As the LBJ and McNamara series has evolved over the past eighteen weeks, readers were engaged, but time being what it is, I had the sense that they were mainly reading each entry as an excerpt.
For this and other reasons, there is now a book version available for pre-order. The publisher is Rivertowns Books in New York (https://tinyurl.com/2jc6ctf9). The book is also for sale at Bookshop.org, Amazon, or BN.com, and it is (or will soon be) available at practically all online bookselling sites. It can be ordered at bookstores with the ISBN 978-1-953943-55-2 for the print book at $17.95 and the ISBN 978-1-953943-57-5 for the ebook at $8.99. The book will be released November 12.
Having been thinking about this project for so long, I continue – really – to be surprised that in the vast array of books about the American decade in Vietnam, relatively little has been written about how so many people in leadership, especially President Johnson and Robert McNamara, the men most responsible for policy decisions, got those decisions so wrong.
This explanation is what the book is about.
Next week’s Substack is called “The Crucible of Choice,” about a recent BBC series “The Corridors of Power,” which contains a remarkable soliloquy from Jake Sullivan, now the national security adviser, apparently filmed several years ago.
Decision making, he says, is “an imperfect loop” of choices made by imperfect people faced with immensely complicated problems. This was the case in the Vietnam era, and it is still true in our time.
The war in Vietnam ended formally for the United States with the signing of what was called the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam, signed in Paris on January 27, 1973. In April with the last prisoners of war released, the remaining American troops left, leaving behind only a contingent of Marines at the U.S. embassy in Saigon.
The wars in Indochina did not actually end until the spring of 1975, with victories in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos for exactly the forces and ideologies that the United States had been there to defeat.
Whatever power and influence the USSR and the People’s Republic of China would have in Indochina thereafter, the countries of the region largely evolved according to historical patterns set long before the U.S. military was deployed to the region.
A united Vietnam is authoritarian, nationalist, and generally pragmatic when it comes to its economic development and alliances.
Cambodia no longer has a royal family. But it has a ruler in Hun Sen who came to power in 1985 and has now turned over the role of prime minister to his son Hun Manet. The population exceeds sixteen million – which means that it has recovered from the massacres of two million or more in the Khmer Rouge era, after the U.S.-supported regime was ousted in 1975.
And Laos is a one-party state on the margins of global awareness, notable for the mist-covered mountains where the CIA flew in support of the tribal people in the losing side of the conflict, many of whom have found a home in, among other places, Minnesota, where frigid winters must be a challenge.
As for the United States, the impact of our decade in Vietnam was profound and lasting. The United States had lost a war in which the country’s vaunted eminence had failed, for all the expended effort it was able to make – and notable afterward that the men responsible for it never expressed regret until Robert McNamara did. “Vietnam” is now a synonym for the limitations of American power and the rise of meaningful citizen advocacy for political and social change.
Lyndon Johnson went home to the Pedernales and to the chagrin of Lady Bird and his daughters resumed unhealthy habits for a man with heart problems that doubtless contributed to his death at the age of sixty-four in the same week that the Peace Accords in Paris were signed.
Bob McNamara was a vigorous fifty-one years old when he left the Pentagon. He spent thirteen years at the World Bank. It was in the early 1990s that we started to work together first on his memoirs and then on two other books, Argument Without End and Wilson’s Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing and Catastrophe in the 21st Century, a peroration on conflict that summarized McNamara’s considered beliefs on war.
It was around that time that McNamara called me to say that the filmmaker Errol Morris wanted to make a film with him to explore his views on war. My reaction was to warn my friend Bob (as he was to me) that Morris’s film would probably put him once again in the limelight of vituperation, just as the publication of In Retrospect had in 1995.
But that was not what happened.
In The New York Times, Stephen Holden’s review said:
“If there’s one movie that ought to be studied by military and civilian leaders around the world at this treacherous historical moment, it is ‘The Fog of War,’ Errol Morris’s sober, beautifully edited documentary portrait of the former United States defense secretary Robert S. McNamara…
“Stocky and slick haired, with rimless glasses and a grand corporate manner, Mr. McNamara appears to be an exceptionally articulate, self-confident man who came to this project prepared to deflect embarrassing questions about his personal responsibility for the debacle. While he readily confesses to having made serious mistakes of judgment, he will not admit to any grave moral failures.”
The film posters presented McNamara in his raincoat, a solitary figure — an image that I very much recalled myself.
In his 1995 national book tour for In Retrospect, McNamara appeared at a packed event in the atrium of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He was holding his own until near the end, when a Vietnam vet began to harangue him, and the audience seemed to approve of the protest. With cameras clicking and rolling, McNamara blurted, “Shut up!” There was a gasp in the room, including from me.
The next morning, at about 7 AM, McNamara knocked on my hotel room door and wearing that tan raincoat he so often wore and gray New Balance running shoes, and he told me he was going to hike (his word) along the Charles River. “I know what makes people so angry,” he said, “But I have to do this. I need to talk about the war and its lessons so we can prevent anything like it from happening again.”
He continued on his book tour, traveling alone, lugging a small suitcase and wearing that raincoat. We offered him security, but he declined.
Another notable moment took place at Time magazine’s seventy-fifth anniversary celebration at Radio City Music Hall in March 1998. Certain guests were asked to pay tribute to someone they greatly admired. John F. Kennedy Jr. chose McNamara and made this remarkable statement:
“After leaving public life and keeping his own counsel for many years, Robert McNamara did what few others have done. He took full responsibility for his decisions and admitted he was wrong. Judging from the reception he got, I doubt many public servants would be brave enough to follow his example. So tonight, I would like to toast someone I’ve known my whole life not as a symbol of pain we can’t forget, but as a man. And I would like to thank him for teaching me something about bearing great adversity with great dignity.”
McNamara was not present. In July the following year, Kennedy and his wife were killed in a crash of a small plane he was piloting.
On July 6, 2009, McNamara died. He was ninety-three. His family sent a note to those who had offered condolences, saying that in accordance with McNamara’s wishes, “there will be no funeral or memorial service and his ashes will be placed in Snowmass, Colorado, and Martha’s Vineyard.” McNamara’s widow from his second marriage, Diana Masieri McNamara, eventually interred a portion of the ashes under a large headstone in Arlington National Cemetery.
I wrote at the time, “I can hear McNamara’s gravelly voice and picture him waving his hand to lend emphasis to his determination not to be extolled – or denounced by a protestor – at a posthumous event. In different circumstances he might have been persuaded otherwise…But it would be inconceivable, I suppose, for his survivors to overrule McNamara’s fiat that the scattering of his remains be the only ceremonial recognition of his very full, very long, and very controversial life.”
Reconsidering McNamara all these years later, in the transcripts of his sessions with his editors, and all the other material in histories, memoirs, and tapes, especially Johnson’s, the judgment remains as McNamara himself recognized, that he could never be forgiven for what happened in the Vietnam war, but by facing it so personally and ultimately so openly, he could make a contribution toward preventing it from happening again. Even so, in Afghanistan and Iraq in the twenty-first century, the United States again waged wars with endings that resembled those in Indochina, especially in Afghanistan, and today confronts in China and Russia two great nations that each in its own way are dangerously determined adversaries.
**************************
This is the final installment of the series. Thanks to all who read it — numbering by Substack count in the thousands. A book version is in preparation with details on where and how to order it coming soon.
Here’s the link for the website page where people can watch the C-SPAN interview online : www.c-span.org/video/?536661-1/author-peter-osnos-lbj-robert-mcnamara-vietnam-war.
In an early morning phone call with Robert McNamara on January 31, 1968, Lyndon Johnson commented about observing his defense secretary the day before. “I looked at you…I thought you were so damn tired, you better go home to your wife,” the president said.
The Tet offensive was underway across Vietnam. The seizure of the Pueblo had happened, and a potential crisis involving possible nuclear leakage from a damaged naval vessel had been resolved,
“The result is, Mr. President, I’m really not up to date on Southeast Asia, I can’t tell you anything,” McNamara contended.
To which LBJ said, “The closer you get to leaving, the more I miss you and I just…there’s not anybody in this government that can say as much in as little time as you can.”
McNamara then went on to characterize what he thought of the Tet assaults:
“I think it shows two things, Mr. President. First, that they have more power than some credit them with. I don’t think it’s a last gasp action. I do think it represents a maximum effort in the sense of, they’ve poured on all of their assets, both in terms of personnel and materiel and this will set them back some, but after they absorb the losses, they will remain a substantial force…it probably relates to negotiations in some way. I would expect that they were successful here, then they’d move more forcefully on the negotiation front and that thinking that have a stronger position from which to bargain.”
The gist of the call was that McNamara was still clinging to the hope that negotiations to end the war in Vietnam might be started before he left office, and Johnson wanted McNamara to know how very much he thought and cared for him.
The cascade of events in Asia were leading to two significant dates: February 29, when McNamara would be formally replaced by Clark Clifford; and March 31, when LBJ would declare that he would no longer run for reelection. The emotional toll for both men had been profound, but unlike other political breaks based on policy failure, there was no acrimony or assignments of blame for what had gone wrong, at least to each other.
Reaching the end of In Retrospect, McNamara again seeks to justify why he had gone along with – or not gone publicly against – policies he strongly suspected would not succeed:
“Many friends, then and since, have told me I was wrong not to have resigned in protest over the president’s policy. Let me explain why I did not. The president (with the exception of the vice president) is the only elected official of the executive branch. He appoints each cabinet officer, who should have no constituency other than him…A cabinet officer’s authority and legitimacy derives from the president. It is also true, however, that, because of their frequent public exposure, some cabinet officers develop power independent of the president.
