Tucker's Last Stand (19 page)

As they made their way home, Goldwater and his one bodyguard and his driver in one car, Baroody and White in a second car, Baroody said to White, “I never saw him before exactly in this shape.”

“What do you mean?”

“The combination of indignation and despair. Well,” he said, unsmiling, as the driver approached his own house before driving White to the hotel, “at least we got him laughing about all the X's and little X's in the general's house.”

“Your aide knows exactly where to go?” the American Legion hostess asked the candidate. Goldwater nodded. “Fine. And no one will disturb you, I can assure you of that. You can even lock that door from the inside.”

Goldwater opened the door with some curiosity. It was a comfortable room with a large couch and three armchairs, a mirror for makeup and a private bathroom. He locked the door and sat down but immediately rose when he heard the knock. He approached the door:

“Who is it?”

“The general.” The voice was high-pitched and soft.

Goldwater opened the door and admitted a man dressed in a seersucker jacket and khaki pants, without a tie, a large American Legion badge pinned to his chest pocket. He was perhaps fifty years old, slender, his hair sandy brown, his face tanned by years of exposure to the sun. His smile was genuine and relaxed. They shook hands; the general sat down and went immediately into his subject.

“I can't tell you this with the finality I have reported other things, Senator, like 34-A and the documents on the Trail. But I think I have pieced together an operation designed to do several things. First, persuade the American people that President Johnson is going to take a stronger stand on Vietnam, and two, get from Congress a blank check on anything he proceeds to do. Which, you ought to know, is a hell of a lot less than what he ought to do.”

“Well, General, before we get into that, what exactly do you expect he's going to do?”

“One of the reasons I insisted on seeing you is that I have only pieces of information, and maybe you can put them together better than I can. Maybe between the two of us we can figure it out.”

“Well,” said Goldwater affably, “we may as well begin. We've got some time, but not all day.”

The general leaned forward and said:

“Two destroyers, the
C. Turner Joy
and the
Maddox
, have been instructed to initiate patrols closer to North Vietnamese and Chinese territory by sixteen miles than they ever came before. The
Maddox
has been ordered to cruise right up to
seven miles
from Dong Hoi, and then within eleven miles of Hainan, the Chinese island northeast.

“Now I can tell you this: There is
nothing
those two destroyers can accomplish up that close to enemy territory that they can't accomplish at the conventional thirty miles away. The 34-A fake fishing boats are getting all the close-in intelligence we need, and there isn't anything on those destroyers that will accomplish anything seven miles from shore that isn't being better handled by those little boats with the South Vietnamese crews.”

“What's the point, then?”

“There can't be any other motivation that I can think of except to provoke the NVA.”

“But why would the NVA permit themselves to be provoked? What's Ho Chi Minh got to gain by shooting a couple of torpedoes at U.S. ships?”

“That's what I don't have the answer to, Senator.
I don't know
why the NVA would do that. It isn't as though they had the resources to do a Pearl Harbor on us. So what if they hit the
Maddox
or the
Turner Joy
? So they have damaged or even sunk a U.S. destroyer, and run the risk of getting the United States into an all-out war with their country—”

Goldwater held up his hand. “Wait, wait. Another thing, General: What do the captains of those two destroyers, or for that matter the commander of the Seventh Fleet, what do they think they're accomplishing by going up that close?”

“I
can
answer that one. The CIA station in Danang has reported that intercepts of NVA military radio transmissions indicated that the NVA are on to 34-A, and are thinking of going out after those fake South Vietnamese fishermen. Our idea has got to be that a show of strength by the Seventh Fleet will nail down the freedom of the seas, which includes the right of the 34-A ‘fishermen' to go right up there to the three-mile limit. As far as the Navy is concerned, they're there to assert the U.S. three-mile rule.”

“Have the North Vietnamese proclaimed a twelve-mile limit?”

