HOW WE SANK INTO VIETNAM
Buttinger, Joseph
One of the most puzzling questions future historians will have to deal with is why the United States ever got involved in the contemporary struggle for Indochina that has been going on since...
...117, pp...
...97 The President's reaction to this evaluation of the air war was his approval of an increase in B-52 sorties from 60 to 800 monthly, effective of February 1967...
...A "total reversion" of Mr...
...487-89 83 Ibid., p. 461...
...The Thieu regime will fall because it lacks any kind of popular support—in contrast to the Communists and their allies in the South who still constitute, as they have done ever since 1945, a powerful and indestructible indigenous force...
...18 This demand was also contained in a report by the Special Committee on the Threat of Communism dated April 5, 1954, which stated that "it be U.S...
...servicemen in Vietnam rose from 948 to 2,646, and by October 1963 it had reached 16,732...
...The President, while still opposed to open warfare against the North, agreed to an intensification of the ongoing secret Plan 34A operations and approved of all necessary preparations for an immediate start of systematic bombing raids when he should consider this opportune...
...The idea for this study came from professors George B. Kistiakowsky and Carl Kaysen of Harvard and Jerome B. Wiesner and Jerrold R. Zacharias of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
...The military and other experts thought that 128,000 troops would be needed to meet the threat of North Vietnamese and Chinese intervention...
...policy in Vietnam, not only with publicly expressed optimism about its outcome but also with support of the measures that escalated both the air strikes in the North and the ground war in the South...
...air support for the South Vietnamese and Cambodian troops continued, devastating much of the country and creating, as had been the case in South Vietnam, countless refugees...
...Even the risk of provoking the intervention of Communist China was impassively considered...
...settle for something short of a military victory, as for instance a coalition government including Communists, a free decision by the South to succumb to the Vietcong or the North, or a neutral (or even anti-U.S...
...61 From then on the discussion no longer turned around the question whether but only when air strikes against the North should begin...
...Goldberg to the White House, asking him not only to go through his arguments once more but also to join in a meeting of the "Wise Men" planned for March 25...
...4a Ibid., p. 162...
...There are only two "concessions" in Mr...
...A further widening of the credibility gap was achieved by the President himself in a press conference on July 28...
...The report they submitted on the military situation on October 2 spoke of "great success" during the last year and of no ill effect from the political crisis on the conduct of the war...
...26, pp...
...As long as Kennedy had lived, Washington had resisted the demands raised by the military leaders and some of their civilian associates to send large contingents of U.S...
...fully recognized France's sovereign position," as Secretary of State George Marshall said in a still secret State Department cablegram sent to the U.S...
...He countered the growing pressure of the military spokesmen by increasing the number of U.S...
...63 Rostow had already argued, in a memorandum of February 13, 1964, that Ho Chi Minh "has an industrial complex to protect: he is no longer a guerrilla fighter who has nothing to loose...
...The change of attitude toward Diem, when it finally came about, was dramatic and irreversible...
...They were not supposed to fight back, and their 26 Ibid., Document no...
...While the Vietnamese generals, convinced that the regimes' policies were demoralizing the army, plotted to overthrow Diem, Harkins claimed that the hatred for the government had not diminished the "vigor, enthusiasm and enter prise" of the army...
...221-24...
...Their views were supported by another study of the Pentagon Office for Systems Analysis which, according to the Pentagon account, painted "a bleak picture of American failure in Vietnam...
...We are in an escalating military stalemate...
...Johnson ordered another brief halt in the bombing (February 8-12), because a move to end the bombing and start peace talks with Hanoi was being discussed in London between Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Soviet Premier Alexei N. Kosygin, with the President's consent...
...150-53...
...cit., p. 7. 8 See the Memoirs of Cordell Hull (New York: Macmillan, 1948), pp...
...70 Ibid., Document no...
...Another influential adviser, Walt W. Rostow, provided a "theoretical framework for escalation" with his concept that "a revolution could be dried up by cutting off external sources of support and supply...
...The policy McNamara proposed, said the Chiefs, would "no longer provide 'a complete rationale for our presence in South Vietnam or much of our effort over the past two years...
...Most of those who took up arms were South Vietnamese and the causes for which they fought were by no means contrived in the North...
...A Vietcong attack on the United States military advisers' compound at Pleiku in the Central Highlands 86 Ibid., p. 309...
...One was that of Undersecretary of State George W. Ball, who not only doubted the effect of the projected bombing, but also argued against the domino theory...
...542-51...
...26, pp...
...In the meantime, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had refined their list of 94 targets...
...Only a few days after Mr...
...Johnson was willing to consider...
...McNamara summed up his views as follows: "Current trends, unless reversed in the next 2-3 months, will lead to neutralization at best and more likely to a Communistcontrolled state...
...All references to the Pentagon Papers are to thisedition...
...He believed that an earlier fiveday pause, May 8-13, had been too short...
...intervention in Indochina: the National Security Council...
...Kennedy, struck with the concept of counterguerrilla warfare, simultaneously ordered the start of clandestine actions—"sabotage and light harassment"—against North Vietnam by South Vietnamese agents under CIA direction...
...On August 10, General Taylor, now Ambassador in Saigon, reported that the Khan government had only a 50-50 chance of survival, for which reason he considered it necessary to implement contingency plans against North Vietnam with optimum readiness by January 1, 1965...
...The U.S...
...87 Yet the plans for bombing the North were now definite enough for the Administration to decide that allied governments should be briefed, which was done early in December...
...125 Now American optimism— partly resulting from the enemy's tactics of not provoking through aggressive action a reversal of Mr...
...One member, Arthur J. Goldberg, the United States representative at the United Nations, was added to this group on March 20...
...Pacification" will presumably continue, including the liquidation of suspected Communists and "neutralists" by the terror groups of the CIA-led Operation Phoenix, while the cease-fire would prevent the Vietcong from fighting back...
...He even went so far as to ask for funds the plotting generals might need to "buy off 41 Ibid., p. 158...
...70, pp...
...The Lansdale Mission increased its activity as the deadline for the evacuation of Hanoi by the French approached (October 9, 1954...
...52 This was not all...
...actively oppose any negotiated settlement in Indo-China at Geneva...
...The withdrawal of 1,000, which they proposed, was actually announced for the end of 1963...
...The year ended with the enemy increasingly resorting to desperation tactics in attempting to achieve military-psychological victory...
...In essence, McNamara suggested again that the U.S...
...In short, Washington was never kept in the dark about the nature of the Diem regime and the disastrous consequences that were likely to follow from Diem's policies...
...A McNaughton memorandum of June 12, 1967, listed as favorably inclined toward a cutback of the bombing Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus C. Vance and Secretary of the Navy Paul H. Nitze...
...B8 Now 49 U.S...
...The chief reason why the United States still continues to support the current Saigon government (which would collapse immediately without American support), and refuses to accept a coalition government that would include Communists (as McNamara had already suggested in 1966), is the fear that such a government might soon turn out to be a mere vehicle for establishing Communist control of South Vietnam...
...14 1954: Shall the U.S...
...Diem—McNamara, after another visit to Saigon in March, urged "new and significant pressures on North Vietnam," which in the minds of the military had long begun to mean bombing raids...
...On December 7, the embassy was instructed to soften the demand for reforms and drop the request for taking part in decision-making...
...The fact that the air war was expensive in money and pilot losses, 102 while unable to achieve its goals, was not McNamara's only reason for wanting to curtail it...
...policy in Vietnam, the Pentagon study contains another item of interest...
...combat troops to Vietnam raised as early as November 1961 (with shocking misjudgments as to the forces required...
...HOW WE SANK INTO VIETNAM troops to Vietnam proved longer and more slippery than the policy-makers in Washington could possibly have foreseen...
...622-23...
...was involved in a war which could not be brought to a satisfactory conclusion...
...81 Ibid., Document no...
...28, pp...
...100 On the same day, May 4, 1967, the President received a letter from McGeorge Bundy, a former presidential assistant for national security who had left the Administration on February 28, 1966...
...The National Security Council was the first body to proclaim, in February 1950, the importance of Indochina for the security of the United States...
...117 Typical of the sterility of these arguments was Dr...
...3o Ibid., p. 77...
...But six days later, the government's Special Forces troops, on orders of Diem's brother Nhu, raided Buddhist pagodas throughout the country, arresting and brutalizing 1,400 people, mostly monks and nuns...
...I'm telling you now I am not going to stop the bombings...
...The Pentagon study does not say when the President decided to reduce the bombing...
...United Kingdom] and other allies...
...Already at the end of 1965, while rejecting Secretary Ball's point of view, McNamara expressed the belief that the U.S...
...73 June 1965 was also the month when the so-called credibility gap became wider and henceforth a permanent theme of the Vietnam debate...
...In a press interview on August 15, 1963, Diem promised the outgoing American Ambassador Nolting, and the public, that he was seeking conciliation with the Buddhists, apparently in response to the urging of Nolting, who was Diem's staunchest defender in Washington...
...In the socalled Communist denunciation campaigns, which began in the summer of 1955, 50,000100,000 people were put into detention camps...
...The South Vietnamese reported 137,660 of their troops killed and nearly 300,000 wounded...
...5 Ibid., (Fox Butterfield) p. 8. 408 toward Vietnam remained ambivalent for at least the first three years of the Indochina war...
...He tried to support his rosy view of the military situation with reports sharply conflicting with those of the Ambassador and the CIA...
