The Wrong Rubicon: LBJ and the War

WHEN Lyndon B. Johnson became President he was something of a throwback to another time. He was a decade older than John F. Kennedy — just enough older to identify him with an earlier generation and its somewhat different view of the world. He was not a product of the Ivy League and the East; he had not come under much influence from the liberal intellectuals who had surrounded Kennedy; unlike them, he had not chafed on the sidelines during the cold war years of the Eisenhower Administration. But it was these liberal intellectuals who had come to power in 1961, while Johnson’s obscurity in the vice presidency had kept him out of the main channels of Kennedy Administration talk, thought, and outlook. His view of the world had been shaped neither academically nor in Kennedy’s service but while he was the Senate Majority Leader in the fifties, in the full chill of the cold war, when he had been frequently summoned to the White House for briefings by Eisenhower and Foster Dulles. In “responsible” bipartisan fashion he generally supported their foreign policy objectives in Congress.

Johnson was a middle-aged man of smalltown America, both a Westerner and a Southerner, and except where politics had demonstrably forced his growth — as on the question of civil rights — he functioned, like most men, as a product of his background. There is little to suggest that at this time he saw the world moving away from the stereotype he had accepted in the fifties — the notion of the “Communist bloc” monolithically seeking to bury “the free world.” lake any Rotarian or state legislator and many members of Congress, he saw this world conflict in terms of good and evil, and if he was by no means a right-winger who spied a Communist under every bed and believed in holy war against them, he still was at the time of his accession to the presidency one of those millions of Americans who were nationalist almost to the point of nativism, impressed by the lesson of World War II that aggression unchecked was aggression unleashed, and whose years of greatest activity had coincided with the frustrations and passions of the cold war. Thus his kind of “internationalism” was in many ways only the reverse coin of the old isolationism of the thirties; both were based on a selfrighteous sense of American superiority, on a sort of “higher morality” that derived from pride in democracy, free enterprise, and material success. And in Johnson’s case it would never be entirely free from the attitudes of the hard-scrabble Texas hill country in which he had grown up, amid dust, poverty, and struggle.

“I know these Latin Americans,” he remarked privately to a group of reporters, not long after becoming President. “I grew up with Mexicans. They’ll come right into your yard and take it over if you let them. And the next day they’ll be right up on your porch, barefoot and weighing one hundred and thirty pounds and they’ll take that too. But if you say to ‘em right at the start, ‘Hold on, just wait a minute,’ they’ll know they’re dealing with somebody who’ll stand up. And after that you can get along fine.”

If there was a suggestion here that despite his genuine concern for the poor and downtrodden, Johnson thought somewhat in terms of a “white man’s burden” to do something useful for other races without yielding much to them, he was more explicit, early in 1964, about his attitude toward Communists. He didn’t agree, he said in another private conversation, with the liberals who thought that “fat Communists” were better than lean and hungry ones. Communists were all alike, he went on, and he believed in keeping them off balance and worried, “The more trouble they have the better for us,” he said.

Johnson had not presided over disaster at the Bay of Pigs, nor necessarily drawn Kennedy’s conclusions about the dangers of relying upon so-called “experts” rather than upon his own judgment or that of men Ire knew to be sound and trustworthy whether or not “expert.” He had not personally suffered the frustrations, anguish, and political dangers of that debacle or undergone the “somber” experience of Khrushchev’s polemics at Vienna, or found himself and his government unprepared and embarrassed by the Berlin Wall. With the military, Johnson’s primary experience had been in congressional committees and then more as an ally against the traditional enemy, the executive branch politicians, than as a critic or judge. .

Significantly, Johnson came into office with considerable confidence in Secretary Rusk, who had been of declining influence in the Kennedy Administration, and in Secretary McNamara. Rusk had been the official deputed by Kennedy to keep the touchy Vice President Johnson informed on world affairs; with his bureaucrat’s scrupulous attention to detail and possibility, Rusk had carried out the assignment generously, and Johnson took to the White House with him no little gratitude as well as the impression that the Secretary was a man who appreciated him and with whom he could work. Since, in more influential circumstances than the Kennedy Administration had accorded him, Rusk would reveal himself as the hardest of the “hard-liners” on Asian Communism, this relationship was of profound importance for the future. Of McNamara, with whom he had at that time no such special relationship, Johnson was nonetheless admiring. A month after becoming President, Johnson said flatly: “I think McNamara is the ablest man I ever met.”

Johnson, for sound political and diplomatic reasons, had chosen “continuity” as the theme of his new Administration; on November 27, he would say to Congress: “Let us continue.” Already, he had asked Kennedy’s Cabinet and staff to stay with him. His personal belief in the Secretaries of State and Defense also meant that continuity in foreign policy was not likely to be a quick pose for political effect but would be a fact for some time to come.

Rusk and McNamara were closely identified with the Kennedy Administration’s policy in Vietnam. They had a vested interest in its success, on which largely depended their own reputations. They were not likely to recommend its abandonment or fundamental alteration, and as long as Johnson wanted them to remain in office and retained his own real admiration for them, continuity in Vietnam — more of the same — was very nearly certain. And Kennedy, at his death, was not moving openly toward ending the war.

A GOOD deal, moreover, is known of Johnson’s own views on Southeast Asia at the time of his accession to the presidency. In May, 1961, under instructions from Kennedy, he had visited Southeast Asia on an official mission, stopping in South Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, India, and Pakistan. Among other things, Johnson reached an agreement with Ngo Dinh Diem — whom he incautiously called “the Churchill of today” — for increased American military assistance. According to news reports of the Johnson tour, he also discussed the possible stationing of American troops in both Thailand and South Vietnam.

Johnson also effected an increased military assistance agreement with Thailand. In South Vietnam, he laid heavy stress on combating “Communism’s allies”—the poverty and misery he saw in the native villages. Upon his return to Washington, his public statements were concentrated on this aspect of his finding — the need for the United States to do its part in the economic and social development of Southeast Asia as a major means of keeping that area in “the free world.”

At a news conference immediately after his return, however, Johnson was asked about the need for sending American troops to the countries he had visited. There was no plan or need for such a step at that time, he replied, and no promises had been given. But, he added: “I would not want to forever foreclose the possibility of America protecting her interests wherever it might be.” (Italics added.)

And, he said, he had been “disturbed” that “so many Asian leaders should express doubt as to United States intentions.”

In his private report to Kennedy, Johnson stressed the need for economic and social development but bore down much more heavily on the military problem than he had done in his public remarks:

Our mission arrested the decline of confidence in the United States. It did not — in my judgment — restore any confidence already lost. . . .

I cannot stress too strongly the extreme importance of following up this mission with other measures, other actions, and other efforts. . . .

The report presented an almost classic statement of the so-called “domino theory”:

The battle against Communism must be joined in Southeast Asia with strength and determination to achieve success there—or the United States, inevitably, must surrender the Pacific and take up our defenses on our own shores. Asian Communism is compromised and contained by the maintenance of free nations on the subcontinent. Without this inhibitory influence, the island outposts — Philippines, Japan, Taiwan — have no security and the vast Pacific becomes a Red Sea.

The “key to what is done by Asians in defense of Southeast Asian freedom,” Johnson wrote the President, “is confidence in the United States. There is no alternative to United States leadership in Southeast Asia. . . . SEATO is not now and probably never will be the answer because of British and French unwillingness to support decisive action.”

Of course, “these nations cannot be saved by United States help alone.” They had to help themselves, particularly in fighting ignorance, poverty, and disease. Nevertheless:

We must decide whether to help these countries to the best of our ability or throw in the towel in the area and pull back our defenses to San Francisco and a “Fortress America” concept. More important, we would say to the world in this case that we don’t live up to treaties and don’t stand by our friends. . . . I recommend that we move forward promptly with a major effort to help these countries defend themselves. . . .

