3. AMERICA AT WAR IN ASIA
Johnson raised the number of American military personnel in Vietnam from 16,000 to 184,000, from the beginning to the end of 1965, and to 385,000 in 1966, 486,000 in 1967, and 536,000 in 1968. He privately called it “a bitch of a war” and was haunted by the casualties, which got to 400 dead a week, spiking at the worst of the combat to twice that. It was the first war in history that was on television in the living rooms of the world every day. A vigorous debate arose in the United States over choosing between “guns and butter.” The administration solemnly asserted its ability to do both. Casualties rose with force levels and the theater commander, General William Westmoreland, compounded other problems by sending increasing numbers of men, as they arrived, on search-and-destroy missions, assuming that the more of the enemy could be lured into the South and killed, the more quickly the war would end. This was probably the greatest blunder of U.S. military history. Generals MacArthur (who died in 1984) and Eisenhower warned against ground war in Indochina, but both stressed that if such a war must be fought, the flow of men and supplies from the North had to be stopped by closing the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) on the 17th parallel and extending that through Laos, whatever the terms of the 1962 Neutrality Agreement (completely ignored by the North, which was hardly a surprise to Kennedy and Rusk, the American authors of the agreement.)
Unlike the practice in previous wars, draft calls were for a defined period, and combat duty tours were 6 months for the officers and 12 months for the lower ranks, not a great morale booster, and when a tour was over, the beneficiary of the elapsed time gratefully departed, even if he was exchanging fire with the enemy. Because of the immense lengths to which the American government went to make the lives of the Expeditionary Force in Vietnam as comfortable as possible, there was an unusually high percentage of support forces to combat forces, or “trigger-pullers.” Johnson himself exploded about “Ban Deodorant and Coca-Cola squads,” as there were not 200,000 combat troops and airmen even when there were over 500,000 Americans in country.
None of these command errors must take away from the great effort and many battlefield successes of the United States and its allies (the South Vietnamese became steadily stronger, the 50,000 South Koreans were very tough troops, and the Thais, Filipinos, and Australians provided modest numbers of competent forces). The full level of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong casualties will probably never be known, but must certainly have exceeded a million dead. But Ho Chi Minh and his chief collaborators were not interested in casualties. Contrary to Westmoreland’s calculations, there were no such pressures on North Vietnamese society from these horrifying casualties as would have afflicted any Western society. Similarly, though the United States bombed the North, Johnson had the mistaken idea that he was always on the verge of applying more pressure than the enemy could endure. U.S. intelligence had no concept of how fanatically trained and determined North Vietnam was after more than 15 years of Ho Chi Minh’s people’s paradise.
In the aerial bombing of an enemy it is quite in order to rule out certain targets for humanitarian reasons, but the air defenses and resupply routes and sources have to be destroyed and the infrastructure of the enemy reduced to rubble and maintained in that state. The Soviet Union provided the North with sophisticated antiaircraft defenses and the United States kept applying and reducing bombing pressure, which had the sole effect of emboldening the enemy, facilitating the resupply and redeployment of antiaircraft missiles, and unnecessarily deflating the morale of American airmen, who were superbly professional and about whose safety the president cared deeply (to the point of frequent insomnia). In addition, there were 300,000 Chinese support personnel in North Vietnam, liberating an equal number of North Vietnamese to serve as cannon fodder in the war in the South. Especially after the uproar over MacArthur’s suggestion of using Nationalist Chinese in Korea, there was not a thought to utilizing them here, even for the equivalent purpose of freeing up more South Vietnamese to fight the enemy.
