Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (90 page)

At the time this seemed like a politically sound as well as militarily promising approach to take. We return to the power of the Cold War consensus in the United States. If Johnson had done nothing, and watched South Vietnam collapse, he risked criticism not only from conservatives and hawks but also from important allies within the Democratic coalition. Labor leaders, including Walter Reuther, supported escalation in 1965–66. AFL-CIO president George Meany ardently backed it long after that. "I would rather fight the Communists in South Vietnam," he said in 1967, "than fight them down here in the Chesapeake Bay." An anti-war resolution introduced at the AFL-CIO convention in that year lost by a vote of 2,000 to 6.
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The majority of congressional Democrats, too, gave enthusiastic backing to Johnson's moves toward escalation. LBJ, indeed, worried more about criticism of his foreign policies from the Right on Capitol Hill than from the Left. Richard Russell of Georgia, one of the most powerful men in the Senate on defense issues, never believed that South Vietnam possessed much strategic value to American interests, and he was cool to escalation in early 1965. Once Johnson acted, however, Russell backed him to the hilt. "We are there now," he said. "If we scuttle and run, it would shake the confidence of the free world in any commitment we might make." He and his colleagues in essence abdicated congressional oversight over Vietnam policies for much of Johnson's presidency. Unprecedentedly high defense appropriation bills during these years swept through Capitol Hill with little or no debate. Even Fulbright's hearings in 1966 sparked little interest on the Hill. Until 1968 Johnson enjoyed considerable bipartisan support in Congress for his conduct of the war.
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Except for a few of the most anti-communist military advocates, supporters of escalation in 1964–65 were not sure—at least most of the time—that the United States and South Vietnam had to
win
the war, in the sense of destroying all hostile units on the field. Rather, they hoped to inflict so much pain on the enemy in both the North and the South that Ho would allow the war to wind down. American engagement, Johnson believed, would sooner or later force Ho Chi Minh to "sober up and unload his pistol."
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Thanks in large part to continuing American escalation after 1965, the United States did prevent South Vietnam from falling during the LBJ years. In retrospect, however, it is clear that this policy was doomed in the long run. It reflected exaggerated expectations about the potential of American military and diplomatic muscle, as well as a misguided faith that the American people would continue to pay the price that escalation entailed. Their reluctance to do so after 1967 undercut the policy and reduced Johnson to cries of bewilderment and rage. Johnson's approach also exposed profound misunderstanding of Vietnamese culture, politics, and history.
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By 1964 the fires of revolutionary nationalism that ignited the North Vietnamese and the NLF burned far too strongly to be stopped by American arms or to be extinguished at the bargaining table.

Neither Johnson nor most of his advisers understood this in 1964 and 1965. Some, including LBJ, never did. They would have profited, as would the American people, from much wider exposure to the cultures of other nations. But the problem was only partly one of miseducation. The United States undertook escalation in 1965 because of the Cold War. In this larger calculation the nature of Vietnamese society and history was of little consequence. Johnson never even claimed that Vietnam had great strategic value. He called it a "little pissant country." What really mattered to him, as it had mattered so often to Americans in the postwar era, was the credibility of his country's commitment in its larger battle against Communism in the world. To show weakness on one part of the globe was to risk disaster on other parts. Rusk put this point clearly. "The integrity of the U.S. commitment," he said in 1965, "is the principal pillar of peace throughout the world. If that commitment becomes unreliable, the communist world would certainly draw conclusions that would lead to our ruin and almost certainly to a catastrophic war. "
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The focus on credibility in the fight against worldwide Communism seems both excessive and tragic in hindsight. It ignored contradictory evidence at the time, including a fact known to most of the policy-makers themselves: thanks in part to bitter Sino-Soviet rivalry, there was no such thing in the 1960s as a worldwide Communist conspiracy. Ho Chi Minh, to be sure, was a Communist, and he received aid from both China and the Soviet Union. A tyrant, he might well be expected to assault other nations in Southeast Asia once he united his own country. But Ho was above all a nationalist. And it was only speculation that he could or would overrun other nations when and if he took Saigon. The domino theory was just that—a theory. Assessing the theory in June 1964, a CIA report expressed doubts about its applicability to particular situations. If South Vietnam collapsed, it said, Laos and Cambodia might fall, too. But that was conjectural. And a "continuation of the spread of communism in the area would not be inexorable, and any spread which did take place would take time—time in which the total situation might change in any number of ways unfavorable to the communist cause."
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Thoughtful advice: CIA officials tended to be more cautious about escalation than many other American policy-makers at the time. But also unheeded advice. It competed helplessly against a Cold War consensus that continued to rule American society, politics, and culture. In deciding for escalation in early 1965 Johnson was as much a prisoner of this consensus as he was an activator of it. "LBJ," an accomplished historian of the war concludes, "appears less a fool or knave than a beleaguered executive attempting to maintain an established policy against an immediate threat in a situation where there was no attractive alternative."
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6, 1965, enemy forces attacked an American air base at Pleiku in South Vietnam. The assault killed eight American soldiers and destroyed six helicopters and a transport plane. McNamara and Westmoreland urged LBJ to retaliate instantly. Johnson, who had been waiting for such a pretext, agreed. "We have kept our guns over the mantel and our shells in the cupboard for a long time now," he said at a two-hour meeting with top advisers. "I can't ask our American soldiers out there to continue the fight with one hand tied behind their backs." All his major advisers—Rusk, Bundy, Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Earle Wheeler—were consulted and agreed. Johnson thereupon ordered air attacks on targets in North Vietnam.

