in Vietnam, General Westmoreland, Lodge reckoned that most support for the Viet Cong would fade as soon as some ‘counter-terrorism measures’, as he called them, were taken against the North. Furthermore, he said, they would bolster morale and give the population in the South a feeling of unity. The two options which he instanced were ‘If we bombed Tchepone’ (one of the staging points, in Laos, of the Ho Chi Minh trail) and the other was an attack on North Vietnam torpedo boats.²⁵ Among the actions which had already been considered and at one time, apparently, preferred was a blockade of Haiphong – possibly because of the Cuban precedent although whether this could have been accomplished without some act of war is an open question – and it is conceivable that this accounted for the interest in torpedo boats. There was, however, some feeling in the State Department as McGeorge Bundy told Johnson that the US posture towards Vietnam was ‘too McNamara war-like’ and, as an interesting side-light, the US had supported a UN condemnation of a British air strike in the Yemen because, according to Adlai Stevenson: ‘We have a consistent record of opposition to reprisals of this sort’ and ‘This particular strike was out of all proportion to the provocation – although the provocation was real.’²⁶

The line between provoked and unprovoked US air attacks on North Vietnam was soon to become rather blurred and at the end of August, after the Tonkin Gulf incidents, the Pentagon Papers described a JCS memorandum as calling for deliberate attempts to provoke the DRV into actions which could then be answered by a systematic air campaign.²⁷ Perhaps this camouflage was thought necessary because their earlier proposal for unprovoked attacks – to which, incidentally, their outgoing chairman, General Taylor, apparently did not subscribe – had been turned down. Ten years after it had first been suggested, the JCS wanted to destroy the new ‘target complex’ at Dien Bien Phu: which was now reckoned to be one of the key points in moving war materials from North Vietnam into Laos and South Vietnam. Instead of limited attacks to change Hanoi's intentions the JCS wanted to make sure of destroying its capabilities but were apparently prepared to compromise on ‘sustained attacks’ as an initial measure.²⁸

At the other end of the scale on which US decisions were being made was, it might be assumed, negotiation. At the UN, however, the US assumed that there might not be enough support in the Security Council for ‘affirmative action’ on South Vietnam – ‘the one thing we do not want is to take our basic political case to the UN and fail to muster a majority’ – but in any event the US seemed more intent to ratify than to negotiate its position on Vietnam.²⁹ There was of course the possibility that its opponents did not understand what this was so when the new Canadian representative on the practically defunct International Control Commission went to Hanoi in June, 1964 his essential role was that of herald. When he had met the Canadian Prime Minister, Lester Pearson, in New York at the end of May Johnson had said that his message to Hanoi was that, while he was a man of peace, he did not intend to permit the North Vietnamese to take over Southeast Asia. Even if Hanoi's objective had been the more modest one of South Vietnam it seems that the message which Seaborn was given was that the US position was absolutely non-negotiable. According to one account he had conveyed US determination ‘to contain the DRV to the territory allocated it’ at Geneva in 1954 and to see the GVN's writ run throughout South Vietnam. He had also been told to remind Hanoi that US patience was ‘running thin’ and if the conflict should escalate the greatest devastation would of course result for the DRV itself.³⁰ To underline the seriousness of US intentions Seaborn reminded Pham Van Dong that their commitment to South Vietnam had implications expanding far beyond Southeast Asia. Pham Van Dong, apparently, laughed and said he did indeed appreciate the problem. A US defeat in South Vietnam would in all probability start a chain reaction extending much further.

The USA is in a difficult position, because Khanh's troops will no longer fight. If the war gets worse, we shall suffer greatly but we shall win. If we win in the South, the people of the world will turn against the USA. Our people will therefore accept the sacrifices, whatever they may be.³¹

For North Vietnam therefore, just as much for the US, there seemed to be nothing substantive to negotiate about. According to Pham Van Dong what President Ho Chi Minh had meant by a just solution was, first, that the US should withdraw from Indo-China; second, that the affairs of the South must be arranged by the people of the South; third, it meant reunification of the country. The only concession was time. ‘We are in no hurry. We are willing to talk but we should wait until South Vietnam is ready.’ As for the war itself Pham Van Dong said he suffered to see it go on, to develop, to intensify: ‘Yet our people are determined to struggle. It is impossible, quite impossible (excuse me for saying this) for you Westerners to understand the force of the people's will to resist and to continue.’³²

Beyond those uncompromising positions, prospects of a government of national coalition, which Pham Van Dong said would ‘snowball’ in the South, were unimportant but there were two further points of interest. First, his statement that the DRV would not enter the war, second, his assertion: ‘We shall not provoke the USA.’ Other than deception, two months after the decision may already have been taken to send PAVN units to the South, it is an open question, or perhaps a matter of definition, what Pham Van Dong meant by the first statement. But the second, even if it did not mean that he was aware that the US was looking for provocation, did mean, if it was true, that the US could not rely on North Vietnam to put the American scenario into effect. At least in so far as its own regular forces were concerned; but this did not rule out the irregular forces which, although now under the command of General Westmoreland, were to be used for more or less clandestine operations against North Vietnam.

Whether or not one believes that it was these operations, code name Op Plan 34A, which resulted in the mutually acknowledged encounter between North Vietnamese torpedo boats and a US destroyer and aircraft in the Gulf of Tonkin on 2 August they were, in themselves, the first US-directed attacks on North Vietnam. US servicemen had already been killed in South Vietnam in 1964, US aircraft had been shot down and a US aircraft ferry was mined and sunk at Saigon in May. There was, however, no suggestion that 34A operations were designed on a retaliatory basis. Rather, as the official history of The US Navy and the Vietnam Conflict puts it: ‘In initiating maritime operations, Washington policy makers sought to send a clear signal to Hanoi of US potential for retribution.’ Initially, however, they remark, the communication was muffled; as would be the connection with the US Navy on the high seas. Essentially what was under way was a projected series of covert coastal operations, in unmarked boats, with international crews – Vietnamese, Thai, Taiwanese and, apparently ‘European’ mercenaries – but, unmistakably, under US direction and control. From the beginning of 1964 they were under the overall command of the US Commander in Vietnam; there was an office in the Department of Defense in Washington which ‘kept a tight rein’ on the operation; and direct oversight of the Naval programme was exercised by the US Naval Advisory Detachment in Danang, the base used by boats operating on missions to the North.³³

Desultory operations by South Vietnamese frogmen had begun in February 1964: but the first ‘significant success’ is reckoned to have come at the end of May with the capture of a North Vietnamese junk and the interrogation of its six passengers. In June and July the attacks increased in frequency and intensity and on at least one occasion resulted in quite a heavy fire fight with North Vietnamese defenders. At the same time, in separate operations, US Air Force fighter bombers based in South Vietnam were attacking targets in Laos and naval aircraft from US carriers were flying photographic reconnaissance over Laos and two of them had been shot down in early June. More serious in its consequences were the ‘Desoto Patrols’ which had begun in 1962 off the northern coastline of China and which were designed ‘to collect intelligence concerning Chicom electronic and naval activity … establish and maintain Seventh Fleet presence in area [and] serve as a minor cold war irritant to Chicoms’. They were subsequently extended to cover North Korea, the USSR, North Vietnam and Indonesia but the patrolling destroyers were ordered not to approach within 20 nautical miles of the mainland. In 1964 this was reduced to 12 miles but in the case of Vietnam, and for the first time, the destroyer was authorized to close up to four nautical miles to the mainland. The reason for this drastic reduction was the request from General Harkins' command that the patrol should obtain ‘intelligence on DRV forces capable [of resisting] projected operations in conjunction with OPLAN 34A’ and the destroyer was to photograph, to monitor junk activity, to provide information on VC supply routes and, perhaps most important, to locate and identify coastal radar transmitters.

When the patrol actually took place in March (it had been postponed so as not to interfere with 34A operations) its operational radius had been changed somewhat – up to eight miles from the North Vietnamese mainland but only four to the offshore islands – but it was a large assumption that, as when the French had left ten years earlier, the limit for territorial waters was still only three miles. Whatever it was in law and whenever it was that North Vietnam laid claim to a 12-mile limit the US Pacific Fleet in the mid-twentieth century, like the French Navy in the nineteenth, did not take the Vietnamese very seriously and even in regard to the USSR its commander, in order ‘to assert our traditional belief in the right of free use of international waters’, had also requested permission to send a destroyer into the Sea of Okhotsk: close enough to Russia for it not to have been entered by a US warship for the previous ten years.

