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Pagina principale Road to Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam
Road to Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam
"The most thoughtful and judicious one-volume history of the war and the American political leaders who presided over the difficult and painful decisions that shaped this history. The book will stand for the foreseeable future as the best study of the tragic mistakes that led to so much suffering."—Robert Dallek
Many books have been written on the tragic decisions regarding Vietnam made by the young stars of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Yet despite millions of words of analysis and reflection, no historian has been able to explain why such decent, brilliant, and previously successful men stumbled so badly.
That changes withRoad to Disaster. Historian Brian VanDeMark draws upon decades of archival research, his own interviews with many of those involved, and a wealth of previously unheard recordings by Robert McNamara and Clark Clifford, who served as Defense Secretaries for Kennedy and Johnson. Yet beyond that,Road to Disasteris also the first history of the war to look at the cataclysmic decisions of those in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations through the prism of recent research in cognitive science, psychology, and organizational theory to explain why the "Best and the Brightest" became trapped in situations that suffocated creative thinking and willingness to dissent, why they found change so hard, and why they were so blind to their own errors.
An epic history of America's march to quagmire,Road to Disasteris a landmark in scholarship and a book of immense importance.
Categories: History\\Military History
Editore: Custom House
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* The marines created Combined Action Platoons (CAPs), a combination of U.S. Marines and South Vietnamese militia who lived inside villages and worked on civic action projects as well as providing security.
* Sharp was considerably less certain when he recalled the episode six years later. "We asked the Maddox to confirm absolutely that the ships were attacked and told them to get word to us as quickly as possible. We got a report from the ships which neither absolutely confirmed or denied that they'd been under attack, but the weight of evidence still was that an attack had occurred, so I told Mr. McNamara that." U. S. Grant Sharp OHI, LBJL.
* North Vietnam's main port at the mouth of the Cấm River Delta.
* Estimates are that the Communists suffered more than 110,000 casualties over the three waves of "general offensive-general uprising" in January/February, May, and August/September 1968. See Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), p. 338, n. 7.
* This became known as the "San Antonio Formula." Hanoi rejected it as a "faked desire for peace."
* Three weeks earlier, on June 5, presidential candidate Robert Kennedy had been assassinated in Los Angeles, California. His death threw the Democratic nominating process into turmoil and eventually led to Vice President Hubert Humphrey's nomination as Johnson's successor.
* The third and final phase of the Communists' 1968 offensive, which began on August 17 and lasted for five weeks.
* The second and third waves of Vietcong attacks on urban areas of South Vietnam, in May and August/September 1968, bore out McNamara's warning.
* An idea promoted by President Charles de Gaulle of France, other Western European allies, and liberal American pundits, neutralization, the logic went, had not worked in Laos—North Vietnam had not withdrawn its forces per the 1962 Geneva Accords, so why should it work in Vietnam? As Bundy remarked to Johnson in a telephone conversation on February 6, "You cannot neutralize the bottom half with the top half waiting to eat it up." Beschloss, ed., Taking Charge, p. 226. Johnson and his advisors did not want to negotiate the neutrality of South Vietnam while the country remained perilously weak. They feared it would have a negative effect on the generals who had succeeded Diệm and would be tantamount to surrender. Perhaps at some point in the future, but not now.
* "Twice," recalled close aide Horace Busby, Johnson "sat through Seven Days in May, the [1964 movie] of a president fighting to prevent a military takeover of the United States; and when a guest asked his reaction, the president said, without smiling, 'It scares me.'" Horace Busby, The Thirty-First of March: An Intimate Portrait of Lyndon Johnson's Final Days in Office (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), p. 7.
* The name derives from naphthene and palmitate, the primary jellifying agents. Developed and first used by the United States during World War II, napalm had
been used in Korea and by the French during the First Indochina War.
* McNamara also recommended "termination of the bombing in the North . . . after the [mid-term] election" in order to get peace talks with Hanoi started—something Johnson, at this point, would not consider. Telephone Conversation between President Johnson and Robert McNamara, September 19, 1966, Tape 10808 (WH6609.10), MCWHR.
* Beijing and Havana had signed a Chinese-Cuban trade treaty in March 1962.
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* At the Battle of Ầp Bắc, the Vietcong bested a much larger (ten-to-one) and better equipped ARVN force that failed to sustain contact with the enemy, and downed five U.S. helicopters flown in support of American advisors assisting the ARVN operation.
* When the Vietcong launched attacks, they usually did so against vulnerable civil guard and self-defense corps outposts, which enabled the Vietcong to inflict more casualties than they suffered.
* As early as September 1967, Johnson's oldest and closest political ally, Governor John Connally of Texas, told him that he did not think that Johnson could get reelected.
* Westmoreland returned to Washington and became army chief of staff, a position he held until his retirement in July 1972.
* General Creighton Abrams, who was then Westmoreland's deputy, would replace him as American military commander in Vietnam in June 1968.
* Approximately 30 percent of those who served in Vietnam were draftees. Young men ages eighteen to twenty-five (older men were called first) registered with their local draft board, composed of local community members, which determined their draft status (a power that subjected draft boards to intense lobbying by relatives and friends of the better educated and economically advantaged who had greater access to expert advice, psychiatric professionals, and legal counsel). Exemptions existed for those deemed physically and mentally disqualified, married fathers, and conscientious objectors; deferments existed for those enrolled in college and studying to become doctors and ministers. A majority of draftees (approximately 75 percent) were from poor and working-class families; roughly 20 percent were from middle-class families; and relatively few from upper-class families. In response to criticism of the draft's inequities, college deferments were repealed in 1968 and a lottery system based on birth dates drawn (the lower the number, the higher the likelihood of being drafted, with 19-year-olds called first) was instituted the following year. Between 1965 and 1973, 2,215,000 men were conscripted; 15,400,000 men were granted exemptions or deferments. Similar inequities existed in socialist North Vietnam. College students were exempted from the draft. Politburo leader Lê Duẩn sent his draft-age children to study in the Soviet Union during the war.
* Two months later, Lansdale sent McNamara a list of questions for American advisors working in the field, such as "What [are] the villages' attitude toward [South] Vietnamese troops?" and "What are the feelings of [ARVN] troops at being in military service?," that led to the creation of the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES), a database of information on South Vietnamese villages and ratings of security conditions. The HES had fatal flaws from the start. David Donovan, a first lieutenant in a remote district of the Mekong Delta, later wrote: "I saw District Senior Advisors [DSAs] give the [HES] reports they should have filled out themselves to their less informed and less experienced subordinates. Sometimes the instructions would be to just fill in the blanks with anything that seemed reasonable. Meeting the deadline for submission of the report was the important thing, not accuracy. Often reports on hamlets were filled in when the hamlet had never been seen by the DSA or any of his team members." Max Boot, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam (Liveright, 2018), p. 367; and David Donovan, Once a Warrior King: Memories of an Officer in Vietnam (McGraw-Hill, 1985).
* This led many Vietcong to conclude that Hanoi wantonly, and cynically, sacrificed the southern insurgent movement.
* Tung's special forces had carried out the late August raid on the Buddhist pagodas wearing regular army uniforms.
* Bundy recommended Robert Komer, a deputy on the NSC staff, who became Johnson's special assistant for pacification and, the following year, pacification czar in South Vietnam. McNamara recommended Johnson's close aide and press secretary Bill Moyers.
* Journalist Jonathan Schell chronicled the destruction of Bến Súc and the dislocation of its inhabitants in a long article in the New Yorker, subsequently published in book form as The Village of Ben Suc (Alfred A. Knopf, 1967).
* McCone delivered an even more sobering assessment when he met with the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), a panel of former senior government officials and top scientific experts who advised Kennedy on intelligence matters, two days later in a high-ceilinged room of the Old Executive Office Building across West Executive Avenue from the White House. Privy to the CIA's analytical assessments, McCone saw the immense problems involved in Vietnam better than most. The CIA's June 1963 Special National Intelligence Estimate had concluded that "the relations between the Diem/Nhu regime and the public and also the relationship between the regime and the United States are so disturbed that victory over the Vietcong is doubtful if not impossible." (McCone had read from this estimate at one of the September White House meetings.) "If the Diem regime were to be disposed of," McCone told the PFIAB, "there is no one to replace him" and "even if a military coup were pulled off, the CIA does not believe it could stay in power." "The situation is so bad," McCone concluded, "we may have to get out of the war." "Memorandum for the File, Meeting of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, September 12 and 13, 1963," September 19, 1963, "New Board Meetings (9–12–1963), #9," PFIAB Records, Washington, D.C.
* Stevenson had served as governor of Illinois from 1949 to 1953.
* Kennedy had intimated this formula to Gromyko during their October 18 meeting in the Oval Office.
* Kennedy's statement closely paralleled President Barack Obama's "red line warning" to Syrian president Bashar Assad on August 20, 2012, against use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war—a statement that also generated its own pressures and that Obama also later came to regret.
* MiG jets had also reached Cuba by April 1961, but they were still in crates, unassembled, with no pilots trained to fly them.
* In his 1964 oral history for the Kennedy Library, Robert Lovett recalled his meeting with Kennedy after the president's 5 P.M. meeting with Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko. But presidential secretary Evelyn Lincoln's contemporaneous appointment book confirms the two met at 10:45 A.M. See President's Appointment Books, JFKL.
* The military did speak up, however, when its interests were at stake. At one point, Rusk suggested landing the exiles in southeastern Cuba, where they could retreat to the nearby U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay if necessary. Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Lyman Lemnitzer and chief of naval operations Arleigh Burke protested vigorously. "Rusk later said," wrote a White House aide, "that they would be perfectly ready to put the President's reputation on the block but wouldn't let anyone touch their precious Guantanamo." Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. to Robert Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Papers, JFKL.
* They did not have access to many top-level State Department or White House files, nor any of President Kennedy's and President Johnson's recordings of meetings and telephone conversations.
* At this point in the war, fewer than 500 Americans had been killed in Vietnam. The number would grow to more than 58,000 by the end of U.S. involvement in
* Khrushchev, however, continued to keep captive U.S. pilot Francis Gary Powers, whose high-altitude U-2 reconnaissance plane had been brought down by a surface-to-air missile over Sverdlovsk (since renamed Yekaterinburg) on May 1, 1960, and who had then been convicted of espionage in a show trial. Powers would eventually be released in a prisoner swap for Soviet spy Rudolf Abel on February 10, 1962.