This decision must be made in a full realization of the very heavy and continuing costs involved in terms of money, of effort and of United States prestige. It must be made with the knowledge that at some point we may be faced with the further decision of whether we commit major United States forces to the area or cut our losses and withdraw should our other efforts fail. We must remain master of this decision.

This is an important Johnsonian document. It shows, first, a full acceptance of the EisenhowerDulles “domino theory,” which in itself is an expression of an American interest: maintaining the frontier in Asia, keeping the battle away from American shores, and holding the “vast Pacific” as part of the “free world” rather than seeing it become a “Red Sea.” Johnson’s report, moreover, is couched throughout in terms of American interest — enlightened interest, it may be, but American nonetheless; and that is the Context in which he spoke to the press about the possible use of American troops in Southeast Asia.

By May, 1961. when there were only a few hundred American advisers and technicians in South Vietnam, Johnson, so seeing the American interest, laid down to Kennedy what was to become a blueprint of the policy he himself would follow in years to come, including the risk of committing “major United States forces to the area.” Since the term “major” is an imprecise catchall, it is debatable whether Kennedy ever went that far; at his death, U.S. forces in South Vietnam numbered only about 25,000, which no one could have believed was sufficient for the purpose of which Johnson had written. Johnson ultimately raised this number to well over a half million, and there is no doubt that this makes up a “major” force.

This was a significant switch by the Vice President — had it been generally known — because in 1954, during the Dienbienphu campaign, Johnson and Senator Richard Russell of Georgia — the Democratic leader in the Senate and the chairman of the Armed Forces Committee — had been the loudest and strongest opponents of the Eisenhower Administration’s tentative plan to go to the aid of the French; both argued strongly the lesson of the Korean War, that the United States never again should become “bogged down” in a land war on the Asian mainland, with its teeming millions, its human waves of soldiers. By early 1961, however, Johnson could already think of putting “major United States forces” into Southeast Asia in pursuit of the American interest as expressed in the “domino theory.”

FOLLOWING the overthrow of the Diem government and the murder of Diem and his brother, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge was ordered home for consultations. He was to have had lunch with President Kennedy at his new Virginia country place on Rattlesnake Mountain on Sunday.

Lodge was at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco when he heard the news of Kennedy’s assassination. Even in the excitement and panic of that weekend, however, he was told to come on to Washington since the new President would be even more in need of consultations than the old.

Lodge arrived on Saturday, visited the East Room of the White House where Kennedy’s body lay in state, and early on Sunday afternoon met with the new President in Johnson’s high-ceilinged and roomy old vice presidential suite in the Executive Office Building. Secretaries Rusk and McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, John McCone, the CIA director, and George Ball, the Undersecretary of State, met with Johnson and Lodge. Rusk, McNamara, Lodge, and Bundy all had taken part a few days earlier — before the assassination — in a general political-military review of Vietnam that had been held in Honolulu.

Lodge’s report was bleak, although he made no specific requests for Johnson to decide upon. In the wake of Diem’s removal, the ambassador said, the new government of South Vietnam was shaky and ineffective, political rivalries were sprouting in and out of it, and the various forces set free by the end of Diem’s repression were threatening political chaos. The Viet Cong, already powerful enough, seemed to be redoubling their efforts to take military advantage of what amounted to a divided and leaderless nation. The South Vietnamese Army had managed the coup, but otherwise it was corrupt and inefficient and lacked a real will to fight as well as the leadership to succeed in such battles as it could not avoid.

In short, Lodge, an old friend of Johnson’s from their Senate days, whom Johnson once had recommended to Eisenhower for Secretary of Defense, and who was thus close enough to the new President to speak his mind (Lodge is not a man to mince words, anyway), told the emotionally drained Texan that if Vietnam was to be saved, hard decisions would have to be made.

“Unfortunately, Mr. President,” Lodge said, “you will have to make them.”

The new President, as recalled by one who was present, scarcely hesitated. “I am not going to lose Vietnam,” he said. “I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.”

“What kind of political support will you have?” Lodge, the experienced politician, asked his old friend and vice presidential opponent.

“I don’t think Congress wants us to let the Communists take over South Vietnam,” Johnson said.

So the tragedy of Lyndon Johnson — for it may well be that — was set in motion, barely forty-eight hours after he had taken the oath on the plane at Dallas. The moment, if it was there at all, would pass — that moment when, with Diem gone, there might have been the faint possibility of some initial reconciliation between Saigon and the National Liberation Front, and the history of the 1960s might have been changed. All that would follow — the bombing of the North, the half million young Americans trudging the roads and hills and through the jungles of Vietnam, the huge expenditures, the political divisions at home, the decline abroad, the sapping of a Great Society then unborn, the collapse of the consensus yet to be constructed — had been determined in that hour of political decision.

It was a political decision, made by a political man, in political circumstances that left him no real choice. For the first but not the last time Lyndon Johnson’s cherished “options” were foreclosed; and even if he had been a different person of different experience, even if he had not chosen continuity and clung to Kennedy’s men, even then he could have said nothing else.

Because he was, after all and above all, a new President; he was virtually unknown; he was not universally trusted, and he was even less understood. Throughout the Kennedy years, the people had been narrowly divided; nothing in American politics then was certain — nothing but that a President who failed to pursue a strong line against “Communists” would be vulnerable to political opponents at home and to ambitious adversaries abroad. Even Kennedy, in 1960, had been forced to abandon his “soft” line on such unimportant matters as Quemoy and Matsu; his willingness to apologize to Khrushchev for the U-2 incident had been a major liability, exploited in preconvention days by none other than Lyndon B. Johnson.

Adversaries at home and abroad were watching the new man. Both would measure his responses, his politics, his attitudes, probing for any weaknesses. Above all other things that dreary November Sunday, Lyndon Johnson had to be strong, which is to say that, at the minimum, he had to appear to be strong; in his own words, he, no less than the nation he now must lead, had to convince the world “not to tread on us.”

It is a necessity any new President feels, and not merely as an ambitious politician. That a nation should be respected for its strength as well as its purpose and its past is essential for its security and its ideals, let alone for international leadership. It may well be argued that the greatest respect of mankind should flow to moral rather than military strength, and it is certainly true that there are times when retreat is more to be admired than attack, and when the frank confession of error is more courageous than persistence in it. It ought even to be true that, in Wilson’s phrase, there is such a thing as a nation being too proud to fight — or even too moral.

Unfortunately, it cannot be true because in the world of men that strength which unerringly gains the most respect is armed strength; and if might does not truly make right, who can say that it does not rule most of the affairs of men? Thus, political leaders, no matter how beneficial their purposes, tend always to gird up their good intentions with ample armament. “We arm to parley,” Churchill said, and in his inaugural address President Kennedy declared ringingly: “Only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.”

This instinct may be regrettable, but it is based on a sure knowledge of man, a predatory animal who does not in practice often turn the other cheek. Thus, armed strength and the willingness to use it are the first requisites of international power, and if this fact is sometimes blamed on political leaders, the righteous who make the charge should ask themselves which came first, men or politicians?

AFTER the Bay of Pigs and after the Khrushchev confrontation, as an example, John Kennedy was in something near despair because he sensed that Khrushchev thought he was inexperienced and weak; James Reston saw Kennedy before he left Vienna, and Kennedy told him he feared that he could never negotiate or deal with the Soviet leader as an equal until he had shown strength and convinced the world of his steadfastness. It is instructive that it was not until the Cuban crisis over a year later, when he threatened to use nuclear weapons on Moscow, that Kennedy finally achieved that goal.

In the meantime, one of the actions he took in pursuit of it may have been his fateful first escalation of the American commitment in Vietnam during the fall of 1961. In his conference with Lodge in November, 1963, President Johnson, under the same pressing necessity, for much the same reason, had taken the second step that would lead to so great a war that none of the distinguished men in the room with him could possibly have imagined it. “I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.”