In respect to the guidelines that were issued for the July/August Desoto Patrol, there was apparently a greater awareness of the risks involved than there had been earlier in the year and on-call air support had been arranged from a US carrier. Whether or not this awareness was because of the coincidence with 34A operations, at the time when the destroyer Maddox was off the North Vietnamese coast on the morning of 31 July, it was close enough to see the four fast patrol boats returning from a 34A offshore bombardment of the North Vietnamese island on Hon Me. The following day the Maddox was passing five miles away from other North Vietnamese islands and the day after that it appears that the North Vietnamese naval headquarters ordered its coastal forces to prepare for battle. In the generalized account which they themselves have given, the North Vietnamese, having noted various air and sea attacks, made no attempt to conceal what happened. ‘At noon on Sunday, 2 August 1964 our Navy's Squadron 3 … was ordered to set out to resolutely punish the “acts of piracy” of the US imperialists and to attack the destroyer Maddox which had penetrated deep into our coastal waters.’³⁴ Half an hour later North Vietnamese torpedo boats were close enough to be seen by the Maddox and when they finally closed, approximately 25 miles from the Vietnamese coast with the Maddox making full speed away, the destroyer opened fire and the North Vietnamese boats launched their torpedoes. After 20 minutes the surface action was over but carrier-borne US aircraft immediately afterwards sank one MTB and two others were damaged and beached.³⁵

This much seems generally to have been agreed on both sides. Thereafter on the US side the Pacific Fleet Commander wanted to assert the right of freedom of the seas and to resume the patrols; but the conditions that were imposed were, first, that it should not take place during the next 34A coastal operation and second, that it should stay 12 nautical miles from the North Vietnamese mainland. There was now, apparently, ‘concern in the Washington intelligence community that the North Vietnamese considered the 34A and Desoto Patrol operations as one’³⁶ and having suffered a bloody nose in a brave but fruitless attack it was an open question whether the North Vietnamese would risk another. Probably it was not expected and certainly, by itself, the naval clash on 2 August had not been the occasion for any US retaliation. As Johnson put it: ‘we would assume the unprovoked attack has been a mistake.’ Over the next week this would emerge as the dominant theme in the US presentation: ‘unprovoked attack’ together with ‘freedom of the seas’ and ‘innocent passage’ and might perhaps have been limited to verbal orchestration had it not been for the event, real or imaginary, that was next reported from the Gulf of Tonkin.

Whatever it was that did or did not happen on the night of 4 August first of all removed the restraint on open and damaging US air attacks against North Vietnam, and to that extent may be said to have been the occasion for starting the war, but also afforded the opportunity for a consummately skilful and successful political operation. It began on the morning of 4 August in Washington, 12 hours behind Saigon time, when McNamara, according to Johnson's account, telephoned him to say that there was a strong indication from an intercepted message of another attack on US ships in the Gulf in Tonkin. If Johnson was waiting for something that would, simultaneously, reveal him as a man of action and a man of prudence this was a remarkable opportunity. Having ordered the Desoto Patrol to return to the Gulf of Tonkin after the encounter on 2 August there had, apparently, been another attack on two US destroyers on the night of 4 August. The details subsequently became more and more obscure but when the first reports reached Johnson during a ‘leadership breakfast’ with Democratic Senators he presented it, presumably as he received it, as another unprovoked attack on US warships on the high seas. Nine torpedoes had been fired at the US destroyers, according to Johnson, and if this was not outrage enough he contributed his own intensely emotional flight of fancy ‘Some of our boys are floating around in the water’. If the US ships had been hit this might well have been true, but, for Johnson, it seems that what was conceivable had become reality.³⁷

It was a powerful argument and when Johnson appeared on television later than night to announce that, as he spoke, air action was already under way as a ‘positive reply’ it was described as the response to a multiple attack. Not only was it deliberate and unprovoked, but it was also, as Rusk said, inexplicable; a sort of mad dog act, one might infer, to which there could only be one response. It was not as if just a few shots had been fired. At one point it seemed as if the attackers had fired 22 torpedoes in an encounter that went on for hours with US retaliation by sea and air which had sunk several of the torpedo boats in a repeat performance of what had happened in broad daylight two days earlier. Only this had happened on rather a dark night and the evidence that it happened collides with the doubts of those who think that in reality it never happened at all.³⁸

In February 1968 when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee returned to the events in the Gulf of Tonkin one of the sub-headings in the published account of the Secretary of Defense's exhaustive testimony was ‘Monstrous Insinuations’. In the interval it had been suggested, and would be again, that whatever had happened on 4 August had, as McNamara described it, been induced by the US to provide it with an excuse for retaliation. Or, as George Ball, Under Secretary of State at the time suggested ten years later, the Desoto Patrols were intended primarily for provocation.³⁹

Leaving that as an open question and assuming, further, that when the first reports arrived in Washington of a second attack on 4 August, they were in good conscience taken at their face value, what does in fact appear as a ‘monstrous insinuation’ is that there was no known connection between 34A operations and the Desoto Patrols. Senator Morse, who suspected that there was, said as much in the Senate on 5 August but the following day he was told categorically by McNamara in committee:

First, our Navy played absolutely no part in, was not associated with, was not aware of any South Vietnamese actions, if there were any. I want to make that very clear to you. The Maddox was operating in international waters, was carrying out a routine patrol of the type we carry out all over the world at all times. It was not informed of, was not aware of, had no evidence of, and so far as I know today had no knowledge of, any South Vietnamese actions in connection with the two islands, as Senator Morse referred to.⁴⁰

According to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee study there were in fact four points in the US decision-making system where information about both the proposed Desoto Patrols and the proposed 34A operations was available: in Saigon, in Honolulu, and two in Washington but the division of responsibility for the two programmes, the study suggests, could have been responsible for a compartmentalization of knowledge. Whether it was or not it may be argued that there was no reason why the Pacific Command should not have known of Westmoreland's coastal operations, and vice versa, and most of the evidence suggests that they did. Similarly, even if they were not perfectly synchronized they were connected in purpose: and yet it was argued that the North Vietnamese should have known perfectly well that they were entirely separate operations and that, inferentially, they should have observed the same nominal distinctions as the US administration would subsequently claim. As they had not, and as the President had announced it as open aggression on the high seas against the US, he had ordered an attack on the torpedo boat bases and oil storage tanks by over 60 US carrier-borne aircraft. A single strike, it was effective in its limited purpose of destroying or damaging the targets and also perhaps as a warning of further attacks. Whether it would in any way persuade Hanoi to reduce its support for the southern revolution was another matter and if it did not would another act of war be necessary?

Before he became Vice-President it was said of Johnson that there could be no doubt that he was among the most effective and powerful leaders in the history of the US Senate.⁴¹ His role as Senate Majority Leader during the Eisenhower presidency had however been to facilitate rather than to criticize Republican foreign policy: to the point where it was also said that his insistence on subordination to the executive on all issues of national security – even denying the right of Congress to information – seriously reduced the Senate's ability to participate in foreign policy decisions; and that by insisting that the Senate yield to the President he reduced its customary right to share in foreign policy. Having just crossed one major barrier on the road between peace and war by an open attack on North Vietnam, but with the likelihood that something more would be needed, Johnson was about to demonstrate that skill of consensus building and deployment which had been the hallmark of his political life. Of his previous Senate mobilizations it was said they were like Greek drama – most of the action had taken place off-stage – and the passage of the Tonkin Gulf resolution through Congress was no exception. With minimum divulgence of detail that could throw into question the account of unprovoked aggression, and with Democrats and Republicans responding to the same patriotic feelings, the House voted unanimously in favour of the joint resolution.

In the Senate it was to prove more difficult: even if the final score of 88-2 in favour of the resolution suggested a runaway victory. Few questions had been asked at a remarkably brief committee session but in the course of a two-day debate, apart from the poignant warnings of Senator Morse, it was obvious that many Senators had reservations about the US position and US policies in Vietnam but hardly anyone thought that was the occasion to. voice them. An unprovoked attack had been made on US ships; there had been an appropriate response; and now it was time to close ranks and support the President. Honour, integrity and vital interests were mentioned but it was a sober, responsible and dignified debate in which almost everyone agreed with Senator Fulbright that the situation had been handled in the best possible way and that the joint resolution in turn was the best way to prevent an escalation or enlargement of the war. The reassurance of Fulbright, who was steering the resolution through the Senate, with the support of Majority and Minority leaders, the more important in the case of someone like Mansfield who was known to have fundamental doubts about US policy, allowed the Senators to believe that, open-ended permission notwithstanding, they were voting to contain rather than to expand the war and the US role therein. Senator Nelson had wanted to make it absolutely explicit by introducing an amendment, part of which read: ‘Our continuing policy is to limit our role to the provision of aid, training assistance, and military advice, and it is the sense of Congress that, except when provoked to a greater response, we should continue to attempt to avoid a direct military involvement in the South-East Asian conflict.’⁴² On procedural grounds Fulbright regretted that he could not accept the amendment but nevertheless he gave it an endorsement which seemed just as valuable as the amendment itself: ‘I believe it is an accurate reflection of what I believe is the President's policy, judging from his own statement.’⁴³

Four years later when Fulbright was responsible for re-opening a Senate inquiry into what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin, he said that taking the resolution to the floor of the Senate was something he regretted more than anything he had ever done in his life. In particular he wondered why he had not had the sense to question one particular cable, the authenticity of which seemed to have been the basis of his assurance to Senator Nelson that there was absolutely no connection between the US destroyers and any 34-A operations the South Vietnamese themselves might have conducted. When Nelson and Senator McGovern had gone to see Fulbright before the resolution was passed it was apparently presented as a limited response, rather than a blank cheque, something that would defuse the Vietnam issue during the presidential campaign – and something that would help Johnson against Goldwater. Johnson would later argue that Fulbright knew exactly what he was doing when he steered the resolution through the Senate but on two counts this does not seem to be true. First, Fulbright, like everyone else, had been assured and reassured by McNamara that there was no provocation, no incriminating connection, and no doubt that a second attack had taken place. Second, according to the White House Press Secretary at the time, he had very definite assurances from Johnson that the Tonkin Gulf resolution was not going to be used for anything other than the Tonkin Gulf incident itself.⁴⁴ According to Senator Gruening, who voted against the resolution, Johnson had also asked him not to introduce a resolution which would have prevented draftees being sent to Vietnam and had said: ‘Listen, if we're not out of there by next January you can do anything you please.’⁴⁵