...118 The available evidence indicates that the evolution of the President's thinking during February and March reflected the conflicting positions of his advisers and responded to the divided opinions and sentiments of the country...
...JOSEPH BUTTINGER 412 ended up taking back what the peasants had been given by the Vietminh...
...Nixon announced another reduction of 50,000 in U.S...
...The number of individual flights had risen from 55,000 in 1965 to 148,000 in 1966...
...This led to a bitter debate, in which the President soon found himself in the middle between the advocates of deescalation and the proponents of the old policy of sending more troops to the South and bombing more targets in the North...
...policy in Vietnam...
...It is true that massive ground operations (recognized, as was the bombing of the North, as unproductive), were gradually given up, but U.S...
...42 Ibid., Document no...
...They likened his mentality to that of a "Spanish Inquisitor," and accused him of not tolerating any organized opposition, loyal or otherwise, and of brutally suppressing all open criticism...
...27 North Vietnam, says the analyst, was concentrating, from 1954 to 1958, on its internal development...
...JOSEPH BTJTI NGER solutely no assurance" of success in this "costly and indeterminate struggle...
...As soon as Washington realizes that only a political compromise with the Communists can end the war and consequently accepts as inevitable a government with NLF representation, Thieu will have lost the power to block the way to peace, simply because his regime will collapse...
...Not all requests by General Westmoreland were fully or immediately granted, but at the end of 1965, there were 184,314 "American boys" fighting and many dying in a war that Johnson, on August 29, 1964, had said should be fought by "Asian boys...
...H. Anthis, a special assistant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for approval by the Departments of State and of Defense.68 The Joint Chiefs of Staff, in order to be prepared for wider operations should the President order them, adopted the Operation Plan 37-64 in a meeting on August 4. This Plan called for the deployment, in the South China Sea and in Thailand, of air strike forces for the opening of 'a systematic bombing campaign against the North...
...The primary mission of these troops is to secure and safeguard important military installations like the air base at Danang...
...On July 19, 1967, McNamara lost his closest ally in his struggle for a change of policy, Assistant Secretary of Defense McNaughton, who was killed in an air crash...
...seriously considered intervention and advocated it to the U.K...
...s4 The reaction of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the McNamara memorandum was "predictably rapid and violent...
...On the air war, McNamara said that "our bombing is yielding very small marginal returns, not worth the cost in pilot lives and aircraft," adding that "in spite of an interdiction campaign costing at least $250 million per month at current levels, no significant impact on the war in South Vietnam is evident...
...37 Only three days later, McNamara and Secretary of State Rusk submitted a report elaborating this position further by repeating that the U.S...
...525-26...
...General Taylor's complaint on March 7 that the air war was "unnecessarily timid" had an immediate effect in Washington...
...During the Vietnamese Tet holiday of February 1967, Mr...
...Intervene...
...Robert Kennedy, according to the account, advanced the proposition that if the war could not be won by any regime, then it was time for the U.S...
...The Chiefs did not know that the President had seen McNamara's memorandum 12 days earlier...
...HOW WE SANK INTO VIETNAM extension of Communism over the remainder of the continental area of Southeast Asia and possibly westward...
...And it goes on to say: "The record shows plainly that the U.S...
...The forces Taylor requested were not to exceed 8,000 men—a modest number even at that early time...
...Ball's incisive arguments see Pentagon Papers, op...
...58 Pentagon Papers, op...
...Special Forces teams, whose numbers he wanted to be radically increased...
...8 Less than a year later, such insights, if they still existed in Washington, had to be suppressed in order to justify the new policy of supporting the French in Indochina...
...Premature publicity" was to be avoided and the actions taken "in ways that should minimize any appearance of sudden changes in policy...
...108, pp...
...102, pp...
...Nixon was determined to save money, save American lives, and reduce opposition to the war, this did not mean that he was working toward "winding down" the war in order to bring it to an early conclusion through political compromise...
...The "Wise Men," most of whom had up to 1968 been considered more or less determined "hawks," had all approved of the President's escalation of the air war in 1967 (with the possible exception of McGeorge Bundy and General Ridgway...
...100 Ibid., p. 531 and Document no...
...The panel also argued against the Rostow theory which held that Ho Chi Minh could not afford to risk loosing the North's industries...
...He realized that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were utterly mistaken when they .proposed on October 11, 1961, that 40,000 American soldiers could "clear 35 Ibid., Document no...
...Yet coalition governments with Communists after World War II did not lead to Communist rule in Finland, Austria, Italy, or France...
...522-23...
...Johnson, on April 11, 1968, authorized a new higher ceiling of ground troops...
...134, pp...
...Rostow and Undersecretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach...
...40-42...
...cit., (E...
...16 Ibid., p. 11...
...Sometime in March Mr...
...It was a first small step, to be followed, over the next two years, by much larger ones in rapid succession...
...Based largely on a warning of November 1965 by the Defense Intelligence Agency, which said that "the primarily rural nature of the area permits continued functioning of the subsistence economy" in the North, the Pentagon analyst concludes: "The idea that destroying, or threatening to de 82 Ibid., Document no...
...Hanoi had not "responded," since, as Assistant Secretary McNaughton put it, the conditions the U.S...
...Lucien Conein...
...But, the study adds, "from later interrogations of captured infiltrators, United States intelligence officers learned that until 1964, almost all the infiltrators were native southerners who went to the North in 1954...
...Inflated reports about the success of the so-called strategic-hamlet program seemed to have contributed to a mood of restrained optimism during 1962, despite a second attempt by army officers to get rid of Diem, and despite the intelligence community's continued emphasis of the demoralizing effect on the army by Diem's handling of it...
...This requires not only a longer period of time than one month and not only the resignation of Thieu, but the replacement of his entire government by one composed of representatives of all political forces in the South: of the present regime, of the NLF, and of other groups not represented in the existing government— in other words, the coalition government Hanoi and the Vietcong have proposed ever since the start of negotiations, and which Washington so far has rejected...
...In contrast to many high American officials who had doubts, Lodge never wavered in his determination to get rid of Diem...
...In his famous speech of March 31, in which Mr...
...may be pressed to negotiate "before a Communist agreement to comply," its negotiations position should be defined "in a way which makes Communist acceptance unlikely...
...It is certain that the North Vietnamese PT boats did not hit the American destroyer...
...The arguments of the President's military and civilian advisers in favor of seeking a military solution to the conflict no longer made any impression on Secretary McNamara and his associate McNaughton...
...This view was confirmed in a diplomatic warning to Lyndon Johnson by British Prime Minister Harold Wilson on June 3, 1965, as Washington was considering extending the air raids to the petroleum storage facilities near Hanoi and Haiphong...
...would expect to share in the decision-making process in the political, economic and military fields as they affect the security situation...
...As early as August 3, 1954, the National Security Council for 21 Pentagon Papers, op...
...Brown asked that these raids be conducted "without the present scrupulous concern for collateral civilian damage and casualties...
...And the other side has been unwilling to accept what in their terms is complete capitulation...
...It is indeed one of the more sensational revelations of the Pentagon Papers that all decisions made in Washington before 1954 and most of the later ones up to those concerned with the effectiveness of bombing the North were taken against the advice of the American intelligence community...
...Since none of these actions improved the situation in the South—where General Nguyen Khan had replaced the Junta that overthrew 61 Ibid., (Neil Sheehan) p. 238...
...129 McNaughton was the only official who, in contrast to the adherents of the propagandistically contrived domino theory, had an awareness that the case of Vietnam was indeed unique...
...This was the most important of these disadvantages listed by Taylor: "If the first contingent is not enough to accomplish the necessary result, it will be difficult to resist pressure to reinforce"—probably still the best prediction made about American intervention in Vietnam...
...The group's draft memorandum of March 4 also proposed no new peace initiations, and although it had reservations in regard to General Westmoreland's troop requests, it recommended a reserve call-up of 262,000, and increased drafts and extension of the terms of service...
...But such a treatment of America's role in Indochina since 1968 would not fit into the framework of an article that tries to say something about the meaning and consequences of historical events, and about the motives of the men who make history...
...428 It was his opinion that the President should consider stopping the bombing of all of North Vietnam...
...20 percent to keep South Vietnam out of Chinese hands...
...troop strength as of August 1970, and on April 20, 1970, he revealed his plan to withdraw 150,000 men by spring 1971, leaving only 248,000, or almost 300,000 less than the total number of American troops in Vietnam at the time he took office...
...He compromised by authorizing, on March 13, the dispatch of another 30,000 troops and by calling up 98,000 reservists, pleasing thereby neither the proponents nor the enemies of further escalation...
...440-41...
...Now bombing the North, under the slogan "protective reaction," was resumed with ever increasing intensity, culminating at the end of 1971 in a series of raids as massive as any conducted before the bombing halt...
...414 an essential action if we are to reverse the present downward trend of events...
...On February 13, the President ordered the beginning of the sustained bombing action named Operation Rolling Thunder, with which he erroneously expected to bring the Hanoi leaders to their knees...
...HOW WE SANK INTO VIETNAM demand to send U.S...
...million in 1951...
...While McNamara argued that the U.S...
...60 Indeed, although the systematic raids were started only in February 1965, the view that bombing the North was a military and political necessity and the decision to launch these attacks at the opportune moment can be said to have been firmly established six months earlier—at the height of the presidential election contest...
...Teams of American saboteurs charged with these actions were sent to Vietnam by the Eisenhower administration as early as June 1954...
...This regime also made no progress...
...second, the appearance of the view, fleetingly and without impact on the course pursued, that the U.S...