* Corruption beset Americans in South Vietnam as well: massive quantities of goods disappeared from MACV's main post exchange in Cholon—a building the size of a major American department store—and ended up on Saigon's black market.
* Bolshakov had also passed correspondence between Khrushchev and Kennedy through White House press secretary Pierre Salinger.
* Across the Atlantic, London's Financial Times broke the story of McNamara's nomination to the World Bank on November 27 based on a leak from a diplomatic source.
The Peril of Short-Term Thinking
(November 1963–July 1965)
The November 1963 coup that toppled Ngô Đình Diệm triggered political turmoil in South Vietnam that in less than a year swept the country to the brink of collapse. In response to this turmoil, President Lyndon Johnson and his advisors made a series of decisions that sucked the United States into the vortex of a major, bloody, and unsuccessful war. Why did intelligent and well-meaning men embark on such a futile enterprise so costly in human lives and suffering? They did so because short-term thinking made them far more confident than they should have been about dealing with the problems they confronted and far less attentive than they should have been to the long-term consequences of their decisions. It shifted their attention from a careful examination of alternatives to a groping for means of overcoming difficulties. It also left them psychologically ill-equipped to deal with the accelerating force of events as the deterioration of South Vietnam deepened throughout 1964 and into the spring and summer of 1965. They failed to recognize the tiny changes in circumstances that carried them from one decision to another. As a result, they found themselves facing pressures they had not anticipated and that resulted in outcomes they had not intended. "It gets harder to see straight as you get more deeply committed," confessed McGeorge Bundy, looking back.1 In this environment, the absence of careful attention to the implications of small decisions became magnified. Myopic decision-making turned a series of those small decisions into a large blunder.
President Johnson and his team confronted numerous forces and circumstances they did not create and could not ignore. Some implications of their decisions could not be discerned at the time, becoming apparent only later. But their persistent lack of reflection—reinforced by Johnson's fear of an international and domestic political firestorm that "losing Vietnam" would provoke, especially the possible failure of his cherished Great Society* reform agenda—inhibited a comprehensive, creative, and conscientious reckoning. It is not that Johnson and his advisors did not foresee serious problems—they did. It is that they failed to ponder the long-term consequences of the serious problems they did see. Whatever control they possessed began to slip away as events generated their own momentum, took on a life of their own, and ultimately overwhelmed those leading the war effort, carrying them like rafters who lose their oars down a swiftly moving river littered with waterfalls. Short-term thinking blunted their ability to anticipate obstacles and gave them less time to react to hidden rocks. Each step deeper in, moreover, made extrication harder. As a result, Johnson and his advisors got an outcome they did not plan and that brought them and the American and Vietnamese people to grief. They demonstrated a striking lack of foresight, judiciousness, and reflection that circumstances demanded. Thirty years after, Robert McNamara saw to the heart of the matter. "The problem was that we did not adequately foresee the implications of our actions."2 There is a powerful lesson in their experience for all of us.
President John F. Kennedy's public murder on November 22, 1963, instantly transformed him into a martyred icon. During the days of grief and mourning that followed his assassination, a profound sense developed throughout the country that it had not only lost a graceful, confidant leader but all of its hopes for the future. The countless images of the glamorous JFK on television screens, front pages, and magazine covers inevitably invited unflattering comparisons to his successor's overbearing demeanor and unvarnished manner. A man of labyrinthine mind, mountainous ambition, and Shakespearean contradictions, Lyndon B. Johnson could range from soaring exhibitions of brilliance and sensitivity to oppressive melancholy and vulgar abrasiveness. He could persuade, flatter, cajole, intimidate—depending on the person and the circumstances. He displayed both great depth and great shallowness, combining piercing insights with self-deception on the grandest scale, but none of the celebrity cool that had made for Camelot. He was, noted a long-time aide, at once "a man bedeviled by grand and innocent visions almost beyond mortal reach, and a man beset by petty doubts and cynical suspicions of himself."3 "I am no more bewildered by Lyndon," his wife, Lady Bird, once said, "than he is bewildered by himself."4 "The well of ambition and aspiration flowed out of him like an explosive force," a close friend said. Whenever that explosive force was frustrated, the friend explained, Johnson "behaved like a youngster with a temper tantrum."5 It was an extraordinary mixture of good and bad qualities, all manifest on a larger-than-life scale.
At once cruel and compassionate, sensitive and profane—his speech filled with the colorful rhythms and sometimes crude similes of those born on the land—Johnson's patois of coarseness, magnified by the microscope of critical examination, masked a quick and incisive mind. He was a man of gargantuan ego, a consummate wheeler-dealer whose boorishness, braggadocio, and drive to control and humiliate others masked a deep sense of personal insecurity. Johnson had harnessed this extraordinary mix of qualities as a legendarily effective Senate majority leader from 1955 to 1961 when, in the words of a Washington insider, "he played senators like a violinist would play a Stradivarius."6 His physical movements were equally calculated: "The voice swelled as he went along, arms pumped, hands clapped against his forehead, eyes turned heavenward . . . He would not let the conversation begin until he knew how it would end."7 "He twisted a lot of arms," recalled one long-time aide, and "he did it not only with zest, but with a good deal of confidence that he would win."8 "He was a con man," his close friend Clark Clifford remembered, "but I'd see him use the con approach in a good cause and bring people along. He'd go up and put his arm around some senator—he'd get his nose about that far away from his face—and pretty soon this senator would just wilt, almost as though he was being physically bombarded by some kind of atoms that were coming out of Johnson onto the fellow."9 There was a pitiless side of his character, too, which Clifford also witnessed. "Lyndon Johnson believed you dominate those you can dominate, and you suck up to those that you can't dominate."10
LBJ and JFK
Abbie Rowe/JFK Library
But the same qualities that made Johnson an effective Senate majority leader (arguably the greatest in history)—his habit of pursuing his goals through manipulation and secrecy; his willingness to be elusive and downright disingenuous when it served his purposes; his obsession about not showing the cards in his hand; his reluctance to reveal his hand even to favored advisors at sensitive moments; his conviction that everyone had their price, it was simply a matter of finding it; and his compulsion to personalize every issue—made him particularly ill-equipped to deal with Vietnam. McGeorge Bundy, who saw Johnson warts and all in his role as national security advisor, put it well. "He was a great, wonderful man, and he did accomplish an awful lot of good things. But he got stuck with a really bad problem for which he was not the design solution."11
Johnson possessed as much intelligence and political savvy as Kennedy, but he lacked Kennedy's privileged background and schooling and, perhaps more important, the self-confidence and self-possession that went with it. (This sense of marginalization was what fed Johnson's superstitious respect for education—and his determination that all Americans should receive its benefits.) His ascension to the presidency magnified and accentuated a tragic aspect of his character: his lack of inner security. Johnson "did not have the smoothness and control over his actions that John F. Kennedy did," said Clark Clifford.12 Kennedy of Choate School, Harvard College, and Palm Beach, Florida, felt secure in his dealings with the world; Johnson of small-town Central Texas felt uncertain in the same. "I think his problem in foreign affairs at the beginning was 'I'm going to show these guys I'm not a Texas provincial,'" said Bundy, looking back. "That kind of 'I'll show them' [attitude] was a part of it . . . Foreign affairs wasn't his home country." "Foreigners are not like the folks that I am used to," Johnson once said self-consciously and only half jokingly.13 As a result, he did not trust his own political instincts on international issues, he did not buck the opinion of his foreign policy advisors, and he took almost everything personally. These frailties of character would have important consequences.
Following Kennedy's assassination, Johnson pursued a policy of continuity. "A nation stunned, shaken to its very heart, had to be reassured that the government was not in a state of paralysis," he wrote in his memoir. "I had to convince everyone everywhere that the country would go forward . . . Any hesitation or wavering, any false step, any sign of self-doubt, could have been disastrous . . . The times cried out for leadership."14 Johnson was right: Americans were rooting for him. They mourned Kennedy, but they wanted Johnson to succeed—his progress would be restorative as well as beneficial in its own right. For them, Johnson harkened back to his political idol Franklin D. Roosevelt and a time when government could do things to help ordinary people. Johnson intended to push Kennedy's stalled civil rights legislation on behalf of disenfranchised African Americans through Congress in order to both secure the martyred president's legacy and election in his own right in 1964. Until then, he wanted to keep Vietnam at bay and off the front pages, and to make as few decisions about it as possible for as long as possible. "I'm building the Great Society, don't bother me," he told one White House aide during this period.15 But Johnson would soon learn, like Kennedy, that Vietnam would not wait on him and that he could not control events in that country.
Johnson's desire for continuity applied to Kennedy's foreign policy advisors as well. "I want you to stay on," he implored the troika of Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, and McGeorge Bundy in the days immediately following the assassination. "I need you."16 "Without them," Johnson later told biographer Doris Kearns, "I would have lost my link to John Kennedy, and without that I would have had absolutely no chance of gaining the support of the media or the Easterners or the intellectuals. And without that support I would have had absolutely no chance of governing the country."17 It was not the troika's expertise in national security affairs, tellingly, that was decisive in LBJ's judgment, but the domestic impact of their reputation. In short, Johnson felt deeply dependent on Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy, and while he could be rude and insulting to his closest Texas aides, he rarely was to them.
The circumstances of Kennedy's death, the continuing attraction of being at the center of power, and, not least, the disarming candor of the new president's personal plea for help made it hard for veterans of JFK's inner circle to say no to Johnson. Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy shared a lofty sense of civic duty and a stake in decisions they had helped to make and policies they had helped to set. They had become attached to the problem of Vietnam and obsessed with finding a solution. They had not gotten to where they were by being iconoclasts or troublemakers; they were company men in a company town in an era of establishment solidarity. All of them had survived the Cuban Missile Crisis, and thought, as Rusk said, "How can Hanoi stand up to us when we have just made Khrushchev back down?"18 All of them believed that unchecked aggression invited war down the road and that what Washington did and did not do mattered a great deal in terms of balancing, stabilizing, and protecting the world. Johnson believed these things, too. But years later, after he had left the White House—his presidency scarred by Vietnam—Johnson confided to an aide that he should have brought in his own advisors and taken a fresh look at the war.19 But in his insecurity and his own lack of reflectiveness, he did not.