Gruening, incidentally, like many others, said that Johnson could have been one of the great Presidents had it not been for Vietnam. Averell Harriman said he would have been the greatest and in the famous passage of recrimination related by Doris Kearns, Johnson described how he had to abandon his hopes of building the Great Society in America for ‘that bitch of a war’ in Vietnam. In the summer and autumn of 1964 it seems possible that Johnson had not yet decided to go to war in Vietnam; that he was waiting upon events; and that, like McNamara, he may have been running scared but was hoping for the best. Whatever he was doing, however, after 10 August Johnson had in his pocket a joint Congressional resolution which said that the maintenance of international peace and security in Southeast Asia was vital to US national interests and to world peace; that the US was prepared to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member of SEATO or protocol state; and that Congress approved and supported his determination, as C.-in-C, to take all necessary means to repel any armed attack against the forces of the US as well as to prevent further aggression.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that this was described as the functional equivalent of a declaration of war even if, in the minds of at least some who voted for it, they intended the opposite: that, as Johnson proclaimed, there should be no wider war. Perhaps this was the fatal ambiguity: believing in Fulbright's assurances and at the same time allowing the words to stand which would allow the President to do whatever he wanted until either peace was restored or Congress withdrew its support. Ten years earlier, largely perhaps because Britain would not agree, Senators had refused to write a blank cheque and so the Congressional resolution that would have supported US intervention at Dien Bien Phu stayed as a draft in Dulles's pocket. Now it was in Johnson's pocket: but the difference was that it was signed, sealed and delivered.

What Johnson would do with it was another matter, particularly as he was now entering the last stages of a presidential compaign. The purpose of the Congressional resolution may well have been ‘to pull the rug out from under Goldwater’ and with the simultaneous implication of firmness and restraint, as in the single-strike retaliation, it could be presented as an appropriate, rather than the wildly disproportionate, response which could so easily be hung around the neck of Johnson's Republican opponent, Senator Goldwater. Whereas Johnson was to profit from the ambiguities of the Tonkin Gulf resolution Goldwater never really recovered from his ambiguity about the use of nuclear weapons and the circumstances in which they could be employed.⁴⁶

Appealing to the precursors of the silent majority, the slogan ‘In your heart you know he's right’ was cleverly turned into ‘In your heart you know he might’ and perhaps it was the fear that Goldwater, the Air Force Reserve General, would lead the country over the nuclear precipice which more than anything sent Johnson back to the White House, President in his own right, with ‘the greatest vote, the greatest margin and the greatest percentage that any President had ever drawn from the American people.’⁴⁷ But perhaps, as Theodore White suggests, the election was over before it began, decided long before, perhaps within minutes of the fatal shot at Dallas, and Johnson had properly succeeded to the Kennedy inheritance and to the Kennedy war.

Johnson had also reached the point where the decisions would finally have to be made whether to fight or to let Vietnam go. In July 1964 General Maxwell Taylor had become a new or rather a different but perhaps an even more important player in the bureaucratic game when he took over from Lodge as US Ambassador in Saigon. His previous position as Chairman of the JCS had allowed him to concentrate military opinion on what should be done in Vietnam, as it were, from first principles. Now that he was in Saigon two halves of US policy came together: reports from the field which had the authority and experience of someone who had commanded military forces at the highest level and an input to strategic decisions that would be based on first-hand experience on the spot. Taylor's first report from Saigon, on 10 August, the day Johnson signed the Tonkin Gulf resolution, was surprisingly optimistic and, as he himself admitted, exceeded the optimism of most senior US officials in Saigon. It was surprising in that it described what was at best a political stalemate, even if there had been an extraordinary but rather dubious statistical improvement. Taylor said that only 20 per cent of rural South Vietnam was under Viet Cong control, i.e. half what McNamara said it was in mid March but the principal hopes were to be pinned on contingency plans for action against North Vietnam and a readiness, by 1 January 1965, to put them into effect. In the meantime opportunities or occasions might present themselves when either or both sides, successively, could take the conflict up another notch. One such event occurred on 1 November 1964 at Bien Hoa airfield.

At the same time as the attack was made on the North Vietnamese naval bases on 6 August squadrons of US aircraft began to move up and into mainland Southeast Asia, some to Thailand, but most into South Vietnam with the heaviest concentration, of B-57s (originally the British ‘Canberra’ medium bomber), stationed at Bien Hoa. As they did not start bombing attacks (and then on South rather than North Vietnam) until the following February their presence which was no doubt intended as a gesture of reassurance and determination also constituted a standing temptation to the guerrillas. So much so that one of Johnson's civilian advisers, Michael Forrestal, wondered whether the Air Force had not deliberately set it up so that they could retaliate.

They moved these airplanes in when they had no reason to, not the faintest tactical, strategic, logistical, political reason … to move these obsolete jets out of the Philippines and park them all in a row undefended on Bien Hoa airfield. And if you knew, if you had studied, the Vietcong for very long this was something they had to attack, they couldn't restrain themselves. We made all these arguments to the Defense Department … but for reasons of their own they went ahead and the President didn't think that was important enough to tackle the Defense Department on. Then they were all blown up.⁴⁸

In the event they were not all blown up but a VC mortar attack destroyed five and damaged thirteen B-57s, killed four Americans and wounded 72. Taylor in Saigon and the JCS in Washington recommended immediate retaliation but, two days before the US election, the answer was, predictably, ‘no’. That the US service chiefs were anxious to begin attacks on North Vietnam is borne out by a previous example. Desoto Patrols in the Gulf of Tonkin had been resumed on 17 September. On the following night there seemed to be a repeat performance of what had been reported on 4 August: destroyers manoeuvring to avoid torpedoes, a two-hour engagement, hundred of rounds fired, enemy craft apparently sunk but no corroborating evidence that the US ships had been attacked. Nevertheless the JCS wanted to use the occasion, such as it was, to attack more oil installations, this time in Hanoi and Haiphong, and at the same time to use the not yet destroyed B-57s from Bien Hoa to attack some 40 Chinese MIG fighters which had been flown in to an airfield north of Hanoi at the same time as US aircraft had been deployed to South Vietnam.⁴⁹

HOW TO HELP THE SOUTH

On this occasion, however, Johnson and his civilian advisers were sceptical: and the President made it clear that he was not interested in rapid escalation on such frail evidence and with such a fragile government in South Vietnam. Preoccupation with the impending election apart the weakness of the GVN was to provide the principal limitation on the development of Johnson's policies. As he told his principal advisers on 9 September, he did not wish to enter the patient in a ten-round bout when he was in no shape to hold out for even one. That was already an accurate analogy in the summer of 1964 – ‘An absolute shambles. Public law and order broke down in Saigon itself … some days when we couldn't find the government’⁵⁰ – and with Khanh going around in the revolving door of government – some days he was in power, some days he was not – US frustration was becoming more obvious. Taylor, for example, hardly concealed his disdain for the GVN:

A group of men who turned off their hearing aids in the face of appeals to the public weal. These people simply did not have the sense of responsibility for the public interest to which we were accustomed, and regularly estimated matters in terms of their own personal gains and losses.⁵¹

But faced with what the Director of the CIA said was a disturbing prospect of increasing support in South Vietnam for negotiation, Taylor's conclusion was that: ‘As long as the armed forces are solid, the real power is secure.’ This might have been by way of rejoinder not only to Johnson, who asked what would happen if the GVN got weaker and weaker, but also to McCone who said that they might find that the original US purposes, as set out in Eisenhower's letter of 1954, ‘were no longer supported by the people of Vietnam themselves’. It could, also, have been the point where and when the GVN became secondary to US purposes. Taylor was to look more and more like a shadow Governor-General even though at this point he did not seem to realize how bad things were in the countryside and relied instead on Khanh's regular reassurances. When he did, eventually, the solution was to introduce more US forces but for the moment the answer to the problem was money rather than men. Money, said McNamara, was no object. It would, said Rusk, be worth any amount to win and if as he said, the cost of the anti-Communist struggle in Greece had worked out at $50,000 a guerrilla, the thought of a similar fixed-price operation must have been reassuring at what was otherwise rather a disturbing time.

Rusk and McCone, incidentally, did not seem to agree on this occasion whether the Sino-Soviet split would inhibit adventures by Peking and Hanoi – McCone said it would not: ‘Hanoi and Peking now believed they were doing very well’ – but on the eve of the first Chinese nuclear test there seemed to be a possibility of Russo-American convergence which could conceivably have affected Vietnam. At a meeting on 15 September it was agreed at the highest level that it would be better not to prevent a Chinese nuclear test by an attack on their nuclear installations but in certain circumstances there could be ‘a possible agreement to cooperate in preventive military action. We therefore agreed that it would be most desirable for the Secretary of State to explore this matter very privately with Ambassador Dobrynin as soon as possible.’⁵²

Fear of China was the theme that Johnson later developed, or allowed to be presented, in his memoirs which gave an alarming picture of how the Far East might have looked to him at the end of 1964. The possibilities of what Johnson described as a Djakarta-Hanoi-Peking-Pyongyang axis may well have been there and if they were, no further justification of a steadfast US policy in Vietnam would seem to have been required. As far as new US initiatives were concerned Johnson in particular seemed hesitant and uncertain. Having rejected proposals for retaliation after the Bien Hoa fiasco and having had Taylor's November report that they were in a losing game in Vietnam Johnson was beginning to be confronted, and perhaps now to confront himself, with agonizing choices. On a reading of at least one paragraph of Taylor's report what he described as ‘the minimum government’ had almost ceased to exist; and although Taylor toyed with the idea that US officials might take over operational control of the GVN and the US ‘might do better to carry forward the war on a purely unilateral basis’ these seemed little more than talking points. In fact Taylor had nothing tangible to recommend for strengthening or even preserving the GVN, but as it seemed to be a matter of confidence and morale as much as anything else, Taylor was in favour of increasing covert sea and air operations as a means to this end. The main thrust of Taylor's argument however was towards air attacks on North Vietnam: as an imposed cost of their ‘nefarious actions’, as a means of reducing their operational support and as a bargaining counter with the GVN so that it would become more effective.

