Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 (30 page)

Yet American military officials in Saigon believed the Vietcong and North Vietnamese were approaching the long-awaited point at which they could not put troops in the field fast enough to replace their dead. In the first half of 1967 the body count was up to 7,316 Vietcong and North Vietnamese a month. MACV’s attrition charts, which did not include local enemy militia, showed that the number of enemy troops had declined from 275,000 men in late 1966 to 242,000 in mid-1967. Westmoreland declared in August 1967 that “Enemy armed strength is falling, not spectacularly and not mathematically provable, but every indication suggests this. . . . There is evidence that we may have reached the crossover point.” Victor Krulak was unimpressed. He remembered a similar claim by General Paul Harkins in 1963, a decline in Vietcong from 124,000 men to 102,000. No such decline had taken place. Then at the end of 1967 Westmoreland estimated that more than 220,000 enemy troops were dead. “Wastefully, expensively, but nonetheless indisput-edly, we are winning the war,” Komer proclaimed. “We are grinding the enemy down by sheer weight and mass.” Krulak’s pessimism was wiser. The United States was spending $2 billion per month on the war, and although the communists had taken severe casualties, Saigon and the Americans were not killing the 250,000 troops a year necessary to slow down the enemy.

Westmoreland and Komer also took cheer in the growing success of the Chieu Hoi, or Open Arms Program. Launched in 1963 by Robert Thompson, Chieu Hoi offered amnesty to Vietcong and attracted thousands of deserters by 1967—Komer claimed more than 40,000. At the end of American involvement in 1973, Americans would be estimating that 159,741 Vietcong had deserted. But critics called the program “R and R” for Communists.” Most genuine defectors were low-level Vietcong who had never been enthusiastic about their commitment; the others were Vietcong plants trying to infiltrate the program. Some changed sides as many as five times during the war. William E. Colby, the pacification leader and later CIA chief, estimated that in 1969 and 1970 only 17,000 of the reported 79,000 Chieu Hoi converts were sincere. But Westmoreland and Komer were true believers.

There was other encouraging evidence, good enough at least for true believers. The Vietcong were having trouble by 1967 getting new recruits, primarily because so many millions of South Vietnamese were in refugee camps. The population of Saigon had swelled from 1.4 million in 1962 to 4 million in 1967, and it was also more difficult for the Vietcong to slip recruits out of the cities. Intelligence reports indicated that Main Force Vietcong battalions were no longer at peak strength of from 600 to 700 troops. But Hanoi was replacing the Vietcong with regular North Vietnamese troops in numbers sufficient to augment total communist strength.

While Westmoreland’s confidence in military victory continued to inspire Johnson, Rusk, and Rostow, Lodge became one of an increasing number of defectors. He had decided that Westmoreland was applying World War II tactics to a modern guerrilla war and that he was incapable of incorporating political variables into his strategic thinking. In April 1967 Lodge retired to Boston. Lodge’s replacement was Ellsworth Bunker. Bunker, heir to the National Sugar Refining Company fortune, was a multimillionaire who had become a Democrat during the 1930s. In the 1950s and early 1960s, he filled ambassadorial posts in India, Argentina, and Italy. A New Englander with an obsessive taste for maple syrup (he had it flown fresh to Saigon) and all the reserve of his Yankee forefathers, Bunker earned the title of “Mr. Refrigerator” from the Vietnamese in Saigon. In May 1967 Bunker was prepared to give his entire support to William Westmoreland and the war effort. Lodge’s departure had deprived Johnson of his only independent point of view in Saigon.

Sir Robert Thompson, the British expert on counterinsurgency, lost faith as well. Ever since 1961 he had warned against a military solution to the political problem in Vietnam, and when he saw Westmoreland unleash the killing machine, Thompson knew immediately that the United States was on its way to failure. “American policy in South Vietnam,” Thompson warned Lodge, “is stupid. It doubles the firepower and squares the error. Every artillery shell the United States fires into South Vietnam might kill a Vietcong but will surely alienate a Vietnamese peasant.”