So Kennedy's men became Johnson's men. But each man's relationship with the new president and their influence changed dramatically. Although Kennedy had respected Rusk and trusted his counsel, he found Rusk excessively formal and diffident, and this kept their relationship a distant one. Rusk and Johnson, on the other hand, felt comfortable with one another and shared a natural rapport. Johnson had been miserable as vice president—often ignored, marginalized, and ridiculed behind his back—but the secretary of state had always shown him deference, which the proud and prickly Johnson welcomed and did not forget. He liked that Rusk wasn't flashy like many other Kennedy men; he was quiet, unflappable, and a former Rhodes scholar. The two men shared similar rural Southern roots, similar ages—both had been born in the first decade of the twentieth century—and similar up-by-the-bootstraps life stories that convinced them that hardships existed to be overcome. "This is my kind of man," Johnson said of Rusk privately. "I can get along with him, I understand him, he understands me, and we both are aware that the country is full of Yankees."20 Yet these common backgrounds made them more inclined to accept the received wisdom about the United States in the world than to question it; America's image as the resolute and reliable leader of the West mattered a great deal to both of them. More subtly but importantly, Rusk and Johnson also shared "a kinship on the issue of the right wing and the injury done to the body politic by that right wing attack over China and Korea," recalled one of the new president's closest aides, Bill Moyers.21 In the late 1940s they had seen towering figures—Harry Truman, George Marshall, Dean Acheson—brought low by the demagogic McCarthy, their effectiveness savaged by accusations of weakness in the face of Communist aggression in East Asia. "God Almighty, what they said about us leaving China would just be warming up, compared to what they'd say now," Johnson remarked early in his presidency.22 In particular, as assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, Rusk had underestimated China's intentions prior to Beijing's intervention in the Korean War in late 1950. He was determined not to repeat the mistake he had made a decade earlier. In the process, he made the opposite one, overcorrecting as secretary of state by overestimating China's intentions in Vietnam.
Rusk, LBJ, and McNamara
Yoichi Okamoto/LBJ Library
Robert McNamara's considerable influence with Kennedy carried over to Johnson—and, remarkably, grew even greater. McNamara became, in Clifford's words, "the second most important citizen in the country after the President."23 Kennedy had come to view McNamara as the choicest pick of all the glittering men of talent he had attracted to Washington in 1961, and Johnson did, too. At Kennedy's first Cabinet meeting, it was "the fellow from Ford with Stacomb on his hair" who had impressed Johnson most. "The ablest man I ever met," he called McNamara.24 "There is nobody he is more at home with, more fond of, more respectful of in this Administration than Bob McNamara," Lady Bird wrote in her diary. Johnson could be a bully toward others, but never toward McNamara. "He knew he couldn't rule me," said McNamara later, "and he knew goddam well that I would leave if we didn't develop a constructive relationship."25 "If I got word that Bob had died or quit," Johnson confided to Lady Bird, "I don't believe I could go on with this job."26 Every time he sent McNamara to Vietnam, noted Lady Bird, "Lyndon spoke of how frightened he was. 'I lie awake until he gets back.'"27
Kennedy had also relied heavily on McNamara, but he had tempered his defense secretary's drive with his own skepticism and coolness, sense of history, and awareness that McNamara's analytical acuity often exceeded his political judgment. Lacking Kennedy's self-confidence and experience in foreign affairs, Johnson relied on McNamara more unreservedly and uncritically—at least initially. As a result, McNamara became even more assertive, more willing to press his own opinions with Johnson than he had with Kennedy, even as he resolved to protect Johnson as he had tried to protect Kennedy. Temperamentally, they were very different—McNamara was an intellectual who loved ideas and books and was reluctant to enter the Washington fray, Johnson was an utterly political animal who rarely read beyond newspapers and magazines and instead loved manipulating people and exercising power. Over time, as their differences over Vietnam took root and grew, their relationship would become more complicated, tense, and ultimately unsatisfactory, and the evolution of their relationship from its warm beginning in November 1963 to its cold conclusion in February 1968 would become a metaphor for the course of American involvement in Vietnam during these fateful years. But that was in the future.
McGeorge Bundy's easy relationship with John Kennedy did not carry over to his successor. "There was a tension in Mac" toward Johnson, said Francis Bator, who served as Bundy's deputy, "because of his prior relationship with Kennedy. They had been like brothers. They could finish each other's sentences."28 "It was more complicated between [Johnson] and me," Bundy later acknowledged29—"he and I came from different worlds," he added30—but Bundy went out of his way to confirm the impression in Johnson that his loyalty was to the presidency. Bundy was an operational man with an instinct for how power worked and his influence in the realm of policy under Johnson increased substantially. He had been an expediter and fixer under Kennedy, who more often than not relied on his own knowledge of the world and his own judgment about foreign policy when evaluating Bundy's contributions. Lacking these strengths, from his first day in office Johnson leaned heavily on Bundy's advice, though he found him faintly patronizing. "I think he's a brilliant man, I'm attached to him, and he's indispensable to me," Johnson confided to a close friend.31 Still, Johnson felt painfully removed from the Establishment that Bundy personified. Many people, he once noted plaintively, "say I am not qualified in foreign affairs like Jack Kennedy and those other experts. I guess I was just born in the wrong part of the country."32 The self-contained Bundy, in turn, found it hard to swallow Johnson's boorishness, as when he demanded that Bundy continue his briefing in the bathroom as Johnson relieved himself. Johnson's legendary skills as a showman, schemer, and bully of men—the alternation of flattery and intimidation that he deployed to work his will on others—generally failed when he trained them on the coolly detached and supremely confident Bundy. An uneasy codependence nonetheless developed between these very different men—one too confident and the other too insecure—that Johnson both resented and relished. After all, the graduate of Southwest Texas State Teachers College had the former faculty dean of Harvard University working for him. "A small amused smile would come to his face," wrote David Halberstam, "like a hitting coach watching a fine batter or a connoisseur watching a great ballet dancer. Mac was dancing, and dancing for him."33
Johnson inherited many of Kennedy's men, and he shared many of Kennedy's convictions, too. He had in fact articulated these convictions in his report to Kennedy of the one trip he made to South Vietnam as vice president, in May 1961. "The battle against Communism must be joined in Southeast Asia with strength and determination," Johnson wrote Kennedy. Otherwise, the United States might as well "throw in the towel in the area and pull back our defenses to San Francisco and a 'Fortress America' concept." He predicted dire consequences stemming from American withdrawal from the region. "Without [Washington's] inhibitory influence," Johnson warned, "the vast Pacific becomes a Red Sea." Yet his overheated rhetoric—during the trip he publicly hailed Diệm as "the Winston Churchill of Asia"—did not mean that he favored a military solution in South Vietnam. (And Diệm himself had told Johnson he did not want U.S. troops.) He even downplayed the relevance of U.S. troops, whose commitment to South Vietnam was "not only not required" but "not desirable." He believed the fundamental problems plaguing Vietnam mirrored what he considered were the world's fundamental problems—"hunger, ignorance, poverty and disease," not "the momentary threat of Communism itself"—and posed the "greatest danger" to Southeast Asian stability. "We must—whatever strategies we evolve—keep these enemies the point of our attack," Johnson stressed in conclusion.34 In this, he had his finger on what were ultimately the wiser priorities, pursuit of which in the long run would have left America stronger and better depressed the spread of Communism in Asia. But Johnson always remained deeply concerned, as McGeorge Bundy later put it, "with what the average American voter is going to think about how he did in the ball game of the Cold War. The great Cold War championship gets played in the largest stadium in the United States and he, Lyndon Johnson, is the quarterback, and if he loses, how does he do in the next election? So don't lose . . . He's living with his own political survival every time he looks at these questions."35 Shrewdly, Johnson first considered the weakness of any proposed policy or tactic, but his filter was such that the merits of a particular foreign policy interested Johnson less than the domestic consequences of changing it. During the 1940s and 1950s—Johnson's formative years in Congress—most of the powerful figures on Capitol Hill from whom he had learned the art of national politics had been conservative hawks with an emotional attachment to American involvement in Asia. His own fidelity was more modest; instead, he dispassionately believed no serious contender for political office could afford letting go of Vietnam—the repercussions would be devastating. For him, the domino theory was largely a matter of domestic politics. Yet not letting go carried enormous risks, too. "If this winds up bad and we get in a land war in Asia," he said, "there's only one address they will look for, and that is mine."36
McGeorge Bundy and LBJ
Like Kennedy, Johnson defined his objective in Vietnam as winning the war. But unlike Kennedy, he did not qualify that objective; he did not publicly put limits on U.S. support of South Vietnam; he did not emphasize, as Kennedy had, that the United States could help the South Vietnamese but only the South Vietnamese could win the war. Johnson's mindset was rooted in his assumption that the loss of South Vietnam would entail greater risks and costs than would the introduction of U.S. combat forces. This reflected his greater sensitivity to the political consequences of failure in South Vietnam than to the dangers and unpredictable consequences associated with the application of American military power. Johnson—like Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy—had not experienced the chaos and heartache of war up close as Kennedy had as a junior naval officer in the Pacific during World War II, and they therefore lacked an intuitive understanding that war does not always go according to plan—and the instinctive caution that goes with that bloody recognition. This difference would become important as the pressure of events mounted in Vietnam after the November 1963 coup and forced more momentous choices.