The stark contrast with these changes that were to be induced by the US, which was now beginning to appear as the prime mover, was to be seen in Taylor's honest but puzzled account of the strength of the revolutionary forces in South Vietnam, who, even if they were directed, supplied and supported by the North, were obviously formidable opponents in themselves.

The ability of the Viet-Cong continuously to rebuild their units and to make good their losses is one of the mysteries of this guerrilla war. We are aware of the recruiting methods by which local boys are induced or compelled to join the Viet-Cong ranks and have some general appreciation of the amount of infiltration of personnel from the outside. But taking both of these sources into account, we still find no plausible explanation of the continued strength of the Viet-Cong if our data on Viet-Cong losses are even approximately correct. Not only do the Viet-Cong units have the recuperative powers of the phoenix, but they have an amazing ability to maintain morale. Only in rare cases have we found evidences of bad morale among Viet-Cong prisoners or recorded in captured Viet-Cong documents.⁵³

‘OFF TO THE RACES’

If, as Taylor argued, there was little to say about the counterinsurgency programme except to recognize that it depended entirely on the GVN there was equally little that the US could do, at least in the short term, which was likely to affect the balance of forces in the South except to carry the war to the North. This was what Taylor wanted. For him it was an inevitable choice. Either the US took military action against North Vietnam or it ran ‘a very real risk of failing disastrously in South-East Asia’. But Taylor's audience in Washington while, as he put it, sympathetic was ‘still not ready to bite the bullet’.⁵⁴ This may have been true in that air attacks had not begun immediately but on 1 December 1964 the manuscript record of the executive committee on South Vietnam shows that the policy decision was made by the President: ‘There will be reprisals but decide exactly what at the time.’⁵⁵ In a sense this was Johnson's version of ‘massive retaliation: at times and places of our choosing’ and it allowed the President not only to decide on what would be done but also to postpone immediate actions. In the meantime, having taken the critical decision, was there any chance that anything less than air attacks on the North would be enough to hold South Vietnam together? The impression of this meeting was that the President was at his wits end, casting around desperately, clutching at straws, prepared, as he said, to try everything ‘before Wheeler (the Chairman of the JCS) saddles up’. How could 34,000 hard-core VC, he asked, lick 200,000 ARVN regulars? Why not say ‘This is it!’? Not send Johnson City boy out to die if they acting as they are.'

To this last and perhaps rhetorical question there was no recorded response but McNamara confirmed the essential proposition that it was ‘downhill in South Vietnam no matter what we do in country’. Obviously the situation was getting worse but, given the state of South Vietnam, Johnson still hesitated. They did not, he said, ‘want to send widow woman to slap Jack Dempsey. DRV will bomb Saigon once. Then we are off to the races’. The day of reckoning was coming and Johnson added ‘We want to be sure we've done everything we can’. Help from almost all quarters was considered. Within South Vietnam, having been told by Taylor in effect to write off the Buddhists and the French, Johnson asked whether the Pope could not straighten things out with the Catholics. Why could not they get ambitious politicos into the act? Why not use Chinese Nationalist forces? Anything to be got from India? Or Pakistan? Or even, suggested Rusk, the Germans: although he was reminded by McNamara that would not be popular domestically (whether that meant in West Germany, in the US, or South Vietnam was not entirely clear). Like Dulles before the fall of Dien Bien Phu, Johnson was obviously intent on mobilizing allied or ‘third country’ support. Rusk was certain that the British could do more – ‘Hit Wilson’ was another of his suggestions – while McNamara said that 1,000 men from the Philippines and Australia as well as the UK would have a political effect out of all proportion to their numbers.

With the hope therefore that somehow the US would be able to put out more flags Taylor was sent back to Saigon to be given one last chance. He was now authorized to start planning attacks against the North with the GVN: although they were told that this did not imply any US commitment. Roughly the same thing could be said of the planning that was going on in Washington. While it may have been astute of policy framers such as the Bundy brothers to present Johnson with options based on what George Ball called the Goldilocks principle – too hard, too soft, just right – and while this may not have taken in the full range of possibilities, even from what he was offered Johnson was having difficulty choosing. The planning which began on 3 November, the day of Johnson's election, with the establishment of a Working Group of the National Security Council under the Chairmanship of William Bundy, had produced three rather blurred options. The first was a continuation (and some intensification) of existing operations. The second, ‘fast/full squeeze’, involved heavy and uninterrupted bombing until North Vietnam agreed to call off its support and/or operations in South Vietnam and Laos. The third, more deliberate, ‘progressive squeeze and talks’, would gradually intensify the attacks on the North and was ‘designed to give the US the option at any time to proceed or not, to escalate or not and to quicken the pace or not’.⁵⁶

Perhaps, because it seemed to suggest that the President would still be in control, this was why the third option appealed to Johnson. Rather than the open-ended war of Option B this was somewhere between game strategy and a management exercise but, even so, it was not enough to secure Johnson's irrevocable commitment: beyond, that is, his decision on 1 December that there would be reprisals: but he would decide exactly what at the time. Throughout November when the most intensive planning for some sort of war was taking place the President had been under equally intense pressure, directly and indirectly, from the JCS who, on four different occasions, submitted formal proposals for attacks against North Vietnam.⁵⁷ ‘Every time’ Johnson cabled Taylor at the end of December ‘I get a military recommendation it seems to me that it calls for large-scale bombing. I have never felt that this war will be won from the air and it seems to me that what is much more needed and would be more effective is the larger and stronger use of Rangers and Special Forces and Marines or other appropriate military strength on the ground and on the scene.’⁵⁸ This was the kind of war, Johnson said, which the US had been building up its strength to fight since 1961, and, by implication, was the sort of war he was prepared to fight in South Vietnam. Here he was at odds with Taylor who resisted the commitment of US battalions to South Vietnam until the moment they arrived and was wholly in favour of air attacks on the North but one of the problems with Johnson's preferred policy was that, by increasing the number of US troops, élite forces though they might be, he would be increasing the number of targets for VC attacks. Following the attack on US aircraft at Bien Hoa airfield in early November, an attack on a US officers' billet in Saigon on Christmas Eve killed two Americans and injured another 60. Again, as after Bien Hoa, Taylor recommended an immediate ‘reprisal’ air attack against North Vietnam and again Johnson demurred.⁵⁹ One point on which Johnson and Taylor had however originally agreed was that, because of the danger of a North Vietnamese response to US air attacks, South Vietnam would have to be in better shape than when Taylor had returned to Saigon in early December. By the end of December, it was, if anything, worse and this was one of the reasons why Johnson did not respond to the attack on Christmas Eve. By then, and in spite of explicit warnings from Taylor, General Khanh and a group of young generals had overthrown the civilian government and announced their Armed Forces Council as the new rulers of South Vietnam. The upshot was that Taylor asked Khanh to resign and leave the country; while Khanh and his colleagues, after some astute manoeuvres, were on the point of asking Taylor to do the same. Before long the US would be involved with Khanh in a second, briefer and less sanguinary performance of their saga with Diem and Taylor and Khanh would be in open opposition. Other Americans, such as McGeorge Bundy who described Khanh as the focus of raw power, were convinced that there was no one else in sight although some might have remembered that, for years, exactly the same was said of Diem, and even of Bao Dai before him. Eventually, and only two weeks after Bundy's endorsement, Khanh was removed from power and, on 25 February 1965 to Taylor's intense satisfaction, he was shipped off to indefinite exile.

Problems such as this were of course far more serious than who was in and who was out in what was called ‘a revolving junta’ in South Vietnam. Apart from the uncertainties of political direction, and the inevitable questions that were raised about its alliance-worthiness, abrupt and eccentric changes in administration such as this led to even greater enfeeblement of the ‘pacification’ programme. Generals who are playing politics as well as playing soldiers seldom manage to do both successfully but the example is there to be copied. On one occasion, for example, a Vietnamese battalion, having run into a minefield, broke off contact and, to the amazement of its US advisers, headed back towards Saigon. When next located it was in the middle of Saigon participating in an abortive coup. This was in September 1964 and the operation had been in support of an intensive pacification effort in the provinces around Saigon. A year later an inquiry into this particular programme (Hop Tac: ‘Cooperation’) which was supposed to have been a show piece of US – Vietnamese planning said, among other things, that in the eyes of many Vietnamese it was ‘the plan of the Americans’: something which perhaps Khanh had done to keep the US happy. Whether and to what extent the Vietnamese would support other US plans and what the effect would be if US soldiers were introduced to help fight a war for which the Vietnamese were thought to be inadequate or insufficient was the dilemma which faced the US in 1965. Reluctant to commit himself yet to attacking North Vietnam, but with little interest being shown by Taylor in more US forces, Johnson did not seem to know what to do next and, in the absence of agreement, perhaps instinctively, did nothing.