A whole lifetime of political and human experience was distilled in that sentence; the deepest meaning of the endless adventure is to be found in the circumstances that impelled it. Still, it is doubtful that anyone that day, even Johnson himself, thought about the confidential report he had written in 1961 on his return from Southeast Asia. Nor is there anything to suggest that even in the harsh echoes of Lodge’s summary anyone foresaw that terrible decision of which the new President once had written “we must remain the master.”

The first significant public statement Johnson made about Vietnam as President came on February 21, 1964. He was so new to office that he actually was keeping an appointment made by President Kennedy when, at Charter Day observances at the University of California at Los Angeles, he said:

The contest in which South Vietnam is now engaged is first and foremost a contest to be won by the government and the people of that country for themselves. [But] those engaged in external direction and supply [of the war in Vietnam] would do well to be reminded and to remember that this type of aggression is a deeply dangerous game.

It may be that the first of these sentences was the most significant in the long run. At the time, however, both the President and the public were more interested in the second sentence.

There is no doubt that Johnson intended this passage as a warning to the North Vietnamese and perhaps to the Chinese that the armed intervention he had been willing to think about in May, 1961, was still a possibility in his own mind. Just to dispel any doubt, Pierre Salinger, the White House Press Secretary, saw to it that White House reporters traveling with the President understood how important Johnson considered the statement.

Those who not only disagree with Johnson’s policy in Vietnam as it has developed, but also feel that he duped them during the campaign and later betrayed their hopes, may be right on the facts, but it is a little too much to allow them to have it both ways. In fact, the protests of domestic doves following the Los Angeles spcech were so great that Secretary Rusk called a news conference and denied any implication that the United States was planning to escalate the war. Even so, he carefully repeated that external support of the Viet Cong was a “serious business,” but insisted: “Whatever happens in the north, there is a large problem in South Vietnam to be dealt with. . . . No miracle in the north is going to suddenly transform or eliminate the problem in South Vietnam.”

Johnson himself let the impression get around that he did not understand how the press could have interpreted the UCLA speech as a threat to escalate. I spent an hour with him in his office four days after the speech and asked specifically for the President’s own interpretation, and here are the notes taken on the response:

Asked him [LBJ] for his version of meaning of passage in UCLA speech. Never got it in so many words but did get long lecture on Vietnam. LBJ started by saying if Gen. Eisenhower had tried to invade Normandy the way we have tried to run the Vietnamese war, the Nazis would be in Paris today. Describes our situation in Vietnam as “new” because Lodge now has new general, new chief of mission, new CIA man, complete authority from LBJ. McN [McNamara] to look into new Lodge request, for more pay for the [Vietnamese] troops. So in position to get something done. The policy there is to train Vietnamese troops to win their own war. Notes we already pulled out 1,000 men no longer needed. Says more can be pulled out as more Vietnamese get training. Praised Kanh [the latest general to have taken over in Saigon, Nguyen Kanh] as young, vigorous. Used analogy of somebody coming into my yard, burning my trees, killing my mother. Wouldn’t that be a “deeply dangerous game?” But no suggestion in itself of expanding the war or enlarging American commitment. Implied criticism of Kennedy because we have mess on our hands over there.

The political situation in which Johnson found himself in February, 1964, was clearly not conducive to frank talk about a wider war in Vietnam. Even then, Goldwater was “pooping around” snow-covered New Hampshire, beginning the process of making himself an open and irresistible target for a “prudent” candidate, while horrifying much of the old-line Republican Party. Whatever Johnson may have been thinking privately, whatever the actual situation in Vietnam, the demands of politics — which is to say, the demands of men and circumstance — dictated that Johnson disclaim the intention, if not the possibility, of “going north.” Just as Gold water’s campaign was being shaped in New Hampshire, so was Johnson’s, in the response to his Los Angeles speech.

On June 28, however, Johnson gingerly warned again of the possibility of escalation. As more than fifty thousand people attending the Svenskarnas Dag (Swedes’ Day) picnic listened in Minnehaha Park in Minneapolis, he said the United States, “when necessary,” would not hesitate to “risk war” to preserve peace. This was a last-minute alteration of a prepared text which had declared that the United States “would use the force necessary” to maintain South Vietnam’s freedom; some reporters already had filed stories based on the first text and all called attention to the change. The altered wording showed how politically delicate the matter was, but also that Johnson had not fundamentally changed the views he brought home from Southeast Asia in 1961.

The nation was “strong enough to protect ourselves and our allies,” Johnson said, but it also was committed to “restraint in the use of power.” It would never intervene in “honest clashes or belief or goals.” But, he warned, “we seek neither dominion or conquest but where it exists we must work to dispel it.” Both the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations had portrayed the war in Vietnam as, at least partially, an effort at “dominion or conquest” from the North, and thus the Svenskarnas Dag speech was essentially a repetition of the UCLA warning.

Up to this point, a nice ambiguity had been achieved about Vietnam; Johnson had promised to support Saigon but had not made clear how far he was prepared to go militarily. But in August, with Goldwater nominated and campaigning against what he called the Administration’s “no win” policy, with Johnson ready for his own anointment at Atlantic City, a startling development caused the President to make his attitude even clearer.

North Vietnamese gunboats attacked an American destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin on August 2 without success. Johnson ordered American ships to destroy such attackers in the future. On August 4, new gunboat attacks were reported in the Gulf, and the President went even further. He ordered retaliatory air raids directly against North Vietnam. Explaining this action in a late-night television appearance on August 4, Johnson called the air raids a “positive reply” but said “we still seek no wider war.” The next day, in a speech at Syracuse University, he added:

To any who may be tempted to support or to widen the present aggression, I say this: there is no threat to any peaceful power from the United States of America. But there can be no peace by aggression and no immunity from reply. And that is what is meant by the actions that we took yesterday. [Italics added.]

Whether there would be no immunity for whatever Johnson defined as aggression or just for attacks directly on the American flag, like those in the Tonkin Gulf, the President did not make clear — which, with Hanoi presumably listening, he could hardly have been expected to do. But the operative words no immunity were still another way of saying the same thing that had been said at Los Angeles and Minneapolis.

Johnson also seized the moment of the Tonkin crisis to send substantial new forces to Southeast Asia; these were primarily air and sea units, and their presence in the area was to play a large role in the future. Finally, he also used the episode to drive through Congress the celebrated resolution that gave him congressional authorization “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent future aggression.” (Italics added.)

In one stroke, Johnson had been able both to flex his muscles and prudently to limit what could have been a war-provoking crisis. One of his aides said later that one of the President’s purposes had been “to win Republicans and conservatives with a responsible show of force. He already had the Left.”

But the cost was high. The Tonkin crisis, however it seemed at the time, ultimately produced for Johnson two of his major difficulties. No doubt he handled it superbly; yet it would return again and again to haunt him because the circumstances that apply one day may be, usually will be, entirely different on another. And particularly in politics, what one does to achieve success may prove more important and lasting than the success itself.

With the resolution that the President maneuvered through Congress, and with the deception or guile — whatever description one chooses — that he used to keep it intact and his freedom of action unhampered, the most astute congressional strategist of our time planted the seeds of distrust and suspicion in that body. He alienated not just Senator Fulbright; in both houses, an undetermined but significant number of members came to look back upon the episode of the Tonkin Resolution as a ruthless power play and a betrayal of the congressional-executive trust.

The success of his response in the Tonkin Gulf would guide Johnson straight into an even more damaging mistake than his congressional tactics on behalf of the resolution. For the fact was that, having shown his strength, having diminished Goldwater’s ability to charge him with a “no win” policy and with soft-headedness toward Communism, having established his own “restraint,” Johnson seemed free to do what came so naturally to so political a creature. With every rattle of the Goldwater sword, every reference to the use of nuclear weapons by the Air Force general on the Republican ticket, every provocative remark about bombing the North from the avid jet pilot who was his opponent, Johnson was lured by politics into the profitably contrasting position of deploring — even forbidding— war, escalation, and nuclear brinkmanship. The Tonkin Gulf was the background against which he seemed able to do so safely; in the long run, it was the birthplace of the credibility gap.