“To a degree, I held such power, and some said I should have used it by resigning, challenging the president’s Vietnam policy, and leading those who sought to force a change.
“I believe that would have been a violation of my responsibility to the president and my oath to uphold the Constitution…
“Simply put, despite my deep differences with Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam, I was loyal to the presidency and loyal to him, and I sensed his equally strong feelings toward me. Moreover, until the day I left, I believed I could influence his decisions. I therefore felt I had a responsibility to stay at my post.”
Lyndon Baines Johnson was as political as a man could be. Every move had a purpose behind it. The sincerity of Johnson’s commitments to his domestic policies, and the progress he was able to make, have meant over time that his presidency is regularly reevaluated for its positives — while always requiring that the Vietnam war offset any praise and render him in the end as broken.
Robert Strange McNamara was unsophisticated in his political judgments – which for LBJ meant that his word could be taken at face value rather than as a reflection of self-interest. McGeorge Bundy, by contrast, had just enough cynicism based on his years in and around the Kennedys and the Harvard elite culture to avoid the public aura of infallibility that was McNamara’s problem.
The Vietnam partnership destined to fail was a mismatch of personalities – earnestness to a fault for McNamara and a brew of insecurities and political calculations for Johnson.
On February 28, Johnson awarded McNamara the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House.
McNamara’s description of the occasion is poignant.
“For a person whose image is one of cool efficiency, I become very emotional at times, and so it was this day. When my turn came to speak, I looked at the president and began, ‘I cannot find words to express what lies in my heart today,’ then could say nothing more as I choked back conflicting feelings of pride, gratitude, frustration, sadness, and failure. Had I been able to speak, this is what I might have said:
“‘Today, I end 1,558 days of the most intimate association with the most complex individual I have ever known. Many in this room believe Lyndon Johnson is crude, mean, vindictive, scheming, untruthful. Perhaps at times he has shown each of these characteristics. But he is much, much more. I believe that in the decades ahead, history will judge him to have done more – for example, through such legislation as the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Great Society legislation – to alert us all to our responsibility toward the poor, the disadvantaged, and the victims of racial prejudice than any other political leader of our time. But for Vietnam, a war which he inherited – and which admittedly neither he nor we managed wisely – we would have been much further along in solving those problems.’”
The irony of McNamara’s feelings about American social distress and Johnson’s compassion was that the Vietnamese people’s lives and livelihoods were always considered much less important than U.S. objectives to defeat a determined enemy, communists whose elimination was worth whatever the cost.
McNamara’s emotional behavior at the White House ceremony was interpreted as a measure of how close he had come to a collapse – the suicide of one of his predecessors as secretary of defense, James Forrestal, in 1949 was invariably cited as a precedent. In the years to come, McNamara’s displays of emotion when with friends and at the time his book was published were seen as self-pity for his policy failure rather than remorse for the losses and injuries for so many American GIs and millions of Vietnamese.
Having spent so much time with him as an interlocutor, editor, media counselor and now a biographer of sorts, I think McNamara’s regrets were deep and genuine – for the war’s pointless violence and his role in them, which undid his belief in his abilities as a person who could manage, lead, and dispassionately advise. And it had hurt his family, especially Marg.
To end his narrative in In Retrospect, McNamara quotes LBJ’s letter to Marg: “Though our lives will change…we will not. Lady Bird and I will never change our feelings for both of you. They are lasting in admiration and gratitude. With love.”
And so Clark Clifford was handed the chalice. As an adviser to Johnson without portfolio, he had traversed from arguing against escalation in 1965 to supporting the build-up and bombing of 1966 and 1967. He came to the Pentagon at the moment the Joint Chiefs and General Westmoreland were making a case for increasing the U.S. commitment rather than capping it – and accepting it would most likely never succeed, as McNamara had come to believe.
Within a week, Clifford was with Johnson. To Brian VanDeMark and his editors for Counsel to the President, he would recount how soon he realized the inevitable, that the goal had to be to bring “this to an end on the best terms we can get”:
It was after listening to the generals in his first days on the job that Clifford thought: “Oh my God, this is hopeless. It is absolute folly for us to go on…I felt so strongly about it that I was not sleeping very well at night.”
On March 4, Clifford made the argument to the president, very much the same one that McNamara had made in the months leading to his departure. Johnson had him make the presentation to a group of senior advisers the next day. As VanDeMark writes: “Johnson, tellingly, did not challenge any part of Clifford’s analysis, but instead let him make his case without interruption.”
On March 31, at the close of a speech about Vietnam, LBJ announced that under no circumstances would he continue to run for another term as president. Instead, he would devote himself to the cause of a negotiated peace. Yet the war went on.
McNamara wondered:
“Why didn’t he, when he decided not to run, shift [policy]. Damned if I know. Except that he was the kind of a person that never wanted to say he was wrong. Maybe that was an explanation of it.
“But Jesus, I’d a hell of a lot rather than said I was wrong than go down in history as a guy that was totally wrong and refused to admit it. And if I had a few months left as president and I could shift course and I’d decided not to run and I was willing to pay the price of being charged with failures and having caused all these fatalities on this, at least I would begin to correct my error before I left…
“He and I had no conversation after I left. We had conversations after I left, but I never discussed that with him. So far as I know, he’s never discussed it with anyone.”
On January 16, 1981, the McNamaras returned to the White House, when President Jimmy Carter awarded Marg the Medal of Freedom for her work in founding the organization Reading Is Fundamental, a program to encourage disadvantaged youth to read. Marg was at the end of a long battle with cancer and died seventeen days later.
The Vietnam war was long over. Lyndon Johnson had died in 1973. On his first day as president in 1977, Carter had pardoned draft dodgers. Bob McNamara would carry on until he died in 2009, trying to explain himself and also serving causes to restrain the spread of nuclear weapons, deal with global poverty, and engage with his former Vietnamese enemies and U.S. colleagues to understand why the war had been such a disaster.
He traveled the world and arranged meetings in Hanoi and other locales with historians, journalists, former colleagues, and former enemies. He went to Cuba to revisit the Cuban missile crisis with Fidel Castro, among others. He attended conferences and wrote articles for magazines and journals like Foreign Affairs. The objective was always the same: to reconsider every strand in order to reckon how all that happened came to pass, convinced that if the history was rendered correctly – the collection of data in its way – better or safer outcomes could be managed.
Here’s the link for the website page where people can watch the C-SPAN interview online : www.c-span.org/video/?536661-1/author-peter-osnos-lbj-robert-mcnamara-vietnam-war.
I have now heard from a number of people who have listened to the audio that they find it extraordinary. To hear McNamara explaining in detail and under my questioning why he believed Kennedy would have withdrawn and LBJ used 1964 to stall on making decisions about the war among other matters is, the word all use, is “fascinating.” So below is a direct link to the audio. A click will connect you and a second click will download it.
https://gofile.me/6Psdh/u0tEooeA9
Lyndon Johnson sent Robert McNamara back to Vietnam in July 1967 to assess General Westmoreland’s request for another huge deployment of troops – which McNamara had already said that he opposed in the May 19 memo. In their briefings, Westmoreland and his fellow generals insisted that American strength was turning around the conflict.
Brian VanDeMark writes that McNamara was, if not persuaded, then willing to reconsider the options one more time. The debate over additional deployment ended with a decision to add 45,000 troops. But that moment of optimism collided with demands in Congress for additional bombing, along with criticism, particularly of McNamara, for opposing the increase.
But even as McNamara was subject to criticism from the hawks in Congress and within the Johnson administration, he also had to contend with a growing anti-war movement among younger Americans, during what became known as the “Summer of Love” in 1967. This was followed in the fall by massive anti-war demonstrations at the Pentagon. Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, McNamara was being subjected to personal attacks from all sides as congressional demands for more air power and other hawkish criticisms were offset by increasingly vocal criticism from doves like Senator William Fulbright.
President Johnson also saw himself as a victim and complained to Rostow’s dovish deputy Francis Bator, as recounted by VanDeMark: “You doves think the pressures on me come from you…you are all wrong, The real pressures on me are on coming from people who want me to go North, mine the harbors, bomb Hanoi, get into a war with the Chinese – they’re crazies. That is where the real pressures are. I am the boy with his finger in the dike protecting you doves from the crazies.”
VanDeMark continued: “After he finished, Johnson walked around his desk, picked up a bumper sticker, and showed it to Bator, almost with tears in his eyes. The bumper sticker read: ‘All the Way with LeMay,” a reference to the now-retired Air Force chief of staff (and McNamara’s World War II commanding officer) Curtis LeMay, who advocated bombing North Vietnam “back to the stone age.” LeMay was extreme but far from alone in urging ferocity.
Policy confusion, work fatigue, family-related distress, and denunciations from Congress and anti-war activists were all grinding on McNamara. The Senate Armed Services Committee’s Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee, chaired by Senator John Stennis, held hearings in August 1967 that McNamara described as “one of the most stressful episodes in my life.”
How stress so depletes the body and judgment is one of the main – obvious perhaps but nonetheless central — takeaways from the Vietnam-era record of McNamara and Johnson, the only two men responsible with a documented record that can be fully excavated.
