They Marched Into Sunlight (32 page)

Locke’s central argument, echoed by General Taylor in his magazine piece, was that the Americans were “winning where it counts, that is, in the minds of the people.” Not the American people, perhaps, but the Vietnamese, or at least some Vietnamese. Newspaper accounts from Saigon that week reported “an intensifying anti-American mood” in the South Vietnamese capital, especially among students, professors, local journalists, and Buddhists who believed that the United States had rigged the election of General Thieu. But Locke’s countervailing argument that the Americans were in fact winning Vietnamese minds was based on signs of disarray within the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese ranks. There was ample evidence, Locke argued, that “the enemy is losing control of the people for his side. His recruitment has dropped off sharply, he is having food shortages, and he is having serious problems collecting Viet Cong taxes. Furthermore, he admits losing control over the people (see captured documents). This is a much more significant measurement of who is winning than territory gained.”

The enemy documents Locke cited included a captured letter dated August 8, 1967, that described a meeting that day attended by twenty-eight Viet Cong cadres. According to a CIA translation it noted seven problems:

1. The majority of the Viet Cong soldiers in Giong Trom district are tired of the length of the war.
   
2. They are afraid of air strikes, artillery and M-113 armored personnel carriers.
   
3. Leadership cadres do not want to work harder to indoctrinate guerrillas.
   
4. Many Viet Cong soldiers robbed or oppressed the people.
   
5. Many Viet Cong soldiers were undisciplined, used weapons to kill each other or have caused dissension among various units.
   
6. Many Viet Cong cadres were not dedicated politically.
   
7. Many Viet Cong soldiers were tired of warfare and did not think they would defeat the government of Vietnam or the Allies.
   

A second document, captured April 22, 1967, was addressed to all district committees and party chapters in the southern provinces. According to the CIA translation, it “expressed concern over the number of persons who rallied to the Government of Vietnam [meaning deserted from the Viet Cong to the allied forces] following Operation Cedar Falls in January, 1967, when a large number of cadres [approximately 530, by U.S. military estimates] took the opportunity to surrender…some because of personal dissatisfaction with the Viet Cong.”

Truth and falsehood, falsehood and truth. On that same Sunday at the midpoint of October, the Viet Cong were telling another story entirely through their propaganda channels. “President Johnson is now in a dilemma,” declared a broadcast on Liberation Radio, as translated by the CIA. “The Vietnamese problem is like an ox bone stuck in his throat. He can get this piece of bone out of his throat only if he agrees to undergo the pain of a surgical operation. But instead of doing this, he is trying to swallow another bone.”

Colorful metaphors were part of LBJ’s Texas storytelling tradition, but the ox bone analogy was not one the president could appreciate then, even if in its own way it came as close to the truth as most memos reaching his Oval Office desk.

T
HE DAYS OF
O
CTOBER
had been one hard swallow after another for LBJ. He had closed September by traveling to San Antonio on the twenty-ninth and delivering a speech that was described as an “upbeat” account of the war but was aimed primarily at negotiating a way out. The United States would begin a bombing pause, he said, if Hanoi indicated it would enter into “productive discussions” leading toward a negotiated settlement. “Why not negotiate now? so many ask me,” Johnson had said in that speech. “The answer is that we and our South Vietnamese allies are wholly prepared to negotiate tonight. I am ready to talk with Ho Chi Minh, and other chiefs of state concerned, tomorrow. I am ready to have Secretary Rusk meet with their Foreign Minister tomorrow. I am ready to send a trusted representative of America to any spot on this earth to talk in public or private with a spokesman of Hanoi.”