...Assistant Secretary of Defense John T. McNaughton wrote a threatening message to North Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, delivered on August 10 by the Canadian diplomat J. Blair Seaburn...
...8 Ibid., p. 470...
...He outlined his position in favor of disengagement again in a long memorandum to the President on July 1, proposing "a compromise solution," with arguments as telling as any advanced by other critics of the war at that time...
...On the issue of a cutback in the bombing, which Clifford was known to favor, the position taken (much to the surprise of the Pentagon analyst), was closer to escalation than to a halt...
...McNaughton suggested that the U.S...
...Aware that his troop withdrawals and subsequent reduction of American casualties were taken as evidence that he was really working toward an early end of the war, Mr...
...On the one hand, the U.S...
...88 Ibid., p. 471...
...It could hardly have been otherwise...
...Long before the escalation of July and August, the issue of air strikes against the North had become for McNamara one with serious political and also moral implications...
...yet succeeded to supply a satisfactory explanation in terms of real American interests— political, economic, or strategic...
...In a private message to Lodge he said, "we must go to win, but it will be better to change our minds than fail...
...On August 11, William Bundy submitted a memorandum outlining graduated steps toward a full-scale air war against North Vietnam with "a contingency date, as suggested by Ambassador Taylor, of January 1, 1965...
...The proposal of cutting back the bombing to the 20th parallel, which the President adopted by the end of March, was not even mentioned...
...JOSEPH BUTTINGER 410 forces to that area would be a serious diversion of limited U.S...
...40 But when this demand, as all earlier and later ones requesting reforms, had no other effect 39 Ibid., (Hedrick Smith) p. 107...
...India's ability to remain neutral would be jeopardized and, as the [Communist] bloc meets success, its concurrent stepped up activities to move into and control Africa can be expected...
...118 A pessimistic appraisal of the military prospect also came from the CIA, which in a paper submitted to the Clifford study group said it was "out of the question" that the U.S...
...All in all, the Pentagon study says, the group envisioned "a little bit more of the same," at a time when "the country was becoming increasingly divided over and disenchanted with the current Vietnam strategy and would no longer settle for "more of the same...
...111 As a result of the Tet offensive the rift that had been developing ever since 1966 between some of the Administration's civilian officials and the military leadership widened considerably...
...In a paper for the President on November 17, McNamara challenged 96 Ibid., p. 523...
...In June 1950, after consultations between French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman and Dean Acheson, when nothing at all had happened to "promote self-government" (and nothing would happen for the next four years), the State Department pleased the French by saying that Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos "now enjoy independence within the French Union...
...The extent to which Vietnamization failed to meet Washington's expectations—despite this unprecedented use of American air power—was revealed in the American-supported invasion of Laos by the Vietnamese army in February and March 1971...
...131 Elections in South Vietnam will not be meaningful unless the governmental apparatus that runs the country is dismantled on the province, district, and village level...
...troops in South Vietnam was still 542,000 in June 1969, 13 months after the start of the Paris peace talks...
...William Bundy sent the President, also in May, a 30-day scenario for graduated military pressure against the North culminating in full-scale bombing attacks...
...This "freer way of life" was indeed never more than a cheap pretext for U.S...
...That it might indeed be impossible to win the war even if the decadent and inefficient Diem regime was overthrown was soon confirmed by events: Vietcong activity jumped dramatically immediately after the fall of Diem...
...military personnel in Vietnam to 27,000...
...Diem and the Origin of the Insurrection ONE OF THE MOST important admissions contained in the secret Pentagon study concerns the claim of the U.S...
...Harold Brown...
...Thieu apparently does not believe his own claim that the NLF has no longer any significant popular support...
...a second announcement, made on September 16, said that another 35,000 would leave Vietnam by the end of December 1969...
...forces of 18,000-20,000 men and permitted a "more active use" of the Marine battalion already in Vietnam...
...Few readers will be familiar with the actual multi-volume Pentagon Papers, which total 3,000pp...
...The document of the Pentagon study relating to the events of 1963 are of special interest for two more reasons: first, the persistence of the view that the war can and must be won, and the consequent misconception, based on wishful thinking, about the military situation...
...Not even Mr...
...There was nothing new in their arguments in defense of the old policy, nor in their attitude of moral unconcern over the consequences of this policy for the people of Vietnam...
...The "bulk" of the American troops, then consisting of a mere 16,700 men, could be withdrawn by the end of 1965...
...whereupon, as General Wheeler put it optimistically, "the situation overall will be greatly improved over the pre-Tet condition...
...436 After four years, the phase launched by President Johnson's decision to deescalate the bombing of North Vietnam has neither led to the end of the war nor even produced any indication as to when and with what kind of settlement this long conflict will be brought to a conclusion...
...13 Aid for the French war effort climbed to $119 is Pentagon Papers, op...
...Between 1965 and 1971, three times as many bombs were dropped on Indochina than the Allies dropped in World War II...
...These words were spoken while search-and-destroy operations authorized by the President had been going on for a whole month, a fact American newspapermen quickly made known to the public...
...Thieu already has "won" two elections, the last one with no less than 91.5 percent of all votes cast...
...74 The defensive "enclave strategy" was overcome by events and by "a much more ambitious strategy sanctioned by the President...
...132, pp...
...418 1964: The Year of Preparation and Deceit A FEW DAYS before the assassination of President Kennedy, his top aides held a strategy conference at Honolulu where one further step in the American military involvement in Vietnam was taken with the decision to step up "non-attributable hit-and-run" raids against North Vietnam, and also "operations up to 50 kilometers into Laos...
...HOW WE SANK INTO VIETNAM his services to ensure the President's and his brother's safety...
...Johnson assured his audience that "we have tried carefully to restrain ourselves and not to enlarge the war...
...438 some critics put it, Vietnamization meant merely a change in the color of the bodies...
...114 Ibid., p. 599...
...According to Secretary of State Dean Acheson, recognition of Ho Chi Minh by Peking and Moscow "should remove any illusions as to the `nationalist' nature of Ho Chi Minh's aims and reveal Ho in his true colors as the mortal enemy of native independence in Indochina...
...In view of the record of the South Vietnamese army during all previous years of fighting, the expectation that this army was ever going to defeat the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese forces would no doubt have been recognized as another illusion had the withdrawal of U.S...
...During 1959 and 1960, United States intelligence officials estimated, 26 groups of infiltrators, totalling 4,500 people, made the trip south...
...His purpose in describing the enemy's strong position was to justify General Westmoreland's request for additional troops, a request Wheeler had encouraged in a cablegram to Westmoreland sent after February 8 (no exact date given) in which he said that the "United States government is not prepared to accept defeat in Vietnam...
...But he desired that the step be given as little prominence as possible...
...On the contrary, American intelligence estimates show "that the war began largely as a rebellion in the South against the increasingly oppressive and corrupt regime of Ngo Dinh Diem...
...The reason is not only that much necessary documentation— such as memoirs of participants and still classified government papers—is not yet available...
...cit., Document no...
...In public, however, Ball continued to defend the Administration policy...
...It is simply assumed that the present regime will continue to remain in power...
...destroyers was bound sooner or later to produce the clash which occurred in the Gulf of Tonkin early in August and was used by Johnson as a pretext for ordering his first reprisal raids against the North...
...130, pp...
...Surprisingly on this crucial point the conclusion of the Pentagon Papers is that Roosevelt "never made up his mind whether to support the French desire to reclaim their Indochinese colonies from the Japanese at the end of the war...
...96, pp...
...On May 7, the day after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, intervention was once more discussed between President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles...
...JOSEPH BUTTINGER 416 potential opposition," and in message after message he endeavored to dispel the fear in Washington that the coup might not succeed...
...a6 The President, evidently, preferred these opinions and proposals to those of his Secretary of Defense...
...600-601...
...One of these was CIA chief John A. McCone, who made a prophecy that was soon to come true...
...a fairly rapid pace and without interruption" and be continued until U.S...
...The other voice, often raised and always ignored, was that of the intelligence community, of which a special panel "tended toward a pessimistic view" of the effect of bombing the North on the Hanoi leaders, not conceding a very strong chance of breaking their will...
...Conclusions WHILE AT LEAST A TENTATIVE HISTORY Of the American involvement in Indochina from 1945 to 1966 can, now be written (thanks partly to the publication of the Pentagon Papers), this is not the case for the period from the spring of 1968 to the present...
...But it is probable that Vietnam after 1945 would have experienced a period of peaceful evolution toward independence, under a regime not unlike that of Tito's Yugoslavia, if Roosevelt had lived and succeeded in imposing his anticolonial solution for Indochina...
...The case of Vietnam was and still is unique, for reasons rooted in the history of Vietnam and not to be found in any other Southeast Asian country...
...America's goal should be nothing short of a `military victory,' the Council said...
...85, pp...
...Mounting criticism of the course the President had chosen induced the Administration to conduct a public information campaign in which the President struck a position of apparent readiness to compromise...
...s3 The Pentagon study states that the conclusions of this panel had "a powerful and perhaps decisive influence in McNamara's mind" (but evidently none on the President's...
...What surprises us now is the estimate of the forces they thought were required to stop the predicted worldwide dangers at their conjectured germination...
...to Vietnam...
...Harkins was strongly opposed to the course pursued by Lodge with the blessing of the White House, and he complained that he was "kept in the dark...
...Covert military operations against 49 Ibid., p. 189 and Document no...
...Associate Justice Abe Fortas of the Supreme Court...