In Road to Disaster, VanDeMark describes the mood as McNamara readied himself for the Stennis testimony: “McNamara’s opposition to intensifying the aerial assault…worsened the growing split between him and Johnson. During a Tuesday Lunch on August 8, McNamara opposed the Chiefs’ recommendation for increased air attacks around Hanoi and Haiphong, saying such actions risked Chinese intervention, threatened to kill hundreds of civilians, undercut the prospect of sparking negotiations, and were certain to inflame domestic protests.”
“It doesn’t look as though we have we have escalated enough to win,” Johnson insisted.
McNamara replied that the heavier bombing “would not necessarily mean that we would win.”
Johnson retorted: “We have got to do something to win.”
The president, growing impatient, told McNamara that he would face heat at the hearings.
“I am not worried about the heat,” McNamara replied, “as long as I know what we are doing is right.”
VanDeMark writes: “‘It was quite a scene,’ a White House aide recalled, both men going back and forth, tempers rising. Finally, Johnson told McNamara, in effect, you are on your own – I won’t pull the rug out from under you, but I am not accepting your argument, in just that way, right now.”
Describing his testimony, McNamara writes in In Retrospect, “I spent all day patiently and systematically … explaining the inherent limitations of bombing. I said we had learned that no amount of it … would allow us to win” — except on a scale of destruction and death that would have exceeded Hiroshima and Nagasaki – though he did not say so explicitly.
“The subcommittee issued a unanimous report severely criticizing me for micromanaging the war,” McNamara writes.
The committee said: “We cannot, in good conscience, ask our ground forces to continue that fight in South Vietnam unless we are prepared to press the air war in the North in the most effective way possible…Logic and prudence requires that the decision be with the unanimous weight of professional military judgment.”
Immediately after McNamara finished his testimony, VanDeMark continues, Johnson called him and gave him “a full blast of presidential anger,” an aide recalled, and Johnson remarked to another aide, “I forgot he had only been president of Ford for one week” before Kennedy had appointed him defense secretary — an exaggeration, although McNamara had only served a month in that post.
Johnson’s anger was less about the position McNamara had taken than that he had done it publicly. McNamara had never done that before. And the breach was serious.
McNamara disputes an account years later asserting that the Joint Chiefs had decided to protest McNamara’s position by resigning en masse. But, as contentious and divided as the air war debate had become, the record indicates that the major consequence of all the differences was that ultimately it was Johnson who would have had to resolve them in a way that his political instincts and insecurity about being commander-in-chief prevented him from doing.
As VanDeMark writes, “The accumulated anguish, frustration, and pressure on Robert McNamara reached the tipping point in early November 1967. After years of grappling with Vietnam and struggling to make American policy there work – a policy that he, more than anyone else had crafted and managed – the proud, self-assured man who had come to Washington… believing every problem had a solution, “finally bit the bullet,” as he later put it, and concluded that the massive American military effort in Vietnam could not succeed.”
This was the background for another memo from McNamara to the president on November 1, which went well beyond the May 19 memo in establishing that McNamara no longer could be in a leadership role for the war. He advocated capping troop deployments; stopping the bombing in hopes, at last, of getting into meaningful negotiations with Hanoi; and turning the fighting over to the South Vietnamese – which the Nixon administration would later call “Vietnamization.”
In the editorial sessions for the book, McNamara castigated himself for not taking his advocacy to its logical conclusion: a U.S. withdrawal and full acceptance of the reality that had been John F. Kennedy’s belief and, at core, McNamara’s as well. The United States could not win a war that the South Vietnamese were unable or unwilling to wage themselves. The Stennis hearings in August and the massive demonstrations at the Pentagon in October (which surprisingly went off without serious violence) framed the situation: Hawks demanding more war, protestors demanding the end.
In the vortex were the president, privately in such despair that Lady Bird’s hopes that he would not run again were foremost in her diaries, and McNamara, who could no longer reconcile his role as an adviser to the president with whom he was at a breaking point on Vietnam – the singular link the two men had.
By continuing to present American military force in Vietnam as essential to defeating communism, the fact that vast numbers of civilians and soldiers were being killed was not an argument for accepting defeat. Disputes over tactics and strategy are the narrative texts of memos and the reflections contained in McNamara’s memoir, which is why his remorse was interpreted so widely as regret for himself rather than for the war’s victims.
So why did McNamara initiate the moves which led to his departure from the Johnson administration?
“What was in my mind…I felt that [Johnson] was not prepared to accept my conclusions which were that we could not achieve our objective militarily, that we would have to change our objective…I can no longer have influence on him and I no longer, therefore, need to feel that for me to leave is walking away from my responsibility. If I can’t be influential and I can’t change my judgment on what to do and I can’t get him to do it, then I should leave. I mean it’s that cycle of judgment.”
No American officials were publicly advocating an end to the war for the sake of the lives of Vietnamese people. The case for victory was to preserve the credibility of American power and resistance to communism.
The publication of In Retrospect ignited rage because McNamara had revealed that he had reached his judgment on the war in 1966 and 1967 but he would never say so in public, remaining silent about the war until his book was released in 1995.
After leaving the administration, McNamara acknowledged, “I just turned off.” He rationalized this with the position that he could not publicly challenge his successors on policies that he had been so involved in devising. He could not and would not turn on Johnson personally, nor would he openly dispute the strategies of General Westmoreland and the Joint Chiefs. As Julia Sweig relates in her book on Lady Bird’s diaries: “McNamara was being eased out by the president even as the defense secretary felt a growing pull to resign. Still, the Johnsons adored him. Lady Bird had ‘seldom felt as sorry for’ Lyndon, and McNamara’s departure caused ‘great loneliness and separation’ for them both.”
Johnson never responded to McNamara’s November 1 memo. He did again convene the Wise Men – the outside advisers including Dean Acheson, Clark Clifford, and now McGeorge Bundy, who, not aware how far McNamara’s disillusion had extended, after consideration endorsed staying the course in the war.
But the endgame was proceeding.
Several unseen maneuvers intersected. McNamara showed interest in the presidency of the World Bank, a position that the American president could fill. Johnson, deploying his political touch, brokered the appointment, successfully avoiding the need to confront McNamara directly.
Clark Clifford was then identified as McNamara’s successor at the Pentagon, with the handover to happen in the first quarter of 1968.
McNamara’s resignation as secretary of defense was announced on November 29, 1967, and he would officially leave the job at the end of February.
In the meantime, all hell broke loose in Asia during January 1968. North Korea seized the USS Pueblo spy ship on January 23 and held the crew for eleven months, an excruciating embarrassment.
On January 30, the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese army launched the Tet offensive across the South, which in the tumult seemed an enormous show of force and a display of U.S. and South Vietnamese weakness. That is not actually what it turned out to be — the offensive was repulsed — but that was certainly the way it looked at the time. At this time of turmoil, the Pentagon was in transition.
The outgoing secretary of defense was widely considered at the edge or beyond a mental and physical breakdown, and LBJ was equally an emotional mess, which he would reveal in taped conversations and in the misery that Lady Bird witnessed nightly.
It was in a February 5 phone call with the Washington Star’s Jack Horner that Johnson vented his frustrations:
“I don’t admit this is a communist victory and I don’t think anybody but a goddamn communist admits it. That’s what I think. And I think they’re just using us, just playing games around us. And nearly everybody I talk to tries to find out what’s wrong with our boys, our country, our leadership, our men. Our president’s a liar, Westmoreland’s no good, anybody that differs with them. When McNamara leaves, why he becomes a hero! He was the goddamnnest screwball as long as he’s in there.”
Here’s the link for the website page where people can watch the C-SPANinterview online : www.c-span.org/video/?536661-1/author-peter-8osnos-lbj-robert-mcnamara-vietnam-war.
I have now heard from a number of people who have listened to the audio that they find it extraordinary. To hear McNamara explaining in detail and under my questioning why he believed Kennedy would have withdrawn and LBJ used 1964 to stall on making decisions about the war among other matters is, the word all use, is “fascinating.” So below is a direct link to the audio. A click will connect you and a second click will download it.
https://gofile.me/6Psdh/u0tEooeA9
As 1967 unfolded, the stress of hard work – Robert McNamara’s growing sense of the war’s inescapable trajectory, his differences with the Joint Chiefs on policy especially over bombing, Marg’s and Craig’s ulcers, and the pressure President Johnson put on himself and others – all this was becoming visible. In Retrospect quotes a diary entry by David Lilienthal, a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, saying that he had seen “a harassed and puzzled look in the no longer sprightly” secretary of defense.
Brian VanDeMark’s description of McNamara is especially vivid: “The intense strain of professional obligation and the agony born of guilt and destroyed illusions erupted to the surface in sudden and unexpected emotional outbursts,” he writes. “Jesus, it was an unbelievably stressful environment,” McNamara told VanDeMark and his editors. He was not the only official so affected. In In Retrospect, McNamara adds that Secretary of State Dean Rusk – whose stoic composure was a mask for his inner tensions and troubles within his family – would later write that he took to surviving on a diet of “aspirin, scotch, and four packs of Larks,” a brand of filtered cigarettes.
The transcripts of editorial sessions for In Retrospect convey the major shifts in mood through accounts of how memos came to be written, usually formal in style but generally clear in message. For every memo McNamara would share with the editors, we would urge him to describe the circumstances that led to them. The McNamara-Bundy “Fork in the Road” memo of January 1965, for example, had been a template for escalation after the circumspection of 1964.