This response to the raid on Pleiku started the great escalation. A campaign of regular bombing attacks, Rolling Thunder, began in March and intensified over the next few months—3,600 sorties by American and South Vietnamese planes in April, 4,800 in June. Most sought to blast roads and railroads in the North so as to stem the flow of supplies to the South. LBJ, aided mainly by civilian advisers such as McNamara and Rusk, met regularly for Tuesday lunches to select bombing targets. "They can't even bomb an outhouse without my approval," he said proudly. The President also increased American troop strength. On March 8, two battalions of marines, accompanied by howitzers and tanks, came ashore to protect an American air base at Danang on the northern coast of South Vietnam. They were authorized to attack the enemy if necessary.
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During these early months of escalation Johnson, worried about weakening support for Great Society initiatives in Congress, tried to hide the full extent of his activities in Vietnam. He did not tell the people that American forces were authorized to go on the offensive. He said he would go anywhere to talk peace. At Johns Hopkins University on April 7 he promised Southeast Asia $1 billion or more in aid—an Asian Marshall Plan—once the fighting stopped. But he also made it clear that he would never give in. "We will not be defeated," he emphasized. "We will not grow tired. We will not withdraw." The next day American bombers launched a massive raid, and LBJ authorized the dispatch of 15,000 more American troops.
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While Johnson was shoring up South Vietnam he found himself faced with trouble much closer to home—in the Dominican Republic. On April 24 a coup led by forces supporting Juan Bosch, a non-Communist leftist, overthrew the right-wing, pro-American government there. Bosch, however, could not establish control, and skirmishing broke out. American officials on the scene, including Ambassador Tapley Bennett, warned Johnson that Castro-inspired Communists might prevail amid the disorder. Poorly advised, Johnson was also anxious to prove that he would use American troops—in Vietnam, in the Dominican Republic, wherever seriously provoked—to beat back Communist advances. His response on April 28 was to send in 14,000 American soldiers and marines. In so doing he ignored the Organization of American States, which was supposed to meet in advance of interventions in the Western Hemisphere. The OAS, LBJ remarked, "couldn't pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel."
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American intervention in the Dominican Republic proved popular in the United States. It also achieved its narrow purpose, for Bosch was prevented from ruling the country. By mid-1965 OAS troops were replacing the American forces, and in September a moderate leader, Joaquin Balaguer, took over. But LBJ had greatly overreacted. Bosch was not a Communist; indeed, he had been fairly elected President in December 1962, only to be overthrown in a coup ten months later. Nor were Communists strong amid the turmoil in April 1965. By intervening Johnson damaged whatever hopes the United States might have had of encouraging progressive forces in the Western Hemisphere: thirteen military coups took place in Latin America later in the 1960s. He demonstrated yet again that worries about worldwide Communist conspiracies dominated American thinking about foreign policy.

If Johnson hoped that his show of force in the Caribbean would impress the North Vietnamese, he was wrong. Neither bombing nor American fighting men seemed to improve the fortunes of the South. Seeking order, the South Vietnamese military overthrew the last of many civilian governments in June. General Nguyen Van Thieu, a graduate of the United States Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, took over as head of state. He was a self-effacing but shrewd political general with a great gift for survival in the ever-shifting intrigue of Saigon politics. Colonel Nguyen Cao Ky became premier. Ky had been trained by the French as a pilot and had later operated under CIA cover flying missions against the North Vietnamese. Gaudy and flamboyant, Ky frequently dressed in a black flying suit with purple scarf. Ivory-handled pistols jutted ostentatiously from his pockets.
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Top American leaders had little faith, to put it mildly, in Thieu and Ky. State Department official Chester Cooper likened Ky to a character from a comic opera. "A Hollywood central casting bureau would have grabbed him for a role as a sax player in a second-rate Manila night club." William Bundy, a State Department expert on Asia (and McGeorge Bundy's brother), observed glumly that Thieu and Ky were "absolutely the bottom of the barrel."
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Thieu and Ky nonetheless brought some stability to South Vietnamese politics: Thieu became President in September 1967 and stayed on in that position until the North Vietnamese won the war years later. But they commanded little support among the masses of the people of South Vietnam. Following their coup, as before, the NLF made gains in the South.

With the situation continuing to deterioriate, McNamara wrote a decisive memo in late July. It laid out three options: "cut our losses and withdraw," "continue at about the present level," or "expand promptly and substantially the U.S. pressure." McNamara urged rejection of the first option as "humiliating the United States and very damaging to our future effectiveness on the world scene." The second option would "confront us later with a choice between withdrawal and an emergency expansion of forces, perhaps too late to do any good." He recommended the third. It would lead to "considerable cost in casualties and materiel" but would "offer a good chance of producing a favorable settlement in the longer run." McNamara thought that American troop strength in Vietnam should be increased from 75,000, the number already there, to more than 200,000.
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McNamara's memo, one of the most important in the history of the war, laid out with special clarity the logic behind American policy in Vietnam. All the main themes were there: the fear of "humiliation," the need for American credibility on the "world scene," the faith in calibrated escalation, the underestimation of the enemy, the grand expectation that military pressure would ultimately force Ho Chi Minh to accept a settlement preserving the political integrity of a non-Communist South Vietnam. Like other top leaders, McNamara did not believe that escalation would destroy all enemy forces. But he could not bear the thought of pulling out, and he was confident that the enormously greater power of the United States would prevail.

The five men who saw the memo were the major players: McGeorge Bundy, Rusk, Taylor, Westmoreland, and Wheeler. Other members of the National Security Council did not participate. Congress knew nothing of it. All five joined McNamara in approving the memo and recommending it to Johnson. Some of them, including McNamara, wished to go further and called on Johnson to declare a national emergency and to seek a hike in taxes to support major increases in military spending. Military leaders urged the President to mobilize 235,000 reservists. The administration, these advisers expostulated, was about to venture into war in a large way and should make that clear to Congress, the American people, and the world.