Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 (24 page)

A few weeks earlier, Johnson had dispatched Robert McNamara, Earle Wheeler, William Bundy, and Maxwell Taylor to Honolulu to meet with General Victor Krulak of the Marine Corps and Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, commander in chief of the United States Forces in the Pacific. They agreed to send another 40,000 marines and army infantry to South Vietnam. But they also decided to keep American troops out of the Central Highlands, confining most of them to the northern coast of I Corps. Johnson approved the decision. Early in May the 173d Airborne Brigade, the first army combat troops, arrived to protect the Bien Hoa air base. Another marine battalion went to Chu Lai. By the end of May 1965 there were nearly 50,000 American troops in South Vietnam.

But Johnson wanted the middle road, and he refused to give Westmoreland full rein. Instead he took up the advice of James Gavin, a retired army general. Gavin, a West Point graduate in 1929, had won a Silver Star during World War II. Before his retirement in 1960, he earned his third star as a lieutenant general. John Kennedy appointed Gavin ambassador to France in 1961. The French let Gavin know that the Vietnamese were a relentlessly militaristic people, that the United States would bog down in the jungles just as the French had. Gavin decided that if American ground troops were going to be introduced to South Vietnam, they should be used only to defend“coastal enclaves”— major cities along the South China Sea. Securing all of South Vietnam would take a million troops and an entire decade, bringing severe casualties and bitter political debate. Better to use fewer soldiers to hold coastal enclaves. Such a strategy would prove to North Vietnam that the United States was willing to stay indefinitely in South Vietnam and make Ho Chi Minh more willing to settle the dispute diplomatically. The enclave strategy would also minimize American casualties, leaving the real bloodletting to the ARVN. The American people were willing to tolerate large contingents of American troops stationed indefinitely overseas—twenty years in West Germany and fifteen years in South Korea had proved that. What they would not tolerate was a long-term commitment with mounting casualties.

For the moment, President Johnson held to the enclave strategy along with bombing attacks on North Vietnam. American combat troops were confined to the major American bases but could patrol to a fifty-mile radius. The president hoped that such an approach would stop short of a full-scale ground war while buying time for the South Vietnamese government to stabilize and for the bombing raids to push Hanoi toward the negotiating table. Still worried about the political fallout over a serious escalation, that“that bitch of a war” might destroy“the woman I really loved—the Great Society,” Johnson did not truthfully explain his decision to the public. He said the troops were in South Vietnam to protect the bases. It was the perfect time to go to Congress to ask for more money. The GIs were already in the field, and the president insisted that they were there for self-defense. On May 4, 1965, Johnson asked Congress for another $700 million to support those troops, and the legislators quietly agreed. For the next three years President Johnson argued that in the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964 and the May 1965 funding vote, Congress had consented to the Vietnam War.

At this point the president tried to do what President Harry Truman had done in Korea—put together a multinational,“free world fighting force.” But Vietnam was not Korea. The British Prime Minister Harold Wilson argued that the war was a dead end and that Johnson should stop the bombing and seek a negotiated settlement. Charles de Gaulle of France was more blunt.“The United States,” he said,“cannot win this war. No matter how far they push it in the future, they will lose it.” Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines sent small contingents, and the South Koreans sent their vaunted Capital Division and a Marine Brigade to II Corps in October 1965 and the White Horse Division in September 1966. But that was all. It was going to be an American war.

Westmoreland came back with requests for more troops. The 23,000 military advisers, the 8,600 marines, the 20,000 engineering and logistical troops, and the promised 40,000 new combat troops would not be enough.“The enemy,” General Westmoreland's memoirs note,“was destroying [ARVN] battalions faster than they could be reconstituted.” General Earle Wheeler insisted that“the ground forces situation requires a substantial... build-up of U.S. and Allied forces in the RVN [Republic of Vietnam], at the most rapid rate feasible.” The generals wanted an end to the enclave strategy and the beginning of full-scale offensive operations. Wheeler insisted that the United States“must take the fight to the enemy. No one ever won a battle sitting on his ass.”