At the end of January two of his principal officers confronted Johnson with the consequences of temporization. McGeorge Bundy and McNamara had asked to see the President and were going to tell him that ‘Both of us are now pretty well convinced that our current policy could lead only to disastrous defeat’. Having supported Johnson's unwillingness in earlier months to move out of the middle course, and while they agreed that every effort should still be made to improve operations on the ground and to prop up the authorities as best they could, none of this was enough and the time had come for harder choices. Again there appeared to be three options. One was ‘to deploy all our resources along a track of negotiation, aimed at salvaging what little can be preserved with no major addition to our present military risks’. The second appeared to be the ‘middle course’ but was in fact the one which Bundy and McNamara thought was the worst: ‘to continue in this essentially passive role which can only lead to eventual defeat and an invitation to get out in humiliating circumstances’. This option being discarded there was therefore only one alternative to negotiation: ‘to use our military power in the Far East and to force a change of Communist policy’. Or, if one assumes that a negotiated defeat was a non-option, there was only one course and Johnson was being asked to take it.⁶⁰

At this point it would seem that the initiative was very much with Bundy and McNamara and, if Bundy's account is to be believed, the position of pre-eminence was theirs by default. Rusk, apparently, had nothing left to offer. He did not disagree that things were going very badly and that they would get worse. But the consequences of both escalation and withdrawal were so bad that they simply had to find a way of making the present policy work. ‘This would be good if it was possible. Bob and I do not think it is.’ Whether or not Johnson agreed with the logic of this presentation or whether Johnson instinctively agreed with Rusk, Bundy was soon on his way to Saigon. Just as in earlier years Taylor-Rostow or McNamara-Taylor visits led to enhanced US commitment and effort so the Bundy trip might well have done the same but, coinciding with the Viet-Cong's own escalation, it made for an inevitable and momentous conclusion. On the last day of Bundy's visit, 7 February 1965, a Viet-Cong ‘spectacular’ at Pleiku killed eight Americans, wounded more than 100 and destroyed a number of US helicopters on an adjacent base. It was the sort of attack to which Johnson could hardly not have responded and the significance of Bundy's remark ‘Pleikus are like streetcars’ lay in the opportunities which had hitherto not been taken. This time, with Bundy telephoning in the details to Washington and after a brief meeting of an augmented NSC, Johnson ordered a retaliation attack and on successive days US Navy and Air Force planes, augmented by SVNAF (South Vietnamese Air Force) aircraft, attacked military targets in North Vietnam. On 10 February another Viet-Cong attack at Qui Nhon killed 23 Americans and, again, the US responded with attacks with 100+ aircraft. A week later the first US bombing attacks, as distinct from close-support gunship attacks, were made on South Vietnamese targets and, even more ominously, squadrons of Strategic Air Command B-52s were moved to the US base at Guam, within striking distance of Vietnam.

WAS THE US AT WAR?

Part of the significance of this second US response was that it was no longer advertised in terms of reprisal and retaliation. Hanoi was now held to be responsible, as Bundy suggested, for ‘the whole VC campaign of violence and terror in the South’ and it was for this reason that the Pentagon Papers analyst described the second set of air strikes on 11 February as constituting a much sharper break with past policy than any previous US action in Vietnam.⁶¹ Could the US now be said to be at war? This was a question to which even Bundy did not seem to know the answer although it may perhaps have been because Johnson refused to ask the question. On 13 February Johnson agreed to start a programme of limited but sustained air attacks against North Vietnam: once or twice a week, hitting two or three targets at a time. At least this was the message to Taylor; but, three days later, recognizing that continuing military action against the North was a watershed decision, Bundy was writing to tell Johnson: ‘There is a deep-seated need for assurance that the decision has in fact been taken.’ For one thing ‘Bob McNamara repeatedly stated that he simply has to know what the policy is so that he can make his military plans and give his military orders’ and it seemed essential to McNamara and Bundy ‘that there should be an absolutely firm and clear internal decision of the US government that this decision be known and understood by enough people to permit its orderly execution’.⁶² Having apparently made up his mind in council and having given his orders, as it were, in the presence of credible witnesses it does seem extraordinary that Bundy should have needed to nail Johnson down on his decision. In large part it seems to have been because Johnson, as Bundy put it, did not want to give a loud public signal of a major change in policy ‘right now’; and in smaller part it may have been because Johnson was reluctant to recognize that he might already have gone to war. In intention, at any rate, it was not supposed to be a war. It was supposed to be a signal both to North and South Vietnam of US determination to prevent a Communist victory in the South and a warning to the government in Hanoi to abandon its support for the southern revolution; but even this, involving as it did unmistakable acts of war, was something which Johnson seemed loath to admit. He was, rather, anxious to assure the Russians and the Chinese that the US in fact had no aggressive intentions towards the DRV even though the US as a whole would sooner or later realize that it was going to war if only to maintain peace.

Perhaps this would have been easier if the US had not been engaged in regular air attacks on North Vietnam but, in any event, the air attacks themselves contributed to the other definitive commitment: the deployment of US ground forces. In one sense they appeared to be alternatives: either ground forces in the South or air attacks on the North but while the planning for each may have been independent of the other, as a means to the same end they were almost bound to touch at some point. In the 40-page war plan/war game ‘Courses of Action in South-East Asia’ which McNaughton and William Bundy had prepared at the end of 1964 when it was understood there was a list of 94 targets that might be attacked in North Vietnam, two triangles were superimposed on a map of Vietnam. One had its apex at a Chinese airfield on Hainan and the other at Phuc Yen just north of Hanoi where squadrons of Chinese MIGs were deployed after the first US air attack in August. In February 1965 the first SAM sites were observed in North Vietnam and in the same month the first US surface-to-air missiles arrived at Danang to protect its airfield and what was becoming the principal US base in South Vietnam. Whether or not there was any intention in Hanoi or Peking of attacking Danang its protection posed another problem. In a simple sequence described by U. Alexis Johnson, Taylor's deputy in Saigon: ‘for the Hawks (the US anti-aircraft missile) to be effective they had to be on the hills around Danang. To protect the Hawks you had to bring in the Marines.’ At the time, he says, they were not contemplating any massive introduction of US forces – ‘and, frankly, this grew, somewhat like Topsy’.⁶³

Presumably operational requirements such as this had been considered by the President's advisers in their plans in which the US always appeared to be in control of events but once the Marines had been put ashore – two battalions at Danang on 6 March – what happened next would not necessarily be under US control. In any event, with the first commitment of regular US forces the Administration, whether it realized it or not, had gone through a sort of sound barrier. Other airfields apart from Danang would probably have to be defended as well. Rules of engagement would be changed so that Marines could go on limited offensive operations or help ARVN units that were under attack and, in another manifestation of Catch 22, the more the US was prepared to do the less anxious might South Vietnamese forces be to fight, particularly if it seemed to be an American war, and the US might end up doing even more.

The fact that this, in the end, is what happened, with the US taking over the greater part of the war, does not of course mean that this was what was intended. Johnson, for example, may have wanted to limit the US commitment to 100,000 men, something which he could have reached in stages without confronting the obstacle of a two-thirds majority in the Senate who were needed to approve a declaration of war. His powers as Commander-in-Chief, demonstrated in the sudden intervention in the Dominican Republic in April, could in such an event be quite overwhelming and apparently successful and although the challenge of Vietnam was of quite a different order there were not enough people telling him that it could not be done. Too many, in fact, telling him that it could and, in any case, that it had to be done. McNamara, for example, working out that by keeping Viet-Cong on the move or forcing them to fight there would be a quantum leap in the supplies they would need from the North and the more supplies they needed the greater would be the proportion which the US would destroy in transit. Rusk, less certain that fire power and mobility and logistic supremacy would win, asserted that the US had a commitment to South Vietnam and that commitment must be honoured. The JCS, looking at war uncomplicated by political considerations, took it as a problem of applied US power, had no reason to believe that North Vietnam would be able to withstand US pressure and, because they believed in their own ultimate supremacy, did not seem to care much whether China and the USSR intervened or not.

Even at the point when it looked as if decisions were being taken and Senators such as Fulbright and McGovern were warning against any expansion of the war it could well have been Johnson rather than McGovern who said: ‘We cannot simply walk out and permit the Vietcong to march into Saigon.’ Within the Administration, Under Secretary of State George Ball ultimately led a last-ditch resistance to the troop commitments of July 1965 and after producing a 40-page memorandum in October 1964 was regarded as the in-house dissident. His ‘sceptical thoughts’ on US policy included such hopeful objectives of a negotiated settlement as ‘the effective commitment of North Vietnam to stop the insurgency in the South’ but while, effectively, it seemed to be a plan for a negotiated capitulation he assumed that the pre-condition would be an agreement for a cease-fire. Adlai Stevenson, US representative on the UN Security Council, had also been associated with last-minute attempts to find the basis for a negotiated settlement and while he discovered that Secretary-General U Thant favoured a cease-fire too, US insistence that North Vietnam's infiltration must cease and South Vietnam's independence must be guaranteed meant that there were no grounds for negotiation at least on the US side.

On the North Vietnamese side however it has been suggested that as late as March or even April they were prepared to negotiate rather than fight: thus, by implication, that the war would have been avoidable.⁶⁴ Whether they, also, would have agreed to a cease-fire, as they had been compelled to agree in 1954, whether the GVN would have agreed, whether it would have been observed and what the other implications would have been are questions which would still have had to be answered if either side, or any one of the four sides – US, GVN, DRV, NLF – had shown any sign of compromise but at least in their public positions there was virtually none.