The most promising back channel to peace talks was already under way and involved Dr. Henry Kissinger, a Harvard professor who was serving as an informal consultant and middleman for the White House. Since midsummer Kissinger had been orchestrating contacts between a North Vietnamese diplomat named Mai Van Bo and two French civilians, Herbert Marcovich, a biologist, and Raymond Aubrac, an old friend of Ho Chi Minh. The Kissinger contacts and what was known as the San Antonio formula became linked, and discussions about negotiating a bombing pause dominated White House deliberations during the first half of October, even as the president and his aides expressed doubts that a pause would have any beneficial effect. Johnson was uncertain but leaning toward a pause, though in darker moments he suspected that the North Vietnamese were “playing us for suckers” and had “no more intention of talking than we have of surrendering.” Day after day the full measure of LBJ’s dilemma came into view.

On the evening of October 3, the president met from 6:10 to 9:32 with Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, CIA Director Richard Helms, National Security Adviser Walter W. Rostow, and Press Secretary George Christian. Aide Tom Johnson was in the room taking notes. At LBJ’s request, Rusk began with a report on his recent trip to the United Nations in New York, where the General Assembly had opened a new session. Rusk said he held “forty-seven bilateral meetings and one hundred in various groups” and could not find anybody who could tell him “what will happen if we were to stop the bombing.” Even the Russian foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, was no help, claiming that the Soviets had “given up any attempt to try to influence Hanoi.” When Johnson brought up the back channel negotiations, he was told there might be an answer in two days. “Kissinger told them that we are against waiting any longer, that we are getting impatient,” Rusk said. “Bo wrote a message which is on the way by air mail special delivery. In his phone call with Kissinger, Bo said something like talks will start after the cessation of bombing.”

Rostow jumped in, pointing out a semantic discrepancy, as well as revealing his own skepticism: “To correct that, it was that talks
could
start but no other assurances were given.”

Helms, the spy chief, then noted the vagaries of communications, even when they involved an issue of grave importance to people who usually had the most sophisticated technology in the world at their command. “There were some great difficulties,” he said of a conversation between Kissinger and his French contacts, “because we had an American who does not understand much French talking to a Frenchman who does not understand much English over a trans-Atlantic phone call. It is important that we wait and see what the written message actually says.”

LBJ rambled into a monologue about the deficiencies of his South Vietnamese allies. He said President Thieu had to be pressured to bring more progressive civilians into the government. He compared it to the situation when home rule was established in the District of Columbia and he had told the new mayor, Walter Washington, that there was “a need to ‘get with it’ out there.” South Vietnam needed programs for health and education and land reform. They had to show they knew what they were doing. And Westmoreland had to snap the South Vietnamese army into line. “They have got to get in where the fighting is,” Johnson said. “We cannot have our fatalities running higher than are on the [South] Vietnamese side. I want to know it first if this is a white man’s war, as so many people are charging.”

According to Tom Johnson’s notes, LBJ then turned his attention from the war to the antiwar. He had met with congressional leaders the night before, he said, and they had brought up the subject of a massive antiwar rally being planned for Washington on the weekend of October 21–22. The word from Capitol Hill was that the leadership “would nottolerate” the large demonstration, Johnson said. He had instructed McNamara to “get going on plans to protect the White House, the Pentagon, and the Capitol.”

McNamara reported that Warren Christopher, a deputy attorney general, was leading an interdepartmental task force on the October demonstrations. There were several key questions to be answered, McNamara added. “They would include whether the president should be in Washington or not.”

“Yes, I will be there,” Johnson responded. “They are not going to run me out of town.”

Certainly not, McNamara said, but nonetheless “the president’s presence in Washington may do more to stimulate than to calm it.” And there were other matters related to the protest that needed answers, McNamara added. “We have got to train the Washington police and the National Guard to handle this job. We also have to figure out how to arrest thousands and put them in jail if it is justified. The jails won’t hold the numbers that could be arrested.”

The conversation eventually circled back to the war.

LBJ brought up a captured document written by a North Vietnamese professor that “showed that the Gallup Poll in this country sustained them in Hanoi.” In the document the professor asked, “‘How can we believe anything Johnson says if his own people do not believe him?’”

McNamara said the Kissinger formula seemed the appropriate way to go if they stopped the bombing.