Just as significant was a memo that McNamara sent to LBJ on May 19, 1967, his first written break with the president — which he may not have himself recognized was happening. The memo was lengthy, but its ultimate judgment came through unmistakably:
“The memorandum is written at a time when there appears to be no attractive course of action…”
“The Vietnam war is unpopular in this country…”
“The Army of South Vietnam is tired, passive and accommodation prone…”
“Hanoi’s attitude toward negotiations has never been soft nor open-minded….”
And then the peroration:
“There may be a limit beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the United States to go. The picture of the world’s greatest superpower…trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one…”
McNamara came down firmly against General Westmoreland’s latest recommendation of deploying as many as 200,000 additional American troops. “The war in Vietnam,” McNamara wrote, “is acquiring a momentum of its own that must be stopped.” Westmoreland’s request, he added, “could lead to a major national disaster.”
The reaction of Walt Rostow and others in war councils to the memo, McNamara reports, was “dangerously strong.” Whatever McNamara may have thought and argued over the coming months, the war would continue for six more years and spread to Cambodia.
“Could I have handled the issues confronting us with less pain to the president and, most of all, with greater effect in shortening the war?” McNamara asks in In Retrospect. “I now believe I could have had and should have. I did not see how to do so at the time.”
Lady Bird Johnson’s diaries reflect how LBJ was faring during this tumultuous year. She wrote in September 1967: “I simply did not want to face another campaign, to ask anybody for anything. Mainly the fear that haunts me is that if Lyndon were back in office for a four-year stretch – beginning when he was sixty years old – that bad health might overtake him…A physical or mental incapacitation would be unbearably painful for him to recognize, and for me to watch.”
The war was also seriously affecting LBJ’s Great Society initiatives; the scale of urban rioting that was sweeping the country was a clash between the promises of change and the realities of day-to-day life. The identification of Johnson with so much violence abroad and at home, instead of progressive reform, was emotionally devastating to him, Lady Bird could see the emotional damage, but she also knew that the only way to upend the narrative would be for Johnson not to run again. Her fervent and repeated hope that LBJ would make that decision was the theme that made her diaries so poignant to read years later.
While Vietnam was always at the center of events, the world continued to spin into trouble. In June 1967, a major war erupted between several Arab states and Israel, which Israel, to the astonishment of all, managed to win in six days. Israel’s seizure of Arab territories forever shifted the power dynamics in the region. The Six-Day War also turned the Middle East into another front for Cold War military and political competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, U.S. forces went on high-level alert for direct conflict with the Soviets – a moment echoing the sense of possible conflagration in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Decades later, long after the Soviet Union has disappeared, the conflict continues to resonate with shifting priorities that at times have been exceptionally dangerous to the Washington-Moscow balancing act.
Both Robert McNamara and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin credit the “hotline” that was put in place after the Cuban missile crisis with providing a means of useful communications during the 1967 Middle East war and thereafter that prevented Arab-Israeli fighting from instigating direct superpower confrontation. “The episode,” McNamara concludes in In Retrospect, reflects “how delicate U.S.-Soviet relations remained around the world in the midst of the Cold War. It partially explains the [Joint] chiefs’ feelings about the necessity of ‘prevailing’ in Indochina. And it illustrates the numerous other pressing issues that prevented us from devoting full attention to Vietnam.”
Soviet-Israeli ties were broken during the 1967 war and remained fraught thereafter because of the tangled issues around immigration of Soviet Jews and the complexities of the USSR’s support for Arab hostility to Israel amid the continuing upheavals in the Middle East. Restoring relations in the mid-1980s, Dobrynin writes, “essentially amounted to admitting that the Soviet Union made a mistake by breaking them in 1967.”
In June, shortly after the Arab-Israeli war, Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin met in Glassboro, New Jersey, notable as another occasion when the two superpowers grappled for a way to offset their opposing alliances in war zones, with the recognition that war between them could lead to global annihilation. Dobrynin writes that the positions of the U.S. and North Vietnam were fundamentally incompatible, so the sides “seemed locked in a tragic spiral, although I was able to encourage important military limits to it: I raised the issue of atomic warfare in Vietnam, and I was assured by … the president’s entourage that Johnson had completely ruled out the use of tactical nuclear weapons or an invasion of North Vietnam. Moscow knew about these private assurances although they were never made officially.”
This tacit restraint by the Americans on how far to go against the Vietnamese communists added another aspect to the many controversies about the U.S. role in Vietnam, and increasingly about McNamara’s place in shaping it.
Another benchmark of the Vietnam era was what became known as the “Pentagon Papers” after they appeared in The New York Times in June 1971. In 1967, McNamara had tasked John McNaughton, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, to prepare a comprehensive “study” of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The scholarly term “study” was lost in what became a crisis over the documents’ being leaked and subsequently published. They were invariably portrayed as a revelation of secrets rather than what they were, a documentary aggregation of how and why policies were set and decisions made.
McNaughton was killed in a plane crash that summer, and the project was managed to its completion in 1969 by one of his deputies, Leslie Gelb, who went on to be a prizewinning columnist for the New York Times and president of the Council on Foreign Relations and an acute and acerbic observer of Washington’s power struggles. He may also have been one of the very few people who read all seven thousand pages of what comprised the narrative. Gelb came to believe that McNamara could never bear to read them.
One night in 1971, after the papers had begun to appear in the Times, Bob and Marg were having dinner at the home of the Times’s influential Washington columnist James Reston — an insight into McNamara’s ready acceptance in Washington’s inner social circles after his time at the Pentagon. Reston reported that the paper was refusing to stop publication as the Nixon administration demanded. The resulting case went to the Supreme Court which permitted publication in the Times, the Washington Post, and eventually other newspapers as well.
Whatever care may have gone into to the preparation of the papers, all that was publicly absorbed was the scandal, including, according to McNamara, a conspiracy trope that he had ordered the study conducted in order to undermine Johnson’s likely reelection campaign in 1968 against Bobby Kennedy. Rather than credit McNamara with the concept of studying history, the papers added another strand to a narrative of failure.
Years later, when the papers were again being discussed, Gelb would repeat that what the papers revealed was not so much mendacity and sinister design but the enormous consequences of U.S. ignorance and mishap. One example he would cite was a letter written by the Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh to President Harry S. Truman in 1947 about a possible relationship with the United States. Gelb told me that Ho’s letter was waylaid by the CIA and never reached the president.
In any case, the Pentagon Papers added to the overwhelming consensus that was emerging that the United States was doomed in Vietnam because of its self-inflicted blunders and misjudgments.
Next Week Part 16 The Break
On September 15 at 8 and 11 PM (EDT), C-SPAN will air on its Q-A program an interview in which host Peter Slen and I discuss “LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail. It will then be posted on c-span.org.
*************
I have now heard from a number of people who have listened to the audio that they find it extraordinary. To hear McNamara explaining in detail and under my questioning why he believed Kennedy would have withdrawn and LBJ used 1964 to stall on making decisions about the war among other matters is, the word all use, is “fascinating.” So below is a direct link to the audio. A click will connect you and a second click will download it.
https://gofile.me/6Psdh/u0tEooeA9
To read previous installments in this series go to www.platformbooksllc.net. There is an archive of earlier pieces and a link to sources, acknowledgements.
At 7:10 PM on January 3, 1967, National Security Adviser Walt Rostow signed off on a memo to President Johnson classified “Literally Eyes Only,” in which he forwarded what he considered an “improbable” scenario.
“While recognizing all the reasons Hanoi might wish to sweat us out though 1968, I have come to believe it is conceivable if not probable that they are trying to get out of the war but don’t know how…,” he wrote. “I mean they cannot openly negotiate with us. They must have a deal which saves them minimal face with the NLF [Vietcong] and the Chinese to announce before negotiations are acknowledged…Be clear, I don’t give this very high odds, but I have had the nagging feeling they could well be a position of wanting to get out…I can even reconstruct the reasons for this view,” which apparently were based on hints that the leadership in Hanoi was not as united as it once was — wishful thinking, it turned out.
Rostow then outlined a complex set of actions and responses in which intermediaries would open a secret channel for negotiations with the North Vietnamese.
Nothing came of this ploy and similar feints in 1967. One reason was that Rostow believed then, and to the end of the war and beyond, that the United States would prevail if it showed the determination and provided the resources. Memos were circulated (sometimes selectively in fierce backchannel rivalries), military recommendations were made and debated, and top-level Tuesday lunches were held. A congressional investigation that summer made the case that bombing was being restricted and made out McNamara to be the focus of resistance, which he was.
McNamara’s opposition to unrestricted bombing was personal and largely on strategic grounds. Having been part of a bomb planner group in World War II, McNamara believed — as he later told Errol Morris in The Fog of War — that he could have been tried as a war criminal if the United States had lost the war because of the scale of civilian death he and others were responsible for in Japan and Germany. The limitations of air power was one of the factors in his belief that no matter what was being said publicly about military progress and no matter what Westmoreland’s kill ratios showed, the war was not being won.
American power — short of using nuclear weapons — just could not offset South Vietnamese disarray and North Vietnamese determination.
The emerging disagreement between LBJ and McNamara over war strategy also may have had an essentially unacknowledged Kennedy component. Incidents that McNamara recounted in In Retrospect and emphasized in the editorial transcripts highlight this.
“Bobby had grown to be one of my best friends,” McNamara writes. “When I first met him, he had seemed a rough, tough character who believed that in politics the end justifies the means. But during the eight years I knew him, he grew thirty years in terms of his values and understanding of the world.” As for Jackie, as he always called her, she “did not represent the same political threat to the president as Bobby, but she thought no less deeply than her brother-in-law about the issues of the day.”