Johnson's thinking came through clearly in the first meeting he held with his Vietnam advisors just two days after Kennedy's assassination. Gathering in a high-ceilinged room of the Old Executive Office Building while workers readied the Oval Office for its new occupant, said new occupant expressed his misgivings about the coup against Diệm (particularly the political turmoil it had unleashed), but in remarkable contrast to his May 1961 report stressed that he wanted priority given to military operations over "do-gooders'" social reforms, and made clear his objective to "win the war!" He instructed Lodge (back in Washington for consultations) to "tell those generals in Saigon that Lyndon Johnson intends to stand by our word."37 "He really laid down the law that first day," Bundy recalled.38 His advisors, in turn, painted a gloomy picture of the situation he faced. Johnson learned, McNamara later wrote, that he had "inherited a god-awful mess eminently more dangerous than the one Kennedy had inherited from Eisenhower."39 "It's going to hell in a hand basket out there," Johnson told an aide after the meeting, as he tilted back in the big chair behind the desk in the office he had occupied for three years as vice president. "If we don't do something, [Lodge] says, it'll go under any day," he said as he stared at the ice cubes in his glass. "They'll think with Kennedy dead, we've lost heart. So they'll think we're yellow and don't mean what we say." "Who?" asked his aide. "The Chinese. The fellas in the Kremlin. They'll be taking the measure of us. They'll be wondering just how far they can go . . . I'm not going to let Vietnam go the way of China. I told them to go back and tell those generals in Saigon that Lyndon Johnson intends to stand by our word . . . I want 'em to get off their butts and get out in those jungles and whip hell out of some Communists. And then I want 'em to leave me alone, because I've got some bigger things to do right here at home." He swiveled in the chair, looked at the far corner of the ceiling, and said, "I feel like I just grabbed a big juicy worm with a right sharp hook in the middle of it."40 The words seemed to make Johnson close in on himself.
One of Johnson's biggest problems involved coming to terms with the real nature of the war. He soon learned from McNamara that Diệm's regime had fed grossly misleading statistics to the Americans, including the defense secretary himself. (After Diệm's death, the number of secure hamlets in Long An province was revised downward from over 200 to 10.) The Defense Intelligence Agency reported to McNamara for the first time in mid-December that new, more honest and accurate statistics uncovered by MACV showed that, in reality, the Vietcong had sustained and even improved their capability over the past year, and would probably step up their military operations in the coming year. ARVN stopped conducting operations in Vietcong-controlled areas of the Mekong Delta. With increased access to villages, the Vietcong collected taxes and recruits for an intensified push to topple the government before the United States could intervene militarily. "The structure of the [South Vietnamese] regime in the countryside," wrote journalist Neil Sheehan, "was like a beam that has been eaten from inside by wood-boring beetles. The instant the beam is stressed it snaps in two and reveals the powdered residue within."41
McNamara's trip to South Vietnam on December 19 and 20 confirmed all of this. Harkins reported that Diệm had submitted considerable falsified data to the American military. And now Washington had to deal with a junta of a dozen generals that represented an ineffective instrument of government and that kept the group away from their real military duties. McNamara walked into a conference with the generals, looked around "with blood in his eye" according to one observer, and asked, "OK, which one of you here is the boss?" (The fact that he had to ask such a question spoke volumes.) After a long pause, Minh replied that Đôn headed the army. Well, who then is chief of state? asked McNamara. Minh reluctantly raised his hand—then added: "I am not Naguib, and there is no Nasser."*42 It was a telling admission that should have given McNamara pause if he had stopped to reflect on the implications of Minh's remark. Instead, McNamara lectured the generals on the need for unity and leadership: utterly inexperienced in political leadership, they looked to the Americans to help them run the country and the war effort just as they had, as junior officers, looked to the French. They earnestly admitted that a great deal needed to be done and that they must work harder for their country. Then they went back to their squabbling for hours over patronage (who would control promotions) before adjourning, having accomplished nothing.
McNamara laid out all of this in his trip report. "The situation is very disturbing," he told Johnson upon his return to Washington. "Current trends, unless reversed in the next two to three months, will lead to neutralization at best [a prospect that Johnson, like Kennedy, found unpalatable*] and more likely to a Communist-controlled state. The new government is the greatest source of concern. It is indecisive and drifting." Worse yet, McNamara reported, "there is no organized government in South Vietnam," inside the capital and beyond. Continued McNamara, "Viet Cong progress has been great during the period since the coup, with my best guess being that the situation has in fact been deteriorating in the countryside since July to a far greater extent than we realized because of our undue dependence on distorted Vietnamese reporting." He admitted that the statistics on which he had based his earlier conclusions had been "grossly in error." The Vietcong controlled "larger percentages of the population, greater amounts of territory, and have destroyed or occupied more strategic hamlets than expected."43
"In Texas we say it's better to deal with the devil you know than the devil you don't know," Johnson had privately grumped in the weeks leading up to the coup.44 As vice president, he had been invited to few meetings on Vietnam and at those he did attend, he withheld his counsel in deference to Kennedy so his dissent had been muted and therefore discounted. The coup had realized Johnson's worst fears. "That was a tragic mistake," he would moan the following spring. "It was awful and we've lost everything."45
McNamara had concluded his report by saying, "We should watch the situation very carefully, running scared, hoping for the best, but preparing for more forceful moves if the situation does not show early signs of improvement." A few days later, Johnson asked McNamara, along with Rusk and Bundy, for their reactions to a memo he had received from Mike Mansfield—something that Kennedy had never felt the need to do when the Senate majority leader wrote him. (LBJ and Mansfield had worked together closely when the Montanan served as Senate majority whip under him from 1957 to 1961.) Mansfield made many of the arguments to Johnson that he had made to Kennedy. "As you remarked on the telephone," Mansfield wrote the man, now president, that he had known since their days together in the House in the 1940s, "'we do not want another China in Viet Nam.' I would respectfully add to this observation: Neither do we want another Korea. It would seem that a key (but often overlooked) factor in both situations was a tendency to bite off more than we were prepared in the end to chew. We tended to talk ourselves out on a limb with overstatements of our purpose and commitment only to discover in the end that there were not sufficient American interests to support with blood and treasure a desperate final plunge. Then, the question followed invariably: 'Who got us into this mess?' and 'Who lost China?' etc." He urged Johnson to pursue negotiations leading to neutralization and American withdrawal.
The troika unanimously counseled Johnson to stand firm. McNamara announced that "Senator Mansfield is challenging what he regards as the gross imbalance between the extent of our involvement in Southeast Asia and our narrow self-interests in the area. My assessment of our important security interests is that they unquestionably call for holding the line against further Communist gains." Rusk added, "Peace will not prevail in Southeast Asia until aggression is frustrated." And Bundy argued, "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. This is exactly what would happen now if we should seem to be the first to quit in Saigon."46 Their unanimous advice hardened Johnson's preexisting attitude.
Of the three, McNamara had shifted his position most dramatically. In just two months, he had swung from advocating a phased withdrawal of U.S. military advisors to stressing the essential truth of the domino theory. McNamara's abrupt shift reflected his accommodation to Johnson's goal (echoing Kennedy's)—clearly stated at his first Vietnam meeting—to "win the war!" His long immersion in bureaucratic and corporate culture had instilled in him a strong sense of duty to the institution and the person who headed it, and despite his hard-driving personality, McNamara had learned to put his boss's views above his own—whether it was in the army air corps, at the Ford Motor Company, or now at the highest level of the United States Government. He had not been elected to office—only the president who appointed him had—"and this affected the way I behaved as Secretary, particularly concerning Vietnam," he later explained.47 (That LBJ had been vice president until now made no difference—it had been the ticket that Americans had voted for and the office that mattered.) McNamara's loyalty had been strengthened by witnessing the near insubordination of senior military officers like Admiral Arleigh Burke during the Bay of Pigs and General Curtis LeMay and Admiral George Anderson during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and this defiance made McNamara more committed to standing by first President Kennedy and now President Johnson instead of confronting Johnson when disagreeing with him. "How loyal is that man?" Johnson once asked about a potential staffer. "Well, he seems quite loyal, Mr. President." "I don't want loyalty," Johnson replied, "I want loyalty." He got that from McNamara. "If you asked those boys in the Cabinet to run through a buzz saw for their President, Bob McNamara would be the first to go through it," he proudly said.48 Placing loyalty to the presidency above loyalty to personal beliefs and principles would, in time, exact a heavy emotional and psychological toll on this most allegiant deputy.
During the first months of his presidency, Johnson acted like the proverbial ostrich that buries its head in the sand when it sees danger. He wanted to keep Vietnam at arm's length, to delay confronting vexing problems, and to postpone difficult decisions until after the November election. In a phone conversation with McNamara early in the year, Johnson spelled out his options as he saw them. "We could send in our divisions—our own Marines in there and they could start attacking the Vietcong . . . We could come out of there . . . and as soon as we get out, they [North Vietnam] could swallow up South Vietnam . . . Or we can say this is the Vietnamese's war—they've [the ARVN] got 200,000 men." Nothing stood out as an obvious course. "After considering all of these," Johnson said, "it seems that the latter offers the best alternative for America to follow." It was a conclusion thick with equivocation. "If the latter option failed," he conceded with trepidation, "then we have to make another decision. But at this point, it has not failed."49 Johnson hoped it would not.
"The only thing I know to do is do more of the same and do it more efficiently," Johnson said privately.50 But he faced growing pressure from the Joint Chiefs. LeMay, who hated the restraints imposed by civilian leaders, had begun to argue that North Vietnam should be bombed on the grounds that "we are swatting flies when we should be going after the manure pile."51 Kennedy had heard out LeMay and the other chiefs, but he had in the end never been intimidated by them or felt compelled to follow their hawkish advice. In turn, the chiefs had come to recognize, and grudgingly accept, their limited influence with Kennedy—particularly with regard to sending U.S. combat troops to Vietnam. Now Kennedy was dead and Johnson was president, and the chiefs wasted little time in probing to see what influence and pressure they could exert on the new occupant of the Oval Office when it came to dealing with what they had always considered a fundamentally military problem and their solution to it: the application of more force.
Johnson had served for years on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees and he understood the military's parochialism as well as its patriotism. He recognized and feared the military's ties with the political Right* and Congress; indeed, what gave the chiefs influence with Johnson was not their rank but their influence and support on the Hill. "Lyndon Johnson could not afford to have the Joint Chiefs on record against him, in his own eyes," recalled McGeorge Bundy, "and they were using that political power" in a "very offensive" way. "They tried to gang up on" Kennedy too, Bundy noted, but Kennedy had resisted them on the big issues and at moments of crisis,52 choosing to have McNamara and Taylor mediate between him and the chiefs.