As the war continued, draft calls increased, and Johnson moved to cancel university deferments, so it was not just the working classes and black ghettoes that were furnishing the involuntary soldiers but the middle class and upper-income groups as well; discontent with the war began to ripple very audibly. As the body bags returning the dead came back in increasing numbers and optimistic reports from the Pentagon and the high command in Saigon continued to pour forth, what became known as a “credibility gap” developed and seriously compromised the moral authority of the administration and the president. President Johnson had had less experience of direct military involvement than any holder of his office since Coolidge. Even Hoover (who died in 1964, aged 90 and a respected elder statesman, the Depression long forgotten), though a civilian, had seen a great deal of World War I in Europe. Lyndon Johnson was a congressman at the outbreak of World War II and served briefly in the armed forces, and was in combat, in that he was in a noncombat position on an aircraft that did come under Japanese fire. President Roosevelt ordered all members of the Congress to depart the armed forces (unless they cared to resign as legislators, which was also not particularly encouraged, and FDR had a high opinion of the young LBJ), and the theater commander, General MacArthur, did not miss the opportunity to award a silver star for combat bravery to the returning congressman. (It is not for contemporaries to asperse Johnson’s war service or MacArthur’s motives; the congressman volunteered, served, was in harm’s way, and was demobilized by the commander-in-chief, but some thought it a slightly slender pretext for the third-highest combat decoration.)
Whatever the reasons, Lyndon Johnson, a vehement and strenuous man, highly intelligent and anything but complacent, and in some respects an outstandingly capable president, was a poor war leader. He was always wobbling between more and less war and lost the support of both the hawks and the doves, of all but those prepared to give their president a blank check. In October 1966, when his polls had slipped badly and the midterm elections threatened to sweep out a great many of the crop of Democrats carried in on the landslide of two years before, Johnson met in Manila with the new president of South Vietnam, the capable General Nguyen Van Thieu. They agreed on the formula of the withdrawal from the South of all nonindigenous forces. This was the confession, instantly noted by all close observers, including those in Hanoi, Beijing, and Moscow (and Saigon and Washington), that Johnson was throwing in the towel. If all Ho Chi Minh had wanted was to win the war, he would have taken the deal, withdrawn, waited for six months after the American withdrawal, and then launched all his forces in a direct invasion of the South, with no possibility that the United States would again set a toe in that scalding cauldron of Oriental blood and tears.
Ho Chi Minh, born in 1890, an early communist, who had lived in New York, Boston, London (where he supposedly worked for the renowned chef Escoffier), and Paris, and for prolonged stages in Moscow and various parts of China and Thailand, had been one of the eminent figures of international communism at least since he took the leadership of the nascent Vietnamese communists in about 1943. He had led a life of frequent hardship, danger, and illness, and was a fervent believer in communism as the vehicle and carrier of the forces of history. He had petitioned Wilson for Indochinese independence at Paris in 1919 but did not receive a hearing, and he concluded that it had fallen to him to turn world history decisively. He would not accept merely the reunification of Vietnam. He would press on and decisively defeat the United States of America, the world’s leading capitalist power, and establish the inevitability of the communist triumph over all mankind. There is no other conceivable explanation for his rejection of Johnson’s offer of victory with a face-saving exit for the United States (in time for LBJ to be reelected, get back to the Great Society, and become the longest-serving president of the U.S. except FDR, a modestly more dignified exit than Mendès-France had arranged at Geneva in 1954 as the U.S. had certainly not been defeated as France had). Johnson had set forth to prevent the communist takeover of South Vietnam, and was now facing catastrophe on such a scale that he had neither the mind nor the stomach to win, had been let down by his inherited Kennedy-appointed advisers, had been misled by his generals, and had an opponent who wanted to throw the Americans into the South China Sea and didn’t care if he had to sacrifice illimitable quantities (for the North Vietnamese soldiers were a commodity) of men to do it.
In the off-year elections, the Republicans picked up 47 congressmen, three senators, and eight governorships, including Ronald Reagan in California, where he defeated the incumbent, Edmund G. Brown (who had ridden the Cuban Missile Crisis to victory over Nixon four years before), by over a million votes. Nelson Rockefeller became only the second person (after Thomas E. Dewey) to win three consecutive four-year terms as governor of New York. By 1967, the national atmosphere was of endless violence, demonstrations, mobs screaming obscenities at the police, the ingratitude of students and finally favored African Americans, and, overhanging everything, a war that the country seemed not to be winning and that the enemy seemed to have no interest in ending, even on favorable terms. All over the world, there were anti-American demonstrations in front of U.S. embassies and burnings of American flags. It was hard to reconcile with the long-standing American self-image of God’s own country, the envy and pride of all the world. Not knowing what to do next, Lyndon Johnson kept raising the draft calls for Vietnam.