The president said he would not stop the bombing unless the North agreed “one, to meet promptly, and two, to push for a settlement.”

As they deliberated the bombing pause, McNamara said, it was important that they “know the facts” about the impact of Rolling Thunder, the operational name of the aerial bombardment of North Vietnam. It was a strategy about which McNamara now had grave doubts. As far back as February 1966, according to Vietnam historian Stanley Karnow, the defense secretary had shared those doubts privately with journalists, telling Karnow and other correspondents during a meeting in his hotel room in Honolulu that he believed “no amount of bombing” could end the war. In August 1967 he had testified at hearings on the air war conducted by the Senate’s Preparedness Investigative Subcommittee, chaired by Mississippi senator John C. Stennis and dominated by like-minded hawks who wanted to give the military the freedom to bomb at will in the North. At those hearings, which were closed to the press and public, McNamara had asserted that no amount of bombing could stop the enemy “short, that is, of the virtual annihilation of North Vietnam and its people.”

American planes had dropped nearly 1.5 million tons on the two Vietnams, more than they had dropped in the European theater during World War II—and some 864,000 tons on the North alone. Yet all through 1967 the effect of the bombing runs had been questioned in American intelligence reports. “The NV transport system has emerged from more than 30 months of bombing with greater capacity and flexibility than it had when Rolling Thunder started,” a CIA intelligence memorandum reported in September 1967. “The inventory of freight cars has been maintained and its carrying capacity increased; the number of trucks has also increased despite the high rate of destruction.”

Rusk was less dismissive of the impact. “If the bombing isn’t having that much effect,” he said, referring to the North Vietnamese, “why do they want to stop the bombing so much?”

Rostow, seeking to “sum up” from his perspective, said the bombing had cut industrial and agricultural production in the North and diverted nearly a half million men from other tasks. “If we stop the bombing, it will bring their economy back up and permit them to increase their commitment in the South,” Rostow said.

“I do not agree with that,” McNamara said.

Johnson shifted the conversation back to politics. He brought up the latest polls and said there seemed to be movement away from the administration position in recent weeks. “We need to get answers to all of these slogans which everybody is making up,” he said. “We need a few slogans of our own.” Then he framed the dilemma in a way that alarmed his advisers. They were hearing something they had not heard before.

“The president said he did not want any of the information which he was about to discuss to go outside of the room,” Tom Johnson wrote in his notes. “The president asked what effect it would have on the war if he announced he was not going to run for another term. He said if it were set either way today, the decision would be that he would not run.” He was “already in the goldfish bowl,” LBJ said, so it might be “good for all of those who want to have the job” to “come out with the programs and policies and let the American people decide who they believe should be their next president.”

Rusk was in no mood for such musings. “You must not go down,” he said. “You are the commander in chief and we are in a war. This would have a very serious effect on the country.”

“If I were to run again, I would be the first president to do it,” Johnson responded. “That is, no other president who has served for part of a term, then for a full term, has ever succeeded himself for another full term.”

“I don’t think you should appear too cute on this,” said McNamara. It was an interesting comment from a defense secretary who himself was burning out that October, privately losing confidence in the war he had prosecuted with such mathematic assuredness in earlier years. It was now obvious to his colleagues and the president that the defense secretary’s nerves were raw, even if he could hide the private sadness that overtook him occasionally in the privacy of his Pentagon office. While telling LBJ not to appear too cute, McNamara was already assessing his own way out, from his position, not the war—a job offer from the World Bank.

“What I am asking is: What would this do to the war?” Johnson continued.

“Hanoi would think they have got it made,” said Rusk.

“Our people will not hold out four more years,” Johnson said. “I want to get rid of every major target. Between now and the election, I am going to work my guts out. I would be sixty-one when I came back in, and I just don’t know if I want four more years of this. I would consider telling the American people that it is an awfully long period. But I am afraid it would be interpreted as walking out on our men. We are very divisive. We don’t have the press, the newspapers, or the polls with us, although when I get out into the country, it seems different than it is here.”