LBJ, McNamara, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The chiefs began their pressure campaign in late January with a memo urging Johnson to "put aside many of the self-imposed restrictions" on U.S. operations in South Vietnam and undertake bolder action, including bombing and even U.S. ground operations against North Vietnam—a significant escalation of military involvement. "We must prepare for whatever level of activity may be required and, being prepared, must then proceed to take actions as necessary to achieve our purposes surely and promptly," they categorically declared. It was an endorsement for using the maximum force necessary, whatever the consequences. The chiefs premised these recommendations on their belief that "a more aggressive program would enhance greatly our ability to control the degree to which escalation will occur" and "our conviction that if support of the insurgency from outside South Vietnam in terms of operational direction, personnel, and material were stopped completely, the character of the war in South Vietnam would be substantially and favorably altered."53 But could escalation be controlled once it started and could North Vietnamese infiltration be completely stopped? The chiefs had not thought to ask and answer these crucial questions at anything beyond a superficial level, and as a result they based their entire Vietnam strategy on what would prove to be fallacious assumptions.
The chiefs continued their pressure campaign when they met again with Johnson in early March. Arguing that "preventing the loss of South Vietnam" was of "overriding importance" to the United States (a political judgment properly made by the president, not the chiefs, and one which Johnson had never articulated), they insisted that Johnson be prepared to destroy North Vietnamese military and industrial targets, mine harbors, and impose a naval blockade—even if this led to Chinese intervention and the use of nuclear weapons to cope with that consequence. In addition, they privately complained to the White House through military aide Major General Ted Clifton about the level of force recommended by McNamara, comparing it to the Bay of Pigs.
Johnson had no intention of triggering a larger war with China. "Can you imagine the United States being at war with Red China in the jungles of Southeast Asia with a population of a billion contiguous to North Vietnam?" he said. "If we get into that situation, we will bleed to death over there in South Vietnam. I am not going to do it."54 So Johnson deflected the chiefs' pressure for the time being. "It is quite apparent that he does not want to lose South Vietnam before next November," JCS chairman Taylor wrote afterward in a memorandum of the meeting, "nor does he want to get the country into the war."55 The chiefs had not gotten what they wanted, but they had staked out their position and made it abundantly clear to the president. While Johnson did not want to do what the chiefs recommended, he also did not want to be in conflict with them—especially in an election year. Their incessant pressure for heavier American involvement would lodge itself in Johnson's mind and have a significant cumulative impact. Repetition would have its effect.
Johnson felt anxious and frustrated as political conditions in South Vietnam continued to deteriorate and the Vietcong grew stronger, making it harder and harder for him to finesse the problem. Denied a competitive, pluralistic process, South Vietnam had never developed a tradition of responsible political opposition. Dissent had expressed itself, instead, in conspiracies of small, clandestine groups distrustful of one another and the government. Freed from Diệm's authoritarian restraints, Buddhists, religious sects such as the Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo, non-Vietnamese minorities like the Montagnards of the Central Highlands and the urban Chinese of Cholon, and students all battled, often violently, to define South Vietnam's political direction independently of their rivals. (In Saigon, wags said, two people constituted a party, three people a party and a faction.) Amid this chaos, professional soldiers with no background or training in politics except experience at petty infighting struggled to rule the country. No one had anticipated the magnitude of the centrifugal political forces that had been kept under control by Diệm's iron rule.
The junta of generals certainly had not. Though they were locals (unlike the Americans in Washington), they read the political situation badly because they had no experience at governing a country and had eliminated the one man who did. Confronting many more problems than they had expected and sensitive to charges of dictatorship, the generals preoccupied themselves with self-justification and mutual recrimination. They bickered endlessly, offered no unified vision, and relied heavily on cronyism. They did little to improve the lives of villagers and the urban poor. Popular euphoria over Diệm and Nhu's removal soon gave way to frustration over the junta's incompetence and corruption. Uncertainty and fear about the future grew. The generals watched passively as political anarchy set in.
After just three months, on January 30, 1964, General Nguyễn Khánh seized power, underscoring the intense political maneuvering in South Vietnam. Short, stocky, and taciturn, the thirty-six-year-old Khánh compensated for his natural reticence with a peacock's display of aviator sunglasses, goatee, and red beret. Also noticeable was his rigorous practice of always taking care to keep Nguyễn Khánh's interests uppermost in his ambitious mind. When the Buddhist crisis erupted, Khánh had encouraged Diệm to declare martial law. Then, as Diệm's fortunes declined, Khánh began plotting with other ARVN generals to oust him and his brother. The junta rewarded Khánh's participation by appointing him a corps commander, a position from where he laid plans for his own seizure of power. Washington recognized the new Khánh regime, but with few illusions. To one senior U.S. official, Khánh seemed "a skillful if unscrupulous croupier in the political roulette as played in Saigon, one who knew how to give the wheel a new spin whenever the ball seemed about to settle on the wrong number."56
Johnson and his advisors did not focus on Khánh's weaknesses but, rather, on what they imagined to be his strengths: his opposition to neutralization talks (which he—like Washington—believed would simply lead to North Vietnam's takeover of South Vietnam) and his potential to rally his people and reinvigorate the war effort. Anxious to keep South Vietnam from unraveling, Johnson swallowed his anger and irritation at the latest coup and fixed on Khánh as someone who would somehow hold together the fractious and disintegrating country. Wanting "no more of this coup shit," Johnson ordered McNamara and Taylor to travel to South Vietnam to "make Khanh 'our boy,' and proclaim the fact to all and sundry," wrote Taylor. "He wants to see Khanh in the newspapers with McNamara and Taylor holding up his arms" like a winning boxer. In his parting instructions to McNamara, Johnson said, "Bob, I want to see about a thousand pictures of you with General Khanh, smiling and waving your arms and showing the people out there that this country is behind Khanh the whole way."57
McNamara and Taylor arrived in South Vietnam on March 8, and the following day, like politicians on the hustings, barnstormed the countryside with Khánh trying to promote the general to his own people. Heavily protected by troops and helicopters, they posed for news cameramen and photographers as Johnson had instructed, standing on either side of Khánh and holding up his arms, creating a tableau that evoked a presidential nominating convention. "Việt Nam Muôn Năm!" shouted McNamara in fractured Vietnamese to crowds of mystified onlookers with blank expressions on their faces. He meant to say, "Vietnam Ten Thousand Years!"—the Vietnamese equivalent of "Long Live Vietnam!"—but his improper intonation of the memorized phrase made it sound like "Vietnam wants to lie down!"58 A gesture that had been intended to boost Khánh's popular appeal instead made the general look like an American puppet to his South Vietnamese countrymen—exactly what the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese had been arguing since late January.
"The greatest gift for us was when McNamara came and toured the countryside, holding up Nguyen Khanh's hand and shouting, 'This is our man!'" said the leader of the Vietcong's political wing, the National Liberation Front. "This saved our propaganda cadres a great deal of effort."59 The episode illustrated American policymakers' shocking lack of cultural awareness and insensitivity to Vietnamese sensibilities, and the appalling disparity between American intentions and their effects. An individual (Nguyễn Khánh) and an institution (ARVN) utterly dependent on the United States had become the preponderant political forces in South Vietnam. And while Johnson and his advisors saw them as bulwarks against the chaos gripping the country, the South Vietnamese, who traditionally perceived professional soldiers as lacking the Confucian moral and political authority to govern, saw them quite differently.
When McNamara returned to Washington, he told Johnson that conditions in South Vietnam had "unquestionably" worsened since Khánh took power. The Vietcong had benefited from the turmoil following the November and January coups and now controlled nearly 90 percent of the key Delta provinces. They had also begun driving ARVN from the Central Highlands, home to numerous spurs of the Hồ Chí Minh Trail that infiltrated troops and supplies from the North. Khánh had taken little action to confront and reverse these trends. The government lacked broad political appeal, the war effort continued to deteriorate (ARVN desertions were skyrocketing), and North Vietnamese infiltration had increased due to more support from China, which wanted to drain American resources without risking another armed confrontation as in Korea. The chiefs were again pushing for air attacks against North Vietnam. McNamara opposed, noting that Khánh opposed them, too, because he believed South Vietnam lacked the strength to withstand North Vietnamese retaliation. "Unless and until the Khanh government has established its position and preferably is making significant progress in the South," he wrote, bombing the North "carries the risk of being mounted from an extremely weak base which might at any moment collapse and leave the posture of political confrontation worsened rather than improved." Johnson agreed with McNamara. Wanting to play for time, he told McNamara on March 21 to keep doing "more of the same" and on April 14, he told Bundy that "what we're trying to do is get 'em [the South Vietnamese] to protect themselves."60
When grappling with domestic issues such as the landmark Civil Rights Act that he was then steering through Congress, Johnson enjoyed—even relished—a sense of challenge, confident that he could master the situation. But with Vietnam, Johnson saw no thread to guide him through what seemed a frightening labyrinth. On the one hand, he wanted to avoid making decisions about Vietnam. On the other, he wanted to win the war. His fear battled with his proud ego, which became apparent in a phone conversation with McNamara on April 30. "Let's get somebody that wants to do something besides drop a bomb," Johnson told McNamara, someone "that can go in and go after these damn fellows and run them back where they belong." But this was not the Senate, where he knew precisely which levers to pull. "We're not getting it done," he fretted. "We're losing. So we need something new . . . What I want is somebody that can lay up some plans to trap those guys and whup hell out of them, and kill some of them. That's what I want to do."61 Conflict between his anxiety about deepening the war and his determination to win it would characterize Johnson's attitude toward Vietnam throughout his presidency.