THE POINT OF NO RETURN

By February 1965, then, and whether or not previous attacks of one against the other could have been written off as being impetuous, inadvertent or ill-informed, both the US and North Vietnam had now reached the point of no return. To revert for a moment to Hobbes, the nature of war ‘consisteth in a tract of time wherein the will to contend by battel is sufficiently known not so much in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto’: something that was revealed by the way in which each side made peace so conditional that war became inevitable. An appeal from the leaders of 17 non-aligned nations for an end to the conflict through negotiations allowed the US to re-state the conditions for ‘unconditional’ discussions and, at the same time, gave Johnson the opportunity of delivering his most characteristic, imaginative and pointless proposals. Essentially it transformed the Mekong into the Tennessee Valley and converted a revolution into a problem of development. Speaking at Johns Hopkins University on 7 April Johnson's ‘pattern for peace’ in Southeast Asia in a sense admitted that the war had already begun and 400 young Americans had already been killed to defend the national pledge that every US President had made since 1954. Everything that the US was doing, however, was to convince the leaders of North Vietnam ‘of a simple fact’: the US would not be defeated, would not grow tired, would not withdraw ‘either openly or under the cloak of a meaningless agreement’. US resources were equal to any challenge. Once that was conceded, as well as an independent South Vietnam, the only path for reasonable men was that of peaceful settlement and for Johnson the ‘terrible irony’ lay in the fact that what the people of North Vietnam really wanted was the same as all the other poor people in Southeast Asia. Hinting that North Vietnam might take its place in some sort of American Marshall Plan Johnson pledged himself to ask Congress to provide a billion dollars to support a UN development programme in Southeast Asia in which healthy children, abundant harvests and electricity would be the common objective. The fact that Vietnam was still divided would in itself no longer be divisive.⁶⁵

It was an ingenuous approach, a balance of threat and promise, but with restricted appeal in Hanoi whose perspectives were entirely different. On the same day that Johnson spoke at Johns Hopkins the Central Committee in Hanoi had given different dimensions for peace: that the US must withdraw completely from South Vietnam and that the peaceful reunification of Vietnam was to be achieved with no foreign interference. Essentially it returned to Geneva, 1954 and where the US took for granted that there were now two Vietnams the Central Committee, claiming to speak as always for the Vietnamese people, reasserted its proposition that Vietnam was one and indivisible. Although, rather tritely, they could be presented as differences of perception it is hard to understand how either presentation could have encouraged the other side to believe that there was any basis for serious negotiation. Quite apart from the fact that North Vietnam was being attacked regularly by US aircraft and Americans in South Vietnam were subject to intermittent attacks, for any dialogue to have begun would have required one side or the other to abandon its position. Publicly, neither side was prepared to compromise. Privately, both sides were putting forces into position in South Vietnam. Towards the end of April US intelligence confirmed the presence of a regiment of the 325th PAVN Division in Kontum Province which had been there since February. Altogether regular PAVN units totalling 8,500 men were subsequently identified as having arrived in South Vietnam by the end of April – 2,500 by the end of 1964⁶⁶ – and although their full strength was unknown to them at the time the US was already planning to put 90,000 men, most of them American, into South Vietnam in order to hold the country together.

Not everyone agreed that such numbers would be necessary but as McNamara had minuted on the report of the Army Chief of Staff in March: ‘Policy is: anything that will strengthen the position of the GVN will be sent …’⁶⁷ and even though the formal decisions had not yet been taken which would send the total of US forces in South Vietnam up to nearly 200,000 by the end of the year the US was, logically at least, becoming involved in an open-ended commitment. If air attacks on the North had not yet persuaded them to abandon the revolution in the South, and if that revolution was itself on the brink of success, was there some level of US commitment, some size of US forces and some appropriate US strategy that would persuade Hanoi – and the NLF – that they could not win? When the US were concerned to try to keep out of the ground war in South Vietnam, US battalions were deployed principally to provide security for US air bases but, having arrived, they were soon to be the means to more ambitious ends. If US forces were more or less permanently in position in South Vietnam would this in effect ‘deny’ victory to the Communist forces? The ‘enclave’ strategy as it was known was, as the Pentagon Papers analysts describe it, a masterpiece of ambiguity but the existence of heavily fortified but diminished areas would seem to have offered little more hope of success than Corregidor, Tobruk or Stirling Castle. In any event, the arrival of US battalions seemed to provide their own momentum and to offer the hope of seizing the initiative from the enemy (as well, it might be said, as from the South Vietnamese Army).

The US Military Commander in Vietnam, General Westmoreland, now began to assume a position that was at least equal in importance to that of the US Ambassador, General Taylor. Convinced that the enclave strategy would lead to disaster, the alternative of ‘search and destroy’ which was given Presidential approval in the summer of 1965 was, as the Pentagon Papers analysts observed, articulated by both Westmoreland and the JCS ‘in keeping with sound military principles garnered by men accustomed to winning’.

Accompanying the strategy was a subtle change of emphasis – instead of simply denying the enemy victory and convincing him that he could not win, the thrust became defeating the enemy in the South. This was sanctioned implicitly as the only way to achieve the US objective of a non-communist South Vietnam.⁶⁸

Thus, in June, ‘“Rolling Thunder” [the US air attacks on the North] and the ground strategy switched places in the order of priorities as far as achieving US objectives was concerned’ and the day after it was announced in Washington that ‘American forces would be available for combat support … when and if necessary’ an editorial comment seems to have been apropriate: ‘The American people were told by a minor State Department official yesterday that, in effect, they were in a land war on the continent of Asia.’⁶⁹

It was a situation which Johnson still seemed loath to acknowledge but at this point the government of South Vietnam was crumbling. Six district capitals had been abandoned since May. After fierce fighting as well as steady attrition 20 ARVN battalions were no longer combat-effective and in the middle of June the flamboyant Air Vice-Marshal Ky and the more sober General Thieu overturned the last civilian government. US air attacks on the North intensified and as a measure of terrible first-aid American B-52s began bombing South Vietnam in support of what was about to be described by McNamara as a ‘non-government’. As if all this was not bad enough it was at this point also that General Westmoreland tendered his estimate: 44 US or ‘third country’ battalions, a total of 175,000 men, would be needed by the end of 1965. And when asked by the JCS whether that would be enough to persuade Hanoi and the NLF that they could not win Westmoreland could give no assurance over the next six months although it would establish, he said, a favourable balance of power by the end of the year.

It was perhaps at this point, too, that it could be seen that in order to save itself from defeat in South Vietnam the US was going to war for its own purposes. In March, in a frequently quoted memorandum for McNamara, the Assistant Secretary of Defense, John McNaughton, had quantified US aims in Vietnam: ‘seventy per cent to avoid a humiliating US defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor). Twenty per cent to keep South Vietnam (and the adjacent) territory from Chinese hands. Ten per cent to permit the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a better, freer way of life.’⁷⁰ If McNaughton's memo seemed unduly cynical at the time, the last stages of America's entry into full-scale but limited war suggest unmistakably that South Vietnam was once again an object rather than a subject of international relations. Specifically, its government was not expected to last until the end of the year. Generally, it was described by McNamara as a ‘non-government’; a government, said Lodge, (who was shortly to replace Taylor as Ambassador in Saigon) which should not be taken too seriously: ‘If the area is important to us we must do what is necessary regardless of the government.’⁷¹

Whatever it was now in relation to the US, the assumption of most of Johnson's advisers at the end of July 1965 was that, unless the US did something about it, the GVN would soon cease to exist. Whether or not the war was about to enter the ‘third stage’ in which, according to the Maoist sequence, guerrillas would emerge as conventional forces in sufficient strength to defeat the government, the situation was obviously critical but, equally obvious from McNamara's presentation, this was exactly the war that the US could hope to win or, in McNamara's less sensational grammar and other things being equal, they stood ‘a good chance of achieving an acceptable outcome within a reasonable time’. Given the almost unrelieved gloom that surrounded his assessment of South Vietnam which looked as if it could do practically nothing to help itself it became clear from his exposition that it was marvellously dispelled by a confidence in US dynamics: that it was about to take over the war and that US forces could fight guerrillas and ‘main force’ units with equal facility. It was, one might say, on the point of becoming a McNamara-type war in which it would be easier to identify, locate and attack the enemy or, as General Wheeler put it, the Viet Cong would have to come out and fight. And then, as the French believed before the battle began at Dien Bien Phu, the outcome could be in no doubt.

On the assumption that the military projection was correct McNamara might have had no doubts either. Wheeler, hopeful, said the commitment of large-scale PAVN forces would be a favourable development for the US. They would be unlikely to send more than 25 per cent of their forces into the South: some 60,000 men. McNamara was asking for another 100,000 – and perhaps another 100,000 in six months’ time – but having forced the enemy to fight and die beyond his means, he, too, took it for granted, or else it was a confession of faith, that the VC/DRV main force units would be destroyed. After which the South Vietnamese could go back to their programme of rural reconstruction. Obviously there were certain costs attached. Altogether US armed forces would have to be increased by 375,000 men. Congress would have to authorize a call-up of the Reserves and National Guard and an increase in the draft. By the end of the year the US could expect to have 500 men killed in action every month but McNamara believed that the US people would support the course of action which he proposed because it was ‘a sensible and courageous military-political program designed and likely to bring about a success in Vietnam.’

