O C T O B E R 1 9 6 9
Who Stopped the escalation? That story can be told. Townsend Hoopes, Undersecretary of the Air Force (1967-1969) was one of the small group of men in the Defense and State Departments who dared to challenge Lyndon Johnson and his war policy from within the government. This is a political drama; it is also an intimate account of how independent-minded men helped restore to the American government a certain mastery of events at a time when there seemed to be no course but the one everyone feared: wider war
by Townsend Hoopes
Nineteen sixty-eight began with the Communist Tet offensive in Vietnam. Late in February, the Johnson Administration sat down to assess the attack. Soon, disagreements about the meaning of Tet, and the proper response to it, appeared at the highest levels of government.
Go to part two of this article.
General "Bus" Wheeler, USA, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was an intelligent, personable, politically sophisticated staff officer whose talents were admirably suited to the demanding tasks of coordinating the strong (and by no means always common) interests of four powerful military bureaucracies -- the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps -- and of serving as their principal advocate and defender in relations with the Secretary of Defense, the President, and the Congress. Handsome and distinguished in appearance, he was also seasoned, articulate, and courteous, as well as more resilient than most military professionals in his relations with civilian officials and politicians. He understood the importance of intangible factors and readily grasped the limits of what was politically feasible. His perception and tact had helped on countless occasions to bridge the sensitive gap between what his colleagues on JCS insisted was militarily necessary and what the civilian authorities were willing to approve. Though they disagreed often, he and McNamara respected each other greatly. There was, however, never any doubt of Wheeler's fundamental commitment to a military solution in Vietnam, his determined advocacy of whatever level of effort was required to achieve it, or his unqualified support of Westmoreland. Although more polished and subtle than the Service Chiefs, he was in every respect a convinced and authentic spokesman for the professional military interest.
The Wheeler cable gave authoritative confirmation to many earlier impressions. The fighting was by no means over; indeed, large actions appeared in the offing at Khesanh or Hue and all across the central highlands. The enemy had suffered very substantial losses during the Tet offensive, yet retained sizable reserves, and was displaying a greater tenacity than the U.S. Command had seen at any earlier period of the war. He was hanging in close to urban areas in a serious effort to disrupt the inflow of food and other supplies, to paralyze the economy, to intimidate the people by rumor and violence. At least six enemy regiments remained on the edges of Saigon. ARVN had fought well on the whole, but had required reinforcement by U.S. troops in a number of places, including Hue. In addition, it had been necessary to position more than half of the 110 U.S. maneuver battalions in Northern I Corps to counter the heavy enemy threat there. As a result, there was no remaining theater reserve to meet contingencies. Westmoreland's forces were stretched thin, and required prompt and substantial reinforcement. Wheeler's cable then summarized the "force requirements," which amounted to about 206,000 men divided into three time phases: 107,000 by May l; another 43,000 by September l; and the final 56,000 by December. The ground force package (both Army and Marines) totaled about 171,000, the Air Force about 22,000, and the Navy about 13,000.
To say the least, the magnitude of the request was a stunner to those gathered around the table. The Secretary of the Navy, Paul Ignatius, asked why, if U.S. and allied forces had killed more than 30,000 enemy troops since Tet, Westmoreland needed an extra l00,000 men within sixty days. General Harold Johnson, the Army Chief of Staff (and Acting JCS Chairman in Wheeler's absence), replied that because the Viet Cong were now vigorously recruiting in the countryside, abandoned by ARVN, we had to expect them to recover their losses at least numerically; he thought, however, that the quality of VC forces had suffered irretrievably.