ALL the evidence visible at the time, and much testimony gathered since, suggests that in 1964 Johnson was not deeply concerned about Vietnam. The excellent Rusk and McNamara, as well as Lodge’s competent “new team,” were on hand to handle it, and anyway, the “issue polls” Johnson studied with as much care as he gave to CIA reports showed that Vietnam, then, was the major concern of only a small proportion of the voters. There was no real fear in the White House that the war would become the central issue of the years ahead, that every word spoken now would have its later impact, and not always the one intended.

But if the war was not a matter of night-and-day care, the election was. For eminently practical political reasons, Johnson wanted to win a landslide. Believing as he did in his Populist, politician’s heart that the best politics was to deliver “something for the folks,” with his Great Society program already being drawn up, Johnson recognized that he had the chance to break the decade-long deadlock of American politics; he could win the overwhelming mandate Kennedy had never had, swing Congress decisively as Eisenhower had never done, and deal with the backlog of urgent domestic business that had been piling up since the fifties. Then, like his idol, FDR, he could go on to break new ground.

Goldwater, in short, offered almost unlimited opportunity to a politician who had proved his skill in domestic affairs (the Kennedy tax and civil rights bills had been moved, the long-threatening railroad strike had been settled) and demonstrated both his strength and his restraint abroad; few men, certainly not hungry, mercurial Lyndon Johnson, could have resisted the openings offered, with Vietnam and peace in many ways the greatest of them. The President knew he had Goldwater on the ropes, knew he could be champion, perhaps the greatest of champions, when for so many years it had seemed impossible; and it was just not in him to stop punching or to pace his attack carefully. Thus, on September 25, Johnson declared:

We don’t want our American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys. We don’t want to get involved in a nation with 700 million people and get tied down in a land war in Asia.

And on September 28, with enthusiasm rising:

We are not going north and drop bombs at this stage of the game, and we are not going south and run out. . . . We are going . . . to try to get them to save their own freedom with their own men. . . .

And a little later, with Goldwater clearly in mind:

Sometimes our folks get a little impatient. Sometimes they rattle their rockets some, and they bluff about their bombs. But we are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves. . . . There is only one road to peace and that is to work at it patiently, deliberately, wisely, step by step, year by year, never to become reckless, never to become weary of the journey and irritated with folks who may not agree with you the first time you talk to them.

In the fall of 1964, Lyndon Johnson may or may not have known that he was not going to deliver on his promises that he would not “go north.” He told the reliable Charles Roberts of Newsweek that he had decided to bomb North Vietnam as early as October, 1964. He told me in 1965 that as early as October, 1964, the targets had been chosen for attack, if bombing was ever decided upon. Given Johnson’s obfuscation of his own motives and actions, and his occasional bombast, he may have been saying the same thing to both of us, in different ways. Contingency plans for bombing the North had been in existence for years; planes were readily available, as the Gulf of Tonkin had demonstrated; as early as 1961, Walt W. Rostow had been an ardent advocate of bombing, and his proposals and justifications had been brought to Johnson’s attention. General Taylor, who had succeeded Lodge as Ambassador to Saigon in 1965, advocated bombing strikes in October, 1964, after earlier opposition.

During the campaign, however it may have diverted his attention, Johnson — or any President — could not have failed to know that the situation in Vietnam was deteriorating. Nothing anywhere suggests that Johnson himself had fundamentally changed the view he had expressed in 1961 — that a “free” South Vietnam was vital to American interests and that, if necessary, “major American forces” would have to be committed to keep it “free.” Given everything, it is fair to say that if he did not know that he could not keep his promises not to “go north,” he certainly did not know that he could keep them.

In his search for personal vindication, for consensus, and for the power consensus would bring him, therefore, he had gone a step too far. He had transgressed the acceptable limits of his political reach. If he had not actually made up his mind what to do in South Vietnam, he had no way of knowing what might be required of a President who believed protecting it so vital to American interests. Yet, he could say: “As far as I am concerned, I want to be very cautious and careful, and use it only as a last resort, when I start dropping bombs around that are likely to involve American boys in a war in Asia with seven hundred million Chinese.”

But he was not that “cautious and careful” in what he said in his campaign, or in how he said it. And this would be what was remembered.

The drama of the confrontation with Goldwater, the monstrous outpouring of crowds, the posturing television images, the insistent words, the ever mounting ebullience of Lyndon Johnson, the souring, vaguely ominous tone of his opponent — all these combined to produce an enormous impact on the public, as a presidential campaign usually does. In that impact, the earlier warnings, the carefully maintained ambiguity of policy for the sake of consensus, the clear suggestions of what might have to be done, all were forgotten by President and public alike. Lyndon Johnson was promising peace, and Barry Goldwater was promising war; the President had shoved in all his stack; that was the effect on men, and in the endless adventure it is not the fact, so much as the impression, that controls.

“It seems,” Lyndon Johnson told reporters on election night at the LBJ Ranch, near where he had grown up in the dust and poverty of the hill country, “that I have spent my life getting ready for this moment.” And as the returns poured in, state after state falling into his column, the electoral total mounting, the great sweep developing, governors, senators, congressmen, members of legislatures riding in on his coattails, that long wait seemed eminently worthwhile. Everything seemed justified because it was the greatest election victory in history. The deadlock was smashed; the consensus was built; the Great Society was on the way; and Lyndon Johnson, the accidental President, would belong to the ages.

But history played a demonic joke upon Lyndon Johnson and, therefore, upon us all. Once, in 1964, he had told some reporters he had invited for lunch that he did not intend to make the mistake that he believed had ruined Franklin Roosevelt’s second term. “Roosevelt was never President after 1937 until the war came along,” he said. Lyndon Johnson would not forget the limits of power; he would not carelessly throw away the fruits of his great victory for some unattainable goal, as Roosevelt had done in trying to pack the Supreme Court.

But he did.

HANOI and Saigon, of course, had heard the campaign oratory too. By the time the election was over, South Vietnam was in deep political and military trouble and its American advisers were nearing despair. A succession of coups in Saigon had resulted neither in political progress toward needed reforms and stability nor in military advances. Diem had been followed by chaos. Neither the Viet Cong nor the North Vietnamese had failed to take advantage of this situation.

Militarily, the Viet Cong were mounting ever bigger and more successful battles, and the evidence suggested that they were getting more and more help from North Vietnam. Deliveries of weapons and supplies apparently had increased, although there arc no reliable figures to suggest by how much. So, apparently, had the infiltration of North Vietnamese fighting men, although here again the figures are fuzzy. On July 10, 1967, the Defense Department gave the following infiltration figures for the period.

Whether or not these figures are precise, there is little reason to doubt that they give a fairly accurate picture of increasing infiltration, which was getting to be a serious matter by the beginning of 1965. The United States itself had put in an additional five to six thousand troops in August, 1964, though not ostensibly for purposes of combat, and as the war seemed to be moving toward a showdown, the North Vietnamese would have had every reason to increase the military pressure in the South, and the NLF to welcome the assistance.

Two days before the American election, Viet Cong mortars had destroyed six B-57 bombers and killed five Americans in a surprise attack on the South Vietnamese air base at Bienhoa. Lyndon Johnson had done nothing — not surprisingly, from an American point of view, because as the campaign had developed it might have been a bad risk for him to have launched even limited reprisal air raids that close to Election Day; his image as a “man of prudence” might have been shaken, and although the election surely could not have been lost, Johnson was by then in no mood to jeopardize even one vote. He wanted them all.

But it is also not surprising if Hanoi and the NLF drew their own conclusions. Bienhoa was a more costly attack than the one in the Tonkin Gulf — a Communist victory, in fact, resulting in dismaying American losses. Since it was generally believed that the American bombers were at Bienhoa to impress the North Vietnamese with the potential of American air power, and since they had been placed there as part of the response to the Tonkin Gulf crisis, the mortar attack could have been nothing but a direct challenge to the United States — the sort of thing Johnson had said would be accorded “no immunity.” American men were killed, and that made it surely the kind of attack on American forces that the Tonkin Resolution had authorized him to “take all necessary steps” to repel. But he did not act.