Johnson had, with great courage and legislative skill, taken a giant step in the emancipation of the former slaves, but in doing so, he had forfeited the support of the white majorities in the South, which had voted for the Democrats since that party was founded by Jefferson and Madison 175 years before. And the white liberal majority that had been mobilized by the nonviolent protests of Martin Luther King, crystallized in the parliamentary genius of Lyndon Johnson, were wary of racial violence and rising crime rates. Johnson had been fiscally responsible and there was not a debt problem and, as always, war stimulated economic activity.
4. STRATEGIC REASSESSMENT
Robert McNamara had persuaded the president of the wisdom of his idea of simply allowing the Soviet Union to reach parity with the United States in nuclear throw weights and launch vehicles, even as America streaked ahead of Russia to the moon. The defense secretary believed that this would encourage substantive arms-control negotiations, and when he referred to the nuclear balance he proudly called America’s declining level of superiority in numbers and deliverable destructive capacity of nuclear weapons a beneficial development, even an achievement. Eisenhower’s policy of shrinking the personnel and devoting most of the military budget to the achievement of ever more sophisticated technology in delivery systems and invulnerability of retaliatory power, while capping defense spending at quite affordable levels, had been turned upside down. As if the bitter fruit of the Kennedy inaugural promises of burden-bearing and indiscriminate defense of the barricades of freedom were to send huge draftee armies into quagmires at the ends of the earth while America’s city cores burned, it all seemed to have been a terrible wrong-turning. And MacArthur’s view that draftee armies cannot be asked to give their lives for anything less than victory, in anything less than a high and direct national interest rose up like a cobra’s head over the whole harsh national public policy debate.
Despite McNamara’s generous gift of nuclear parity to the Soviet Union, there was no dividend in enhanced arms-control discussions. The Kremlin planned to blink momentarily in incredulity as it sped past the U.S. and became the world’s greatest power. Robert McNamara, like most of the Kennedy group, as the evidence poured in of their miscalculations, bailed out, leaving their president to face the discordant music in ever greater solitude. McGeorge Bundy, like McNamara himself, and the lesser claque of bright and best young men who had so dazzled the virtual frontiersman and alumnus of Southwest Texas State Teachers’ College, Lyndon Johnson, scurried out the back door of the White House into the long grass and, in many cases, into the burgeoning antiwar movement.
In June 1967, as it became clear that Egypt and Syria were about to attack Israel, Israel staged a preemptive strike. It smashed the Egyptian air force, occupied all of Sinai up to the Suez Canal, as it had in the Anglo-French scam of 1956 (Chapter 12), and pushed the Syrians back beyond the Golan Heights. As King Hussein of Jordan was persuaded by Egypt’s Nasser to fly to the aid of what was represented as Egypt’s victory (like Mussolini coming to assist in Hitler’s great victory in the west of 1940), Israel seized all the West Bank of the Jordan River and ended the division of Jerusalem, taking the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. It was a great victory, but Israel became an Alsatian goose, too full of Arabs. It occupied Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, giving Israel in its new borders a population that was only about 60 percent Jewish. Since Israel could not expel the Arabs it governed, there were obvious demographic problems. Further, since the only Palestinians the King of Jordan could now claim to represent were the majority of his own countrymen, he soon handed over (though officially only in 1971) being the spokesman of the Palestinians to the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the disheveled, bewhiskered, incomparably devious, and almost imperishably ubiquitous Yasser Arafat. For all seekers of a reasonable peace, it would prove a very poor trade, from a plucky king to an unmitigated terrorist.