As the spring progressed, mounting frustration heightened the dilemma that Johnson and his advisors faced between avoiding direct U.S. military involvement and preventing the loss of South Vietnam. This fed a "desperate energy," wrote McNamara, looking back, to do something, try something to halt the rapid deterioration in South Vietnam. Their desperation discouraged them from carefully considering whether things could be turned around, because homefront pressures did not allow for travel on that path; in concert with this, there would be no consideration of what victory would ultimately cost.62 A bleak intelligence assessment in mid-May reinforced this inclination. "The overall situation is South Vietnam remains extremely fragile," the CIA reported. "Although there has been some improvement in GVN [Government of South Vietnam]/ARVN performance, sustained Viet Cong pressure continues to erode GVN authority throughout the country, undercut US/GVN programs and depress South Vietnamese morale. We do not see any signs that these trends are yet 'bottoming out.' . . . If the tide of deterioration has not been arrested by the end of the year, the anti-Communist position in South Vietnam is likely to become untenable."63 The CIA predicted dire consequences should South Vietnam fall. Such an outcome, it concluded, would be "profoundly damaging" to American prestige "and would seriously debase the credibility of U.S. will and capability to contain the spread of Communism elsewhere in the area. Our enemies would be encouraged and there would be an increased tendency among other states to move toward a greater degree of accommodation with the Communists."64
As their anxiety and desperation mounted, Johnson and the troika began to internalize and, more insidiously and dangerously, to personalize the issue. Social scientists call this "the IKEA Effect": the tendency for individuals to place a disproportionately high value on objects—or, in this case, policies—they assembled themselves (such as furniture from IKEA), regardless of the quality of the end result. Michael Norton of Harvard Business School, Daniel Mochon of the University of California, San Diego, and Dan Ariely of Duke University conducted a study that demonstrated this effect: participants with no carpentry experience who built their own products saw their products as similar in quality to those of professional carpenters—and expected others to share this opinion—because they had made these products themselves.65 So, too, with policy: individuals sometimes become so bound up in a certain course that it becomes difficult to know where objectivity stops and personal involvement begins. Increasingly identified with Vietnam in the public mind and increasingly cognizant that their reputations had become hostage to the issue, the foursome's detachment slowly gave way to personal investment in a commitment for which none of them countenanced failure. America's war was becoming their war. A reporter asked McNamara for his response to the conflict being called "McNamara's War." "I don't object to it being called McNamara's War," he said. "I think it's a very important war and I am pleased to be identified with it and do whatever I can to win it."66
The increasingly personal language that McNamara and others used when talking about Vietnam and one another's relationship to it underscored this shift. "I don't believe the American people ever want me to run [from Vietnam]," Johnson told his old mentor, Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Richard Russell of Georgia. (Russell had taken Johnson under his wing when the Texan entered the Senate in 1949 and helped guide his career.) "If I lose it, I think that they'll say I've lost, I've pulled in. At the same time, I don't want to commit us to a war. I'm in a hell of a shape." Even the famously logical McNamara began to mix emotional appeals with analytical reasoning. "I just don't believe we can be pushed out of there," McNamara told the president. "We just can't allow it to be done. You wouldn't want to go down in history as having—" "Not at all," Johnson quickly replied. McNamara's uncharacteristic willingness to play on Johnson's personal insecurity revealed his own.67
These factors, combined with continuing pressure from the chiefs, led the troika to recommend—and Johnson to authorize—contingency planning for air attacks against North Vietnam. "I don't want for us to be responsible for escalating this thing and appear that we're on a bombing campaign because we're not," he privately told Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota in early June.68 So Johnson gave the chiefs the chance to plan for what they wanted, failing to realize the momentum and pressure that would generate. Johnson believed he had held off the chiefs, but he had actually energized them by giving some of the most aggressive and effective lobbyists in Washington a chance to privately tell their hawkish allies in Congress and the press that the president had forbidden them to do what they wanted and yet allowed them to prepare by identifying targets in a country they claimed with relentless certitude would be extremely vulnerable to bombing.
Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy were not entirely in disagreement with the chiefs on the utility of air power. Filtering their analysis through their own experience, the troika assumed that the threat of graduated air attacks would dissuade North Vietnam in the same way, they believed, that the naval blockade had dissuaded the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis only eighteen months earlier. Limited force—"controlled escalation" in the parlance of the day—would sober the North Vietnamese, while allowing them to back down from a larger engagement. Maxwell Taylor, now outgoing as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, whom Johnson had recently selected to succeed Lodge as ambassador in Saigon, shared the troika's thinking. He liked to quote Polybius, the Greek historian of Republican Rome, who wrote, "It is not the purpose of war to annihilate those who provoke it, but to cause them to mend their ways." Taylor believed, as he wrote early the following year, that "as practical men," the leaders of North Vietnam "cannot wish to see the fruits of ten years of labor destroyed by slowly escalating air attacks (which they cannot prevent) without trying to find some accommodation which will exorcise that threat. It would be to our interest to regulate our attacks not for the purpose of doing maximum physical destruction but for producing maximum stresses in Hanoi minds."69 Limited bombing seemed the most prudent and flexible of all possible courses of action—far less risky that obliterating North Vietnam or getting out. Such bombing represented a mere intimation of the massive force America could unleash against North Vietnam should it hesitate to yield on Washington's terms. Hanoi could not possibly resist this pressure.
Yet because they viewed Vietnam as a limited war (as it certainly was from America's perspective), Taylor and the three others mistakenly assumed the North Vietnamese would view it as limited, too. But for the North Vietnamese, it was much more than that: it was a total war—almost a sacred crusade—for national unification and social justice, one that had been going on for decades. The troika and Taylor could not imagine that a small country vastly outgunned by the United States would meet force with force, responding to air attacks by actually escalating the fighting in South Vietnam. This would prove a fundamental miscalculation rooted in their failure to see the conflict from Hanoi's perspective.70 Similar logic applied to a draft congressional resolution the troika had been working on that supported U.S. military operations in Southeast Asia should they become necessary. "While we weren't certain that we would recommend to the President that we undertake such action," McNamara later said, "we were certain that since it was a possibility, we should go forward with a resolution that would itself have some deterrent effect" on North Vietnam.71
At the heart of this reckless assumption that North Vietnam could be intimidated into compromise was profound ignorance of political currents in Hanoi. Hardliner Lê Duẩn, who had taken control of the Politburo from Hồ Chí Minh at the Ninth Plenum of the Vietnamese Workers' Party in late 1963, was far less amenable to a compromise solution than Hồ had been. Lê Duẩn and his fellow militants, in fact, severely criticized Hồ as a half-hearted temporizer who had compromised too much with the French in 1946 and 1954. They had no intention of compromising on reunification with the Americans now. Hồ feared that a confrontation with the United States would turn Vietnam into a battlefield between Americans and Chinese, as had happened a decade earlier in Korea. Lê Duẩn, on the other hand, believed recent events—particularly the Battle of Ầp Bắc* in January 1963 and the coup that overthrew Diệm in November 1963—proved the vulnerability of South Vietnam's military forces and the instability of its political structure, which could be effectively exploited by stepping up the war in the South. To this end, Lê Duẩn (himself a southerner*) steered a resolution through the Politburo that granted the authority to wage war in the South* and ordered a buildup of the North's conventional army to bring the war to a speedy end before the Americans could successfully intervene militarily. Going forward, political struggle would support military struggle, not vice versa as had been true to date.72
All of this was unknown to Johnson and his advisors, who believed that contingency planning would leave them in control, and that if it came to the use of force, they could turn it up or down, on or off as quickly and easily as adjusting a thermostat. But this assumption was an illusory coping mechanism on the part of increasingly desperate men. Control had begun to slip away from them. McNamara's assistant for Vietnam, John McNaughton, hinted at the self-delusion of those in LBJ's inner circle who felt unable to control a rapidly deteriorating situation. "The trouble with you," McNaughton told Bundy aide Mike Forrestal that spring, "is that you always think we can turn this thing off, and that we can get off of it whenever we want. But I wonder. I think if it was easy to get off of it, we would already have gotten off. I think it gets harder every day, each day we lose a little control, each decision that we make wrong, or don't make at all, makes the next decision a little harder because if we haven't stopped it today, then the reasons for not stopping it will still exist tomorrow, and we'll be in even deeper."73 What McNaughton said to Forrestal applied just as well to Johnson and the troika. This hallucination of command, rooted in their confidence that all equations were solvable and that they were smart enough to do so now, gulled men vexed by an intransigent problem.
Lê Duẩn (on far right)
Keystone Pictures USA/Alamy Stock Photo
Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy discussed these contingency plans among themselves and presented their recommendation to Johnson on May 26. They told Johnson that worsening circumstances might soon force him to initiate military action against North Vietnam. Johnson often talked through his deliberations both for nervous relief and to think out an issue and, hesitant to make such a decision, he turned to others for advice the next day. First he called U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson. "I shudder at getting too deeply involved over there, and everybody thinks that's the only alternative," he lamented. Stevenson sympathized: "I've been shuddering on this thing for three years and I'm afraid that we're in a position now where you don't have any alternatives. It's a hell of an alternative and it really gives me the shakes."
As soon as Johnson hung up with Stevenson, he called Richard Russell. An astute politician, whose low-key manner masked razor-sharp political judgment, Russell—called "Mr. Defense" by his Senate colleagues—had followed developments in Vietnam since the first Truman commitments in the late 1940s. Their exchange was so telling that it deserves to be quoted in detail.
JOHNSON: What do you think of this Vietnam thing? I'd like to hear you talk a little bit.
RUSSELL: . . . It's the damn worst mess I ever saw . . . I knew that we were going to get into this sort of mess when we went in there and I don't see how we're ever going to get out of it . . . I just don't know what to do.
JOHNSON: That's the way I've been feeling for six months.
RUSSELL: It appears that our position is deteriorating and it looks like the more that we try to do for them, the less that they're willing to do for themselves. It's just a sad situation. There's no sense of responsibility there on the part of any of their leaders . . . It's a hell of a situation. It's a mess. And it's getting worse. And I don't know what to do . . . You've got over there McNamara . . . he's a can-do fellow. But I'm not sure he understands the history and the background of those people out there as fully as he should . . . The damn thing ain't getting any better and it's getting worse . . .
JOHNSON: I spend all my days with Rusk and McNamara and Bundy . . . and all those folks that are dealing with it and I would say that it pretty well adds up to them now [telling me] that we've got to show some power and some force . . . Their feeling is that . . . we haven't got much choice . . . that we are there, that this will be a domino that will kick off a whole list of others, that we've just got to prepare for the worst . . . Now I have avoided that for a few days. I don't think the American people are for it . . . I don't think the people of the country know much about Vietnam and I think they care a hell of a lot less.
RUSSELL: Yeah, I know, but you go to send a whole lot of our boys out there—
JOHNSON: Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. That's what I'm talking about . . . I don't want to do anything on the basis of just the information I've got now . . .
RUSSELL: It's a tragic situation. It's just one of those places where you can't win. Anything you do is wrong . . . I have thought about it. I have worried about it. I have prayed about it.
JOHNSON: I don't believe we can do anything—
RUSSELL: It frightens me 'cause it's my country involved over there . . . If you . . . bring North Vietnam into it too, it's the damndest mess on earth. The French report that they lost 250,000 men and spent a couple billion of their money and two billion of ours down there and just got the hell whipped out of them . . .