These events, taken with the general tone of Johnson’s campaigning in the final months against Goldwater, can have had no other effect in Hanoi except to convince Ho Chi Minh’s government that it could step up the level of its military effort to a final push in 1965 without danger of major American intervention. A mortar attack directly on an American billet in Saigon just before Christmas also drew no American response; Johnson is reported to have been reluctant to shatter the Christmas season with warlike acts, or to dispel the general good feeling of his pre-inaugural period; but again, the North Vietnamese were unlikely to take such considerations into account. It is no wonder that in January, according to the figures quoted above, the first big increase in infiltration into the South could be counted, or that General Taylor’s intelligence agents had detected whole North Vietnamese units gathering for the kill. Hanoi had decided it had the green light.

This interpretation is supported by events in Saigon and elsewhere. As 1964 turned to 1965, seldom if ever had there been such unrest and turmoil in that unhappy capital. It is not part of this narrative to trace the bewildering successions of governments, uprisings, riots, resignations, statements, and outside influences at work, but in sum, a powerful anti-American, neutralist sentiment was visible, with Buddhist street mobs its most dramatic instrument; a strong South Vietnamese antiCommunist military bloc opposed it; and insofar as the outside world could judge, there seemed to be a climactic struggle between these elements for power. Some Americans in Saigon actively feared the emergence of a Buddhist-neutralist government that would seek peace with the NLF.

IN THE world at large, both De Gaulle of France and U Thant of the United Nations were seeking negotiated peace, and it even appeared to some that the Soviet Union was in the same mood; Izvestia called for a Johnson-Kosygin meeting, and Peking was alarmed enough to accuse the new Soviet leaders of practicing “Khrushchevism without Khrushchev.” Both in Saigon and elsewhere, it was apparently believed that Johnson, as he had seemed to say in the campaign, would countenance no “wider war” and that peace, therefore, was the realistic alternative.

At home, too, involvement in Vietnam was not popular. The Gallup poll for November 29, 1964, reported that 50 percent of the respondents believed the United States had handled Vietnam badly; in January, Lou Harris showed that 23 percent wanted to “negotiate and get out,” and another 40 percent were willing to do no more than “hold the line.” A few respected Senate voices — Mike Monroney of Oklahoma and John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, for instance — were expressing public doubts.

On its face, it might therefore seem that here was a second moment, somewhat comparable with that following the fall of Diem, when peace could have been had in Vietnam.

Johnson, it well may be, could have found a reasonable excuse for disengagement. He could have pointed out that there was evidently in Saigon neither sufficient will to win the war nor anything resembling the free government and free people for whose benefit both he and Kennedy had maintained the war was being fought. Following the theme Kennedy had insisted upon, and which Johnson had sounded fervently in the closing stages of his campaign, he could have said that it was a war for Asian boys to win; that the United States was willing to lend technical and material support, but since the Asian boys and their leaders displayed too little concern whether they won or not, the United States thought it the better part of good policy not to send good money — much less men — after bad. It is even possible, considering the state of things in Saigon and how the United States had influenced events at the time of the Diem overthrow, that a government could have been nudged into power that would have announced peace aims and made further United States participation a moot question.

Johnson not only had this on-scene situation within which to operate in the weeks following his election; he also had a solid domestic position to cover any retreat. He could have extricated himself from the war with less difficulty, probably, than De Gaulle had had during the Algerian disengagement. The Texan had won the most enormous political victory any President ever had; his mandate was unchallenged. He had spared the country Goldwater, and the collective sigh of relief was as audible as any political sentiment of this century. The response to Johnson’s “peace” statements on Vietnam during the campaign, while not universal, were as near an expression of solid public support as most Presidents ever get. The Republicans and the Southern Democrats, the only conceivable organized political powers that could have objected, had been shattered in the one case and badly shaken in the other. Never again would Lyndon Johnson have anything approaching the “free hand” that the 1964 elections gave him in the opening months of 1965.

In his State of the Union Message that January, Johnson himself made it clear where he wanted to go. He propounded a sweeping program of domestic reform, and, as he later would do in his Inaugural, called for rapprochement and a pooling of energies with the Soviet Union for peaceful purposes. A major war in Vietnam could do little to advance — it would actively pervert — both his domestic and his international purposes, particularly his desire to end the cold war and cooperate with the Soviets. Given the activities of U Thant, France, and the Soviet Union, it is likely that a strong Johnson move toward a negotiated settlement would have met some international cooperation that might have borne fruit; U Thant, for one, is convinced that it would have.

There probably had been no other point in the Vietnamese involvement, as we have seen, when the American effort seemed so near to abject failure. Political chaos in Saigon; apathy toward the war evident among the South Vietnamese populace; corruption everywhere; an aggressive Viet Cong pushing its sanguinary efforts in the countryside; tough North Vietnamese units and replacements arriving in force to help the insurgents; and the South Vietnamese Army badly, if not criminally, led by an inept, closed, and politically divided officer corps: these facts meant that a major defeat was at hand unless something was done, soon, and in Washington. And more than a year earlier, that grim November afternoon in the Executive Office Building, Lyndon Johnson had told Cabot Lodge, “I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.”

Lyndon Johnson was personally and politically committed. Steeped in and shaped by the cold war era of American history, a devout believer in the “domino theory” and the evil intentions of Communism, he was not looking for a way out; he was looking for a way to win, or at least to get the terms he believed were necessary.

The important thing, therefore, was that Johnson had no bargaining position whatever in Vietnam. In early 1965, he was on the edge of defeat and toppling over, and Ho Chi Minh knew it as well as he did. Given a little more strength, a little better field position, it might have been possible even for sincere anti-Communists like Johnson and Rusk to have made a pragmatic settlement, as the best of a bad bargain, on which the face of victory might have been painted. But the only way Lyndon Johnson or any other President could have negotiated his way out of Vietnam early in 1965 was by the virtual surrender of the anti-Communist government in Saigon and the abandonment of the American commitment to it.

Political negotiations, after all, do not create new situations; they only ratify power relationships that already exist. A negotiated settlement of any controversy is a ratification of the status quo (unless one side or the other foolishly gives away its position). In early 1965, the power relationship that existed was that North Vietnam and the NLF had all but won their war; they were in general control of South Vietnam outside Saigon, and any conceivable negotiation would inevitably give that status quo legal as well as de facto standing. Lyndon Johnson not only knew that better than anyone; he believed that to permit such a conclusion to the Vietnamese affair would be disastrous abroad and politically explosive at home.

Johnson was confronting the new Soviet regime of Brezhnev and Kosygin, and he wanted them to be under no illusions about the strength and determination of the man in the White House, just as Kennedy, after Vienna, had desperately wanted to prove his steadfastness and nerve to Khrushchev. This concern on the part of Johnson was neither idle nor vain. To the extent that power is a determining force in the affairs of men — and who would deny that that is a great extent? — one of the essential ingredients of power is its credibility. Power has no meaning if it will not or cannot be used, and not all of America’s might would have impressed the Soviet leaders had they believed Johnson feared or had not the political ability to use it.

After the long campaign of 1964, with Johnson in the role of peace candidate, there might well have been a question in Moscow on that point. It was sound diplomacy, as Johnson saw it, to remove any doubt about his willingness to stand fast when challenged. Moreover, it was characteristic of his whole experience in politics that, having established in his campaign a position of moderation and restraint on the war, he then faced the other way and set about proving his readiness and ability to use his power when he had to.

But Johnson was not concerned merely with his own position, important as that was in the world, and particularly in the eyes of his Soviet counterparts. On October 16, 1964, as he and Gold water drew near the end of their one-sided contest, the Chinese Communists had exploded a nuclear device in the interior of Asia; the increased power and prestige that immediately accrued to Peking were a new factor in the balance of forces in Asia. Believing, as Johnson did, in the threat of Asian or any kind of Communism, he could only have seen an American withdrawal from, or compromise in, Vietnam as a further, and unacceptable, gain for the Chinese.