CONSENSUS

It was, in its way, a business-like forecast: this is what has to be done and this is how much it will cost to get the job done properly. In these terms it was a matter of how much more was needed to complete a job that had already been begun; and, apart from the fact that modern Secretaries, or Ministries, of Defense tend not to talk about going to war, the job in this case was identified by McNamara as ‘demonstrating to the VC/DRV that the odds are against their winning’. So, in a way, the US was not really going to war but simply moving further up the Clausewitz scale by using more force. The only question that remained was how far it would have to go and how soon. Johnson's inclination undoubtedly was to move up in stages, avoiding crises and confrontation, and when the time came for him to muster the final consensus this in fact was the way in which it was presented.

The two meetings at which the options were presented and the choice confirmed took place on the evening of 27 July 1965. The first, a meeting of the National Security Council, lasted 40 minutes and the second took place ten minutes later between members of the NSC and the Joint Leadership of Congress. Allowing for differences of tone and reporting on both occasions the President offered the same five choices. The first, with its more dramatic coda, was to use the massive power of the US, including the Strategic Air Command, to bring the enemy to his knees – ‘blowing him out of the water tonight’. That, said Johnson, was a course which was favoured by less than 10 per cent of the country. The second course was to get out ‘on the grounds we don't belong there’ and ‘ought not to have been there’. Not many people felt that way about Vietnam. Commitments had been made by three Presidents. ‘Most feel that our national honor is at stake and we must keep our commitments there.’ The third choice was to stay where they were with 80,000 men, taking casualties and doing nothing. Or, as Johnson told the Congressional leaders, ‘get Lodge out there and see if he can pull a rabbit out of the hat’. Not surprisingly, no one was recommending that course so it seemed in effect to be a straight choice between options 4 and 5.

The fourth choice, said Johnson, was to declare an emergency: ‘Call in the reserves, thousands of men and the billions of dollars – tell the country that our best guess was Y billion dollars and X thousand men, and ask for it.’ It was something which, Johnson told the Congressional leaders, had a good deal of appeal to him as President but accounts of both meetings emphasized Johnson's concern with the Russian as well as the Chinese reactions if the US were to take that course. In February, whether or not they had considered the implications, the US had bombed North Vietnam when Premier Kosygin was in Hanoi and although this had not produced a violent response, the USSR since the fall of Khrushchev the previous autumn had been taking a renewed and lively interest in North Vietnam even though Khrushchev himself seemed to have lost interest in his wars of national liberation. It would have been an obvious risk to count on continued USSR quiescence – Johnson mentioned hints which the USSR had given and the special problem of the surface-to-air missile sites – and at the back of everyone's mind and in most intelligence appreciations and policy projections there was the unknown and ominous factor of Chinese intervention. Whether this was the prime factor, or whether Johnson's caution was founded on native political calculus, the alternative to what he himself called a provocative and dramatic approach would be simply ‘to give the commanders the men and materials they say they need from existing forces, to use money under a transfer authority – to try not to bluff or brag or thunder – and at the same time to get Ambassador Goldberg (America's new representative at the UN) and Secretary Rusk to go and work for a diplomatic position.’ That would at least see them through the critical monsoon season and although it meant using up the manpower reserves they would quietly push them back up. So, as Johnson told the Congressional leaders in recommending this course, ‘before he went into the districts of the Congressmen and Senators he would have done what Westy and Wheeler want done’.

The choice, in fact, had already been made a few minutes before in the NSC meeting and in one sense was the peak of Johnson's consensus-building achievement. In the final ascent, when the President and his advisers were considering McNamara's report, only George Ball and Clark Clifford, Chairman of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, had urged the President to draw back in face of impending disaster but even Ball had apparently said he ‘would go along with’ the report.⁷² In extremis, Mansfield, too, said that as a Senator and as Majority leader he would support the President's position: even though he had been bombarding the White House with dire and accurate prophecies and had read a statement to the Congressional leadership meeting which seemed on the verge of dissent. Fulbright, if not now irreconcilable, was at least excluded from the President's consultative circle but Johnson had perhaps more than made up for this with his historical consensus. In June and July two of the principal architects of US Vietnam policy had been invited to give their opinions. As one of the ‘Elder Statesmen’ (General Bradley and the Marshall Plan Administrator, Paul Hoffman, were two of the others) former Secretary of State Dean Acheson had joined with the others in saying ‘You have got to face up to this and do whatever is necessary even if it gets you into a Korean scale of war’⁷³ and when General Goodpaster had been sent to brief the former President on the latest development in Vietnam he reported:

General Eisenhower considered the matter at some length. The first question to consider is what the end of all this can be. He commented that we have now ‘appealed to force’ in South Vietnam, and therefore ‘we have got to win’.⁷⁴

With the weight of this historical consensus behind him Johnson's meeting with the Congressional leadership took on the nature of a national rally. A few minutes earlier, at the end of the NSC meeting, the President had asked whether anyone in the room opposed the course of action decided on. There was no response. Now it was an occasion for presenting and enlisting the right amount of determination, for a certain amount of dissembling or equivocation, for historical allusions, and for a great deal of patriotism. Where Westmoreland had asked for 44 battalions, McNamara translated this into ‘an immediate requirement’ for only 13. Where the ratio of soldiers to guerrillas was thought of as 10 to 1, General Wheeler reduced it to 4 to 1. Where McNamara asserted there had been no major defection of GVN forces, Wheeler, who knew that was not true, said nothing. For those who were looking for historical precedents and analogies Johnson read from Eisenhower's letter to Churchill during the battle of Dien Bien Phu (perhaps it was the part about the failure to halt Hirohito, Mussolini and Hitler) and Ambassador Lodge, pitching it rather steep, said that to pull out of Vietnam (alternative 2) would be worse than a victory for the Kaiser or Hitler in the two World Wars.

Almost everything therefore seemed to point to alternative 5, rather than 4: asking, undramatically, for what was needed for the next five or six months but, either way, said Johnson, he would give General Westmoreland what he wants. Likening his position during the 1954 crisis to that of one of the Senators at the meeting, Johnson said he had supported the decisions then without approving them but now, perhaps in case anyone had missed the point, he added ‘There were 80 to 90,000 men out there asking for help and his answer was “yes”.’ An historic meeting, said the Speaker. The President would have the support of all true Americans. The following day, 28 July, in the course of a mid-day press conference, Johnson rehearsed his understanding of the lesson of Munich and announced that 50,000 troops would be added to US fighting strength in Vietnam although unconditional negotiations would, as always, be welcome. The text of the President's statement was widely distributed under the title ‘Peace With Honor’. For those who remembered what Chamberlain said when he returned from Munich it may not have been very encouraging. But perhaps Mr Johnson was thinking of Disraeli.

For his part, in confirming the intentions of one side in the culminating and principal phase of the Vietnam war, Johnson believed, and like Hobson it may have appeared, that he had no choice. Continuity if not integrity had to be maintained so, with Rusk taking the US commitment for granted, McNamara taking it on as a problem-solving exercise or some sort of crisis management, the JCS eager to employ their expertise and resources, most of his advisers closing down the options and no absence, initially, of popular support, one may argue that unless South Vietnam was to collapse under the strain of war and revolution Johnson, if he did not want to go backwards, had to go on. His attempts so far to ‘demonstrate the odds to Hanoi’ might have been too inconsistent to constitute an effective warning but even if there had been a perfect translation from intention to action the question of whether it would have deflected North Vietnam from what looked like its sacred purpose of reunification remains unanswered but the odds are that it would not have been accomplished without the destruction of its government and a large part of its country and people.

This probably being unknown at the time, the US set out to meet what its government saw as challenges and commitments. Its generals, like those of Athens, were for the time being ‘empowered to act as they thought best in the interest of the state respecting the numbers of the army’⁷⁵ (although they would object that, unlike the Athenian generals, they were not entrusted with the whole management of the expedition) and one wonders whether Maxwell Taylor, the classicist general, who did not aspire to the role of an American Xenophon leading a retreat to the sea, ever pondered on Thucydides' description of the Sicilian expedition when it set out.

Indeed the expedition was not less famous from wonder at its boldness and by the splendour of its appearance than for its overwhelming strength as compared with the peoples against whom it was directed; and for the fact that this was the longest passage from home hitherto attempted and the most ambitious in its objects, considering the resources of those who undertook it.⁷⁶

REFERENCES AND NOTES

1. The quotation is from Richard Helms, Oral History, Johnson Library. Thomas Powers in his book about Helms, The Man Who Kept The Secrets (New York 1979), reports Johnson's conviction that the two assassinations were related: ‘they’ got Kennedy in retribution for Diem. p. 152.

2. A very minor incident during ‘Confrontation’ is likewise turned into the sensational and inaccurate ‘In December 1964 Indonesian and Australian gunboats fought off Singapore’ and the subsequent British organization of a ‘war fleet’.

3. The Vantage Point (New York 1971), p. 50.

4. Pentagon Papers (New York Times), 1971, p. 189.

5. Gareth Porter, Vietnam: The Definitive Documentation of Human Decisions (London 1979), Vol. 2, p. 222.

6. Edward J. Marolda and Oscar P. Fitzgerald, The United States Navy and the Vietnam Conflict, Vol. 2, Naval Historical Center, Department of the Navy, Washington DC, 1986, pp. 202–3.