I expressed surprise at the size of the request for additional air power -- seventeen tactical fighter squadrons, of which twelve were to be Air Force and five Marine. Two of the twelve had been previously requested, and the Air Force was engaged in preparations to deploy them. I expressed concern that sending more would seriously crowd the airfields in South Vietnam, with resulting higher damage rates from mortar fire and sapper attacks or, alternatively, would create further adverse political consequences if we introduced another increment of U.S. air forces into neighboring Thailand. General Johnson replied that the new request simply maintained the existing ratio of air support to ground forces. This was true, but it was a bureaucratic rather than a substantive answer. I did not pursue the point in the meeting, but there was in fact no well-reasoned analysis to support the existing air-ground ratio; it had simply evolved out of the early conditions of the war. Moreover, it was a matter of some delicacy in Army-Air Force relations because it touched the boundary line between the assigned roles and missions of the two Services. If the Air Force did not provide close air support in a ratio satisfactory to the Army, that would strengthen the Army's argument for developing its own means of close support. Already, through the introduction of helicopter gunships of increasing power, speed, and sophistication, the Army had pressed against that boundary. The rote application of that ratio in constructing the new "force requirements" for Vietnam was the first hint that perhaps they had not been entirely made in Saigon, but that Wheeler had carried to his meeting with Westmoreland some rather definite JCS views as to what was needed and could be obtained at this juncture of the war.
The fact remained that we already had thirty land-based tactical squadrons in South Vietnam. Wheeler and Westmoreland were now asking that this be increased to forty-seven. A number of professional airmen considered South Vietnam already saturated with allied air power, and there was of course the basic question whether large additional forces were available. In response to the Pueblo crisis, we had just dispatched 150 aircraft to South Korea. The Air Force was a "can do" outfit; it could generate additional squadrons if the decision were made to do so, but this would take time, cost money, and almost certainly require the further call-up of Reserves if we were to avoid a drawdown of the squadrons in Europe or otherwise committed to NATO.
McNamara gave his opinion that to meet the Westmoreland request would create a requirement for about 400,000 more men on active military service (Reservists or draftees) and involve an added cost of $10 billion for the first twelve months (at this time he was working on a Defense budget for the year beginning in July, 1968, that amounted to about $90 billion, of which roughly $30 billion was attributable to Vietnam). He asked each Service to analyze the Westmoreland request in light of three possibilities: (1) that we would fully comply, (2) that we would partially comply, and (3) that we would examine alternative political and military strategies in Vietnam. But for purposes of moving ahead, he asked that we concentrate initially on the first alternative.
ONE of the major ironies of the Wheeler trip was that had McNamara not been in his final month of office, he rather than Wheeler would almost surely have gone to Saigon, and his judgment rather than an undiluted military judgment would have formed the basis of the authoritative request, if any, for more forces. Previously, at every critical turn in the war, McNamara had flown to Vietnam to bargain directly with Westmoreland and the other commanders regarding the manpower and discretionary authority required for the next phase. In every instance, he had reached his own conclusions before departing Washington and had meticulously prepared his position, including a draft of what he would report to the President on his return. In every case he prevailed upon the military commanders to scale down their requests (called "requirements"); in return for their cooperation, he gave his public endorsement to the amended buildup. That pattern had been repeated at approximately six-month intervals since early 1965. It was a technique which exemplified McNamara's mastery of, and strong instinct for, managed decision-making: by holding control within very narrow channels, developing an advance position, and moving fast, he finessed serious debate on basic issues and thus saved the President from the unpleasant task of arbitrating major disputes within his official family. It had worked smoothly, but it had also resulted in a twenty-five-fold increase in the military manpower commitment to Vietnam -- from 21,000 to 510,000 -- over a three-year period.
Even in the advanced state of disenchantment which had overtaken him by late February, McNamara' s instinctive reaction on receiving the new military request was to "manage the problem," whittle down the numbers, muffle the differences, and thereby avoid a bruising confrontation within the administration. The President's initiative of November to move McNamara to the World Bank proved a fateful hinge on which swung later events of far-reaching consequence. Phil G. Goulding, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, thought that if McNamara had remained firmly in the saddle and had made the trip to Saigon, there would have been no request for 206,000 men and probably no immediate and dramatic reappraisal of policy. The matter is of course speculative, but my own view is close to Goulding's.