Once, when Marg was traveling, McNamara went to New York for dinner with Jackie, and he recalled that in her apartment “she became so tense she could hardly speak. … She turned and began, literally, to beat on my chest, demanding that I do something to stop the slaughter!’”
On the subject of Jackie, McNamara spoke to his editors of two episodes that are revealing and colorful. They also show the intensity of her feelings as the war progressed.
“Marg was out, and I went up there [New York], and I always – I think I probably went up commercial air. I never had security agents, and once in a while I used a government plane, in which case I would pay the commercial price…I stayed at the River Club and Jackie was up on 85th…There was a taxi strike, so I thought, ‘What the hell? Well, I’ll go on the bus.’
“So I didn’t know anything about Manhattan…I got on the bus. And it wasn’t too full, even in the midst of the taxi strike…We get up to 85th or wherever the bus stopped…so I go to the back of the bus to get out of the back door…The woman in front of me caught her heel in the step and stopped suddenly, and I bumped up against her, and the guy behind me bumped up against me.
Editor: These people did not recognize you as the secretary of defense?
McNamara: Oh hell no. And I’m walking along…I walked on about fifty steps and I thought, ‘My god, something’s missing.’ I reached in my pocket, my wallet was gone.”
Somehow, the evening unfolded, because at the restaurant, La Caravelle, McNamara seated Jackie, encountered a friend, whispered his problem, and borrowed enough money to pay for dinner and to fly back to Washington.
On another visit, in the Kennedy apartment, “We were talking about the war and she got so tense she could hardly speak. She was just obsessed with the killing that was going on.”
And then, said McNamara Jackie, sitting next to him on a couch started pounding her fists on his chest demanding he do something.
Summarizing their relations, McNamara said, “She was a much more sensitive person than many people. She was not only glamorous – she was glamorous – but she was a much more sensitive person.”
(Whispers that McNamara and Jackie’s relationship might have gone beyond friendship never went further, but almost certainly reached Johnson.)
Another episode in early 1967 happened when Robert Kennedy, now a U.S. senator, traveled to Paris and returned with what to him, McNamara recalls, was “a legitimate North Vietnamese peace feeler.” The story appeared in Newsweek. When Johnson next met with Bobby, the president — convinced that the leak had been a deliberate ploy by Kennedy — said: “The war will be over this year, and when it is, I’ll destroy you and every one of your dove friends. You’ll be dead politically in six months.”
In his source notes for In Retrospect, McNamara writes, “Robert Kennedy reported this episode to me.”
Reflecting perhaps his own political naivete, McNamara insisted that “Johnson accepted my closeness to the Kennedys because he understood my loyalty to the presidency and to him. This was even true when he and I split irreconcilably over Vietnam.” Lady Bird’s diaries support the view that LBJ’s warm feelings for McNamara were genuine, but by the end of 1967, Johnson wanted to get rid of his secretary of defense.
Clark Clifford was also very close to the Kennedys, having represented Jackie in personal issues after the assassination — which he refused to discuss with his editors as he worked on his memoirs. How this would have affected his dealings with LBJ is a mystery of personality that probably had more to do with these relationships than it is possible to discern from words and their assertions alone.
Clifford’s dignified, soothing mannerisms were always an asset to him in his dealings with people, including Johnson. In more than one instance, Clifford would assure Johnson that he had spoken to Bobby and could report that Kennedy would not actively undermine Johnson, when in fact he was determined to do so.
McNamara’s intensity and his publicly bumptious certainty meant that he was always in the limelight and assertive in making a case, even when he knew – increasingly – that it was wrong. This perception of McNamara defined his lasting reputation.
In March, Douglas Kiker, then the Washington columnist for The Atlantic Monthly, wrote a profile called “The Education of Robert McNamara,” which was especially colorful and insightful about the man he called the “second most powerful…and second most controversial” man in Washington.
“Washington reporters are sharply divided in their opinion of him,” Kiker reported. “Liberal columnists admire him and defend him. ‘He’s the biggest dove in the higher echelons of the Johnson Administration,’ says one. “He resisted the bombing of North Vietnam to the very end. He was chief advocate of the 1965 bombing pause. And he’s been arguing ever since that the bombing is not doing what it’s supposed to do. He’s dying to get this war over with.”
Pentagon reporters, Kiker went on, had a different opinion. “‘McNamara is a great national asset, but so is the hydrogen bomb,’ says one. ‘Both of them must be utilized – and contained. He has a basic disregard for people. He has a contempt for the press and the people’s right to know. He’s very authoritarian.” Kiker observed that “the biggest complaint is that McNamara has deliberately misled the press – and through them the American people – on Vietnam: that by imposing secrecy and juggling facts and figures, he has obscured the true facts concerning both the progress and the cost of the war.”
Kiker makes a list: In January 1962 McNamara described the situation in Vietnam as” encouraging.” In September 1963 it was “getting better and better.” In March 1964 it had “significantly improved.” In May, “excellent progress was being made.” By November 1965, the “United States had stopped losing the war.” By July 1966, he was “cautiously optimistic.”
This portrait of McNamara once again captures a central reason for the way history has framed the principals responsible for the war: Johnson, McNamara, Bundy, Rusk, Westmoreland, among others, collectively David Halberstam’s “the best and the brightest.” Their personalities were instrumental in apportioning blame for the debacle.
LBJ as president, was inevitably at the center – he was intense, volatile, and politically manipulative, whereas JFK had been, cool, young, and martyred. And because of his death, how President Kennedy would have dealt with the war can only be an unresolved question.
McNamara’s larger-than-life persona and his tendency to relate better to the swells than the hoi polloi was a paradox. He prided himself on being a social iconoclast who lived in Ann Arbor rather than the Detroit suburbs where other auto industry big shots resided. He was an outdoorsman but was always comfortable with Washington’s elites – Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post and a social arbiter in the capital – was one of his closest friends and he was always welcome in her circle, even among those who considered his role in Vietnam reprehensible. This remained true years later when I worked with him on his books. A C-SPAN video of a book party for McNamara in 1999, hosted by Katharine Graham for another of his books, Argument Without End, about his post-war meetings with the Vietnamese communists, featured a cross-section of political figures and journalists, even as many of these people considered McNamara responsible for the Vietnam war’s mayhem.
Next Week: Part 15: McNamara in ‘67 “ A harrassed and puzzled look. No longer sprightly.”
I have now heard from a number of people who have listened to the audio that they find it extraordinary. To hear McNamara explaining in detail and under my questioning why he believed Kennedy would have withdrawn and LBJ used 1964 to stall on making decisions about the war among other matters is, the word all use, is “fascinating.” So below is a direct link to the audio. A click will connect you and a second click will download it.
https://gofile.me/6Psdh/u0tEooeA9
To read previous installments in this series go to www.platformbooksllc.net. There is an archive of earlier pieces and a link to sources, acknowledgements
The data Robert McNamara was using in his public presentations in 1966 and 1967 were diagrammed in an attrition calculation he devised and repeated, the belief that you could inflict so many casualties on the enemy that its strength would deteriorate. General William Westmoreland and his officers in Vietnam also adopted this rhetoric, measuring progress in the number of targets destroyed, the body counts, the traffic down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the POWs captured, the weapons seized, and something called the Hamlet Evaluation Survey — all to make a case of progress with numbers that McNamara eventually came to understand were misleading.
Years later, in the 1980s, CBS News produced a documentary that accused Westmoreland of having systematically lied in his data. He sued the network. McNamara became entangled in explanations about how numbers gathered by the CIA could differ from those compiled by the U.S. military in Vietnam, based on who were considered combatants as distinct from village militias.
Part of the problem for McNamara was that the CBS producer of the documentary was the journalist George Crile, who, by his marriage to the daughter of the columnist Joe Alsop’s wife, had been accepted in Washington social circles that were McNamara’s friends even after the war, along with the Kennedys, a group known collectively as “the Georgetown set.” The tag team of Crile and the CBS correspondent Mike Wallace brought celebrity panache to a case that viewers found persuasive.
McNamara told his editors that he would say, if challenged in court testimony and under oath, “categorically…that I do not believe it was Westmoreland’s intention to deceive.”
This cultural confusion and obfuscation resulting from President Johnson’s hard-edge politics, combined with the determination of Westmoreland and the Joint Chiefs to show battlefield progress, came into conflict with the emerging sense among elites in the Cambridge-Washington corridor that the war would not be won. The result was that McNamara found himself in an awkward straddle because of his association with both groups.
The Westmoreland case was eventually settled without resolution, but the belief that McNamara was complicit if not responsible for offering up incorrect numbers never disappeared. Wallace was so upset by the trial that he had himself hospitalized for depression.
McNamara’s certainty of presentation whenever he was asked to speak was a cover for his recognition that public opposition to the war was increasing – and in his own family, Marg and their offspring found it harder to balance their feelings about the war with McNamara’s perceived role in it. In Craig McNamara’s memoir, he recounts this dynamic that McNamara in his years of postwar reflection always wanted to deflect.
The index of In Retrospect shows very few references to Craig and his sisters Margy and Kathy, though the book does mention that Marg McNamara, his wife, and Craig developed severe ulcers. And when the subject of family came up in his extensive discussions with his editors, McNamara always said that he did not want to explore the topic. Craig’s book made the reason as clear as it could be. The dynamic was extremely complicated.
But father and son seemed to be close. When, many years after the war, Craig and his wife embarked on becoming walnut famers in California, McNamara provided the essential funding.