7. On the day he was shot, with terrible irony, Kennedy had told a Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce breakfast ‘The Iroquois helicopter from Fort Worth is a mainstay in our fight against the guerrillas in South Vietnam. So wherever the confrontation may occur … the products of Fort Worth and the men of Fort Worth provide us with a sense of security.’

8. W.C. Gibbons, The US Government and the Vietnam War (Washington 1984), Vol. 2, pp. 209–11.

9. Maxwell Taylor, Swords and Plowshares, (New York 1972).

10. Pentagon Papers (Gravel) Volume III, pp. 37–8. For an account of what happened from the point of view of the deposed generals see Tran Van Don, Our Endless War, (London 1978), Ch. 8.

11. Gibbons, op. cit. Vol. 2, pp. 215–16.

12. Ibid. p. 217.

13. Ibid.

14. William J. Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam (Boulder, Colorado 1981), p. 226.

15. William S. Turley, The Second Indo-China War (London 1986), p. 57.

16. Pentagon Papers (Gravel), Volume III, p. 39.

17. Ibid. p. 40.

18. Pentagon Papers (Gravel), Volume III, p. 42.

19. William H. Sullivan, Oral History, Johnson Library.

20. Gibbons, op. cit. p. 242.

21. Although, as Kaufman points out, Johnson's request in May for $125 m. in additional economic and military assistance for South Vietnam troubled some Congressmen, for the first time in the 19-year history of the Foreign Aid Programme the House Foreign Affairs Committee approved the President's full request for funding, including the additional aid for Vietnam. Furthermore, the final appropriation of $3.25 billion was only $267 m., or 7.6 per cent less than the original request: the lowest pecentage cut in the entire history of the Aid Programme. Burton I. Kaufman, ‘Foreign Aid and the Balance of Payments Problem: Vietnam and Johnson's Foreign Economic Policy’ in Robert A. Divine (ed.), The Johnson Years (Lawrence, Kansas 1987) Vol. 2, p. 84.

22. Gibbons, op. cit. p. 253.

23. Pentagon Papers (Gravel), Volume III, pp. 65, 163.

24. NSF Aides – memo for President, Vol. 4, Johnson Library.

25. Pentagon Papers (Gravel), Volume III, P. 173.

26. Bundy Memos Vol. 3, 9 April 1964, Johnson Library.

27. US-Vietnam Relations, Book 4, pp. 6–7.

28. Pentagon Papers (Gravel), Vol. 3, pp. 172–3.

29. NSF Aides – Memos for President. Vol. 4, May 25, Johnson Library.

30. George C. Herring (ed.), The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of the Pentagon Papers (Austin 1983), pp. 19, 7.

31. Ibid. p. 33.

32. Ibid. p. 32.

33. Edward J. Marolda and Oscar P. Fitzgerald, op. cit. p. 338.

34. The Anti-US Resistance War For National Salvation 1954–1975 (JPRS Washington 1982). By way of comparison, in October 1946 in the course of a dispute between Britain and Albania two British destroyers struck mines in the Corfu Channel. One was sunk, the other damaged, and 44 British sailors were killed or drowned. Among other things the British ships, having previously been fired on by Albanian shore batteries, were studying Albanian coastal defences. The International Court, with dissenting opinions, gave judgment against the People's Republic of Albania although they recognized that their sovereignty had been violated. Compensation of $2 m. was never paid. Nor was Albania bombed or shelled in reprisal.

35. Four books have been written on the Tonkin Gulf episode and its aftermath. In addition to John Galloway, The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (Rutherford, N.J. 1970) they are Anthony Austin, The President's War (Philadelphia 1971); Joseph C. Goulden, Truth is the First Casualty (Chicago 1969); and Eugene G. Windchy, Tonkin Gulf (New York 1971). Gibbons, op. cit. Vol. 2, provides one of the latest collations; and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee produced two sets of Hearings when they re-opened the question in 1968 (20 Feb, 16 Dec) and more evidence for the ‘Termination of South-East Asia Resolution’ in May 1970. The original Hearings were at a joint meeting of the Committee on Foreign Relations and the Committee on Armed Services, South-East Asia Resolution, 6 August 1964. US News and World Report on 23 July 1984 had an article ‘The “Phantom Battle” That Led to War’ which uses documents from the Johnson Library although two of the meetings seem to be elided.

36. Marolda and Fitzgerald, op. cit. p. 422.

37. LBJ Papers. President. Meeting notes, 4 August. Johnson had begun with his favourite opening: ‘I want to counsel with you.’ When the meeting ended Senator Aiken remarked: ‘By the time you send it up there won't be anything for us to do but support you.’ See also Mark A. Stoler, ‘Aiken, Mansfield and the Tonkin Gulf Crisis’, Vermont History, Spring, 1982.

38. Among those who were convinced that it was an illusion was Commander James B. Stockdale. With first-hand experience of the events of 4 August, and convinced then that nothing had happened, he was, by ironic coincidence, ordered to lead the attack the following day. A year later he was shot down leading a similar attack and spent the rest of the war in a North Vietnamese prison. He was subsequently awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for conspicuous bravery in captivity. James and Sibyl Stockdale, In Love and War (New York 1984).

39. Michael Charlton and Anthony Moncrieff, Many Reasons Why (London 1978), p. 108.

40. Gibbons, op. cit. Part 2, p. 312.

41. Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (Signet 1976) p. 165.

42. Gibbons, op. cit., p. 327.

43. Ibid. p. 328.

44. Ibid. p. 334.

45. Gruening, Oral History, Johnson Library.

46. Some indication of Goldwater's alarming ideas and understanding was his argument that the war should have been carried to North Vietnam ten years before and his speculation that, at the same time, a low-yield atom bomb might have been dropped on North Vietnam as a defoliation project. Theodore H. White, The Making of the President (London 1964), p. 106.

47. Ibid. p. 380.

48. Michael V. Forrestal, Oral History, Johnson Library. For another account of what happened see Townsend Hoopes, The Limits of Intervention (New York 1970).

49. NSF Aides memoranda for the President (McGeorge Bundy), vol. 5, Gulf of Tonkin incident, 18 September, Johnson Library.

50. William H. Sullivan, Oral History, Johnson Library. There is a useful summary of government upheaval in Larry Berman, Planning a Tragedy (New York 1982), p. 161.

51. NSF Files, McGeorge Bundy memoranda for the President, 14 September, 1964, Johnson Library.

52. Bundy, memos ‘Chinese Nuclear Weapons’, 15 September, 1964. Johnson Library.

53. Taylor, ‘The Current Situation in South Vietnam, November 1964’, NSF files, Johnson Library.

54. Taylor, op. cit., p. 327.

55. Cabinet Room – Ex-Corn (SVN) 12/1/64 (1139), NSF Files, Johnson Library.

56. Pentagon Papers (Gravel), Vol. III, p. 224.

57. Ibid. p. 231.

58. Gibbons, Vol. 2, op. cit. quoting cable, p. 383.

59. On the matter of appropriate reprisals, apart from the reductio ad absurdum problem in developing a tit-for-tat strategy (‘They blow up a restaurant – what the hell you going to do? Try to bomb a restaurant?’) noted by Chester Cooper in his ‘Oral History’ (Johnson Library), the connotation and comparisons with what happened in Nazi-occupied Europe does not seem to have occurred to US policy makers. Civilians who would be killed, incidentally, in reprisal attacks on North Vietnam would be just as innocent, or guilty, depending on how one looked at it.

60. NSF File Bundy Memorandum for the President, 27 January, 1965.

61. Pentagon Papers (Gravel), Vol. III, p. 307.

62. Bundy Memoranda for the President, 16 February, Johnson Library.

63. U. Alexis Johnson, Oral History, Johnson Library.

64. This is the general thrust and implication of Professor Kahin's argument, Intervention (New York 1987), Ch. 12.

65. US-Vietnam Relations, Book 12, pp. 12–15.

66. I am grateful to Professor William S. Turley for correspondence on this point and am indebted to him for a copy of a MACV Combined Intelligence Center paper ‘The NVA Soldier in South Vietnam’, 3 October, 1966, Appendix A.

67. Pentagon Papers, Vol. III, p. 404.

68. Ibid. p. 395.

69. Quoted in Herbert Y. Schandler, Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam (Princeton 1977), p. 22.

70. Pentagon Papers, Vol. III, p. 695.

71. Memorandum for the record, 22 July, 1965 ‘Meetings on Vietnam’, 21 July Meeting Notes File, Johnson Library. Other sources for the late July decisions are: Secretary of Defense Memorandum for the President 20 July 1965; summary notes of 53rd NSC meeting, 27 July; memorandum of the same meeting prepared on 2 November 1968, from notes dated 27 July 1965; and NSC: meeting with Joint Leadership 27 July 1965 prepared in December 1968. All Johnson Library. Kahin op. cit. gives detailed comparative accounts. See, also, Robert L. Gallucci, Neither Peace Nor Honor, (Baltimore 1975); Larry Berman, Planning A Tragedy (New York 1982); Wallace J. Thies, When Governments Collide (Berkeley 1980); and for a first-hand account George W. Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern (London 1982).

72. This is the account given in Chester Cooper's memorandum, op. cit., 22 July. It is not mentioned by Kahin but flatly contradicted in the account given by Valenti. Kahin, op. cit. p. 372.

73. William Bundy, Oral History, Johnson Library.

74. The Eisenhower Briefings, Johnson Library.

75. Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Jowett.

76. Thucydides, op. cit. trans., Richard Crawley (London, 1874).