Worldmaking (58 page)

Building the Great Society meant winning the Vietnam War—or at least doing enough not to lose. So President Johnson secured congressional authorization, in the form of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, to combat Vietnamese communism in whatever way he deemed fit. The first step was a program of aerial bombing to hurt Hanoi and stem north–south infiltration: on March 2, 1965, the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign against North Vietnam commenced. Next was the introduction of U.S. combat troops: on March 8–9, nine thousand men from the Ninth Marine Expeditionary Brigade made landfall in South Vietnam. These modest early commitments snowballed in precisely the way Nitze feared. By the end of the following year, there were 365,000 American troops in Vietnam. By 1968, the total number of American troops had reached half a million. Making good on NSC-68's strictures, and protecting the president's right flank, was a vastly expensive business.

While he had devoted relatively little time to considerations of foreign policy, there was also a clear Wilsonian aspect to Johnson's worldview. The president liked to quote Wilson's observation that “I hope we shall never forget that we created this nation, not to serve ourselves, but to serve mankind.”
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Like Kennedy, LBJ hoped that the combination of U.S. foreign aid and expertise might help solve the perennial global problems of “ignorance, poverty, hunger, and disease.”
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Johnson would later expend a lot of energy considering how New Deal–style public works programs might be applied to South Vietnam. During a celebrated speech at Johns Hopkins University in April 1965, Johnson announced his intention to build a new Tennessee Valley Authority in the Mekong Delta. NSC staffer Robert Komer recalled that Johnson would drive him “up the wall” on the issue of rural electrification in South Vietnam.
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Exporting the New Deal would modernize countries in the Third World, allowing the United States to realize Wilsonian dreams. Banished at the Navy Department, Nitze played no role in the key escalatory meetings of the Vietnam War. But NSC-68's portrait of communist intentions tended to frame discussions on the efficacy of escalation. Nitze would find himself torn over whether to support the Americanization of the conflict.

Walter Lippmann and George Kennan both believed that it was foolish to invest American credibility and resources in preserving South Vietnam's independence. The faux nation was so insignificant in the grand scheme of things that any American effort to prop it up was little more than a fool's errand. Lippmann initially welcomed Lyndon Johnson's accession to the presidency. The two men enjoyed warm relations in the first couple of years when the esteemed journalist was a regular visitor to the White House. In September 1964, Johnson awarded Lippmann the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his role in educating his fellow Americans about the complexities of world affairs. But the president's escalation of the Vietnam War through 1964 and 1965 caused Lippmann to reassess. He went from hailing LBJ as “a man for this season” to describing him as a “primitive frontiersman” who had “betrayed and abandoned” his worthy domestic ideals.
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On October 14, 1965, Lippmann wrote to Allan Nevins, a history professor at Columbia, “I do not doubt Johnson's sincerity and fervor for these domestic reforms, but when he looks abroad, he is filled with a simple-minded chauvinism of the good-guy, bad-guy thought, and I doubt very much if he has the kind of moral courage to liquidate an unprofitable war.”
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Lippmann began to attack Johnson's Vietnam policies in his “Today & Tomorrow” column. In response, administration officials established what became known as the “Lippmann Project,” parsing the journalist's voluminous writings for egregious inconsistencies and errors of counsel. “An acceptance of Lippmann's doctrine [in Vietnam]—as in the cases of Greece, Berlin, Korea, and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” reassured Walt Rostow in a memo to Dean Rusk, “would undermine the stability of the Free World everywhere and endanger our own safety by making the mainland of Europe and Asia safe hunting ground for the Communists.”
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George Kennan joined Lippmann in attacking the president's policies in private and in print—and similarly earning LBJ's enmity. On February 7, 1965, the NLF had attacked Pleiku air base in South Vietnam, killing nine Americans and injuring five hundred. McGeorge Bundy was in South Vietnam at the time and, upon visiting Pleiku, he fell under what General William Westmoreland described as “field marshal psychosis.” On Bundy's recommendation, the president ordered reprisal bombing raids against North Vietnam.
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Kennan recorded his concerns in his diary the following day: “The provocation, admittedly, was great; but this bombing of points in Vietnam is a sort of petulant escapism, and will, I fear, lead to no good results.”
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On December 12, 1965, Kennan wrote the lead article in the Outlook section of
The Washington Post
on U.S. involvement in Vietnam. His critique was typically elegant and searing:

I would not know what “victory” means … It seems to me the most unlikely of all contingencies that anyone should come to us on his knees and inquire [about] our terms, whatever the escalation of our effort … If we can find nothing better to do than embark upon a further open-ended increase in the level of our commitment simply because the alternatives seem humiliating and frustrating, one will have to ask whether we have not become enslaved to the dynamics of a single unmanageable situation—to the point where we have lost much of the power of initiative and control over our own policy, not just locally but on a world scale.
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Lippmann was thrilled to have a fellow dissenter, writing warmly to his former adversary: “[I] read your article in the
Washington Post
on Sunday. It is very illuminating and profoundly true, and I am very much afraid that the President has got beyond the point of no return in the distortion of our foreign policy by this Vietnamese War.”
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Kennan's article in
The Post
annoyed LBJ, as was expected, but worse was to come. In February 1966, Senator J. William Fulbright called Kennan to testify before his Foreign Relations Committee. Fulbright, a cerebral and imposing presence in the Senate, had become increasingly frustrated by Johnson's escalation of the war, which he had come to view as unwarranted. He made arrangements for the hearings to be televised live to maximize the impact of his star witness's testimony. It certainly made for powerful theater. The White House could hardly impugn the architect of America's containment doctrine as weak willed—a man interned by the Nazis and banished from Moscow by Josef Stalin. In clipped, elegant sentences, Kennan eviscerated the shibboleths that served to sustain America's escalating commitment to South Vietnam. Kennan observed that President Eisenhower's “domino theory”—which held that if one nation falls to communism, its neighbors will soon follow—had recently been proved nonsensical by events in Indonesia, where a brutal anticommunist insurrection in 1965 had wiped a protocommunist regime off the map. The rebellion marked a vicious period of bloodletting in which half a million Indonesians—those of Chinese origin were targeted in particular—were killed. But the toppling of Sukarno's Jakarta regime showed that some dominoes could pop back up with minimal American interference (the CIA was involved only in a secondary capacity). Sukarno's ouster certainly seemed to show that East Asia was not quite the region on the brink of communist revolution that crisis-driven Vietnam hawks liked to maintain.

Kennan devoted much of his testimony to explaining how the United States should extricate itself from the mess in which it found itself. The United States was sufficiently strong and respected, Kennan insisted, that a tactical withdrawal from Vietnam in 1966 would scarcely register among allies and enemies: “There is more respect to be won in the opinion of this world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant or unpromising objectives.” Kennan suggested that the United States withdraw incrementally by limiting tactical engagements and defending strategically important enclaves. The important thing was to melt away quietly without instilling too much consternation or conveying a sense of panic. Thereafter, Saigon's fate would be entirely in its own hands. If the nation failed to stand unaided on its own two feet—well, then, Charles Darwin had a theory about that.
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Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, one of only two senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, was smitten by Kennan's coolly rational logic, observing that “words simply fail me in expressing the degree to which this testimony of yours has moved me this morning … It is going to be referred to for generations to come.” Senator Frank Lausche of Ohio pushed a little harder, asking Kennan how the architect of containment could so readily abandon his own theory. Kennan replied simply that “the situation has changed”—America had to choose where to spend its finite resources, and South Vietnam was not sufficiently important to warrant the investment. Angriest of all was Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri, who had recently returned from Vietnam mightily impressed by the morale of U.S. troops and appalled by tales of atrocities perpetrated by the Viet Cong. “Morally,” Symington demanded, “do you think we have the right to desert them by going into coastal enclaves?” Kennan, impassive during the tirade, replied slowly and patiently:

Senator, if their morale is so shaky that without an offensive strategy on our part they are simply going to give up the fight, I do not think they are worth helping anyway. And, as for the question of our having a moral obligation to them, they have had enormous help from us to date. I mean, goodness, they have had help in billions and billions of dollars. How many countries are you going to give such a claim on our resources and on our help? If they cannot really do the trick with this, I feel strongly that the trouble lies somewhere with them and not with us.
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Kennan's testimony caused a remarkable stir. NBC broadcast the hearings live in their entirety, but CBS opted to air a rerun of
I Love Lucy
instead. The network's decision led its news president, Fred Friendly, to resign in protest. Meanwhile Kennan was swamped with a barrage of fan mail from across the nation. His secretary recalled that the mailman would arrive at his Princeton home every day “hauling sacks like Santa Claus.”
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One poll revealed that in the month after Kennan's testimony, public support for LBJ's handling for the war dropped from 63 to 49 percent.
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For a man of Kennan's self-critical disposition, the acclaim and validation must have been pleasurable—though the warm feeling did not last long.

As Lippmann and Kennan presented formidable public critiques of President Johnson's Vietnam policies, Nitze continued in his struggle to master his views on the conflict. He had visited Vietnam in June 1965 in his capacity as secretary of the Navy and was unimpressed with the field commander, General William Westmoreland. He had queried the general on some of the data he presented on troop numbers—with a little too much certainty, in Nitze's opinion—and Westmoreland “took deep umbrage and said I was accusing him of inflating enemy strength in order to justify lifting the ceiling on American forces in Vietnam.”
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Upon his return, Nitze warned McNamara about Westmoreland's cavalier methods for calculating enemy strength—perhaps, Nitze ventured cautiously, the United States should consider withdrawing its forces from Vietnam. McNamara asked whether withdrawal would lead communists to escalate their efforts elsewhere. Nitze replied yes. McNamara then asked where this might happen. Nitze didn't know. “Well,” McNamara observed, “under those circumstances, I take it you can't be at all certain that the difficulties of stopping them in the next area that they may choose won't be greater than the difficulties of stopping them in South Vietnam.” When Nitze replied “no, I can't” to the second consecutive question, McNamara killed the discussion: “You offer no alternative.”
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The following month, Nitze was given an unambiguous opportunity to voice his concerns when Johnson called a meeting to discuss Vietnam with the cabinet secretaries, service secretaries, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Midway through the meeting, LBJ asked Nitze directly what he thought of American prospects in South Vietnam—should he agree to Westmoreland's request for more troops? Nitze replied that the situation was challenging but that adding more troops would commensurately increase prospects for success. “Would you send in more forces than Westmoreland requests?” interrupted the president. “Yes. Depends on how quickly they—” LBJ cut him off. “How many?” the president demanded. “200 [thousand] instead of 100?” “Need another 100 in January—” replied Nitze. “Can you do that?” Johnson cut in again. “Yes,” said Nitze obligingly.
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Over the course of a minute-long presidential interrogation, Nitze had lent clear support to a war he had found troubling for so long. In a room of can-dos, the principal author of NSC-68 had decided to take ownership of its logic.

Nitze lived to regret the advice he dispensed under pressure at the meeting, although his support for the war certainly improved relations with the president. When McGeorge Bundy left the White House to assume the presidency of the Ford Foundation, LBJ briefly contemplated appointing Nitze as his replacement. Robert McNamara was open to just about anyone taking the job so long as it wasn't the relentlessly hawkish Walt Rostow. So he told Johnson that Nitze “could do it all right,” though he added a caveat: “I don't know if you'd find it pleasant to work with him; he's an abrasive character.”
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Takes one to know one, Nitze might have replied.