With McNamara managing the manpower question, it seems likely that agreement inside the circle of advisers would have been rather quickly reached on troop reinforcements of perhaps 50,000, together with a renewed offer to stop the bombing in exchange for reciprocal acts by Hanoi. Such terms would have been set forth in a generally tough, patriotic, hortatory speech by the President. This approach might have bought the Administration another month or two of public toleration. It might have weakened Senator McCarthy's showing in New Hampshire (where public knowledge of the 206,000 figure helped enormously), which in turn might have made Robert Kennedy more hesitant; it might have persuaded President Johnson to stay in the political race. But in the end, I am sure, and well before the summer, an attempt to carry on in Vietnam without significant change, as though the Tet offensive had not really happened, would have generated a wholesale domestic cataclysm as well as a major explosion in the Democratic Party that neither Lyndon Johnson nor his Vietnam policy could have survived. For the deep-seated, powerful thrust of public opinion in March was that "more of the same" was simply not good enough. The further irony is that an explosive upheaval, produced by yet another effort to finesse the basic issues, might have forced a far more definitive decision sometime in mid-1968: for example, immediate unilateral reduction of U.S. forces and a phased liquidation of the entire enterprise in twelve to eighteen months. Because circumstances brought about a dramatic reappraisal in March and because the President was thereby persuaded to act .as he did -- to put a ceiling on the war, to halt the bombing partially, to take himself out of the political race -- the teeth of the domestic opposition were pulled sufficiently to preserve at least a semblance of Lyndon Johnson's leadership inside the Democratic Party and to permit him a tolerably graceful exit at the end of the year, with his Vietnam policy still shrouded in ambiguity.
But McNamara did not go to Saigon, and the sending of Wheeler produced an undiluted expression of the true military desideratum -- no less than a 40 percent increase in a force level already at 510,000. This was an event that galvanized the Pentagon civilians, who were for the first time able to assert their strong anti-escalation position in a favorable psychological and managerial climate. The Wheeler-Westmoreland request was a catalyst that made serious reappraisal unavoidable, and Clark Clifford's arrival as Secretary of Defense meant that new channels of communication were now available to debate the issues.
SINCE his Senate confirmation in January, Clifford had of course been preparing himself for his new responsibilities by conferring frequently with McNamara, Deputy Secretary Paul Nitze, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. On February 28, two days before the swearing-in ceremony, the President named an Ad Hoc Task Force on Vietnam, with Clifford as chairman. Its purpose was to examine the Wheeler-Westmoreland request for more forces and to determine the domestic implications. As the principals understood it, the assignment from the President was a fairly narrow one -- how to give Westmoreland what he said he needed, with acceptable domestic consequences.
Clifford convened the Task Force that same day in McNamara's Pentagon dining room for an introductory meeting. Beginning on March 1, he held day and evening sessions through March 6. McNamara attended the first session as Secretary of Defense, but did not thereafter participate. The other participants were Clifford, Nitze, Assistant Secretaries Paul Warnke and Phil Goulding for Defense; Rusk, Undersecretary Nicholas Katzenbach, Assistant Secretary William Bundy, and Philip Habib for State; Wheeler for the JCS; Richard Helms for CIA; Walt Rostow for the White House; Secretary Henry Fowler for Treasury; and General Maxwell Taylor as a special adviser. Initially, Clifford adopted a kind of quiet judicial posture, encouraging others to develop information. He was going through, as he later put it, "the most intensive learning period of my life." Rusk said little at the opening session, it being a familiar trait of his to remain relatively silent at meetings he did not himself conduct, preferring to reserve his position for the President's ear. Thereafter, he did not attend the Task Force discussions.
