Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 (34 page)

The next morning the Wise Men met alone with Johnson. Wheeler was there at the beginning of the meeting, claiming that the Pentagon was not seeking a “classic military victory in Vietnam,” which prompted an incredulous Dean Acheson to ask, “Then what in the name of God do we have five hundred thousand troops out there for? Chasing girls?” Johnson waved Wheeler out of the meeting and went around the table. He received a lot of counsel but no reassurance. McGeorge Bundy then presented the collective wisdom of the group: “The majority feeling is that we can no longer do the job we set out to do in the time we have left . . . . We must begin to take steps to disengage. When we last met we saw reasons for hope. We hoped then there would be slow but steady progress. Last night and today the picture is not so hopeful.” Walt Rostow “smelled a rat . . . a put-up job . . . . I thought to myself that what began in the spring of 1940 when Henry Stimson came to Washington ended tonight. The American Establishment is dead.” So was Operation Complete Victory. Westmoreland would get neither his 206,000 new troops nor his invasions of Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam. When the meeting was over, Johnson concluded that “The establishment bastards have bailed out.”

Dean Rusk had also wavered, although he would never do it publicly. His sense of loyalty ran too deep. He had pushed the war for seven years, always with the conviction that it was necessary to save the world from “a billion Chinese armed with nuclear weapons.” Johnson had a deep-seated trust for Rusk, a trust born of shared rural beginnings. When Rusk urged Johnson to consider a partial bombing halt over North Vietnam as a start to a new peace initiative, Johnson listened, even though he remained skeptical. But in case there was even a glimmer of hope that Ho Chi Minh would respond, he wanted to try. “Even a blind hog,” the president said, “sometimes finds the chestnut.”

Lyndon Johnson was a broken man. His memoirs register that moment: “They were intelligent, experienced men. I had always regarded the majority of them as very steady and balanced. If they had been so deeply influenced by the reports of the Tet offensive, what must the average citizen be thinking?” Suddenly a president who lived to achieve consensus saw himself as a hated man. The near defeat at the hands of Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire, the entrance of Senator Robert Kennedy into the presidential race, and his own private polls indicating defeat in the upcoming Wisconsin primary convinced him that he had to take another look at Vietnam as well as his own political career. Johnson was feeling old in the spring of 1968, tired and finished.

Johnson’s health was a recurring anxiety. It was not uncommon for him to undergo physical examinations every week or call in a physician to look at him every day. His heart attack thirteen years earlier still frightened him. He had abdominal and throat surgery in 1965 and 1966, and during the course of his presidency more than forty precancerous lesions and one small malignant tumor were removed from his skin. Johnson was convinced he would not live out a second term. He even had a secret actuarial study predict his longevity: “The men in the Johnson family,” he said, “have a history of dying young . . . . I figure with my history of heart trouble I’d never live . . . another four years. The American people have had enough of presidents dying in office.”

Long before the Tet offensive, Johnson was giving serious consideration to retiring. Tet confirmed what his own body told him. The war was a cancer consuming his health, his political career, and his beloved Great Society. The idea of running again for president, of facing a full year of hostile crowds shouting obscenities, was unthinkable. Like few other presidents in American history, Johnson always had his nose to the political winds, and the spreading stink was undeniable. To avoid a divisive political campaign and prove his sincerity in seeking an end to the war, Johnson delivered a speech on the evening of March 31, 1968, that stunned the whole country. He told the American people that he was “reducing . . . the present level of hostilities . . . . I have concluded that I should not permit the Presidency to become involved in partisan divisions that are developing . . . . Accordingly, I will not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for . . . President.”

Hanoi’s leaders shouted for joy at the news. The war was over, if not militarily then certainly politically. Ho Chi Minh’s prediction that the United States would not sustain the war had materialized. In an interview with a French journalist in 1968, Giap defined Tet as “the most tragic defeat for the Americans. The Tet offensive marked a turning point in this war . . . . It burst like a soap bubble the artificial optimism built up by the Pentagon . . . . Gone, and gone for good, is the hope of annihilating the Liberation forces . . . . Gone are the pacification projects. They would have to start all over from scratch.” On April 1, 1968, Lyndon Johnson stopped all Rolling Thunder raids north of the nineteenth parallel, and two days later the North Vietnamese accepted the invitation to discuss the war. They were not serious, of course, any more than they had been in 1954 when they offered to talk to the French about Dienbienphu. Diplomacy was simply another tool in bringing about the final expulsion of the United States from Indochina.