As 1966 progressed, LBJ’s declarations of righteous goals in Vietnam and the scale of the violence being used to support those goals were becoming irreconcilable. For his defense secretary to make the case that progress was being made and privately to recognize its weaknesses was a corrosive paradox – and enhanced what was Vietnam’s legacy of mistrust and repudiation of the country’s leadership.
In the spring a new round of Buddhist uprisings in the South, as McNamara writes, “underscored the Saigon government’s fragility and lack of popular appeal.” McNamara and John McNaughton, the Pentagon official the secretary most admired (he would have been McNamara’s chosen successor had he not been killed in a plane crash in 1967) drafted a “Possible ‘Fall-back’ Plan” based on the belief that “while the military situation is not going badly, the political situation is in ‘terminal sickness’ and even the military prognosis is of an escalating stalemate.”
At a White House meeting, McNamara recounts LBJ making an “elliptical remark about ‘being ready to make a terrible choice – perhaps take a stand in Thailand,” which indicated that Johnson was aware of the seriousness of the problem. “Looking back,” McNamara continues, “I deeply regret that I did not force a probing debate about whether it would ever be possible to forge a winning military effort on a foundation of political quicksand.”
Dean Rusk, on the other hand, was arguing that “the situation has reached the point where North Vietnam cannot succeed.” Walt Rostow added, “Mr. President, you can smell it all over: Hanoi’s operation backed by the Chicoms [Chinese communists] is no longer being regarded as the wave of the future…We’re not in, but we’re moving.”
As McNamara met with his editors and drafted chapters about the events in 1965, 1966, and 1967, he would return again and again to the factor that he came to understand underlay American determination to beat back communism – the Cold War itself:
“The major lesson of the whole damn thing is we misjudged the magnitude of the communist threat, both the Soviet and Chinese threat. We misjudged them…we overstated it…it welded the West together, it brought unity that we wouldn’t have had…And we didn’t search out contrary views.”
Another irony of the period, as described by Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in In Confidence, was that in his interactions with Dean Rusk and consultations with top officials in the Kremlin, the point was always being made that the conflict in Vietnam should not mean that the United States and Soviet Union were in direct confrontation or conflict themselves or that they would be. Even though it was at war with what it contended were proxies for Moscow and Beijing, the United States also wanted to maintain outreach to the Soviets and later to Beijing (as when Nixon in 1972 traveled to China in February and then to the USSR the following June).
“Some specific questions in Soviet-American relations were solved or at least explored,” Dobrynin writes. “Both governments resumed their confidential exchanges of messages and examined such ideas as the use of nuclear energy for mining and earth-moving projects, and the peaceful exploration of the moon and outer space. After a long delay we signed an agreement at the end of 1966 opening direct air traffic between the two countries.”
Dobrynin also writes that the replacement of McGeorge Bundy with his deputy Walt Rostow had put an unequivocal advocate of escalation into the inner circle supporting the Joint Chiefs, who while divided among themselves on what should be done kept pressing for more commitment from their respective services.
“Johnson in fact was beginning to realize that unless the war ended in 1967,” Dobrynin asserts, “he could hardly count on being reelected for another term; as the war widened, so did opposition to it across the country.”
The nationally televised Senate hearings chaired by Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas in 1966 had an enormous impact on public opinion. “Fulbright explained to me,” Dobrynin writes, “that was why the president felt that greater military pressure had to be applied to North Vietnam to force it to settle. The columnist Walter Lippmann, who increasingly and bitterly challenged the president’s war policies, told me at lunch in his home early in June that Johnson and Rusk were no longer interested in a peaceful settlement now and were pinning their hopes on a military solution to end the war before the 1968 elections.”
A June 1966 Gallup poll cited by Brian VanDeMark in his book Road to Disaster showed that support for the U.S. role in Vietnam had fallen by 20 percent over the previous year, to 47 percent, while opposition had nearly doubled to 35 percent. “And 66 percent of the country, “VanDeMark writes, “said they had lost confidence in Johnson’s leadership on Vietnam. Johnson privately called the results ‘disastrous.’”
A CIA appraisal of the effect of Rolling Thunder’s impact after a full year of the bombing campaign said that for all its thousands of sorties against military and economic targets, the “resulting damage was relatively light, in good measure reflecting the restricted nature of the air campaign.” Over the next year, the bombing restraints would become a major factor in applying pressure to Johnson, as hawks in Congress and at the Pentagon were demanding ever more escalation.
Even though McNamara was skeptical about the efficacy of air power to achieve the administration’s goals in Vietnam, and even though he despaired privately over the political situation – which were the subject of regular discussion in newspaper columns and Georgetown dinner parties — he became the focus of criticism from inside the administration and in Congress, as the publicly identified architect of a war he himself thought was being lost. McNamara, it was believed, was trying to have it both ways.
The deployment of more troops, the extension of the bombing, the failure to make any headway on negotiations, the hardliners in ascendency in Washington and Hanoi, continuing political disarray, disaffection and corruption in South Vietnam — all these factors made 1966 the year that the United States went all in on the war and also the year when the template for failure in the years ahead was set.
Next Week: Part 14 Bobby, Jackie, LBJ, Bob: Friends and Foes.
I have now heard from a number of people who have listened to the audio that they find it extraordinary. To hear McNamara explaining in detail and under my questioning why he believed Kennedy would have withdrawn and LBJ used 1964 to stall on making decisions about the war among other matters is, the word all use, is “fascinating.” So below is a direct link to the audio. A click will connect you and a second click will download it.
https://gofile.me/6Psdh/u0tEooeA9
To read previous installments in this series go to www.platformbooksllc.net. There is an archive of earlier pieces and a link to sources, acknowledgements.
By January 1966, the United States was all-in on the war, by land, air, and sea. The Kennedy-era belief that South Vietnam could and would win its own battle had been replaced, decisively, with a strategy of American war power that in time would overwhelm the communist forces and somehow enable South Vietnam to become a bastion of democratic freedom in Asia.
Over the course of the next year, the military effort would be disappointing, at least to those who recognized that the data being compiled missed the essential point: that the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong were not yet losing the war and the South Vietnamese-U.S. alliance was not making the necessary gains.
The North Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh, who had once identified himself with principles of the American revolution, had now become a party figurehead, and Hanoi’s strategic and political strategy was now set by another communist official, Le Duan, whose name was so unfamiliar that Robert McNamara had to spell it out for Lyndon Johnson over the phone. At the same time, General Vo Nguyen Giap, the military mastermind, had lost influence to two other generals, Van Tien Dung and Hoang Van Thai, neither of whom were disposed to compromise.
In the ensuing months, there were hints of possible negotiations, approaches to which McNamara always wanted to give some credence. Still, these initiatives went nowhere. The bombing pause over the 1965 Christmas holidays ended without effect. The historian George Herring wrote years later, in his book LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War, that “McNamara’s influence began to wane” after the bombing halt ended:
“The secretary of defense had pushed the pause and accompanying peace initiative and LBJ, grudgingly and against his better judgment, had endorsed it…Moreover, the once indomitable secretary of defense was increasingly skeptical that the war could be won militarily…At some point late in his tenure, he was cut off from some information because of his growing opposition to the war and his suspected ties to dovish Senator Robert Kennedy.”
In In Retrospect, McNamara writes, “I wish Herring were right” and then asserts that while he “grew increasingly skeptical … of our ability to achieve our political objectives in Vietnam through military means, … this did not diminish my involvement in the shaping of Vietnam policy.”
In reality, Herring’s appraisal was correct in describing the trajectory of McNamara’s thinking and his stature with Johnson in 1966 and into 1967.
Having launched his Great Society programs and achieved historic civil rights triumphs in Congress, LBJ wanted to link these domestic political successes with military achievements in Vietnam. In a speech at Freedom House in New York on February 23, 1966, Johnson said:
“Men who believe they can change their destinies will change their destinies. Armed with that belief they will be willing – yes, they will be eager – to make the sacrifices that freedom demands…to become that is within them to become, to cast off the yoke of discrimination and disease; to the freedom to hope and to build on that hope, lives of integrity and well-being.
“That is what our struggle in Vietnam is about tonight. This is what our struggle for equal rights in this country is all about. We seek to create that climate, at home and abroad, where unlettered men can learn, where deprived children can grow, where hopeless millions can be inspired to change the terms of their existence for the better…
“Whether in the cities and hamlets of Vietnam, or in the ghettoes of our own cities, the struggle is the same. That struggle is to end the violence against the human mind and body, so that the work of peace may be done, and the fruits of freedom may be won.”
In her diaries, Lady Bird Johnson expressed a different message, as Julia Sweig points out. “She also worried about the emotional toll on Lyndon,” Sweig observes, “for whom the responsibility of returning two hundred thousand American boys to safety made him feel, she thought, their collective loss even more strongly than the boys’ own mothers.”
Barely more than a year after the inauguration, Lady Bird recorded the following: “I count the months and the weeks until the time I have set [to exit the presidency], but I have not the force of character, and not even really the desire, to try to make Lyndon work less hard.”
Another factor of consequence in 1966 was the departure of McGeorge Bundy. He and McNamara, each in his own way, had brought intellectual luster to the White House, along with their connections to the country’s elites, which offset the intense rough-and-tumble of Johnson’s political instincts. Although they were instrumental in devising the administration’s policies in Vietnam, they could nominally identify themselves as simply developing strategy plans rather than manipulating Congress and public opinion. Those were the tactics that fostered the cynicism necessary for advisers who knew that shaping perceptions of progress was their main mission.