As he had in 1961, he saw the containment of Communist expansion and influence in Southeast Asia as a necessity of American national security, and he saw South Vietnam also as the key “domino,” not only in Asia but in the whole string of American commitments upon the credibility of which — so Johnson and Dean Rusk believed — world peace depended. If he pulled out of Vietnam, he believed, Communism, seen almost as a mystic force rather than as a policy of national states, would in swift progression outflank Thailand, menace the Malaysian peninsula and Indonesia, surround India, and throw the American line of influence, perhaps even defense, back somewhere into the Pacific. Wars of liberation, vindicated as a technique, would spring up like bonfires throughout the underdeveloped world. Even Europe might be in difficulties because the American commitment to defend it, and particularly West Berlin, was a key factor in its security; and Johnson believed that if he pulled out of Vietnam ignominiously, no one, least of all Brezhnev and Kosygin, would believe that he would honor a commitment anywhere.

JOHNSON played it safe as he began his full term. There would be as little break with the Kennedy image as possible. That meant not only that the “commitment” of Eisenhower and Kennedy to South Vietnam had to be honored — one might find a way to escape that kind of entanglement— but it meant also that Rusk and McNamara and Bundy and Maxwell Taylor, and ultimately, even Cabot Lodge, would still be there. The architects of the Vietnamese involvement would be Johnson’s advisers in the new circumstances created by his landslide, just as they had been Kennedy’s in the fall of 1961 and Johnson’s in November, 1963.

Among Johnson’s high-level advisers, only Undersecretary of State George Ball openly took the negative on Vietnam. In October, 1964, he had sent the President a hundred-page memorandum advocating a withdrawal from the “gluepot” of Indochina; or, if that could not be done, at least a concentration upon the ground war in South Vietnam itself rather than “going north” with air power. Ball’s memo thus confirms the fact that even before the election, while Johnson was still assuring the voters that he did not want to “start dropping bombs around” in an Asian war, an air attack against North Vietnam was considered likely enough by a sub-Cabinet officer to get up a major argument against it.

But Ball was only one among many, and Johnson’s decision to retain the Kennedy Cabinet deprived him, practically speaking, of much of the political freedom a landslide election in his own right had provided. He might talk to reporters about “keeping his options open,” but he already had limited them severely for the sake of political continuity. The men with the greatest vested interest in winning the war, and in demonstrating its rightness, would continue to be his principal advisers—advocates as well as judges, fact-finders as well as fact-weighers — on war policy.

Several officials who were close to Johnson at that time also recall the sheer ebullience of the moment. One of them had also served Kennedy and remembers the same sense of omnipotence in the White House in early 1961. “Everything had always worked out for us,” he said. “The primaries, the convention, the debates with Nixon, the confrontation with the Houston ministers, the election itself. We thought we had the golden touch. It was just like that with Johnson after ‘sixty-four.’ ”

In Kennedy’s case, the sense of the golden touch vanished at the Bay of Pigs, never really to return. But by January, 1965, Lyndon Johnson had even more reason for sheer confidence in his ability to make things come right. He had maintained the government in an hour of crisis, taken over the Democratic Party from the Kennedys, pushed through the legislation John Kennedy couldn’t (as Johnson saw it), crushed Goldwater, and won the White House with the biggest vote margin in history.

People who have known Johnson the longest maintain without exception that he is at his best when the going is toughest — as, for instance, when he had a Democratic majority of only one senator in 1957, or just after he succeeded Kennedy in the White House. Richard Nixon put it another way during the campaign of 1964. He was working as hard for Goldwater as he could, he said privately,because as a political realist he was most afraid of a Johnson landslide. He had observed Johnson over many years in the Senate, and he agreed with Johnson’s friends. When the going was hardest, when there were practical restraints on him, Johnson was an exceptionally able leader; but when he was powerful enough to have a free hand, Johnson lost his otherwise sure touch, and his vanity and mercurial temperament were likely to take charge of him.

IF JOHNSON nevertheless maintained most of his habitual political caution as 1965 opened, that had little to do with his attitude on military operations in Vietnam. He might worry about Republicans being able to charge him with softness, but he had no fear that Americans would condemn a fight against Communism, or that their soldiers could not win a war.

It would be too much to suggest, in the light of the Korean War and of the French experience in Indochina (not to mention the American experience to that point in South Vietnam), that Johnson or his advisers thought the war could be easily or quickly won by an American intervention. But the history of the war, one of these men has said in retrospect, is “a search for the quick fix.” It has been one effort after another to force a quick end to a situation that cannot even be sharply defined, much less circumscribed. Men in Washington now understand, a great deal more clearly than they did in early 1965, that the war in Vietnam is neither as simple as a rebellion nor as clear as an aggression. It is an immensely complicated struggle, with historical and social as well as political and economic roots, a terribly total, but curiously limited, war in which military power is only one of the weapons needed. Even in its strictly military aspects, it is not necessarily a war in which firepower and sophisticated equipment and tons of supplies (in all of which twentieth-century American armies specialize) can be decisive.

But how could Lyndon Johnson, in his moment of triumph, with his sense of the golden touch, doubt that his superbly equipped forces, representing all the technological and industrial genius of America, organized by the incomparable McNamara, with his modern administrator’s skills, trained and led by the impressive generals and admirals with whom Johnson had conspired politically in his congressional days, backed by the most powerful industrial capacity and the most impressive economy in history — how could he doubt that this juggernaut could deal with a few ill-clad guerrillas, if necessary with the old-fashioned Chinese-style infantry divisions of Vo Nguyen Giap, with an enemy who had to steal his weapons, bring in his supplies on bicycles and the backs of old women, and whose soldiers were regimented Communist slaves without the incentives of freedom and democracy to make them fight well?

As for the political aspect of the thing, was not Lyndon Johnson the man who had brought the R.E.A. to Texas? He knew how to deliver the political goods to the people. And once America brought its famous know-how to the task of raising the Vietnamese standard of living, the Saigon government ought to have no more difficulty winning the loyalties of the people than LBJ had had in getting elected to Congress down in the hill country.

And there is something else, too, something that must be discussed delicately, but discussed nevertheless. Lyndon Johnson was not then, and is not now, a racist, or even an imperialist. He was and is, however, a fervently nativist American who still, in the White House, could remember and recite his childhood oration from George Frisbie Hoare, the famous encomium to the colors that includes the phrase . . the fairest vision on which these eyes ever looked was the flag of my country in a foreign land,” and whose patriotism and conviction of his country’s superior virtues were passionate and instinctive.

He was and is a man of the South in whom the heritage of Ol’ Massa has been overcome but not forgotten, as it never can be by any Southerner. He was and is a child, too, of Texas and Colonel Colt, influences just as powerful. He was and is a man, therefore, of power and pride, and the latter will not brook much hindrance of the former, particularly from men who, though not perhaps inferior, still have to be reminded from time to time of the realities of things:

They’ll come right into your yard and take it over if you let them. And the next day they’ll be right up on your porch, barefoot and weighing one hundred and thirty pounds and they’ll take that too. But if you say to ‘em right at the start, “hold on, just wait a minute,” they’ll know they’re dealing with somebody who’ll stand up. And after that you can get along fine.

The enemy in Vietnam was barefoot and weighed one hundred and thirty pounds. He was the kind of man who might be fine in his place, who could be a useful citizen and a good friend if he let you train him right and help him a little, but who would take over your front porch if you didn’t stand up to him. Lyndon Johnson was not about to let little brown men who skulked in the jungle do that to him and to the United States of America, and he was not capable of believing that the barefoot guerrillas might try to take the front porch anyway, even if told to “hold on, just wait a minute.” The French had had no helicopters and no aircraft carriers and no political backing at home, and Ho Chi Minh could deal with them, all right. But when it came to the full might of the U.S.A. — when God’s country struck with the righteous wrath of freedom aroused — surely then it would be Glory, Glory Hallelujah, as it had been in every war in American history. And that symbolic flag of George Frisbie Hoare’s fervent oratory again would be “terrible as a meteor.”