But Johnson’s announcements did not constitute a real change in strategy, just tactical adjustments. Along with Walt Rostow, William Westmoreland, and Earle Wheeler, he still wanted to achieve the original goal of establishing a stable, noncommunist government in Saigon. The thrashing Westmoreland had given the communists at Tet was proof of American military superiority. That ARVN had fought its Tet battles with courage and discipline was even more encouraging. The weak link in the strategy was politics at home, Johnson believed. Withdrawing from the presidential race, rejecting the requests for more troops, and limiting the bombing of North Vietnam, Johnson hoped, could buy political time for his basic policies to succeed.

William Westmoreland also had to go, another political victim of Tet and, like his predecessor General Paul Harkins, a fatality of the General-Blimp image he had self-destructively embraced. Johnson brought Westmoreland home in April 1968 and named him army chief of staff. Before he left Vietnam, Westmoreland said that the “war cannot be won in the classic sense, because of our national policy of not expanding the war . . . [but we] denied to the enemy a battlefield victory . . . and arrested the spread of communism.” He returned to Washington unreconstructed. Johnson replaced him with General Creighton (“Fighting Abe”) Abrams.

While limiting the air war over North Vietnam and preparing the way for negotiations in Paris, Johnson was doing everything possible to shore up the political and military situation in Saigon.

At first the center of attention was the A Shau Valley, actually a series of several valleys and mountains in Thua Thien Province. By 1968 the A Shau Valley had become one of the principal entry points into South Vietnam from the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the staging area for most enemy attacks in I Corps. More than 6,000 NVA troops were in the valley, and Westmoreland and Abrams worried that they were ready for a second offensive. Designating the attack on the A Shau Operation Delaware, Westmoreland had B-52s pound the valley for a week in mid-April before sending in elements of the 1st Cavalry (Airmobile) Division, the 101st Airborne Division, the 196th Light Infantry Brigade, and the ARVN 1st Division to attack the enemy troops, supply caches, and bunkers. The battle raged for three weeks, costing the United States more than sixty helicopters. But the campaign killed 850 North Vietnamese troops, compared to 139 Americans, drove them out of a region they had controlled for years, and captured an unprecedented number of weapons.

By the time Operation Delaware was winding down in the north, Tet II was under way farther south. With the peace talks just weeks away, enemy troops maneuvered for position. On May 5, 1968, the communists launched 119 attacks on provincial and district capitals throughout South Vietnam. They attacked Saigon and Tan Son Nhut air base and got two regiments into the northern suburbs of Saigon and back into Cholon. They also fired 122-mm rockets into Saigon for several days. The U.S. 25th Infantry Division fought back, and tactical air strikes eventually dislodged the enemy. When the fighting ended, 160,000 more civilians were homeless.

By that spring Khe Sanh was becoming an embarrassment. The Tet offensive had distracted American attention from the outpost, but Westmoreland would not back away from his prediction that it was the real communist objective. The marines repulsed NVA infantry assaults on March 16-17 and again on March 29, but Giap was already in the process of withdrawing his troops from Khe Sanh. American troops were there without an enemy to fight, and Creighton Abrams wanted to get them out of Khe Sanh for use in other battles. In Washington there was concern about the political fallout of withdrawing from Khe Sanh. Clark Clifford, sensing the mood of the nation, wondered about “all the hoopla last year, the talk of Dienbienphu, of Khe Sanh as the western anchor of American defenses in I Corps, the doorway to the Ho Chi Minh Trail. How’s it going to look when we pull out?” Vo Nguyen Giap understood the dilemma: “As long as they [the Americans] stayed in Khe Sanh to defend their prestige, they said Khe Sanh was important; when they abandoned Khe Sanh, they said Khe Sanh had never been important.” Still, Abrams did need the men. The marines and air cav troops left Khe Sanh on June 13, 1968. General Rathvan Tompkins described what was left of the place: “Khe Sanh was absolutely denuded. The trees were gone . . . everything was gone. Pockmarked and ruined and burnt . . . like the surface of the moon.”