Clifford moved immediately to broaden the inquiry's frame of reference by stating that to him the basic question was whether the United States should continue to follow the same course in Vietnam. What was likely to happen if we put in another 200,000 men? Would that bring us any closer to our objectives? Perhaps Westmoreland did need 200,000 additional troops under his present strategic concept, but was that a sensible concept? McNamara said Westmoreland's forces had been asked to carry more of the burden of achieving U.S. political objectives in Vietnam than could be borne by military power; we could not, he said "by limited military means" force North Vietnam to quit, but neither could they drive us out of South Vietnam; the time had therefore come to recognize the necessity for negotiations and a compromise political settlement. Nitze argued the need to re-examine the involvement in Vietnam in the wider context of U.S. interests and commitments elsewhere in the world; he said that whatever the result in Vietnam itself, we would have failed in our purposes if the war should spread to the point of direct military confrontation with China or Russia, or to the point where our resources were so heavily committed in Vietnam as to put our other commitments in serious doubt. He thought a less ambitious strategy should be devised in order to buy time for strengthening ARVN and for getting out. Habib, who was deputy to William Bundy and a specialist on Vietnamese affairs, thought almost any alternative course would be preferable to sending more U.S. troops, because that would simply take the pressure off the GVN and ARVN to stand on their own feet. ^ .
Rostow, Wheeler, and Taylor expounded the hard line, arguing that the Tet offensive was in reality a new and unexpected opportunity. The guerrilla enemy, so long elusive and unwilling to give battle under conditions that favored America's superior firepower, had suddenly exposed himself all over the country. He had come into the open in large numbers, in a desperate attempt to seize cities and promote popular uprisings. This dramatic shift of strategy indicated he could longer stand the relentless pressure of U.S. military power in a protracted war. Therefore, the prompt and substantial reinforcing of Westmoreland could open the way to victories that would decimate enemy forces and bring Hanoi, much more quickly than otherwise, to the conference table under conditions favorable to our side. Speaking for the JCS, Wheeler said the full 206,000 men were needed, and that to provide less would be taken by Westmoreland as a vote of no confidence. Taylor doubted whether sending even the full 206,000 would enable Westmoreland "to do what he is trying to do." [Endnote 1].
Nitze and Warnke, supported by Katzenbach, sought to counter these arguments. There was, they argued, no very convincing evidence that the enemy's attack was motivated by desperation or that his immediate aims were as ambitious as a popular uprising against the GVN and the wholesale desertion of ARVN. It seemed more likely, they argued, that the enemy had decided the time was ripe for a major effort to achieve several very important but still limited purposes: to capture one or more major cities, to cause large-scale panic in the ARVN, to recapture large parts of the countryside in order to destroy the pacification program and gain access to new recruits; above all, to show public opinion in America that, contrary to the optimistic projections of November, the United States was not winning the war and in fact could not seriously attempt to win it without undermining more important domestic and global interests.
Warnke, who was to have perhaps more influence on Clifford's change of position than any other single person, had held the pivotal post of Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs since August, 1967. Previously he had been General Counsel of the Defense Department, and for fifteen years before that engaged in practice with a distinguished Washington law firm. Warnke possessed a strong, lucid mind, bold in conception, rigorously disciplined in argument. He was tough, but always personally engaging, discriminating, and fair. Above all, he brought to bogged-down inter-agency arguments on Vietnam the bracing gift of candor, including a readiness to assert the increasingly obvious truth that the Emperor's policy had no clothes on.
As Warnke saw it, both sides were disappointed by the results. The enemy failed to capture and hold any major city, and he suffered tremendous losses, perhaps 30,000 killed; also, ARVN fought better than expected. But the attacks produced devastating effects on our side as well -- many cities were overrun and then gravely damaged or destroyed in the process of recapturing them, with heavy loss of life; the enemy still held the countryside and had demonstrated the inherent fragility of the pacification program; large-scale U.S. forces were tied down in remote, uninhabited places like Khesanh and Conthien, unable to move, pounded by enemy artillery, and with their ability to resist direct assault a matter of growing doubt. Finally, it was clear that public opinion in United States had been shaken to the roots. In plain truth, Warnke argued, neither side could win militarily. U.S. strategy should henceforth be based on that reality and should aim, not at victory, but at the kind of staying power necessary to the achievement of a compromise political settlement. In military terms, this meant no further troop increases (for the enemy could and would match them), a pullback from isolated posts like Khesanh, and a far less aggressive ground strategy designed to protect the people where they lived. A revised directive should be sent to Westmoreland making clear that henceforward his primary mission would be to protect the population of South Vietnam. There should also be a renewed effort to open talks, if necessary by halting the bombing.