It seemed then that it might not even be necessary to send in American troops, although Ball, dissenting as usual, had argued that if there was to be an intervention, it ought to be on the ground in the South, where he thought the war would be won or lost. But that would guarantee ugly casualty lists, for one thing. For another, a generation of Americans had been brought up on the proposition that never again should their troops get embroiled in a land war on the continent of Asia, as they had been in the stalemate in Korea.

Air power was cheaper. It was what the South Vietnamese officers wanted. It was most acceptable in Congress, where for years airmen had lobbied assiduously and well. It would engage a Navy impatient for a piece of the action, with its carriers already steaming in the Tonkin Gulf. Air and sea power, after all, were the great American assets in the Pacific area; why not fight one’s own war rather than Giap’s?

Kept away from sensitive areas along the Yunnan border, moreover, air raids also were less likely than a troop commitment to alarm the enigmatic Chinese into the kind of massive retaliation they had launched when American forces in Korea had approached the Yalu River in 1950.

Besides, the enemy in North Vietnam had not yet felt the sting of war. It cost Hanoi little to sponsor and support terrorism and guerrilla action in the South, If the scourge of war could be carried to Ho Chi Minh and the zealots of his government, not just to their troops and agents far off in the South, they would get a clear and painful idea of what their ambitions could cost. There would be “no sanctuary” in North Vietnam, and that would make it an entirely different war.

ALL in all, air power appeared on its face to be the quickest way to meet the main need of the moment, which was bolstering the morale and prestige of the anti-neutralist South Vietnamese Army and government factions and keeping them in control in Saigon. This was necessary if the war was even to be continued, let alone concluded advantageously.

Still, Inauguration Day passed, and Johnson had made only a characteristically limited commitment to the air power advocates. But at some point during these turn-of-the-year months, he had agreed with his military advisers that deliberate attacks on Americans (as distinguished from attacks on South Vietnamese which might incidentally kill Americans) would be answered with air strikes against the North. That was no more than implementing the pledge of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, and the action would be modeled on the Tonkin Gulf retaliation, which had pleased the President with its blending of power and restraint.

This limited commitment again was predictable, given Lyndon Johnson’s political modus operandi. He was under military pressure to bomb; he was under political pressure for restraint; every instinct derived from his lifelong war of political survival told him to alienate neither force but to placate both with half a loaf for each. In his retaliation decision, he found the middle ground, that comfortable territory on which he saw no reason not to stand in Vietnam, as he had always stood in Texas and in the Senate.

A more sweeping policy of bombing the North, in general punishment for what it was supposed to be doing in the South, had long been advocated by Walt W. Rostow, among others. The President, although deeply concerned at the possibility of a South Vietnamese collapse, was not willing, as February began, to undertake such a portentous campaign. McGeorge Bundy was in Saigon, however, on a mission partially designed to determine whether general air attacks as recommended by Rostow ought to be launched.

The question was never answered. On February 7, vicious Viet Cong mortar fire came down on the American Special Forces camp at Pleiku, and Viet Cong infiltrators breached the South Vietnamese security perimeter to blow up several aircraft. Eight Americans were killed, and 108 others were injured. This case litted the circumstances under which Johnson had decided to retaliate against North Vietnam enough so that, on the same day, with Bundy urging him on by overseas telephone, air strikes were launched by forty-nine carrier planes against staging areas and base camps around Donghoi in North Vietnam, just above the Demilitarized Zone. A second wave of South Vietnamese planes, escorted by American jets, struck the Vinhlinh communications center, even nearer the DMZ, on February 8.

These raids against the North, according to the official White House statement, were “in response to provocations ordered and directed by the Hanoi regime,” which had been reported by American intelligence as ordering “a more aggressive course of action against both South Vietnamese and American installations.”

The statement also contained the official rationale for attacking the North Vietnamese in response to Viet Cong attacks in the South: “These attacks were only made possible by the continuing infiltration of personnel and equipment from North Vietnam. This infiltration markedly increased during 1964 and continues to increase.”

Official after official, in public and in private testimony, explained at the time that the Pleiku raids had been an open and direct challenge of American will and purpose, ordered by Hanoi and carried out on Hanoi’s orders; the resulting air raids had been a “limited and fitting response.” Even George Ball, no doubt reflecting sadly on his hundred-page memorandum of October, 1964, testified loyally at a news conference that the Administration had had no choice but to respond, so that Hanoi could not mistake American intentions, so that American lives could be protected.

“Secret intelligence,” of course, was adduced to prove that Hanoi had planned and precipitated this test. Nevertheless, Charles Mohr, a reporter who had spent enough time in Vietnam to have a sense of its complexity and who was, in February, 1965, the White House correspondent of the New York Times (later, he returned to Saigon), analyzed the Administration explanations skeptically in a Times article on February 8:

The Administration contention clearly is that North Vietnam made possible the attack on Pleiku. But the questions about the incident grow out of the apparent fact that a small Vietcong unit, armed with captured [American] weapons and protected by a lack of field intelligence on the part of the South Vietnamese Army, succeeded in creeping onto the American base and dealing a bloody blow.

Thus the final question is how much of the responsibility for Pleiku can be laid not just to Hanoi but to a failure to prosecute the antiguerrilla war in South Vietnam itself in a more vigorous and successful way.

And one Administration official, asked why Pleiku had been considered more of a North Vietnamese challenge than Bienhoa (two days before the election), replied: “There’s a limit to America’s patience. When the attack was repeated, and repeated under those circumstances, there was no alternative.”

Another official put it more bluntly. “They were hitting us,” he said, “and we asked ourselves, ‘Why the hell don’t we hit them one?’ ”

Still, there was something ambiguous about this first attack on the North. There was unquestionably an element of retaliation about it, just as advertised. The attack on Pleiku was certainly the latest of a series, and the usually imperturbable McGeorge Bundy, who was on the scene shortly after the night battle, gave an emotional report on the carnage; weeks later, in his White House office, he could still speak to me with obvious feeling of the President’s right and duty to protect American boys against being butchered in their tents. Soviet Premier Kosygin also was in Hanoi at the time, and there were those in the Administration who believed that to suffer the Pleiku attack without response would only permit Hanoi to argue to him that American power in Southeast Asia was a paper tiger; hence Kosygin might be more inclined to help along the Communist war effort, scornful of American response and moving ipso facto nearer Peking in the process.

THE rationale of retaliation, however, was subject to serious doubt from the start. For one thing, only twelve hours elapsed between the beginning of the Pleiku attack and the American strike on Donghoi; many critics doubted whether a policy determination as well as a combat operation could have been put together so quickly.

These doubts have been greatly strengthened in many minds by subsequent events. On February 14, for instance, while the headlines still glared, General Taylor said in an interview on CBS television that future attacks on the North would be determined “by the behavior of the Hanoi government.” Adlai Stevenson had already said, in a letter to the United Nations Security Council president, Roger Seydoux of France, that despite the retaliatory attacks the United States had no intention of carrying on a general air war over North Vietnam.

Yet, writing for his book, published two years later, in February, 1967, General Taylor never mentioned retaliation. Explaining the origins of the bombing, he wrote:

The first reason was to let the people of South Vietnam feel that for the first time, after eleven years of bitter warfare, they were striking back against the source of all their troubles. . . . The second reason for our use of our air power was a military one. It was to utilize superiority in the air to strike military targets which, if destroyed, would have the effect of restraining or making more difficult the infiltration of men and supplies from North Vietnam to South Vietnam. . . . The third reason for the air campaign . . . was to remind the leadership in Hanoi, the men who were directing the war in the South, that little by little through the progressive, restrained application of force by bombing, they would pay an ever-increasing price for a continuation of their aggression in the South.