“That's something very curious. CIA has intercepted NVA messages in which they refer to a ‘twelve-mile limit' but there haven't been
any
public assertions on the subject.
None
. No complaints to the International Control Commission, to the U.N., to the State Department—none.”

“Does Admiral Sharp know about those radio intercepts?” Senator Goldwater's reference was to the CINCPAC in Honolulu.

“I don't know. I may be able to find that out. I'm already doing some discreet digging on that point. Right now I just don't know.”

Barry Goldwater had a faculty widely remarked by his staff of asking the same question of very nearly anyone he engaged in serious conversation. It didn't have to be a highly placed person close to him. It could be and had been known to be the hotel bellman or cleaning woman. He asked it now:

“What would you do, General, if you were in my shoes?”

The general was surprised, but not taken aback. “I don't know. The fact of the matter is, Senator, the Johnson administration has no
strategy
. They do have the big Igloo project I've told you about, to tie up the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and they're getting more and more data for that big notebook McNamara keeps filling up that results in no action that stops Ho Chi Minh in his tracks. I can guess only this: President Johnson isn't going to take any decisive action before the third of November. And I haven't seen anything to suggest that they have a strategy for
after
the election. But whatever you decide to do, I figured you ought to know what's going on.”

Goldwater paused. “Did you see the business on television night before last? The little girl with the daisies?”

“I didn't see it. I might as well have; it's the talk of the Pentagon. And I'm not the only officer there who was pissed off about it.”

“You don't happen to know if LBJ knew about that commercial. I mean ahead of time?”

“Senator, there isn't
anything
relating to his campaign the President doesn't know about ahead of time.”

A knock. Goldwater rose, went to the door and said in a voice loud enough to be heard at the other side, “
I'm coming, I'm coming. Joe, take the folder back to the office. See you later
.” He turned to the general and whispered; “Thanks, General—” he smiled, “Eggs. You are a good man. I mean, a good general.”

“Good luck, Senator.”

They shook hands.

18

July 27, 1964

Saigon, South Vietnam

For their next meeting in Saigon, Rufus took the precaution of calling Tucker into town one day before Blackford. His message said merely that he was calling him in from Nakhon Phanom one day before their joint meeting “to give you a few hours of leisure in a city where you can order a decent meal.” Blackford flew in from Danang on Air America, went directly to the apartment (a different one, of course) to which they had been directed. Tucker had spent several days making tests and his mood was transparently high. He welcomed Blackford warmly, as Rufus did, in his own way.

They drank iced tea. Rufus gave a general account of the political picture. Not much there, really, that they hadn't picked up on Voice of America and in
Stars & Stripes
, though as Rufus spoke of the political picture it was clear that it was freighted with the suspense that attached to coexisting anomalies that couldn't go on too long without colliding. North Vietnam was technically at peace with South Vietnam. South Vietnam was technically at peace with North Vietnam. The United States was technically at peace with North Vietnam. The Geneva Accords forbade its signatories, including the Soviet Union and North Vietnam, from doing what they were nevertheless blatantly doing. Codicils to the SEATO treaty and to the Geneva Accords pledged the United States to defend a nation being aggressed against. And nothing—nothing decisive—was being done to reify, and then act conclusively on, reality.

“The only thing we are doing that is unambiguously legal,” Rufus sighed, an amused-bitter sigh, “is what you are up to, Tucker. Because what we do in Thailand, at Nakhon Phanom, in order to close down the Trail in Laos, is of no theoretical concern to the North Vietnamese, since Laos is a foreign country, pledged to neutrality.”

Blackford tilted his iced tea glass, swallowed, then said, “As a matter of curiosity, Rufus, what's legal in respect of North Vietnam isn't necessarily legal in respect of Thailand and Laos, is it? I mean, we're operating out of two independent countries—”

“No, it would not necessarily follow. But in this case it does. We have the permission of Thailand to proceed with Operation Igloo White, and under the 1962 Second Geneva Conference Accord, all parties are not only permitted to take steps to ensure Laotian neutrality, they are
urged
to take such steps.”