With Clifford listening intently and learning fast but not yet committed to any position, the sheer momentum of the ongoing policy continued to dominate the proceedings. Except for Clifford, who was still neutral, the participating principals -- Rusk, Rostow, Wheeler, Taylor, and Fowler -- were strongly for meeting the request and getting on with the war. They claimed, explicitly or by implication, to know the President's mind, and everyone was aware that he had many times said his commanders in Vietnam would get whatever they needed. In the circumstances, the advocates of change faced a heavy, uphill battle, but they kept doggedly at it. After each Task Force session broke up, Warnke and Goulding stayed behind to express to Clifford their concern over the drift of the discussion, to press a particular point, to counter a particular line of argument. Clifford listened intently, then asked them to go and prepare facts and analysis that he could use at the next session. All during the seven-day period, Warnke and Goulding would thus retire to an office between sessions to develop hasty counterarguments, dictating and correcting drafts at a rapid clip, so that Clifford could have fresh information for the next meeting.
While the Clifford Task Force was meeting, the Army and the Air Force were analyzing possible "alternative strategies" at Clifford's direction. In the Air Force, Harold Brown and I worked steadily through the weekend, receiving drafts from the Air Staff, discussing these with the Vice-Chief, General Bruce Holloway, and a small team of officers, and then sending the drafts back to be amended and refined. The Air Staff brought forward three alternatives: (1) an intensified bombing campaign in the North, including attacks on the dock area of Haiphong, on railroad equipment within the Chinese Buffer Zone, and on the dike system that controlled irrigation for NVN agriculture; (2) a greater effort against the truck routes and supply trails in the southern part of North Vietnam (the narrow area called the panhandle), to be generated by shifting about half the daily sorties away from the Hanoi-Haiphong area; and (3) a campaign designed to substitute tactical airpower for a large portion of the search-and-destroy operations currently conducted by ground forces, thus permitting the ground troops to concentrate on a perimeter defense of the heavily populated areas.
The Air Staff strongly preferred Alternative 1, but Brown and I continued to feel that, while there was little assurance such a campaign could either force NVN to the conference table, or even significantly reduce its war effort, it was a course embodying excessive risks of confrontation with Russia. Alternative 2 was statistically promising (it became the basis for the President's later decision to eliminate all bombing above the 20th parallel), but it too lacked decisiveness. Alternative 3 was pressed on the staff largely at my insistence, and the analysis seemed to show that tactical airpower could provide a potent "left jab" to keep the enemy in the South off-balance while the U.S.-ARVN ground forces adopted a modified enclaves strategy, featuring enough aggressive reconnaissance to identify and break up developing attacks, but designed primarily to protect the people of Vietnam and, through population control measures, to force exposure of the VC political cadres. It was a strategy aimed not at winning a military victory, but at providing a strong negotiating posture. Harold Brown forwarded the Air Staff papers together with a memorandum representing his supplementary views and my own. He and I were in full agreement.