McNamara had been weakening since 1966, increasingly enduring the sickening awareness that he had been wrong, horribly wrong, and that hundreds of thousands of people were dead because of his decisions. The United States could not stop the flow of men and supplies from North Vietnam, not unless Washington was willing to unload strategic nuclear weapons on North Vietnam and Laos. In October 1966 McNamara wrote a memo warning the president that to “bomb the North sufficiently to make a radical impact on Hanoi’s political, economic and social structure would require an effort which we could make but which could not be stomached either by our own people or by world opinion.” As far as he was concerned, the United States had played with air power its last promising card and lost.

In May 1967 McNamara asked Johnson to stop the air war over North Vietnam, put a cap on troop levels, and seek a diplomatic settlement. The “picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed,” he told the president, “is not a pretty one.” McNamara was now skeptical of the attrition strategy and Westmoreland’s talk of the crossover. “The point,” he puzzled, “is that it didn’t add up. If you took the strength figures and the body count, the defections, the infiltration and what was happening to us, the whole thing . . . didn’t add up. . . . How the hell the war went on year after year when we stopped the infiltration or shrunk it and when we had a very high body count. . . . It didn’t add up.” In June McNamara commissioned a top-secret study. With the aid of Morton Halperin, deputy assistant secretary of defense, Leslie H. Gelb of Havard set out writing what within a few years would be known as the Pentagon Papers. But at the moment McNamara was asking Gelb to get the study under way, Johnson decided to rid his administration of McNa-mara. By the end of the summer the president managed to position McNamara for the presidency of the World Bank. In November 1967 McNamara resigned.

Within the larger division in Washington politics, some hard-liners had strong ties to the military: Senators John C. Stennis of Mississippi, Henry Jackson of Washington, Stuart Symington of Missouri, Gale McGee of Wyoming, Russell Long of Louisiana. Long denounced all “who encourage the Communists to prolong the war. I swell with pride when I see Old Glory flying from the Capitol. . . . My prayer is that there may never be a white flag of surrender up there.” The joint chiefs threatened to resign in mass if Johnson adopted McNamara’s proposal for de-escalation. In August 1967 Stennis, who chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee, convened hearings on the war. After listening to a parade of military officials, the committee concluded that “civilians had consistently overruled the unanimous recommendations of military commanders and the joint chiefs of staff.” At least one commander, Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, would later hold the line on paper even after it had crumbled in the real world: “We could have flattened every war-making facility in North Vietnam. But the handwringers had center stage. . . . The most powerful country in the world did not have the willpower needed to meet the situation.”

Westmoreland and Walt Rostow meanwhile worked out specific plans for increasing the pressure on the communists. In particular, they wanted to implement heavy American bombing of Vietcong and North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia. They also looked to invading Laos and Cambodia and cutting the North Vietnamese supply lines along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Both men urged Johnson to permit Westmoreland’s “hook north of the DMZ” to trap the assembled North Vietnamese troops and stop their operations in I Corps. And they wanted a massive bombing campaign against every military and industrial target in North Vietnam. Their relentless trust in battle had begun to frustrate even the president. “Bomb, bomb, bomb, that’s all you know,” he fumed in response to a demand by General Wheeler for a multiplication of Rolling Thunder raids. To Westmoreland’s requests for more troops, he replied, “When we add divisions, can’t the enemy add divisions? If so, where does it all end?”