...Nixon JOSEPH BUTTINGER himself could possibly have expected the other side to accept elections as long as Thieu's administrative, military, and police apparatus—in which the henchmen of the present regime exercise total power—remains entrenched...
...The U.S...
...Explicit and wide-ranging as the Pentagon Papers are, they supply no satisfactory answer to the question of why the United States ever became obsessed with the notion that the triumph of Vietnamese Communism in 1954, a twice accomplished historical fact, had to be undone after the French had failed to undo it in a war that lasted almost eight years...
...Ultimately, the American military aid program reached '$1.1 billion in 1954, paying for 78 percent of the French war burden...
...66 Instead of ordering the withdrawal of the Maddox and halting further provocation by the South Vietnamese commandos, the President ordered another destroyer, the C. Turner Joy, into the Gulf, ("more as a deterrent than a provocation"), and he apparently also approved a second attack of South Vietnamese naval raiders on August 3 against the Rhon River estuary and radar installations at Vinhson...
...Robert D. Murphy, a prominent career diplomat then in private business...
...The number of aircraft lost was 171 in 1965 and 318 in 1966...
...This man was the 39-year-old head of the Vietnam Interdepartmental Working Group, Paul M. Kattenburg...
...This historical background, if they had not chosen to ignore it, could have taught them that the Communists had been victorious in Vietnam, without any outside help, in 1945, and had again succeeded in obtaining, through the Geneva Agreements, a promise of gaining control of the entire country through the elections to be held in 1956...
...The Chiefs also claimed that the "military situation has improved substantially over the past year," and they assured the President that no one, "American or foreigner...
...Apart from the request of another 206,000 troops and a demand for calling up reserves, the military asked for the immediate bombing of Hanoi within three nautical miles of the center and 1.5 miles of the center of Haiphong...
...Much of this optimism was no doubt expressed only to assuage public concern over the growing U.S...
...78 Ibid., p. 388...
...as But in the spring of 1967, there was now considerably more support, within and outside the Administration, for McNamara's proposals against more troops and less bombing than his views had enjoyed in October 1966...
...117 Ibid., p. 606...
...17 It took another ten years before insistance on "a military victory" and on a "clear concession of defeat by the Communists" advocated by the authors of this report became Washington's unequivocally pursued aim in Vietnam...
...35-38...
...This is, no doubt, what the Communists themselves believe and why they do not insist, as Washington and Saigon falsely maintain, on full control of a coalition government, but are ready to settle for a mere share in power—which President Thieu rejects openly, while Mr...
...military effort that would be required to achieve the stated objectives— indeed, there is no firm basis for determining if there is any feasible level of effort that would achieve these objectives...
...is no wonder that the final recommendations of these men were contradictory to the point of being meaningless, since no really new policy moves were proposed...
...116 But it was Dr...
...1, p. 26...
...Nixon's program makes no provisions for ending the political terror with which the present regime attempts to eliminate all its opponents...
...JOSEPH BUTTINGER rary," the study declares...
...15 with the use of napalm, which the President had authorized on March 7. Air strikes now were also extended to nonmilitary targets, especially industries, but "publicity on the strikes was to be progressively reduced...
...The report of the scientists was given to McNamara at the beginning of September 1966...
...The account also makes clear the failure of the raids, both in respect to breaking the will of the Hanoi leaders and cutting the flow of men and supplies by stating that "as a venture in strategic persuasion the bombing had not worked...
...had engaged its power and prestige, a change of policy was prevented by "the haunting fear of the impact of defeat not on the welfare of the nation but on the reputation of the United States and its President...
...While, according to the study, "there were some incidents of murder and kidnapping in the southern countryside from 1954 to 1956, they were not directly attributable to the Communist `stay-behinds.' "28 As to the terrorist acts of 1957, the account concludes "there is only sparse evidence that North Vietnam was directing, or was capable of directing, that violence...
...could not win this war and should therefore get out of Vietnam...
...What could be written about this period at this time, if idle speculation is avoided, is no more than a description of all important decisions and events, with relevant comments by those responsible for them...
...130 It seems that even the CIA realized what I call the uniqueness of Vietnam and, as McNaughton put it, the congenital impossibility of the South Vietnamese case...
...and South Vietnamese troops could clear South Vietnam of Communist forces, 114 a view echoed by the first draft memorandum of the Clifford group which stated that "even with 200,000 additional troops we will not be in a position to drive the enemy from SVN [South Vietnam] or to destroy his forces...
...22 Yet these were conditions that could hardly have been accepted by France...
...the South Vietnamese government's "infrastructure is moribund and weaker than the V.C...
...538-39...
...JOSEPH BUTTINGER inform them of the raids he had ordered and to ask them for a congressional resolution endorsing whatever action he saw fit to undertake in Vietnam...
...President Thieu, opposed to any kind of concession to the Communists, could not possibly be part of such a government...
...All the high officials who debated the pause in bombing assumed that it would be tempo 84 Ibid., (Fox Butterfield) p. 469...
...Nixon's program: a commission to supervise the elections composed of representatives of all political groupings, and the resignation of President Thieu four weeks before the elections...
...When Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency, U.S...
...Throughout this discussion it was taken for granted that bombing would be resumed...
...actions and objectives...
...7 Far from unconditionally supporting the French against the Vietminh, Washington urged the French, as it would in vain for the next six years, to give more independence to the Indochinese countries...
...127, pp...
...American ground troops were withdrawn from Cambodia as of June 30, but massive U.S...
...With the help of his men in the army, police, and administration, Mr...
...both stubbornly clung to their views expressed in October 1966...
...This claim, the Pentagon analyst says in what seems to be an intentional understatement, is "not wholly compelling...
...On this point, opinions will probably always remain divided, but those who believe that no other course could have been chosen without damage to the West or the United States would do well to consider the following: (1) no Indochina war would have taken place if France had not insisted on reestablishing its control over Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos after these countries had gained independence following the Japanese surrender in 1945...
...The Pentagon account concludes that in opposing the unification of Vietnam—through the elections stipulated in the Geneva agreement —and in maintaining a separate state in the South, the United States had "a direct role in the ultimate breakdown of the Geneva settlement," contrary to the "assertion of several administrations that North Vietnam alone was responsible for the undermining of the Geneva accords...
...But not only military leaders, the President's civilian -advisers too were ready by spring 1964 to take the actions that Johnson, for obvious political reasons, kept postponing (though urging, already in March 1964, that "contingency planning" for pressure on North Vietnam "proceed energetically") . As to Johnson's aides, McNamara said in May 1964 he did not "rule out" bombing of North Vietnam...
...46 There was, however, no American complicity in the murder of Diem and his brother Nhu that was committed by some of the plotting officers...
...483...
...But McNamara also had political suggestions for the President, such as to "take steps to increase the credibility of our peace gestures in the mind of the enemy...
...effort by saying that there was "no adequate basis for predicting the level of U.S...
...thanks to President Eisenhower's reluctance to act without congressional authorization ("Eisenhower was old-fashioned enough to believe in the Constitution" 19...
...27 Ibid., p. 67...
...ambassadors of countries involved in Vietnam, how very tentative the decision to stop bombing above the 20th parallel in reality was...
...This report reveals a total disregard for vital aspects of the Geneva accords and some embarrassingly naive assumptions of the economic and political effect the kind of sabotage undertaken by these teams could possibly have...
...Toward the Turning Point THE DEPTH OF THE DISSENTION that had developed in regard to Vietnam in the Johnson administration by the spring of 1967 was most apparent in the contrasting views held by Secretary McNamara in his May 19 mem orandum and the opinions and proposals of William Bundy contained in a memorandum of May 30...
...proposed amounted to "capitulation by a Communist force that is far from beaten...
...44-46...
...Kennedy went one step further by saying that the U.S...
...According to the New York Times "Week in Review" of Sunday, June 27, 1971 (quoting the Chicago Sun Times), the CIA advised Nixon the U.S...
...86 Several times during the fall of 1965 McNamara repeated his proposal, which was opposed by Secretary Rusk and the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...The Pentagon study concludes that Mr...
...military action which, far from being defensive, "was a search-and-destroy operation into Vietcong base areas...
...Indeed, at a time when no regular North Vietnamese troops fought in the South (not to mention Chinese) ; when the strength of the Vietcong was estimated at below 40,000...
...American intelligence officers in Saigon estimated that 30 armed terrorist incidents were initiated in the last quarter of 1957, with at least 75 local officials assassinated or kidnapped...
...572-73...
...The mission of the Marines was restricted to a static defense of the Danang -airfield...
...In summary, if you need more troops, ask for them...
...The highest figure I had previously obtained was $815 million...
...Peace to Vietnam, and an end to the troubles that the Vietnamese war has caused to the United States, will come about only if and when the Nixon administration or its successor realizes this historical fact—stops all acts of war against the Vietcong and North Vietnam, drops support of the present Saigon regime in favor of one willing to permit all political forces in the South to participate in free elections, and then willingly accepts the choice of the people, even if the final outcome should be what it was in 1945 and 1954—the prospect of a pro-Communist regime for the whole of Vietnam...
...Our strategy, said this analysis, has not worked...
...117, pp...
...Yet the means of achieving this end were consistently underrated, even by such men as General Westmoreland, who had little inhibition in requesting forever increasing numbers of Americantroops for Vietnam...
...11 Two years later, the Council's formulation of the domino theory had become more sweeping...
...129, pp...
...government that the war was imposed on South Vietnam by Hanoi...