THESE various countermovements notwithstanding, the Task Force ended its seven-day effort by drafting a set of recommendations which in all essential respects confirmed existing policy. In a short unsigned memorandum for the President, it recommended an immediate deployment of about 20,000 additional troops and the prompt approval of Reserve call-ups, larger draft calls, and lengthened duty tours in Vietnam sufficient both to provide the remaining 186,000 men requested by Westmoreland and to restore a strategic reserve force adequate to meet contingencies that might arise elsewhere in the world. There was to be a reiteration of the formula announced at San Antonio in September, 1967, but no new initiative toward negotiation or peace. There was also to be a step-up in the bombing, with Wheeler, Taylor, and Rostow advocating measures beyond those acceptable to the other members of the Task Force --that is, to expand the targets around Hanoi and Haiphong and to mine Haiphong Harbor. These were the central recommendations. The advocates of change gained only the fringe benefit of delay --that is deferment of the actual decision to deploy the remaining 186,000 to Vietnam and agreement to make that decision subject to (1) evidence of improved political performance by the GVN, (2) studies that might produce new political and strategic guidance for Westmoreland, and (3) week-by-week examination of the developing situation in Vietnam. Beyond these frail and imprecise caveats, the report was entirely silent on the matter of the relevance and adequacy of U S. political objectives in Vietnam, the validity of the present ground strategy, the usefulness of the bombing, or the effects of Tet. Its spare, terse, emotionless prose typified those papers that go to the President for action on issues of great heat and consequence. They do not reargue the issues, for these are painfully known to all concerned; they state merely the minimal compromise agreement that the contending parties have been able to reach.
Clifford, although he passed along the report, was uneasy about it, for the Task Force deliberations had deepened his doubts as to the wisdom and practicality of existing policy. Moreover, in separate meetings with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he had probed for their professional assessment of the battlefield effect of adding 206,000 troops, but had received only "vague and unsatisfactory" answers. They could not promise victory; at most, they could say that more troops would add to the cumulative weight of our pressure on the enemy. Warnke, Goulding, and I were profoundly discouraged, for we felt that presidential approval of the first increment of troops would implicitly reaffirm both the Bunker-Westmoreland assessment of the Tet offensive and the Westmoreland ground strategy. To me the Task Force report was mindless folly, confirming once more the depressing truth that the inner core of the Administration was frozen solid in misconceptions as to the nature of the war, as to what our military power could accomplish, as to how our real interests in Asia should be served. The advisers seemed incapable of extricating themselves from policies that were manifestly not working. The memorandum contained, for example, no mention at all of negotiations, yet it seemed clear we would only begin another dreary cycle of inconclusive bloodshed and widening conflict if, in the wake of Tet, we made the mistake of insisting there could be no talks until we had once again regained the military initiative. As I said in a memorandum to Warnke at this time:
In the see-saw struggle to determine the precisely propitious moment to risk negotiations, we should try to retain a sense of proportion. We are a nation of 200 million -- the strongest economic and military power in the world -- whereas North Vietnam is an underdeveloped country of 19 million. We should be able to afford a certain magnanimity on this point of the circumstantial "position of strength" prerequisite for entering upon negotiations. In other words, we should not too much insist on our own particular stage setting for talks. If we do, we will probably get no talks at all.
But by far the most serious deficiency of the Task Force report was its failure to gauge the horrendous political implications of its basic recommendation that the military manpower request be met. For this involved a Reserve mobilization on the order of 250,000 men as well as increased draft calls. Together, these measures would add 450,000 men to active-duty forces, bringing the total strength to about 3.9 million. With his sensitive journalistic antennae quivering, Goulding, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, hastily dictated an appendix which Clifford circulated within the Task Force, but which did not go forward to the President. Goulding's appendix noted that there had been absolutely no preparation of public opinion for such a large-scale mobilization. The official line had stressed our ability to fight in Vietnam and at the same time to meet commitments elsewhere without undue strain; it had held that we were winning the war and, specifically, that we had emerged victorious from the Tet offensive; it insisted that ARVN was improving every day. Now suddenly 250,000 American Reservists were to be separated from their families and careers and another 200,000 men drafted --- all in the absence of any new or palpable national crisis.