And when a member of the White House staff later in 1965 asked McGeorge Bundy for a guidance memo on why the bombing of the North was necessary, Bundy’s reply cited the first two reasons advanced by Taylor in his book, and added another — to convince Hanoi that the United States intended to make good its commitment to South Vietnam.

By the spring of 1965, moreover, there were plenty of officials in the Administration who would confide that the real value of the bombing was as a “bargaining card”; that is, they said, it was something that could be traded at the proper time for value received, The destruction being wrought on North Vietnam could be used in a negotiation to offset the military superiority then enjoyed by Communist forces in the South. Barely three months after the Pleiku response on May 13 — President Johnson ordered the first “pause” in the bombing, an obviously diplomatic move; nothing happened, and the bombers went back to work on May 19.

There was a glaring weakness, in fact, in the Administration’s own statement about retaliation for direct attacks on American troops. McNamara inadvertently made that weakness public on February 7 when, in response to a news-conference questioner who asked how the Viet Cong had been able to penetrate the base defenses at Pleiku, he said he did not believe “it will ever be possible to protect our forces against sneak attacks of that kind.”

The hard-hitting Viet Cong quickly confirmed this. On February 10, three days after the Pleiku attack and the first wave of “retaliatory” raids against Donghoi, the guerrillas launched another assault, this time against American barracks at Quinhon. They blew up the barracks, killed nineteen Americans, wounded thirteen, and got away.

The next day, 160 American and South Vietnamese planes bombed barracks and staging areas in Chanhoa and Chaple, North Vietnam, again in “retaliation.” The essential absurdity of the scheme could not have been made plainer. McNamara had pointed out that there could be no base security in the South while the guerrillas were free to operate; yet, once retaliation had been publicly pledged after Pleiku, for every attack on Americans there would have to be a response directly against North Vietnam. If that were not so, whatever deterrent value, whatever credibility for American determination, whatever boost for South Vietnamese morale had been gained at Pleiku would have been dissipated, and in effect, a gigantic American bluff would have been called with impunity. Such a paper-tiger effect would surely generate even more attacks against Americans.

On the other hand, to strike back only when struck was ridiculous and impossible. It handed the enemy the initiative. It made the lives of American boys a sort of trigger for American air raids. It gave over to the Viet Cong the decision whether an American air raid could be launched against North Vietnam. Retaliation was simply untenable, and even the word could be justified only if it were a “cover,” a sugar coating, for the launching of a general air bombardment of North Vietnam; and only then if that bombardment could ultimately be shown to be a justified, logical, and feasible military strategy designed to bring the war to a close.

But the bombing was not that, either. The Pleiku raids were neither purely spontaneous retaliation, as the Administration at first fatuously insisted; nor were they, as this lack of candor suggested to so many critics, the first step in a longplanned, carefully conceived air campaign against North Vietnam, a campaign the launching of which had only awaited some such pretext as Pleiku.

THE truth is characteristically Johnsonian; it lies somewhere between these poles. Johnson had decided that air strikes were needed, primarily to boost South Vietnamese morale and confound the neutralists, secondarily to protect American troops, and incidentally to make life and war more difficult for Ho Chi Minh and his government. But with a wary eye on public opinion in the United States and a healthy respect for the potency of peace as a political issue, in his established pattern of going two ways at once, as a man of restraint as well as power, he had not been willing by the time of Pleiku to order a general air bombardment — to order the bombing of the North, in a phrase Richard Nixon was then using, “day by day, and for that matter, night by night” until its collapse.

The raids, then, were both agreed upon in advance and retaliatory; just as Stevenson wrote Seydoux, Johnson then had not ordered continuing overall aerial warfare. In his first great test as a war President, he was relying upon his tried and true method. He would bomb, all right, but he would not really turn the bombers loose. He would retaliate, but he would not initiate. He would show his muscle but only suggest how tough he could be if he really tried; as Taylor said in his February 14 broadcast, the raids were “deliberately planned . . . to suggest the possibility of other and bigger forms of reaction.”

Wars are not elections in Texas, however, and what suffices in one theater will not necessarily do in the other. A former official who participated in the post-Pleiku discussions has privately described what happened on February 7, 1965:

We began the bombing with no philosophy of what we were doing. We didn’t necessarily even intend to start a campaign. We ignored the difficulty of halting the natural growth of something once started, and we considered the whole thing too much in terms of immediate effect and not enough in terms of long-range problems.

A policy, by definition, is a course of action intended to produce a desired end at an acceptable cost. Bombing the North might have formed such a policy had it been believed in the Johnson Administration, however erroneously, that the assault eventually would cause Hanoi to sue for peace on terms advantageous to the United States; but that policy would have required the difficult, dangerous, and repugnant decision to launch the “strategic bombing” of populations and cities, as well as the tactical bombing of “military targets.”

Bombing might also have been a policy, in the true sense, had it been aimed at interdicting every route from the North into the South — stopping at the border or beyond every man and ounce of material coming down in aid of the NLF, sealing off the indigenous part of the war from any outside aid and sponsorship. But the bombing was never so aimed, and no military man was foolish enough to maintain that air power could close mountain and jungle trails to men carrying mortar shells on their backs or to old women trotting under chogi sticks loaded at both ends with sacks of ammunition, much less to battalions of determined, hardy soldiers slipping one by one through the hills to a prearranged rendezvous in the South. McNamara, for one, never contended that air power could cause any worthwhile reduction in the amount of supplies and the number of men being sent from North to South; he said only that it would make it more difficult and costly to get them there, and no doubt it has.

In either case, however, the bombing would have been aimed at ending the war at an acceptable cost, and that would have been a policy, however bloody or futile it might have proved. So would Ball’s alternative suggestion of a commitment of combat troops to help the South Vietnamese Army. Control of the South Vietnamese populace, after all, was what the war was about. Johnson might have taken a real step forward in that struggle by making a troop commitment before the full weight of the North Vietnamese intervention cited by Taylor could have been brought to bear. He might even have staved off a major part of the ultimate infiltration of North Vietnamese troop units, by giving Hanoi a clear signal of his determination to fight, and by getting superior forces on the scene “fustest with the mostest.” A troop commitment at that time, moreover, might have been defended against adverse American and world opinion; the troops would have been fighting in the South, in defense, against men who could be clearly pictured as invaders.

If North Vietnam actually was responsible for the war in the South — and with the political campaign over, the Administration insisted that Hanoi was responsible—it perhaps made some sense to “raise the price of aggression” to Ho Chi Minh. But to punish him for what he was supposed to be doing would not necessarily make him stop it, unless the punishment was total; and vengeance is not a worthy or sensible reason for making war.

Moreover, meting out punishment in this world of sin and sadness demands an Olympian regard for one’s own purity that bodes ill for one’s judgment; and it is a dubious psychological proposition, anyway. A nation assaulted by another, with whatever justification, is likely to feel aggrieved, particularly an underdeveloped, formerly colonized, often invaded, Communist, Asian country bombed from the air by a powerful, capitalist, white, Western, occasionally imperialist nation. It could just as well have been argued that bombing the North would create a fierce will to fight on and win in a people who had borne the worst of the nationalist struggle against the French and who, almost alone among Asians, had mounted an underground resistance against the Japanese occupation in World War II.

Finally, bombing the North in any systematic, planned way was seen, even in 1965 and by many high in the Johnson Administration, as a largely irrelevant war, what McNamara would later describe to me as a “diversionary effort” that would only nibble at the edge of the fundamental problem of coping with the guerrillas in the South. McGeorge Bundy, returning from Saigon and Pleiku just after the retaliatory raids, reminded reporters that “the primary contest is in South Vietnam.”

So no bombing campaign to bring the North to its knees was planned or intentionally started. The bombing began because Lyndon Johnson, in the ebullience of his power and in the fatal grip of an irrelevant experience, wanted to strike and thought he needed to strike and found in the rationale of retaliation the political stance required to fit his lifelong method of operation. The result was the fourth bloodiest war in American history.