...these changes should rather "be understood as being gradual and wholly consistent with existing policy...
...Under orders of the new head of the U.S...
...71 The year 1965 became important for the course of U.S...
...Very few people noticed that this was a reversal of the decision made two weeks earlier to send 30,000 new troops...
...Although McNamara, in a news conference on November 5, 1966, had given no indication of his disenchantment with the policies Mr...
...28 Ibid., p. 5. mulated a program for economic and military aid to South Vietnam...
...more important is that a correct evaluation of decisions and events of this period is impossible as long as their true significance cannot yet be judged from the results they eventually will produce...
...2 In view of the forceful statements Roosevelt made against the return of the French to Indochina to his Secretary of State Cordell Hull and to his son Elliot, as reported in their memoirs,3 this conclusion must be regarded as erroneous...
...government in the South...
...When this time came in February 1965, the raids were started within 12 hours...
...We control next to no territory...
...99 Ibid., (Hedrick Smith) pp...
...The scientists, who felt obliged to say something constructive, proposed the construction of an antiinfiltration barrier between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, which they said could be built at a cost of $800 million...
...75 What this meant, in addition to rapidly mounting American casualties, had become evident on May 4, when the President had asked Congress for a supplementary appropriation of $700 million "to meet mounting military requirements in Vietnam," commenting, prophetically: "Nor can I guarantee this will be the last request...
...involvement in a major Asian ground war was there for all to see...
...73 Ibid., p. 411...
...The story of the plot and of the successful conclusion of the coup on November 1, 1963, is well-known...
...In quoting from their texts, the Pentagon Papers are also referred to as the Pentagonstudy, account, record, or the Pentagon analyst, which may refer to any one of the unnamed authors of the 3,000-page historical account...
...420 these boats apparently "had mistaken the Maddox for a South Vietnamese escort vessel...
...JOSEPH BUTTINGER to the offensive proves the opposite to be true...
...More important, however, than his opposition to further esca 97lbid., Document no...
...15 On this occasion the National Security Council again took the earliest and most extreme position by urging the President to warn the French that their "acquiescence" in a negotiated settlement would lead to the end of all U.S...
...3 33 Confronted by such dangers—which not only the military mind but also several civilian international affairs experts were able to imagine—it is not surprising to learn how many responsible men in Washington discussed what the U.S...
...The bombing, he said, will not achieve its intended purpose...
...The bombing was intensified on March 14 and 71 Ibid., p. 400...
...cit., p. 10...
...87 The pause ended after 37 days, on January 31, 1966...
...Nixon continued along the road he had chosen in June 1969 and withdrew a total of 172,000 men during 1971, leaving no more than 158,000 by the end of the year...
...ent to other presidential advisers only two or three years later: that the war was "vastly unpopular and that our role in it is perceptively eroding the respect and confidence with which other nations regard us...
...126 Ralph Stavins, Richard J. Barnet, and Marcus G. Raskin, Washington Plans an Aggressive War(New York: Random House Vintage, 1971), p. 246...
...But it reveals, in a memorandum of March 31 by Secretary Rusk to the U.S...
...IF THIS ANNOUNCEMENT of April 20, 1970, aroused new hopes for an early end of the war, these hopes were crushed ten days later when South Vietnamese and American troops invaded Cambodia...
...Nixon tries to avoid it with a proposal for elections that guarantees the survival of the present regime...
...goals in Southeast Asia, the National Security Council said that the French effort was "essential to the security of thefree world, not only in the Far East but in the Middle East and Europe as well...
...But the record shows that both these men were informed, in reports to McNamara of May 19, June 13, and July 28 about the entire scope of the 34A operations, for which advance schedules were drawn up by General Rollen...
...he also did not yield to the pressures for a widening of the air war against the North...
...But up to the beginning of the Buddhist demonstrations during which government troops fired into a crowd at Hue on May 8, sparking a countrywide mass movement against the Diem regime, Washington clearly adhered to the dictum coined by an American journalist: sink or swim with Diem...
...i5 Pentagon Papers, p. 10...
...With the American public, Mr...
...The problem of Indochina in relation to the interests of the United States was also taken up early in 1950 by the body which, apart from some military and civilian advisers to the President, was most consistent in advocating the policy of aid for the French that eventually led to direct U.S...
...From March 2 on, the air assaults on the North were conducted on a sustained basis and no longer related to specific Vietcong "atrocities...
...92, pp...
...advocated by the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...News & World Report, June 25, 1954...
...31, pp...
...Johnson's original position, according to Mr...
...No other evidence is needed to show that the case of Vietnam does not fit into Wash 126 Life, December 31, 1971...
...The study calls the 47 men of the seminar "the cream of the scholarly community in technical fields" (p...
...In the pages dealing with this phase of U.S...
...cit., p. 13...
...On October 30 (one day before the coup), he said in a cablegram to General Taylor that "on balance we are gaining in the contest with the V.C.," and that "the general trend has been and continues upward...
...In a statement on U.S...
...infrastructure...
...had in Vietnam, a working group under William Bundy insisted, on November 29, that bombing the North should be conducted "at 62 Ibid., (Neil Sheehan) p. 311...
...This escalation had been demanded by Admiral Sharp and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but there is no doubt that the President was also influenced by the optimistic prognosis of such civilian advisers as Walt Rostow who, in a memorandum of December 12, 1966, had found the military situation so "greatly improved" that he expected a "potentially victorious position by the end of 1967...
...107 Ibid., p. 593...
...His land reform program, instead of redistributing land to the poor, 28 Ibid., p. 73...
...he left the Administration in 1966, but remained to all appearances a loyal supporter of the policy he privately considered to be catastrophic...
...All these operations, it was agreed, "should not be acknowledged publicly...
...45 Ibid., p. 162...
...593-94...
...26 When the Lansdale Mission ended its dubious operation in August 1955, the Eisenhower administration's commitment was not only to a separate anti-Communist state in South Vietnam but also to the government of Ngo Dinh Diem, which had finally consolidated its power by defeating, in the spring and summer of 1955, the so-called politicoreligious sects...
...32 National intelligence reports predicted at that time that owing to Diem's one-man rule and toleration of corruption, a serious crisis threatened and that Diem lacked the ability to lead his country at this period...
...It would never have come about had it not been preceded by the decision made by the victorious Allies at the Potsdam Conference of July 17 to August 2, 1945, which gave the French not only a free hand but also Allied support for the reconquest of Indochina...
...The Vietcong now had the initiative...
...271-74...
...226-29 and, for an earlier message, Document no...
...position, see George Mc T. Kahin inthe New Republic, November 6, 1971...
...Up to 1959, the Diem regime was "nearly successful" in wiping out Vietminh agents...
...Two voices were raised against the notion that bombing the North would produce the effect its advocates predicted...
...Secretary Rusk's position was ambivalent...
...When John F. Kennedy assumed the presidency, the question of what to do to prevent South Vietnam from falling into Communist hands was more urgent than ever...
...Fully aware that this might come as a shock to the American people, "he ordered that the decision be kept secret...
...For another 17 months, until the end of March 1968, he listened to those of his advisers, military and civilian, who continued to chase after the illusion of a successful military solution of the conflict, even if he himself nourished doubts and did not comply with every request of the men who believed that the war could be won...
...Much has been written about the question whether General Westmoreland and Washington had any inkling of enemy preparations for a big offensive...
...15, pp...
...to the effect that `American forces would be available for combat support together with Vietnamese forces when and if necessary.'" But the White House maintained, in reply to mounting criticism, that "there has been no change in the mission of United States ground combat units in Vietnam in recent days or weeks...
...Rusk firmly opposed any American initiative for peace talks...
...The hope (not shared by the intelligence community) was that "progressively escalating pressure" might force Hanoi to order a halt of the insurrection...
...Ibid., p. 537...
...307 and 310...
...When Hanoi, on April 3, agreed to peace talks with Washington, a new phase began in the evolution of American policy in Vietnam...
...76 Ibid., Document no...
...The alleged number of killed Vietcong and North Vietnamese was 788,700 toward the end of 1971...
...12 On June 27, 1950 (after the outbreak of the Korean war), President Truman announced that the United States would accelerate military assistance to the French in Indochina (a first announcement of aid at the modest amount of $10 million had already been made on May 8, 1950...
...85 Not only the American public, but Congress too was kept in the dark about the steps taken by the Administration all during 1964 toward enlarging the war...
...At the same time the insurrection, firmly supported by Hanoi since 1960, gathered strength...
...the idea, advanced by Secretary McNamara, of seeking a compromise solution to the war through negotiations with the enemy...
...the famous domino theory was yet to be invented, and as late as the fall of 1948, the State Department's Office of Intelligence and Research "concluded that it could not find any hard evidence that Ho Chi Minh actually took his orders from Moscow...
...Johnson pursued (and never would even after he left the Administration in March 1968), he and his assistant McNaughton stuck to the views they had so firmly expressed in the memorandum of October 14, 1966...
...fighting strength from 75,000 to 125,000 men implied a change in the existing policy of relying mainly on the South Vietnamese to carry out offensive operations and using American forces to guard installations and to act as emergency backup, Mr...
...Bringing in 18,000-20,000 men turned out to be only a highly inconclusive move in the policy of trying to win the war with a combination of bombing the North and assisting the South Vietnamese army with American troops against the Vietcong...
...Nixon assumed the presidency, pledging to end the war, and December 1971, over 18,000 Americans lost their lives in Vietnam...
...Less than 12 hours after Washington had received word of the alleged second attack on the U.S...