Bundy’s departure to the Ford Foundation for the most part ended his Vietnam-related reputation – although conspiracies emerged about the foundation’s connections with the CIA, never proven. Only in his never-finished memoir did Bundy’s regrets surface. He described his departure to his coauthor, Gordon Goldstein, not as a break with Johnson on policy, but as differences over how that policy was presented to the public. “Once the choice of 1965 was made,” Bundy recalled, “I supported it, in and out of office.” Instead, he said, he was opposed “to the way the Administration, and in particular the President himself, did and did not explain” the escalation in the war.
“It was the president’s lack of transparency,” Goldstein writes, “that angered Bundy rather than the strategy to Americanize the war – a strategy he privately questioned with McNamara but otherwise publicly endorsed. As Bundy struggled to explain in one of his fragments, ‘You must make it plain that while you wanted choices spelled out to the public, you yourself were in favor of ground combat reinforcement in 1965. You did also favor a real examination of alternatives, which did not happen.’”
McNamara, for his part, became fixated on data, a consequence of his personality and his experience and training in graduate school at Harvard and in the business world. Regarding the war in Vietnam, this meant a focus on the numbers of enemy dead and the pace of airstrikes, among other indices increasingly seen as coldly technocratic – and therefore inhumane. This stain proved to be indelible for the rest of McNamara’s life.
Even McNamara’s public displays of remorse, his tears when his memoir was published, were dismissed as insincere or mocked in editorial cartoons that turned what was coming from his eyes into missiles.
Errol Morris’s presentation of McNamara in his Oscar-winning documentary The Fog of War was criticized in early reviews for letting the former secretary of defense off too easily. The closing scene of the film is an epilogue in which Morris asks McNamara whether he would specifically apologize for the war. Set off from the rest of the film (I always wondered, privately, whether it had been added after those initial reviews, which I could not confirm), the setting shows McNamara talking to Morris in a car rather than a studio.
Morris: After you left the Johnson administration, why didn’t you speak out against the Vietnam war?
McNamara: I’m not going to say any more than I have. These are the kind of questions that get me in trouble. You don’t know what I know about how inflammatory my words can appear. A lot of people misunderstand the war, misunderstand me. A lot of people think I’m a son of a bitch.
Morris: Do you feel in any way responsible? Do you feel guilty?
McNamara: I don’t want to go further with this discussion. It just opens up more controversy. I don’t want to add anything to Vietnam. It is so complex that anything I say will require additions and qualifications.
Morris: Is it the feeling that you’re damned if you do, and if you don’t, no matter what?
McNamara: Yeah, that’s right. And I’d rather be damned if I don’t.
Next Week: Part Thirteen Disillusion and Delusions
I have now heard from a number of people who have listened to the audio that they find it extraordinary. To hear McNamara explaining in detail and under my questioning why he believed Kennedy would have withdrawn and LBJ used 1964 to stall on making decisions about the war among other matters is, the word all use, is “fascinating.” So below is a direct link to the audio. A click will connect you and a second click will download it.
https://gofile.me/6Psdh/u0tEooeA9
To read previous installments in this series go to www.platformbooksllc.net. There is an archive of earlier pieces and a link to sources, acknowledgements.
On the battlefield, the impact of American forces was being felt in direct conflict with the Vietcong. Even Bernard Fall, an eminent French expert on Vietnam (considered a particular sage by many press pundits, including I. F. Stone, whose weekly newsletter was a leader in challenging American forecasts of the war), wrote in Newsweek that U.S. power might make a decisive difference – an opinion he would later abandon, soon before his death two years later, when he was killed by a roadside bomb in Vietnam.
And the effect of the escalation on the ground turned out to be short-lived. In the summer and fall of 1965, Robert McNamara writes in In Retrospect, “reality collided with expectations. We no sooner had begun to carry out the plan to increase dramatically U.S. forces in Vietnam than it became clear there was reason to question the strategy on which the plan was based. Slowly, the sobering, frustrating limitations of military operations became painfully apparent. I had always been confident that every problem could be solved, but now I found myself confronting one – involving national pride and human life – that could not.
“My sense of the war gradually shifted from concern to skepticism to frustration to anguish. It shifted not because of growing fatigue, as was sometimes alleged, but because of my increasing anxiety that more and more people were being killed and we simply were not accomplishing our goals.”
Strikingly in all the documentation of this period, the issue of the war’s morality – the deaths of so many South Vietnamese civilians – was never the overriding concern. Criticism of the war inside the administration was about tactics and strategy – and the political costs of giving up – not about how to justify so much violence for a worst-case projection of the risks of communism across Asia.
On November 2 came another pivotal event in the wartime narrative, the self-immolation of Norman Morrison, a young Quaker, father of three, in front of the Pentagon and just yards from McNamara’s office window. Campus teach-ins and commentary in the press opposing escalation had little of the emotional impact of Morrison’s death – an echo of the Buddhist monks’ immolations that preceded the ouster of Diem in November 1963. Morrison’s family released a statement that he had given his life “over the great loss of life and human suffering caused by the war in Vietnam.”
McNamara writes: “I reacted to the horror of his action by bottling up my emotions and avoided talking them with anyone — even my family. I knew Marg and our three children shared many of Morrison’s feelings about the war…And I believed I understood and shared some of his thoughts. There was much Marg and I and the children should have talked about, yet at moments like this I often turn inward instead – it is a grave weakness. The episode created tension at home that only deepened as dissent and criticism of the war continued to grow.”
In May 2022, McNamara’s son, Craig, published a book called Because Our Fathers Lied: A Memoir of Truth and Family, from Vietnam to Today. The title implies more malice than Robert McNamara, by his own account, intended. His personality and his official role led him and others around LBJ – including the president himself – repeatedly to sublimate moral judgment to strategy.
There were other ironies that autumn. Clashes in Kashmir, in which the Chinese-backed Pakistanis took up arms against Soviet-aligned India highlighted the split between the two major communist powers. And in Indonesia, the Communist Party (supported by China) launched an unsuccessful coup; as many as a half million party members were massacred. Suharto, an independent nationalist, came to power.
After the failed coup, McNamara recalled, a “bellicose and aggressive” speech by the Chinese defense minister, Lin Biao, “seemed to us a clear expression of the basis for the domino theory,” even though the foreign policy expert George F. Kennan argued that China had “suffered an enormous reverse in Indonesia…one of great significance and one that rather confines any realistic hopes they may have for expansion of their authority.” Kennan’s misunderstood Cold War advocacy of “containment” of Soviet power (he felt that the USSR could be contained because of its post-World War II weaknesses, not because of its strengths) had become the justification for the anti-communist crusades around the world. At a Senate hearing in February 1966, Kennan testified that there were now fewer dominoes in Asia to fall. “Kennan’s point failed to catch our attention and thus influence our actions,” McNamara writes.
McNamara’s next major initiative in policy came in an options memo he sent the president in November, after another trip to Vietnam. On leaving Saigon, he remarked to reporters: “We have stopped losing the war…But despite the fact that we’ve had that success, … [the Vietcong and North Vietnamese] have more than offset the very heavy losses which they have suffered. The level of infiltration has increased, and I think this represents a clear decision on the part of Hanoi to…raise the level of conflict.”
In his memo, McNamara offered President Johnson two options – essentially the same choices that he and Bundy had been putting forward all year – more escalation, fulfilling General William Westmoreland’s request for a sharp increase in force power; or a renewed effort at finding a path to negotiation. Back in the spring, Dean Rusk had surprised the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, with what Dobrynin in his memoir In Confidence called a “peace feeler…in the most tentative, unofficial, and personal manner.”
As a diplomat, Dobrynin, whose time in Washington encompassed six presidential administrations, dealt primarily with Rusk, and he characterized those exchanges as serious but civil disagreement. At a State Department reception in May, Rusk, “emphasizing that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union should be enslaved by its own partners” in Vietnam, “gave me to understand that our countries might join forces (without publicizing it) to reach a stage-by-stage settlement.”
Dobrynin elaborated: “Suppose, he said, a confidential agreement on Vietnam could be reached privately between Washington and Moscow. The United States would not regard it as a challenge if the Soviet Union simultaneously gave North Vietnam a solemn military guarantee against American bombardment. On the whole, the developments might look like a compromise reached in the face of imminent confrontation between the two superpowers. This, among other things, would be a major setback for China.”
Rusk even suggested, according to Dobrynin, that “air raids against North Vietnam” could be halted for “a limited probation period.”
In Moscow, the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, after a short period of consideration made it clear that there would be no negotiation.
That also was to be the view in Washington when McNamara again put forward a negotiation notion in November. But the idea of a bombing halt, which was called a “pause,” did gain support – perhaps because Rusk, one of the administration’s hawks, said he was behind it, perhaps because of his interactions with Dobrynin.
In December, while LBJ was at his Texas ranch recovering from gall bladder surgery, McNamara directly pressed the concept of a Christmas pause. McNamara reports in In Retrospect that he had grown “more and more convinced that we ought definitely to think of some action other than military action as the only program. … I personally believe we should go ahead and raise our budgets, raise our strengths [and] increase our deployments out there to gradually meet Westmoreland’s requirements. But I think if we do that by itself, it’s suicide and we ought definitely to accompany it – or even, perhaps, precede it – by some other action.”
In an exchange in the Cabinet Room on December 17, McNamara said, “A military solution to the problem is not certain – one out of three or one in two. Ultimately we must find…a diplomatic solution.