Increasing numbers of people in the Washington establishment criticized Johnson from the other direction. Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska had been early critics and in 1966 and 1967 other prominent legislators joined their ranks. Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the first of the new skeptics, was soon followed by Senators Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, Robert Kennedy of New York, George McGovern of South Dakota, George Aiken of Vermont, Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, Frank Church of Idaho, and Mark Hatfield of Oregon. Disillusioned legislators proposed everything from a bombing halt to a troop withdrawal to peace negotiations—anything but escalation. Several retired military officers also declared their opposition to the war. David Shoup, winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor at Tarawa and commandant of the Marine Corps under Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy, told a college audience in May 1966, “I don’t think the whole of Southeast Asia, as related to the present and future safety and freedom of the people of this country, is worth the life or limb of a single American.” General Matthew Ridgway, by then retired, called for a bombing halt, insisting, “There is nothing in the present situation or in our code that requires us to bomb a small Asian nation back into the stone age.” James Gavin spread the opinions he had shared with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1966, that the United States should shift to an enclave strategy. A “free, neutral and independent Vietnam” he declared, “can be established, with guarantees of stability from an international body.” Johnson wanted nothing of enclaves: We “can’t hunker down like a jackass in a hail-storm.”

In early 1965 Bess Abell, the White House social secretary, had suggested to Eric F. Goldman, the resident intellectual in the Johnson administration, that it would be nice to do something “cultural” during the spring social season. It was the sort of thing that Jack and Jackie, at their witty best fashionable and charming, had done so well at a dinner for Nobel Prize winners and the Pablo Casals concert. Johnson proposed a White House Festival of the Arts. Without thinking too much about it, he concluded that it would be a “nice thing” to do. The social secretary harbored a few reservations—“writers and artists. These people can be troublesome”—but she went along. Invitations were sent to leading artists in painting, sculpture, literature, music, dance, cinema, and photography. Goldman made certain that “no attention was given to politics, ideology, opinions or personal habits of the people chosen.” The list included a former communist, a number of radicals, and a liberal sprinkling of drunks. Almost everyone who was invited accepted, and a large number of people who were not invited tried to wangle an invitation.

The trouble started when one prospective guest decided that he could not in good conscience attend. After considerable thought, the poet Robert Lowell had concluded that his attendance might serve as a form of passive support for Johnson’s actions in Vietnam. In an open letter to Johnson published in the
New York Times,
Lowell wrote: “We are in danger of imperceptibly becoming an explosive and suddenly chauvinistic nation, and may even be drifting on our way to the last nuclear ruin. . . . I feel that I am serving you and our country best by not taking part in the White House Festival of the Arts.”

For Johnson—who after all was simply trying to do a “nice thing”—it was proof that “these people” did not like him. He believed they certainly would not have treated Jack Kennedy in such a fashion. And that the
Times
gave front-page treatment to the letter was proof that the entire eastern establishment opposed him. Although Johnson’s division between “them” and “us” was an oversimplification—most artists and intellectuals gladly accepted their invitations—it did contain a germ of truth. For “them” Johnson was the hick from the Hill Country of Texas, the cowboy who picked up puppies by the ears, proudly displayed his gall bladder scar, and held conferences while sitting on the john. The
New York Review of Books
editor Robert B. Silvers and the poet Stanley J. Kunitz drafted a public telegram to Johnson supporting Lowell’s position, and eventually more than twenty influential artists, writers, and critics signed the telegram. Vietnam, not the arts, had become the issue.

Feeling betrayed, Johnson threatened not to attend the affair, but in the end he showed up for a few minutes. The event turned into a nasty political get-together. John Hersey read from his book
Hiroshima,
published in 1946, and prefaced his reading by announcing, “We can not for a moment forget the truly terminal dangers, in these times, of miscalculation, of arrogance, of accident, of reliance not on moral strength but on mere military power. Wars have a way of getting out of hand.” The cultural critic Dwight Macdonald treated the festival as if it were a political rally. He offensively criticized his host, verbally assaulted guests, and worked to get signatures on a petition backing Lowell. “Having convictions doesn’t mean that you have to lack elementary manners,” Hollywood’s Charlton Heston scolded him. “Are you really accustomed to signing petitions against your host in his own home?” Johnson, gone before the fireworks started, announced loudly enough for the press to hear that “Some of them insult me by staying away and some of them insult me by coming.” At least, he added later to a friend, “nobody pissed in the punchbowl.”