...84 A study group of the Institute of Defense Analysis submitted the same view in a special report on the bombing on August 29, 1966...
...military intervention in Vietnam, for which no one has as 127 Hannah Arendt, op...
...June 27-30 saw the first major U.S...
...122 X22 For a review of the Paris talks that is critical of the U.S...
...430 "both unproductive and unwise," especially the raids on the power plants which the President had authorized in February.'0' During spring and summer 1967 a rift developed between the President's civilian and his military advisers...
...During spring and summer 1966, the doubts of McNamara and his assistant grew perceptively...
...General Taylor was probably sent to Saigon in response to a request by the South Vietnamese government for U.S...
...Nevertheless, in the spirit that still animated his friend and superior McNamara, McNaughton recommended—for the last time— more troops, more bombing, and more support for the Ky government in Saigon...
...The cause of its collapse will not be aggression from the North...
...nothing in Mr...
...All other quotations are from theintroductions and surveys of the 10 chapters of thebook, which also contains articles written by NeilSheehan, Hedrick Smith, Fox Butterfield, and E. W. Kenworthy...
...Nixon's policy of withdrawing American troops—ran as high at the beginning of 1972 as it had just before the Tet offensive in 1968...
...On August 2, North Vietnamese PT boats, seeking the South Vietnamese raiders, encountered the destroyer Maddox, which was engaged in the De Soto intelligence-gathering mission 23 miles from the coast...
...Now they advised deescalation...
...Nixon from proclaiming, "without the slightest qualification," that "Vietnamization has succeeded...
...JOSEPH BUTTINGER up the Vietcong threat...
...Johnson was listening to the more comforting views of his own close advisers who, like McGeorge Bundy, had assured him already in February 1965, the day when the bombing of the North started, that international pressure for negotiations "should be quite manageable," warning the President at the same time "not to accept the idea of negotiations of any sort...
...General Westmoreland's entire strategy of trying to defeat the enemy with ever increasing American combat troops...
...This memorandum, which was written for McNamara by Assistant Secretary of Defense for Systems Analysis Alain C. Enthoven, predicted that "in theory," if 200,000 more Americans were put against the Communist forces, "we'd then wipe them out in 10 years...
...on the other hand, he added that the U.S...
...On the contrary, soon after the coup started, Ambassador Lodge, in a telephone conversation with Diem, offered 44 Ibid, see especially Document no...
...No doubt, the disinclination to escalate the war was the reason for Mr...
...Complying with Westmoreland's request for another 206,000 troops would have required not only vastly increased expenditures but also the calling up of 280,000 military reservists to replenish the depleted reserves in the United States—a measure the President was highly reluctant to contemplate...
...Recognition of Bao Dai, the State Department concluded, should "promote a peaceful and democratic evolution toward self-government and independence of the [Indochinese] states...
...in October he ordered intensified air strikes on the Laotian infiltration routes and a reactivation, under tightened American control, of the 34A operations against the North...
...Indeed, as early as April 1964, the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up a list of 94 potential targets for bombing the North...
...define its negotiations position...
...He suggested a diplomatic strategy leading to an international conference on Vietnam...
...Nixon's maneuver, admitted, in an editorial on February 8, 1972, that "the Nixonadministration's acquiescence last year in the rigged single-state election destroyed the credibilityof the American suggestion that elections are theroute to a political settlement...
...involvement in Vietnam undoubtedly was a fact...
...ofappended documents— an estimated total of about 2.5 million words...
...Clifford, who was sworn in as McNamara's successor on March 1, told a study group comprising both advocates and opponents of deescalation that the real problem was "not whether we should send 200,000 additional troops" but whether the present course "could ever prove successful even if vastly more than 200,000 troops were sent...
...On February 29, the Clifford group, not quite consistent with its finding of March 4, warned in an initial draft memorandum of growing disaffection in the country in case of further escalation...
...If this proved beyond any doubt that all optimistic predictions about the results of an escalation of the ground war between spring 1965 and 1968 were grievously mistaken, the same was true for the escalation of the air war, which also took place during the same period...
...All of this, in particular General Wheeler's description of enemy strength at the end of February, belied what the President had said to reporters at the White House on February 2—that the Tet offensive had been "anticipated, prepared for and met," and the enemy had suffered "a complete failure...
...Between November 1961 and January 1962, the number of U.S...
...69 Ibid., p. 382...
...McNamara decides to express his views about Johnson's Vietnam policy as forcefully in public as he expressed them in his no longer secret memoranda to the President...
...60, pp...
...It was inevitable that these advisers to the Vietnamese forces were to be drawn into combat roles...
...b7 On this controversy and the events of August 4 in the Gulf of Tonkin, see Anthony Austin: The President's War (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1971), especially pp...
...After the Soviet Union and the new Peking government had recognized Ho Chi Minh's government in January 1950, Washington hastily granted recognition to the regime of Bao Dai...
...b4 Ibid., Document no...
...will be "thrown out of the country in six months...
...Military Assistance Command, General Westmoreland, South Vietnamese naval commandos staged, on July 30, 1964, amphibious raids against two North Vietnamese islands in the Gulf...
...139-40...
...For further information on the maneuvers to prevent serious peace talks, see David Kraslow and Stuart H. Loory, The Secret Search for Peace (New York: Random House, 1968...
...A constantly widening delineation of the domino theory was put forward as justification for direct and massive U.S...
...148-50...
...64 Ibid., p. 310...
...McNamara was no doubt also greatly in fluenced by the conclusions of the panel of 47 prominent scientists who held a secret seminar under the auspices of the Jason 91 Ibid., Document no...
...loss of South Vietnam, the Chiefs said, could be followed not only by the loss of the Southeast Asian mainland but also by all of Indonesia and even by a threat to Australia and New Zealand...
...Ball never spoke up publicly...
...HOW WE SANK INTO VIETNAM lation in the air and on the ground were his views on the need for a compromise solution of the war, which he had already outlined in October 1966...
...One reason for this was the political crisis in South Vietnam, where mass demonstrations against the Ky government could be suppressed only by the use of force, with open U.S...
...The main point of this program concerns elections, to be held six months after a peace agreement is signed and a cease-fire established...
...45 Far from opposing the overthrow of Diem, what Kennedy stressed was a wish for "plausibility of denial" of U.S...
...In order to obtain greater certainty about the true situation in the South and the prospects of the coup in preparation, Kennedy sent Secretary McNamara and General Taylor on another of the many American "factfinding" missions to Saigon...
...This ceiling of 549,000 was never quite reached, but the number of U.S...
...Yet McNamara was the first to be fully aware that this would be merely a "first step" and that "the struggle may be prolonged...
...He made the "suggestion" to restrict the bombing to below the 19th or 20th parallel, but to resume bombing in case of a new major enemy move...
...This power is not in the least theatened by a commission to supervise the elections, as President Thieu, determined to make no concessions to the enemy, knew very well when he proposed such a commission two years before Mr...
...responsibility for them...
...52 Ibid., p. 239...
...The debate for and against intervention remained a live issue...
...and when every Southeast Asian country, with the possible exception of Laos, proved capable of handling the threat of Communist insurrection without outside help, the Vice-President insisted that the United States "help these countries...
...Goldberg had infuriated the President with a memorandum on March 15, in which he recommended a halt in the bombing...
...108 In painting this gloomy picture, General 106 Pentagon Papers, op...
...Johnson delivered at Baltimore on April 7, barely a week after his crucial decision to send combat troops to Vietnam...
...HOW WE SANK INTO VIETNAM President on January 27, General Westmoreland spoke in a tone of great satisfaction about the difficulties and setbacks suffered by Hanoi and the Vietcong during 1967...
...80 Wilson's warning fell on deaf ears...
...57 Yet it is certain that Washington wanted to believe such an attack had occurred, in order to justify the reprisal raids on North Vietnamese oil depots and patrol boat bases, which the President was obviously eager to launch...
...What confrontations McNamara had with the President can only be guessed...
...Between January 1969, when Mr...
...Nixon took office was nearly 3 million tons—about as much as had been dropped before the bombing of the North was halted in 1968...
...81 Ibid., Document no...
...With these conflicting views, all strongly represented in the Clifford study group, it 116 Ibid., p. 600...
...354-55...
...aims in Vietnam as follows: 70 percent to avoid humiliating defeat...
...93 Ibid., Document no...
...The fact that these operations accomplished little and as a rule ended catastrophically for the sabotage teams does not diminish their character as acts of American aggression against North Vietnam...
...423-27...
...66 The projected air raids were to last two or six months, during which Hanoi was expected to yield, and to come to the conference table "on terms favorable to the U.S...
...cit., pp...
...49 Less than four weeks later, this optimism had begun to evaporate, as a report of December 21 by Secretary McNamara after another trip to Vietnam shows...
...The 32 Ibid., Document no...
...The Pentagon study, in discussing the first step along this road, concludes that "the President was being less than candid" when he said at a press conference on March 31, 1965 (one day before his decision to commit combat troops), "I know of no far-reaching strategy that is being suggested or promulgated...
...should commit itself to the clear objective of preventing the fall of South Vietnam to the Communists, stating that "we should introduce United States combat forces if that should become necessary for success," and concluding that "it may be necessary for United States forces to strike at the source of aggression in North VietNam...
...But the fact that President Thieu opposes any kind of compromise settlement is no longer of importance...
...502-503...
...I have reached the conclusion," Taylor wrote, "that this is 33 1bid., Document no...