Johnson responded, “Then no matter what we do in the military field, there is no sure victory?”
“That’s right,” McNamara answered. “We have been too optimistic…”
To which Rusk said, “I’m more optimistic, but I can’t prove it.”
A month earlier, Dobrynin had told Bundy at a lunch “that if the United States stopped bombing for two to three weeks, Moscow “would use its influence to get Hanoi to negotiate.”
The bombing pause began on December 22 and was extended on a day-to-day basis. Rusk put forward a fourteen-point program soliciting North Vietnam to begin negotiations without preconditions.
Almost as soon as the bombing was stopped, the Joint Chiefs urged a resumption. And when no sign emerged of a change in Hanoi’s refusal to negotiate, Johnson ordered the resumption of air attacks at the end of January 1966. McNamara quotes a Harris poll at the time that said that “the vast majority of Americans would support an immediate escalation of the war – including all out bombings of North Vietnam and increasing U.S. troop commitments to 500,000 men.”
Could the outcome of the pause have been any different? The North Vietnamese had refused to engage in negotiations. The Johnson administration was, as always, divided and therefore confused. With the Harris poll in mind, the United States went ahead and met the further demands for escalation.
So, 1966 would be the year of an all-out U.S. war effort, once again in pursuit of military objectives that Johnson and McNamara understood were unlikely to meet the requirements of success.
Next Week Part 12 All-in Is Not Enough
I have now heard from a number of people who have listened to the audio that they find it extraordinary. To hear McNamara explaining in detail and under my questioning why he believed Kennedy would have withdrawn and LBJ used 1964 to stall on making decisions about the war among other matters is, the word all use, is “fascinating.” So below is a direct link to the audio. A click will connect you and a second click will download it.
https://gofile.me/6Psdh/u0tEooeA9
To read previous installments in this series go to www.platformbooksllc.net. There is an archive of earlier pieces and a link to sources, acknowledgements.
Beginning with the initial decisions on a bombing strategy and deployment in February 1965, President Lyndon Johnson chose not to tell the American people what he knew to be the case: that the war was entering a very different stage. That month McGeorge Bundy had delivered a memo to the president following his first trip to Vietnam, where he was shocked by an attack in the Highlands in which some American advisers were killed. In Bundy’s memo, as Robert McNamara recalled, the message was this:
“At its very best the struggle in Vietnam will be long. It seems to us important that this fundamental fact be made clear and our understanding of it be made clear to our own people.”
In his book, McNamara adds: “As I will relate, it was not.”
He went on to recount that “President Johnson finally decided on February 19 that regular strikes against the North would begin, but he again refused Mac’s advice to announce the decision publicly.” At the time polls showed that a significant majority of Americans supported the war policies, without knowing they were being changed. “These numbers, McNamara writes, “changed dramatically over the next three years, as Johnson’s continued lack of candor steadily diminished popular faith in his credibility and leadership.”
McNamara recalls that with majority support in the country for escalation, LBJ had the opportunity to be forthcoming with the public, as he was urged to do by liberals among his advisers, including Douglas Cater, formerly an editor at The Reporter magazine, and John Gardner, his secretary of health, education and welfare.
“Those two guys are liberals, and they said to Johnson,… ‘Mr. President, you’ve got to expose more…the people are with you. Take them into your confidence. They want you to do what you want to do.’”
Johnson’s successes in closing deals on Capitol Hill tended toward backroom bargaining and tradeoffs, which was different from publicly explaining the decision to fight a losing war. McNamara’s told his editors that the reason for his own contributions to misleading the public was:
“For me to go public and say we weren’t winning…for anybody – if the president went public and said, ‘We’re not winning,’ because it was a fact in the midst of a war, that is a hell of a thing to say.”
Moreover, he added when the escalation began, the military in particular, were predicating its recommendations on the assumption that with enough force victory would be possible, if not certain. McNamara may well have thought the generals could be right, even though he clearly doubted they were.
In a speech at Johns Hopkins University on April 7, 1965, answering his own rhetorical question, “Why are we in South Vietnam?” Johnson reiterated American promises to support the Saigon government, a pledge made by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy and the commitment to “strengthen world order” against Communist incursions.
He said that in response to stepped-up attacks in South Vietnam, air strikes were underway – but he did not mention ground deployments. “This is not a change of purpose. It is a change in what we believe that purpose requires.”
And LBJ quoted scripture: “We must say in Southeast Asia as we did in Europe in the words of the Bible: ‘Hitherto shalt thou come but no further.’”
McNamara, Bundy, and Clark Clifford, each in his way, attribute Johnson’s vagueness and prevarications to aspects of his character. For as long as possible, he did not want Vietnam to undermine his Great Society agenda, either by warning the public about trouble ahead or going to Congress with requests for the real costs that the war would entail.
When McNamara urged LBJ to raise taxes to meet the additional costs of war, the president told his defense secretary that he just didn’t understand politics. Which was, of course, the case.
McNamara also concluded, as he told his editors, that Johnson believed that “the end justifies the means” and if he was able to succeed in his domestic reforms and reverse the slide in Vietnam, his lack of candor about the war would be overlooked or forgotten.
Johnson also believed that if he were to announce incremental, if open ended, moves in the war, he would come under pressure from conservatives — the “hawks” — to go further and faster. Ironically, Johnson’s politically motivated effort to order not too much escalation – or to do so too publicly – would lead to battlefield frustration and his political demise.
While there were minor feints aimed at a diplomatic approach with North Vietnam, none of which came to anything, Johnson was also stymied he said, by the absence of any plan to end the war by negotiations, without victory or defeat. At one meeting in July, he said, as quoted by Clifford, “This war is like a prizefight. Our right hand is our military power, but our left hand must be peace proposals. Every time you move troops move forward, you should move diplomats forward too. I want this done. The Generals want more and more from me. They want to go farther and farther. But State has to supply me with something, too.”
Rusk, who heard the complaint, did not reply. George Ball’s counsel, with Clifford’s support, had been rejected.
In Lessons in Disaster, Gordon Goldstein writes of McGeorge Bundy, “Frustrated by a deteriorating relationship with President Johnson” — in ways other than the Vietnam issues — “he was on the precipice of resigning as national security adviser.” Bundy then agreed to appear on a prime-time television debate on CBS on the evening of June 21, without telling Johnson.
On the program, Bundy fared poorly in defending the administration’s Vietnam policy before a panel of five respected scholars. As a consequence, he found himself in the untenable and ultimately unsustainable position of falling out with his peers and then with Johnson. After that – as Vietnam controversies in the administration, teach-ins on campuses and a distraction of political upheaval in the Dominican Republic went on – Bundy became essentially irrelevant in real decision making.
When he finally left to join the Ford Foundation in 1966, he was replaced by Walt Rostow, his deputy, an unequivocal hawk, who was to stay until the end of LBJ’s term.
The top echelons of the military, from all historical accounts, continued to be divided over strategy and was never really able, then or later, to reach conclusions that were as clear as they should have been.
H. R. McMaster’s book Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam, published in 1997, is devastating in its criticism: “The failing were many and reinforcing arrogance, weakness, lying in pursuit of self- interest and above all, the abdication of responsibility to the American people.” A career army officer who later rose to the rank of lieutenant general (and briefly served as Donald Trump’s national security adviser), he calls his chapter about the Joint Chiefs in July 1965 “Five Silent Men.”
LBJ’s emotional trajectory comes through his own copious transcribed record, but Lady Bird Johnson’s diaries, as described in more than one hundred hours of her tapes and Julia Sweig’s book Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight, comes as close as possible to portraying her husband’s downward spin as the war progressed.
Before the Camp David weekend in July, she wrote about her sleep problems as Lyndon faced the decisions that he would have to make on Vietnam: “For an extraordinarily healthy, tough, reasonably happy person, sleeping is becoming the hardest thing for me to do, particularly when I feel that I have not played my role well, that I have been a hindrance.”
Sweig writes that Lady Bird could not console her husband, hoping that a Camp David weekend with some relaxation along with the policy discussion might help. “She’d seen time and again,” Sweig writes, “how the release of tension that comes with a difficult decision could ease Lyndon’s torment, self-doubt and depression.”
It is of course unknowable whether in those months of 1965, as Johnson was coming to his fateful decision to send in troops and bombers, he might have made a different choice. He was being pressured to do so by all and sundry – often with conflicting and confusing advice — and even though his telephone tapes often expressed frustration and doubts that escalation could ultimately succeed, he went ahead.
As McNamara underscored to his editors:
“The divisions among us and the unresolvable nature of our objectives continued though and beyond my departure from the Pentagon.”
An exaggerated belief in the Soviet and Chinese threat to American power, ignorance about the true nature of the conflict and competing egos and strategies of military, civilian and political advisers, combined with LBJ’s own deeply embedded ambitions for domestic change and his insecurities about appearing weak in a foreign conflict, were the toxic brew that produced the Vietnam debacle, which now everywhere is deemed a tragedy.
I have now heard from a number of people who have listened to the audio that they find it extraordinary. To hear McNamara explaining in detail and under my questioning why he believed Kennedy would have withdrawn and LBJ used 1964 to stall on making decisions about the war among other matters is, the word all use, is “fascinating.” So below is a direct link to the audio. A click will connect you and a second click will download it.
https://gofile.me/6Psdh/u0tEooeA9
To read previous installments in this series go to www.platformbooksllc.net. There is an archive of earlier pieces and a link to sources, acknowledgements.