“Including bombing Laotian territory?” Blackford pressed the point. “After all, when we bomb the Trail with our Thai planes, we're bombing a foreign country.”

“We are not now bombing Laotian territory. We are
preparing
to bomb Laotian territory. Our motives in doing so are to put into effect a neutrality that was guaranteed to Laos, and by Laos. You speak like a lawyer, Blackford.”

“Rufus, considering what I've done for you in the last thirteen years, if I were a lawyer I would have to, as a matter of honor, disbar myself.”

“Now wait a minute, Blacky—” Tucker spoke up. “This business of what's legal and what isn't legal in these modern situations doesn't really work, does it? I mean, you're going to tell me the war I fought in in Korea wasn't a war because Truman called it a police action one year after swearing in a public ceremony to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution that says only Congress can declare war?”

“Declaring war is out of fashion,” Rufus said. “The atom bomb did that.”

“Yes,” Tucker said, his voice dimmed, the aggressiveness suddenly gone. “Hiroshima changed everything … didn't it?”

“I don't think so,” Rufus said. He was in his contemplative-analytical mode. “What it did change was the appetite to declare war. When a country declares war it is expected to use its maximum resources to win that war. We can't use the bomb in Vietnam—we all grant that. But the general fear of the bomb extends to a failure to use even the next echelon of modern weaponry. Hanoi and Haiphong would cease to exist if we were to drop half the bombs there that we are prepared to drop, so far as I can see, on the Trail. So? We fight with a third echelon—supplies, training, intelligence: support systems, essentially, while the enemy's use of its third echelon is decisive.”

“Decisive?” Blackford asked.

Rufus weighed his words even more carefully. “Contingently decisive, I should have said. The NVA are prepared to kill and to torture the entire South Vietnamese clerical class, the whole intellectual, educational, political, and religious infrastructure: that is what the Vietcong are doing right now, in the countryside. How much of that, backed up by conventional North Vietnamese military, will they need to do before winning? They have very nearly succeeded in seizing effective control of the Mekong Delta.”

Rufus's reference was to the dumpy southern one third of South Vietnam, sometimes called the rice bowl of Asia, which the NVA were reaching not only through exhaustive long marches down the 400-mile Trail, but also by shipping into the southern port of Sihanoukville in Cambodia. “But we must take such comfort as we can, gentlemen, in knowing that we are following the orders of a constitutionally elected government and that we are pursuing objectives which no one could judge dishonorable.”

“Rufus, when we get tried by Bertrand Russell in Sweden, I want you for my lawyer.”

“Blackford, if you go to trial in Stockholm, I shall long since have been hanged.”

Tucker found himself suddenly prompted to break his long-standing covenant never to refer to his role in creating the overweening dark cloud of the day, surely a capital crime in the statute books of Lord Russell and his assorted committees calling for unilateral disarmament. But he drew back before the words passed his lips. He said only, “I guess that gang would get us all, if they could.”

“And they'll need to get us to Stockholm to do so,” Rufus said. Had they been younger men, Rufus would have taken the moment to remind them to be alert at all times to security. But he was talking to men experienced in the trade in which they were engaged. So he asked instead, “How is it going, Blackford?”

Blackford spoke for half an hour about operations in Danang. “If you want a head count on the interdiction process we're subsidizing, prepared to be impressed. During the first seven months of this year, the South Vietnamese patrol boats we pay for, supervise, and give instructions to have inspected one hundred and forty-nine thousand junks plying nine hundred miles of coast north and south of Danang, mostly north, obviously. We have, by one reckoning, inspected five hundred and seventy thousand North Vietnamese fishermen. That's a cumulative figure, of course: some of the same persons have been stopped and inspected a half-dozen times. We have amassed an
armory
of Soviet materiel taken from apparently innocent junks. That part of 34-A—interdiction of subversive materiel and personnel—has become routine, and routinely successful in terms of the quantity of stuff we're stopping.”