JOHNSON: . . . The whole question, as I see it, is, is it more dangerous for us to let things go as they're going now, deteriorating every day . . . than it would be for us to move in?
RUSSELL: We either got to move in or move out.
JOHNSON: That's about what it is.
RUSSELL: . . . It would be consistent with the attitude of the American people and their general reactions to go in, because they could understand that better. But getting out, even after we go in and get bogged down in there . . . it's going to be a hell of a mess. It would be worse than where we are now, to some extent, and that's what makes it so difficult . . . McNamara is the smartest fellow that any of us know, but . . . he is opinionated as hell, and he's made up his mind on this.
JOHNSON: . . . I think he's a pretty flexible fellow. He's gone out there. He got Khánh to agree that we cannot launch a counteroffensive or hit the North until he gets more stabilized and better set in the South and he thought he was buying us time and we could get by till November. But these [Republican] politicians got to raising hell . . . All the Senators, Nixon and Rockefeller and Goldwater all saying, "Let's move, let's go into the North!" . . . They say pick out an oil plant or pick out a refinery or something like that. Take selected targets. Watch this [Hồ Chí Minh] trail they're coming down. Try to bomb them out of the[re] when they're coming in.
RUSSELL: Oh, hell! That ain't worth a hoot! That's just impossible.
JOHNSON: McNamara said yesterday that in Korea that LeMay and all of 'em were going to stop those [North Korean] tanks. There's 90 came through. They turned all the Air Force loose on them. They got one. 89 come on through.
RUSSELL: We tried it in Korea. We even got a lot of old B-29s to increase the bomb load and sent 'em over there and just dropped millions and millions of bombs . . . They would knock that road at night and in the morning, the damn people would be back traveling over it . . . We never could actually interdict all their lines of communication although we had absolute control of the seas and the air, and we never did stop them. And you ain't gonna stop these people either.
JOHNSON: Well, they'd impeach a President they thought would run out, wouldn't they? . . . Wouldn't that pretty well fix us in the eyes of the world, though, and make it look mighty bad? . . . I've got a little old sergeant that works for me over at the house and he's got six children and I just put him up as the United States Army, Air Force, and Navy every time I think about making this decision and think about sending that father of those six kids in there. And what the hell are we going to get out of his doing it? And it just makes the chills run up my back . . . I just haven't got the nerve to do it, and I don't see any other way out of it.
RUSSELL: I wish I could help you. God knows I do 'cause it's a terrific quandary that we're in over there. We're just in the quicksands up to our very heads. And I just don't know what the hell is the best way to do about it.
Sharing LBJ's doubts and sympathizing with his predicament, Russell had not offered a solution to his problem, and Johnson's anxiety about Vietnam remained undiminished. Feeling cornered and frustrated, he turned next to Bundy, who, along with Rusk and McNamara, had begun pressing him to take action. Johnson the decider wanted Bundy the recommender to feel the pressure and burden weighing on him.
JOHNSON: I'll tell you the more that I stayed awake last night thinking of this thing, the more . . . it just worries the hell out of me. I don't see what we can ever hope to get out of there with, once we're committed . . . I don't think it's worth fighting for and I don't think that we can get out. It's just the biggest damned mess that I ever saw.
BUNDY: It is. It's an awful mess.
JOHNSON: . . . What is Vietnam worth to me? . . . What is it worth to this country? . . . Of course, if you start running from the Communists, they may just chase you right into your own kitchen.
BUNDY: Yeah, that's the trouble. And that is what the rest of that half of the world is going to think if this thing comes apart on us. That's the dilemma.
JOHNSON: But everybody I talk to that's got any sense in there says, "Oh, my God, PLEASE give this thought." . . . This is a terrible thing we're getting ready to do.
BUNDY: . . . I'm not telling you today what I'd do in your position. I just think the most we have to do is to pray with it for another while . . .
JOHNSON: Did you see the poll this morning? 65% of 'em don't know anything about it and of those that do, the majority think we're mishandling it. But they don't know what to do. That's Gallup. It's damned easy to get in a war but it's gonna be awfully hard to ever extricate yourself if you get in.
BUNDY: It's very easy. I'm very sensitive to the fact that people who are having trouble with an intransigent problem find it very easy to come and say to the President of the United States go and be tough.74
Griping to Bundy did no better at helping Johnson solve his problem.
Locked in his dilemma, Johnson took refuge in self-pity, a common response in times of stress that encourages people by virtue of a sense of impotency to defer hard decisions and to project a preemptive alibi for failure. This hindered Johnson from coming to terms with the predicament confronting him. Such irresolution soothed Johnson in the short run but would prove harmful in the long run. Johnson "was not so stupid that he didn't know that he was pushing his problem ahead of him," Bundy later said. "And he knew that it was going to be there as a great big nuisance."75 Nevertheless, Johnson huddled.
At the same time that Johnson authorized contingency planning for air attacks against North Vietnam, he initiated secret diplomatic contact with Hanoi through J. Blair Seaborn, Canada's representative on the International Commission for Supervision and Control, the body established to monitor compliance with the 1954 and 1962 Geneva Accords. Seaborn relayed a combination of carrots and sticks, telling Hanoi that if it agreed to cease its support for the Vietcong, Washington would provide it economic aid and diplomatic support; otherwise, it could anticipate American air attacks. Hanoi—still confident it could win a stepped-up war in the South—had no intention of abandoning its goal of reunification or responding to what it perceived as coercive U.S. threats: compromise amounted to a demonstration of weakness that would only embolden the Americans. ("The more concessions we make, the more insatiable they will be," said a secret resolution passed by the Politburo the previous December.76) Foreign Minister Pham Van Dong told Seaborn that the precondition for settlement would be American withdrawal from South Vietnam and acceptance of Vietcong participation in a "neutral" coalition government. He hastened to note, however, "that there was no reason to fear that the [Vietcong] would take over a coalition government."*77 Dong ended by stressing, prophetically, that Hanoi and the Vietcong would "struggle regardless of sacrifice."78
Neither side stood ready to compromise or, just as important, to define mutually satisfactory options—a key ingredient to success. Defining mutually satisfactory options does not come naturally, note negotiation experts Roger Fisher and William Ury. "People involved in a negotiation rarely sense a need for them. In a dispute, people usually believe that they know the right answer—their view should prevail . . . Judgment hinders imagination."79 Thus, Washington and Hanoi remained determined to do and endure whatever might be necessary to see the war to a conclusion satisfactory to it. This meant no negotiations for the foreseeable future. The Seaborn mission, moreover, only provoked the chiefs to step up their campaign for escalation. "The time for continuing a monologue of 'messages' that repeat the substance or maintain the intensity of our past effort seems to us to be well past," they wrote McNamara and the president on June 2. "We should not waste critical time and more resources in another protracted series of 'messages,' but rather we should take positive, prompt, and meaningful military action to underscore our meaning that after more than two years of tolerating this North Vietnamese support we are now determined that it will stop."80
In this atmosphere of growing pressure from the chiefs, Johnson authorized extension of a covert action program against North Vietnam, codenamed PLAN 34A, first discussed at Honolulu on November 20 and begun in early February. Intended to counter North Vietnamese infiltration of men and materiel into South Vietnam along the Hồ Chí Minh Trail in neighboring Laos and Cambodia and from barges along the coast, PLAN 34A included sabotage and propaganda missions against North Vietnam by South Vietnamese commandos as well as Taiwanese and Filipino mercenaries advised by U.S. personnel. Aircraft dropped agents into North Vietnam to blow up rail and highway bridges and high-speed boats launched hit-and-run attacks along the North Vietnamese coast. Electronic intelligence-gathering patrols by specially equipped U.S. naval vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin, codenamed DESOTO, intercepted North Vietnamese radio and radar signals triggered by the PLAN 34A missions and relayed them to a marine corps signals intelligence (SIGINT) unit at Phú Bài and a navy SIGINT unit at San Miguel in the Philippines. (Similar DESOTO patrols had been conducted for years off the coasts of China, North Korea, and the Soviet Union, which paralleled Soviet intelligence-gathering patrols off America's East and West coasts.) Although by June PLAN 34A had accomplished very little—the rigid Communist control structure of block committees in towns and villages detected and reported all unusual movements—the chiefs nonetheless asserted its potential "remains high" and urged its extension.81 They especially wanted to gather information on the location and frequency of Soviet anti-aircraft missile and radar stations along North Vietnam's Tonkin Gulf coast as part of their contingency planning for air attacks against North Vietnam. Johnson acceded to their request.
PLAN 34A raids against North Vietnam resumed in July on instructions from the chiefs, as did DESOTO patrols operating in international waters. The closest approach to North Vietnam of the DESOTO patrols was set at eight miles to the mainland and four miles to the offshore islands—distances informed by the conclusion of legal experts that international waters extended to three miles offshore. This was the same limit established by France when it controlled Indochina, as well as by other Communist countries like Cuba, Poland, and Yugoslavia.* PLAN 34A and DESOTO operated in the same general area at the same general time—a convergence that led the North Vietnamese to mistakenly assume they were connected. In fact, the approval process and operational scheduling of each was compartmentalized: the CIA controlled PLAN 34A and the Joint Chiefs, through MACV, controlled DESOTO. In Washington, each department and agency of government (then and now) zealously guards and fences off its turf—an abiding fact of bureaucratic life that inhibited senior Johnson administration officials from looking at PLAN 34A and DESOTO in an integrated way, which might have led them to see the danger that the North Vietnamese could reasonably associate the programs and therefore view DESOTO patrols as a provocation. The chiefs had ordered the commander of DESOTO patrols to maintain contact with the CIA so that they could avoid "mutual interference," but senior administration officials did not know this and therefore did not ponder its possible implications from a North Vietnamese perspective because no senior civilian official had followed the planning for either PLAN 34A or DESOTO. In hindsight, senior officials should have viewed PLAN 34A and DESOTO as operationally in unison and weighed the implications before approving the patrols. Their negligence proved a fateful error.