After Tet, Washington stressed the importance of shifting responsibility to the South Vietnamese. ARVN went from 798,000 to 850,000 troops, and Creighton Abrams conducted increasing numbers of joint American–ARVN military operations. ARVN troops received crash training programs in the latest military technology and equipment. It was not an easy task, for the South Vietnamese did not mind having the United States doing the fighting. After a visit to South Vietnam in July 1968, a frustrated Clark Clifford complained that it was still largely an American war and that “the South Vietnamese leaders seemed content to have it that way.”

The pacification programs were also expanded. The Vietcong had suffered terribly during Tet and might be vulnerable to a political as well as military offensive. Robert Komer left South Vietnam later in 1968 to become ambassador to Turkey and was replaced by William E. Colby. Colby, born in St. Paul in 1920, had graduated from Princeton in 1940 and spent World War II in the Office of Strategic Services fighting with the French resistance. After the war he earned a law degree at Columbia and in 1950 joined the CIA. In 1959 he became CIA station chief in Saigon. After three years there he returned to Washington to head the CIA’s Far East Division. A devout Roman Catholic, Colby saw life as a struggle between good and evil. In the sixteenth century, as Neil Sheehan perceived him, he would have been perfect as a soldier for Christ in the Jesuit order. Now the embodiment of evil was communism, and Colby viewed himself as an anticommunist crusader, a civilian soldier fighting for a free world.

Colby’s Phoenix Program put South Vietnam, with the assistance of CORDS and the CIA, to eliminating the Vietcong leadership through arrest, torture, conversion, or assassination. The South Vietnamese implemented the program aggressively, but it was soon laced with corruption and political infighting. Some South Vietnamese politicians identified political enemies as Vietcong and sent Phoenix hit men after them. The pressure to identify Vietcong led to a quota system that incorrectly labeled many innocent people as the enemy. By 1972 as many as 20,000 people, many of them Vietcong, had been assassinated. Phoenix undoubtedly hurt the Vietcong, though not nearly so much as the military campaigns during Tet and afterwards.

As the Phoenix Program was going after the Vietcong infrastructure, Colby launched the Accelerated Pacification Campaign to win over the loyalties of the 1,200 villages controlled by the communists. Using local militia to provide security and differentiate between Vietcong and nonpolitical families, the program set about land reform and economic development—clearing roads, repairing bridges, building schools, and increasing rice production. The program lasted until early 1970. By that time the Accelerated Pacification Campaign had redistributed more than 2.5 million acres of land to peasants and armed over 500,000 militia to protect villages from Vietcong attack. Those were substantial achievements, but they failed to counterbalance the destruction and dislocation that the killing machine was bringing to South Vietnamese peasants.

Back home the war was also taking its toll on American politics. It had destroyed Johnson, and was tearing up his party.

The heir to the Johnson wing of the party was Vice President Hubert Humphrey, born in South Dakota in 1911 but seasoned in the progressive Democratic politics of Minnesota. In 1944 he had become mayor of Minneapolis. He gained a national profile at the 1948 Democratic convention when he campaigned for a strong civil rights position in the party platform. Humphrey won a seat in the United States Senate in 1948 and was reelected in 1954 and 1960, firmly defining himself as a Democratic-party liberal, an advocate of civil rights, Medicare, and labor legislation. He made an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960 and in 1964 accepted the vice presidential spot. The next four years were the worst in Humphrey’s life. Johnson was contemptuous of him, calling him a “little boy who cries too much.” Shortly after the inauguration in 1965, Winston Churchill died, and instead of sending Humphrey to the funeral, Johnson asked Chief Justice Earl Warren to go. Humphrey never forgot the insult. Humphrey worried about escalating the war, and in retaliation Johnson froze him out of policy-making discussions. Yet as a loyalist, he did not go public with his doubts, and when Johnson withdrew from the race, Humphrey stepped up.