...In order to collect information for the 34A raids, destroyer patrols were conducted in the Gulf of Tonkin under the code name De Soto...
...JOSEPH BUTTINGER revived the antiwar movement in the United States, where once more 200,000 protesters marched in Washington and 700 veterans of the Vietnam war threw their hard-earned decorations on the steps of the Capitol...
...the bombing of North Vietnam too and even the possibility of invading the North were discussed by the military leaders and seriously proposed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara...
...At the beginning of 1972, the widened Paris talks can be said to have made no progress at all in three years and 139 sessions...
...A Pentagon systems analysis of May 4, for instance, showed that the increases in American troop strength did not produce correspondingly high increases in enemy losses...
...Important in this campaign was the speech Mr...
...He sent a military mission to provide close working relations with the French forces in Indochina...
...The fiasco of the Laos invasion—and the fact that the Communists, as a result of the extension of the war into Cambodia and Laos, controlled at the end of 1971 more territory in these countries than their U.S.sponsored governments—did not prevent Mr...
...In his yearend assessment, which was delivered to the 104 Ibid., pp...
...60 Ibid., Document no...
...197-98...
...and he has experienced only failure in these attempts...
...13 State Department Bulletin, July 3, 1950...
...on March 17, the New York Times reported that the President would approve sending 35,000-50,000 new troops to South Vietnam, (a report the Pentagon study calls "amazingly accurate") . And on March 18, Johnson said in a speech before the National Farmers Union in Minneapolis that "Hanoi was seeking to win something in Washington that they can't win in Hue, in the I Corps or in Khesan," assuring his audience that we "is Ibid., p. 604...
...This does not answer the question what he would have decided in 1964 when it became more and more obvious that in the battle for control of South Vietnam the Communists were gaining the upper hand...
...69 A National Security Council memorandum of April 6 says that the President had approved an increase in U.S...
...Hence we are not giving up anything really serious in this time frame...
...See Joseph Buttinger, Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968), vol...
...If China should come to the aid of the Vietminh, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Radford (then together with Vice-President Nixon the strongest advocate of intervention), proposed the use of atomic weapons not only against China but also against "selected military targets in Indochina...
...As early as March 1965, Assistant Secretary of Defense McNaughton, perhaps the most clear-headed of all American policy advisers on Vietnam, defined the U.S...
...but any closer examination of his election proposal reveals it to be -a crude political maneuver that will not -advance the cause of peace in Vietnam...
...should stop guaranteeing a non-Communist South Vietnam and accept a coalition government that would include Communists...
...The bombing had in fact begun, and the number of advisers to the South Vietnamese army had just been increased to over 23,000...
...An even more sweeping form of the domino theory was put forward by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a memorandum to the Secretary of Defense in January 1962...
...Specific documents—of whichthe Bantam edition contains 134—will be identified when quoted...
...But, as the CIA had forewarned, this failed to "cripple Communist military operations...
...But Johnson, a true master of hyperbole, likened Diem to Churchill and said that we must either support Diem "or let Vietnam fall...
...But there was a noticable softening in the Communist position since January 1969, culminating in the SevenPoint proposal by the Vietcong delegation on July 1, 1971...
...forces to a total of 469,000 men by the end of 1967, which was 100,000 less than General Westmoreland had requested...
...These doubts now were shared, with varying degrees of intensity, by many high officials in Washington and by President Kennedy himself...
...In his first policy document on Vietnam, President Johnson, on November 26, 1963, approved of these decisions and, in maintaining the optimism held by the military and McNamara prior to the coup, reaffirmed the goal of concluding the war by the end of 1965...
...was pouring its resources down the drain in the wrong place" and therefore should "cut its losses" and withdraw from South Vietnam...
...55, pp...
...The Pentagon study, significantly, says that the President viewed this first pause "as a means of clearing the way for an increase in the tempo of the air war in the absence of a satisfactory response from Hanoi...
...121 As the Pentagon analyst comments, no one expected a positive reaction from Hanoi...
...The cost of this operation rose from $460 million in 1965 to $1.2 billion in 1966...
...had recognized the Frenchcontrolled Bao Dai regime on February 7, 1950, the first French request for aid was received in Washington and promptly endorsed by Dean Acheson in a memorandum to President Truman, a document significant for containing an early version of the domino theory, which was destined to become for the next 20 years the basic rationale of U.S...
...It was expected that "these operations would begin only in the new year...
...or pull back our defenses to San Francisco...
...The controversy over the question whether there was also an attack on the Maddox and the C. Turner Joy on August 4 may go on forever, but so far no clear evidence of such an attack has come to light...
...Embassy in Paris...
...586-88...
...Despite a massive influx of 500,000 U.S...
...THE QUESTION of direct military intervention, however, arose only in the spring of 1954, when it became evident that no amount of financial assistance could avert the impending collapse of the French position in Indochina...
...The troop level to which the President had by then agreed was 193,887...
...cit., p. 81...
...Nixon's only motive for withdrawing more and more troops from Vietnam...
...355-57...
...and, more significantly, thanks to strong misgivings by some members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...the people of South Vietnam were handed a psychological blow, particularly in urban areas where the feeling of security had been strong...
...cit., Document no...
...the list, which later was used, now also included bridges and industries...
...Nixon did...
...He cabled his findings to President Kennedy on November 1, 1961, recommending the introduction of U.S...
...29, pp...
...127 And so it continued in early 1972 as it had in 1965 and 1968, when both Mr...
...must "ensure that there be no ceasefire in Indo-China prior to victory 14 Pentagon Papers, (Fox Butterfield) op...
...1 Yet this decision was made only in 1950, after the victory of Communism in China and the recognition of Ho Chi Minh's regime by the Soviet Union and Communist China...
...destroyers, the bombers from the carriers Constellation and Ticonderoga were on their mission against targets selected from a list that had been drawn up several months earlier...
...232-33...
...to the clear objective of preventing the fall of South Vietnam to Communism" and demanded "that we support this commitment by necessary military action...
...He therefore was "inclined" to recommend General Taylor's proposal (as were the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...The bombing, this report said, "had no measurable direct effect" on Hanoi's capability to supply its troops and the Vietcong in the South...
...Whether he himself or the President insisted that he leave the Administration will be known only when Mr...
...Among the "paramilitary operations against the enemy," for instance, was the pouring of contaminants into the engines of the Hanoi bus company "so the buses would gradually be wrecked after the Vietminh took over the 24 Ibid., p. 1. 25 Ibid., p. 1. HOW WE SANK INTO VIETNAM city...
...One of the most puzzling questions future historians will have to deal with is why the United States ever got involved in the contemporary struggle for Indochina that has been going on since 1945...
...1595-99, and Elliot Roosevelt, As He Saw It (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1946), p. 251...
...Johnson's refusal to endorse the request for an additional 206,000 troops...
...The new regime of the Vietnamese generals, McNamara stated, was indecisive and drifting...
...Johnson announced the bombing restriction and added "I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party," the President also remarked that he would send 13,500 support troops for the emergency contingent authorized in February...
...Vietcong progress has been great during the period since the coup [and frankly revising his views of October, McNamara continued] . . . with my best guess being that the situation has in fact been deteriorating in the countryside since July to a far greater extent than we realized because of our undue dependenceon distorted Vietnamese reporting...
...Brown's conclusion that North Vietnam would probably "be willing to undergo these hardships," and that the new raids he proposed would not "be likely to reduce NVN capability in SVN substantially below the 1967 levels...
...casualties was not Mr...
...Simultaneously with his policy of withdrawing Americans, Nixon pursued what became known as the Vietnamization of the war—the policy of increasing, with American funds, the strength and equipment of the South Vietnamese army to such an extent that the war could be successfully pursued after all American forces were withdrawn...
...Volumes have been written about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, but how serious the attack on the Maddox was remains still unclear...
...intelligence services, including the CIA, were fairly unanimous and consistent in denouncing Diem as authoritarian, inflexible, bureaucratic, and suspicious...
...128 Pentagon Papers, op...
...armed 17 Ibid., Document no...
...88 McNamara's Doubts and Disenchantment EVEN MORE PERPLEXING than the attitude of Undersecretary of State George Ball, who consistently advised the Administration to pull out of Vietnam but publicly defended the conduct of the war, was the attitude of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara...
...Nixon's troop withdrawals, still aimed at "winning the war...
...troops would be needed "to clear up the Vietcong threat...
...84 It is at this point that the man who must be considered one of the earliest and most persistent advocates of a "win the war" policy, General Maxwell Taylor, appears at the center of the scene...
...There was still little talk of a Communist conspiracy behind the Vietminh resistance...
...HOW WE SANK INTO VIETNAM in the South...
...43 Ibid., p. 159...
...70 The road on which Mr...
...Johnson's answer was: "It does not imply any change of policy whatever...
...of narrative history and more than 4,000 pp...
...by entering into negotiations not only with Hanoi but also with the Vietcong, has in principal, on occasion verbally, recognized the claims of the National Liberation Front to have a share in the government among all other political forces in the South...
...But Washington, for military, diplomatic, and domestic political reasons, had no choice but to acquiesce in the disaster for the time being...
...23 By that time, however, the French government had become more interested in achieving an acceptable settlement in Geneva than in a continuation of the war with American military help...
...forces required when he said that they "will not exceed 6 divisions or about 205,000 men...
...This memorandum also proposedthat the U.S...
...The enemy, and with him the hapless populations of South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, was attacked from the air on an unprecedented scale...