Westmoreland and Wheeler told Johnson in June 1965 that they needed another 150,000 troops. Dean Rusk was stunned by the request. Just a month before, the administration had been heatedly discussing whether to send 3,500 marines to protect Danang. Rusk asked Westmoreland whether there really was“a serious danger of complete military collapse within a relatively short period of time.” Westmoreland was brutally honest. ARVN“cannot stand up to this pressure without substantial US combat support on the ground.... The only possible response is the aggressive deployment of US troops.” As far as Westmoreland was concerned, it was time to get on with the war.

Not everyone was convinced. Johnson was frustrated that a“raggedy- ass, fourth-rate country like North Vietnam [could] be causing so much trouble,” and he worried that the war might get out of control. George Ball wanted Johnson to stop listening to the generals, limit American ground troops to 100,000, and withdraw if South Vietnam proved unable to carry its fair share. But Johnson's half-measures were frustrating him. As his memoirs recall, he saw that the situation had“reached the desperate point.... We had tried everything... to get... to the peace table.. . from November 1963 to 1965. And we had not succeeded. And we either had to run in or run out.”

Johnson's handling of the revolution in the Dominican Republic in the last week of April 1965 strengthened his resolve. A rebel movement led by Juan Bosch had overthrown the Dominican military government, and the CIA said communists were at work. Johnson sent 21,000 marines to seize control of the country, stabilize the government, and establish a regime favorable to Washington. The decision was popular with the public. Success in the Dominican Republic reassured Johnson and raised his hopes that enough soldiers could achieve similar success in South Vietnam.

But in Vietnam, enough was never enough. In General Earle Wheeler's retrospective judgment, by the summer of 1965“it became amply clear that it wasn't a matter of whether the North Vietnamese were going to win the war; it was a question of when.” At the same time Nguyen Cao Ky told Maxwell Taylor that more American ground troops were necessary if the country was going to survive the monsoon season. Johnson had approved a troop level of 95,000 in June, but Westmoreland and Wheeler wanted forty-four infantry battalions, another 100,000 troops. John McCone and Walt Rostow desired an escalation of the Rolling Thunder bombing raids. George Ball urged Johnson to find a way to get out before it was too late. On July 1, 1965, with his usual eloquence, Ball told Johnson he was facing a“protracted war involving an open-ended commitment of U.S. forces, mounting U.S. casualties, no assurances of a satisfactory solution, and a serious danger of escalation at the end of the road… . Once we suffer large casualties, we will have started a well-nigh irreversible process. Our involvement will be so great that we cannot—without national humiliation—stop short of achieving our complete objectives.” Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield told Johnson,“There is not a government to speak of in Saigon.” Maxwell Taylor, skeptical of what ground troops would be able to achieve, wanted Johnson to limit the troops to 95,000 men and stick to the enclave strategy.

Johnson sought the advice of Robert McNamara, whom he called“the smartest man I ever met.” Early in July McNamara presented his analysis. Summing up the three options already given, he sided with Westmoreland, Wheeler, McCone, and Rostow—expand the military effort against the Vietcong and North Vietnam until they had to negotiate or be destroyed. He proposed giving Westmoreland his forty-four battalions, mining Haiphong harbor, sealing off North Vietnam from all external commerce, and bombing to destroy munitions, fuel supplies, railroads, bridges, airfields, surface-to-missile sites, and war industries.

He wanted to call up 225,000 army reservists to active duty. Short of nuclear weapons, McNamara wished to bring every ounce of American firepower to bear.

The proposal was so far reaching and involved such an alteration in the nature of American policy that McGeorge Bundy took exception. The commitment was too open ended, the outcome too blurred, to justify such an investment.“If we need 200,000 men now for these quite limited missions,” Bundy wrote to McNamara at the end of June,“may we not need 400,000 later? Is this a rational course of action? … If US casualties go up sharply, what further actions do we propose to take or not to take?” What if the Chinese or the Soviet Union intervened? What if the bombing did not bring North Vietnamese diplomats to the table? What if the war went on for years without resolution? The terrible“ifs” multiplied.