On the night of July 30–31, South Vietnamese boats on a PLAN 34A mission raked the offshore islands of Hon Me and Hon Ngu with machine-gun and cannon fire, triggering radar signals and radio traffic that was picked up by the USS Maddox, a destroyer then steaming into the Tonkin Gulf on a DESOTO patrol. The Maddox passed near Hon Me Island the next day82 and continued monitoring North Vietnamese communications. In the early afternoon of August 2, as the Maddox approached ten miles off the Red River Delta, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats emerged from the estuary. A local North Vietnamese naval commander acting on his own initiative, without orders from Hanoi,83 connected the American ship with the shelling of Hon Me and Hon Ngu and struck back, attacking the Maddox in international waters sixteen miles from the coast, inflicting slight damage.
Word reached Washington a few hours later. Johnson initially seemed "bewildered about what had happened," recalled a State Department official who briefed him on the attack that morning. "He couldn't understand why they had done it."84 Maxwell Taylor, now fully installed as U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, spoke for himself and the chiefs when he urged the president to retaliate, arguing that failure to do so would be construed as an "indication that the U.S. flinches from direct confrontation with the North Vietnamese."85
Johnson chose not to strike back. Instead, he ordered the DESOTO patrol continued with a second destroyer at a further distance from the North Vietnamese coast, and sent Hanoi a diplomatic note through Seaborn warning that "grave consequences would inevitably result from any further unprovoked offensive military action" against U.S. ships in international waters. Johnson thought these steps would keep the incident from escalating into a confrontation and would deter—not invite—further North Vietnamese attacks. Even if, as McNamara now realized and pointed out to him the following day, the North Vietnamese might have associated PLAN 34A with DESOTO, it seemed fantastic to Johnson that such naval lightweights would take on the massive destructive forces of the United States.
Amid all this, Johnson's overriding concern remained the election three months away. Just weeks earlier, on July 16, the Republican Party had nominated ultraconservative senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona at its convention in San Francisco. Goldwater had won the nomination on a right-wing platform that included a hard line on Vietnam (America should be "carrying the war to North Vietnam") and a withering condemnation of Johnson's "Munich-like appeasement" in foreign policy. In his acceptance speech, Goldwater had declared that "failures infest the jungles of Vietnam . . . I needn't remind you, but I will, it has been during Democratic years that a billion persons were cast into Communist captivity and their fate cynically sealed. Today we have an administration which seems eager to deal with Communism in every coin known . . . even human freedom itself." Goldwater then added: "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." His words had drawn loud applause from the audience. Johnson felt extraordinarily sensitive to Goldwater's criticism and made this clear when speaking with McNamara on the morning of August 3: "The people . . . want to be damned sure I don't pull 'em out and run . . . That's what all the country wants because Goldwater is raising so much hell about how he's gonna blow 'em off the moon. And they say that we oughtn't to do anything that the national interest doesn't require, but we sure ought to always leave the impression that if you shoot at us, you're gonna get hit."86
Within hours, another PLAN 34A operation took place. Less than a day later—at 7:40 P.M., August 4, Vietnam time—the commander of the Maddox, Captain John Herrick, reported intercepting North Vietnamese communications* that, combined with radar readings and sonar soundings*, indicated preparations for a second attack on his ship and its companion destroyer, the C. Turner Joy. Johnson received word of these concerns shortly afterward (just after 9 A.M., August 4, in Washington), and two hours later, the Maddox reported being under attack. Having absorbed the first attack without retaliating, Johnson felt stung by an apparent second one. This time he responded swiftly, ordering a retaliatory strike against the North Vietnamese bases that had launched the torpedo boats and a nearby oil storage depot. As McNamara later put it, "How in God's name did they think we would react to the idea that North Vietnam could attack a U.S. naval vessel in international waters and not receive some response from the United States?"87 Johnson's anxiety to preempt any accusation that he was "soft on Communism" and irresolute on Vietnam reinforced his decision.
A canny politician with a keen sense of timing, Johnson understood how to exploit a situation to his advantage, and the moment seemed an ideal one to submit the draft resolution the troika had been working on to Capitol Hill. "You know that resolution?" he told Bundy shortly after receiving reports of a second attack on the morning of August 4. "Well, now's the time to get it through the Congress." Johnson knew that Congress hesitated to question the president in an atmosphere of crisis—the flag had been challenged on the high seas—and he liked having as many fingerprints on his policies as possible. Congressional support for his Vietnam policy would blunt pressure from the Right, defusing the fragile and volatile issue as he went into the fall presidential campaign. It would also protect him later if things went wrong—which he remembered Truman had failed to do in Korea. (As Johnson vividly put it, "I want Congress in on the take-off as well as any crash landing.") Bundy wondered about the rush and urged Johnson to slow down and lay the groundwork for a resolution of such import by building public and congressional understanding and support first. But Johnson wanted no argument from his national security advisor; he had made up his mind. "I'm not asking you for a discussion," he told Bundy in a voice edged with anger. "I asked you for the resolution. I want you to do it."88 Johnson made himself equally clear to McNamara.
Within a few hours, however, information reached Washington that raised doubts about the second attack. Low clouds and thunderstorms made visibility in the Tonkin Gulf that moonless night extremely difficult. Crewmembers of the Maddox were young, inexperienced, and jittery. At 1:27 P.M., Captain Herrick cabled Washington: "Review of action makes many reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. Freak weather effects on radar and overeager sonar men may have accounted for many reports. No actual visual sightings by Maddox. Suggest complete evaluation before any further action taken."89 Throughout the afternoon, messages flew back and forth between the Pentagon and U.S. Pacific Fleet headquarters in Honolulu trying to nail down exactly what had happened. Shortly before 5 P.M., McNamara met with the chiefs to review everything that had been learned. Three factors stood out: one of the destroyers had allegedly observed torpedo boat cockpit lights; the Maddox had intercepted and decoded a North Vietnamese message apparently indicating that two boats had been sunk; and U.S. Pacific Fleet commander Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp told McNamara that no doubt now existed that a second attack on the destroyers had been carried out.*90 When Johnson informed congressional leaders of his decision in the Cabinet Room at seven o'clock that evening and the American people by televised address at 11:30 P.M., he treated the attack—despite a lack of hard evidence—as a given. Johnson did not have all of the facts, nor had he waited for them before making a firm judgment. "What really mattered to Lyndon Johnson in 1964 was the election politics of these events," Bundy later explained. "He had decided to hold back from retaliation after the attack of August 2. That left him less firmly and effectively anti-Communist than he wanted to be. The report of the second attack gave him a second chance. He had been patient, and people liked that; now he could also be firm, and most people would like that even better."91 McNamara's interrogation of the chiefs had been done "on behalf of a president who had already committed himself to having a resolution and a speech and had air time."92 "For God's sake, tell me this thing happened," LBJ told Bundy that night, "because I have scheduled a speech to say it happened, I have told the Congress I am going to go after a resolution, and if I cancel this speech, the press is going to say, 'What the hell are you doing?' So I sure as hell hope this is right." "The Lyndon Johnson pressure to get the answer 'Yes, it happened' was on very heavy," recalled Bundy.93
As noted earlier, it is rarely possible to have all of the facts. We live in a world of considerable complexity and uncertainty, and we simply don't have the time or capacity to calculate all of the probabilities and risks inherent in every choice. Cornell University's Thomas Gilovich has explained this dilemma. "Instead of providing us with clear information that would enable us to 'know' better," notes Gilovich, the world "presents us with messy data that are random, incomplete, unrepresentative, ambiguous, inconsistent, unpalatable, or secondhand . . . It is often our flawed attempts to cope with precisely these difficulties that lay bare our inferential shortcomings and produce the facts that just ain't so."
This produces the "illusion of validity"—people's tendency to "be overly impressed by data that, at best, only suggests that a belief may be true." National Public Radio reporter Gregory Warner's account of the terrorist attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya, in September 2013 is a case in point. Warner based his account on eyewitness interviews—including with his personal friend Puni, who was at the mall that day. The eyewitnesses described ten to fifteen multiethnic gunmen (Somalis, Kenyans, Arabs—even a British woman they called "the white widow"), two wearing short-sleeved shirts, and one who escaped by dropping his gun and blending in with fleeing shoppers. When an FBI forensic team arrived in Kenya to investigate the attack, they gained access to all closed-circuit television (CCTV) footage taken in the mall during the attack. The footage revealed there were only four gunmen—all of them Somalis, none wearing short-sleeved shirts, and no evidence that any of the gunmen escaped. When Warner told his friend Puni what the FBI had learned through the CCTV footage, she still resisted accepting the evidence because it did not match her emotions from that day.94 "Willingness to base conclusions on incomplete or unrepresentative information is a common cause of people's questionable and erroneous beliefs," concludes Gilovich.95 As a result, people conclude too much from too little.
People exhibit the related tendency to focus on confirmatory evidence when they gather information relevant to a particular belief. When trying to assess whether or not a belief is valid, explains Gilovich, "people ask questions or seek information" that "lend credence to their hypothesis."96 Peter Wason of University College, London, conducted an experiment a few years after Tonkin Gulf that confirmed this tendency. Participants received four cards, each with a letter and a number—A, B, 2, or 3—on opposite sides. Participants were asked to determine, by turning over one card at a time, whether all cards with a vowel on one side had an even number on the other. Most participants turned over the A card first, then the 2 card—even though a B on the other side of the 2 card proved nothing, while turning over the 3 card and finding an A on the other side would invalidate the hypothesis.97
Cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier of the French National Center for Scientific Research in Lyon and Dan Sperber of the Central European University in Budapest observe that deciding without all the facts makes evolutionary sense, given that humans do not have the luxury to analyze "big data" prior to every decision. People think about a situation only to the extent necessary to make sense—but perhaps only superficial sense—of it. Such "early closure" can lead to premature drawing of conclusions.98 Reinforcing this is what Steven Sloman of Brown University and Philip Fernbach of the University of Colorado have identified as the "illusion of explanatory depth"—people's belief that they know much more than they actually do.99 An experiment conducted at the University of Liverpool known as the "bicycle problem" illustrates this phenomenon: participants who rode bicycles and were deemed good artists were asked to sketch an image of a bicycle. A majority of them drew bicycles that would be nonfunctional, such as attaching both wheels to the chain.100 As we have seen before, "confirmation bias" compounds the problem. Raymond Nickerson of Tufts University notes that people tend to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts those beliefs. This unconscious selectivity in the acquisition and use of information leads people to dismiss evidence of new or underappreciated threats. "People can and do engag