Goulding argued that the shock wave would run through the entire American body politic. The doves would say the President was destroying the country by pouring its finest men and resources into a bottomless pit. The hawks would cry that the Administration had no moral right to disrupt the lives of all these young men and still insist on waging a war of limited objectives, limited geographical boundaries, and limited weapons. They would demand, Goulding wrote, that the Administration "unleash ... hit the sanctuaries ... if necessary invade." The antiwar demonstrations and resistance to the draft would rise to new crescendos, reinforced by civil rights groups who would feel the President had once again revealed his inner conviction that the war in Vietnam was more important than the war on poverty. It would be quite unavailing for the Administration to say that only 20,000 more men were being committed to Vietnam. That might or might not prove to be true; in the larger sense the claim would be irrelevant, for in the context of steady escalation over the past three years, it simply would not be believed. Moreover, the major political damage would be done by the increased mobilization itself, for it was this that would bring on the domestic surprise and disruption, as well as cause the defense budget to rise by $2.5 billion in 1968 and by $10 billion in 1969. Actual deployment of the other 186,000 to Vietnam would be, as the saying went, a "secondary explosion."
Goulding's appendix made clear that the Administration had trapped itself in repeated expressions of overblown optimism and could thus carry into effect the recommendations of the Task Force only if it were ready to accept the gravest domestic political risks. Clifford was deeply impressed by its unanswerable logic; others were equally taken aback. Fowler, who had concluded that a formal war mobilization was the only sure way to obtain the higher taxes and controls he felt were necessary for a successful defense of the dollar, was apparently chastened by the chilling implications of the Goulding analysis.
The Task Force recommendations were sent to the President on March 7. The following day, Clifford went to the White House to discuss the proposed actions and their implications, and also to lay before the President some of the fundamental questions which had formed in his own thinking about Vietnam. The recommendations, he explained, were responsive to instructions and represented actions that the President could take "if that is the way you wish to go." He felt obliged to add, however, that, while not yet agreeing or disagreeing with the thrust of the Task Force report, he had developed "doubts" about the efficacy of the ground strategy, the effectiveness of the bombing campaign, and what could really be accomplished by a further large infusion of American troops. He acknowledged that his doubts did not appear to be shared by the other principals on the Task Force, namely, Rusk, Rostow, Wheeler, Taylor, and Fowler.
When the basic differences were out on the table, the President was less than pleased with Clifford's position, notwithstanding its essential tentativeness at that point. Disturbed by what had seemed to him McNamara's progressive emotionalism and apostasy, the President had looked forward to Clifford's coming aboard as a means of reestablishing solid group harmony. Then, as Clifford later said wryly, "this Judas appeared." The warm, long-standing friendship between the two men grew suddenly formal and cool. For with Lyndon Johnson nothing counted more than personal loyalty, and with respect to Vietnam, nothing was so deep-rooted as the President's instinctive bellicosity and will to win. Clifford was affronting both of these feelings, and over the following days he felt the relationship deteriorating seriously. However, it did not during March fall to the point where the President refused to see him alone -- that was to be a manifestation of the following summer, during Clifford's struggle to effect a total bombing halt in an effort to get the Paris talks off dead center.
The session on March 8 ended with Clifford emphasizing the tentative nature of his own judgments and expressing the hope that there would be time for further study. Wheeler and the JCS were anxious to move ahead on the Task Force recommendations, but Rusk and Rostow were prepared to have the issues studied further, in part because the domestic implications, political and economic, seemed to grow more ominous with each passing day. Some reasonable delay appeared to meet the President's preferences.
Endnotes:
1. There has been a curious, retrospective effort by the military leaders to argue that an actual request for 206,000 additional troops was never made. That figure, they now claim, merely represented one of several possible force levels in a wide spectrum of "normal contingency plans" that covered plausible future battlefield situations ranging from favorable to ominous. But the Wheeler assessment contained only one set of figures and related them directly to his considered view that Westmoreland needed prompt reinforcement. Certainly the President, in establishing the Ad Hoc Task Force on Vietnam, understood that he was organizing to consider a specific manpower request. Finally, Wheeler's own line of argument in the Task Force discussions leaves no doubt that he regarded the figure as a firm military proposal, endorsed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Townsend Hoopes served in the Pentagon from 1947 to 1953 and again from 1965 to 1969. He has also been a management consultant in New York.
Copyright © 1998 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; October, 1969; The Fight for the President's Mind -- And the Men Who Won It; Volume 224, No. 4; pages 97-114.
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