Johnson turned for advice to the“Wise Men,” a group of elder statesmen who represented the American foreign policy establishment. If the United States ever had an aristocracy, it was these men—Ivy Leaguers with a wealth of experience in wielding power. Included in the group were Dean Acheson; Robert Lovett, a Wall Street investment banker and former secretary of defense; and John McCloy, for a time head of the World Bank. Johnson called them to the White House on July 10 to evaluate McNamara's proposal. In a letter to Harry Truman after the meeting, Acheson recalled listening to Johnson“complain about how mean every-one was to him … (every course of action was wrong; he had no support from anyone at home or abroad; it interfered with all his programs, etc., etc.)… . I blew my top and told him he was wholly right on Vietnam, that he had no choice except to press on… . With this lead my colleagues came thundering in like the charge of the Scots Grey at Waterloo.”

Still Johnson searched for a middle course. For political reasons withdrawal was out of the question, especially for a Democratic president familiar with the attacks directed at Truman in 1949 for the fall of China. Johnson was certain that the loss of Vietnam would“shatter my Presidency, kill my administration, and damage our democracy” while compromising American credibility around the world and encouraging communists to launch more“wars of national liberation.” But McNamara's proposal also threatened to be a political disaster. It placed the United States in a state of war emergency. To save his Great Society, Johnson had to appease both liberal critics of the war and conservative critics of the welfare state. So he accepted most of McNamara's advice but rejected the secretary's notion of a massive bombing campaign over North Vietnam and a call-up of reserves. Johnson listened to Dean Rusk, who argued that the United States“should deny to Hanoi success in South Vietnam without taking action on our side which would force the other side [China and the Soviet Union] to move to higher levels of conflict.”

Rusk wanted to keep limits on Rolling Thunder. Johnson agreed. Although he increased the number of sorties from 3,600 in April to 4,800 in June, the president kept them below the twentieth parallel. At the end of July, in a low-key speech, he announced the deployment of another 50,000 troops. It was a lie, or at least a half-truth. The president had decided to send another 150,000 and to abandon the enclave strategy. Few American presidents have made such colossal miscalculations.

The first rule in strategic thinking is political, not military: War leaders must be certain of the nature of their enemy; only then can they apply the proper level of force and know just what constitutes a victory. The Johnson administration, like its predecessors, had difficulty precisely defining the real enemy in Vietnam. At times policymakers talked vaguely of communism, while at other times they identified the Chinese, the North Vietnamese, or the South Vietnamese guerrillas as the real culprits.

The second rule of strategic thinking is also political: Leaders must maintain support for the war at home so people will make the necessary sacrifices. But here, too, Johnson had to be careful. Although the break between Moscow and Beijing and, beginning in 1966, the Cultural Revolution in China probably precluded direct Soviet or Chinese intervention, the administration worried constantly about the prospect of another Korea, an influx of Chinese troops, which the public would not tolerate. The Vietnam War, then, was going to be a limited war, in which political issues dictated military constraints. That did not bother Johnson, at least not at first. He promised Senator George McGovern of South Dakota,“I'm going up old Ho Chi Minh's leg an inch at a time.” Assuming that North Vietnam would cave in quickly to American firepower, the president thought the American people would tolerate heavy casualties in the short term if they saw victory and peace on the horizon. But when the North Vietnamese proved to be intransigent and long suffering, limited war became a horrendous political liability. The longer it went on, the more political support Johnson lost at home.

Yet another rule of strategic thinking that Johnson could not hold to is political: Leaders must remember that the military, like diplomacy, is simply a tool for achieving political objectives. The political objective was establishing a stable, democratic, noncommunist government in South Vietnam, but the United States was never able to correlate the use of military hardware with nation building. Saigonese politics were inherently undemocratic in the first place, and as the United States escalated the war and the volume of firepower, the war's sheer destruc- tiveness inevitably alienated more and more people in South Vietnam. Even a clear military victory over North Vietnam would not necessarily translate into the creation of a stable democratic regime in South Vietnam.