...VicePresident Johnson, for instance, after a visit to Vietnam and some other Asian Countries in May 1961, said that "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 defenses on our own shore...
...Typical for the thinking that prevailed between the reprisal raids of August 4, 1964, and the beginning of systematic bombing raids is a memorandum by Assistant Secretary of Defense McNaughton of September 3, outlining several means of provocation that could lead to a military response by Hanoi, which in turn could "provide good grounds for us to escalate if we wished...
...The Pentagon Papers reveal the subsequent denial of U.S...
...Yet in private the President no doubt was paying attention to what the critics of his policy had to say, and he was also weighing the mood of the country...
...to reinforce the existing disquiet and criticism that we have to deal with...
...policy in Vietnam also because of other actions and events...
...He concluded, as other American generals would conclude in every subsequent crisis, that "from a military point of view the trend is definitely in RVN [Republic of Vietnam] favor...
...8, pp...
...involvement in the war, as for instance President Kennedy's remark in his State of the Union address of January 14, 1963, that "the spearhead of aggression has been blunted in Vietnam...
...They were "operating with relative freedom in the countryside" and had driven the Saigon forces back into a "defensive posture around towns and cities...
...This Potsdam decision, supported only by the British under both Churchill and Attlee, might not have been taken if President 1 The Pentagon Papers: The Secret History of the Vietnam War, the complete and unabridged seriesas published by the New York Times (New York: Bantam [paper], Chicago: Quadrangle [cloth], 1971), Introduction by Neil Sheehan, p. xi...
...An attempt made to destroy the modern presses of Hanoi's largest printing plant was frustrated by Vietminh security agents...
...aid for France...
...policy in Vietnam...
...As Hedrick Smith puts it in his introduction to the chapter on this phase of the story: "The Pentagon's secret study of the Vietnam war discloses that President Kennedy knew and approved of plans for the military coup d'etat that overthrew President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963...
...34 1bid., Document no...
...120, pp...
...In early December, the Polish member of the International Control Commission had tried to arrange talks between American and North Vietnamese representatives in Warsaw...
...Furthermore, the memorandum also says that the U.S...
...its objective was "to maintain a friendly non-Communist South Vietnam" and, quite contrary to the Final Declaration of the Geneva Conference, "to prevent a Communist victory through allVietnamese elections...
...Nixon's unrealistic terms...
...Ball also sensed what became appar 77 For Mr...
...83 These strikes were decided upon in May and started in June (against the advice of the CIA) ; they resulted in the destruction of 70 percent of North Vietnam's petroleum and oil storage capacity...
...This lesson, however, was not only ignored by Mr...
...Nixon's eightpoint program will prevent him or anyone of his clique from running and "winning" again...
...422 JOSEPH BUTTINGER on February 6, 1965, "triggered a swift, though long-contemplated Presidential decision to give an `appropriate and fitting' response...
...Nixon made his eightpoint program public, Mr...
...30 On the basis of the Pentagon study, it can be said that the views expressed by the critics of Washington's Vietnam policy were shared to a surprising extent by the American intelligence community, both in respect to the origin of the insurrection in the South and the nature and performance of the Diem regime...
...military advisers to the South Vietnamese forces...
...But the number of reinforcements Westmoreland requested206,000— was certainly higher than what Mr...
...39, pp...
...HOW WE SANK INTO VIETNAM large the war, and result in committing a good many American boys to fighting a war that I think ought to be fought by the boys of Asia to help protect their land...
...France's granting of "independence within the French Union" under former Emperor Bao Dai in March 1949 did not deceive the U.S...
...102 The casualty rate of pilots in the raids near Hanoi and Haiphong was six times as great as over the rest of Vietnam...
...In a memorandum of March 4 to Deputy Secretary of Defense Nitze, in which he proposed stepped-up bombing raids on the North including the mining of the Haiphong port, Dr...
...on March 16, Robert Kennedy entered the presidential race on an antiwar platform similar to that of McCarthy...
...442-43...
...What follows, therefore, is a mere listing of the more important events and decisions, and a brief discussion of the reason that I believe explains why the hopes for an end of the war, nourished since spring 1968 by promises, negotiations, and some acts of military deescalation, have still not been fulfilled...
...At 6:45 PM, President Johnson called 16 congressional leaders to the White House to 56 Ibid., p. 259...
...Kennedy gradually gave priority to the military aspects of the war over the demand, earlier voiced by Eisenhower in 1954, for economic and political reforms...
...General Matthew B. Ridgway, retired commander of the Korean war...
...In his memorandum of May 19, 1967, he made a point showing that his position had become irreconcilable with that of the President and his belligerent advisers...
...Training centers for infiltrators were established near Hanoi only in early 1960...
...Plan 34A included a wide variety of sabotage and psychological operations, such as flights by U-2 spy planes, kidnapping of North Vietnamese citizens for intelligence information, parachuting sabotage teams into the North, commando raids from the sea to blow up rail and highway bridges, and bombardments of coastal installations by PT boats...
...General Taylor made his recommendations although he was aware of several disadvantages of the course of action he proposed...
...combat role in Vietnam should be several years before their various projects were executed...
...involvement in the coup as one of the many deceptions perpetrated on the American public by Washington in the pursuit of its Vietnam policy...
...On February 3, four days after the beginning of the offensive, he was, according to General Wheeler, ready to send reinforcements if they were needed...
...These scientists not only concluded that the air strikes had had no "measurable effect" but they also cast serious doubt on the entire U.S...
...Congress, which would not agree to intervention without British participation (and Britain refused...
...3e Ibid., Document no...
...Nixon apparently improved his image as a man ready to compromise in order to end the war...
...432 Wheeler was less in touch with the reality of the situation than it might appear...
...115 Ibid., p. 601...
...This growing disaffection," the draft stated, "accompanied, as it certainly will be, by increased defiance of the draft and growing unrest in the cities because of the belief that we are neglecting domestic problems, runs great risks of provoking a domestic crisis of unprecedented proportions...
...In what seems a last exercise of its sense of reality in regard to Vietnam, the State Department, in another cable to the Paris Embassy, declared: "We cannot at this time irretrievably commit the U.S...
...The analyst goes on to say: "For better or worse, the August 21 pagoda raids decided the issue for us...
...our control of the countryside and the defense of the urban areas is now essentially at pre-August 1965 levels...
...On March 20, however, the President invited Mr...
...109 What the President's intentions were at that time is nowhere revealed...
...67 Ibid., P. 331...
...JOSEPH BUTTINGER North Vietnam, under the code name Plan 34A, were begun on February 1, 1964, on orders of President Johnson as recommended by Secretary McNamara...
...the U.S...
...Nixon—unhappily looking toward a $35-40 billion deficit in his 197172 budget—realized that "there are limits to the resources even this country can waste without going bankrupt...
...Furthermore: "The conclusions of the Pentagon study run contrary to the denial by Ambassador Lodge in a press interview on June 29, 1964, and the impressions given by more carefully worded disavowals of American responsibility in the memoirs of some Kennedy Administration officials...
...The first of these patrols, which in August led to the Tonkin incident, were undertaken by the destroyer Craig in February and March 1964...
...It formulated its own version of the domino theory by predicting that the "neighboring countries of Thailand and Burma could be expected to fall under Communist domination if Indochina is controlled by a Communist government...
...General Westmoreland also pleaded for authorization to stage an amphibious assault by the marines into North Vietnam as a diversionary move...
...103, pp...
...76 His answer, however, was not to renounce the effort but to bomb the North "with minimum restraint"— evidence that not everyone in the intelligence community offered consistently good advice...
...Thieu repeated his four Nos—no territorial concessions, no legal Communist activity, no coalition, and 111 Even the New York Times, at first unduly impressed by Mr...
...29 Ibid., p. 75...
...But gaining support for his policy and reducing opposition to the war through a drastic reduction of U.S...
...The first of these helicopters was shot down on February 5, 1962...
...Only a few days after the pagoda raids, CIA agents established contact with two of the main plotters...
...61 Asian mercenaries were hired for these raids, but they were conducted under the control of General Harkins and actually directed for the President by Mr...
...569-72...
...Unification was expected either through the elections provided for in the Geneva settlement or through the collapse of the Diem regime...
...The cease-fire would end all purely military operations, but Mr...
...5 Not until publication of the Pentagon Papers did the American public hear of the existence of these letters...
...2, pp...
...424 of U.S...
...An additional 470,000 refugees were generated during the offensive...
...But the actual policy pursued by the United States ever since negotiations were agreed upon has been to continue the war, in the hope of reducing the enemy's strength and will to a point where it would no longer be necessary for the United States and the Saigon regime to make the political concessions required for a peaceful settlement...
...The killing of the enemy, and the being killed in the process, should be limited to the Vietnamese, or, as 123 Hannah Arendt, in the New York Review of Books, November 18, 1971...
...no neutralism—a position that excludes compromise even on Mr...
...Perhaps Mr...
...9 The true friends of independence for Indochina now apparently were the French...
...military forces into South Vietnam...
...Ambassador Lodge, at another strategy conference at Honolulu on June 1 and 2, urged selective bombing against military targets in the North to bolster the shaky morale in the South, an idea warmly supported by Rusk and McNamara (and also by CIA head John W. McCone...
...107 Even more telling about the enemy's achievements in the Tet offensive was a report of February 28 by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Earl G. Wheeler, written after a visit to South Vietnam...
...HOW WE SANK INTO VIETNAM Zealand, Thailand, Laos, the Philippines, and South Korea that the President was going to announce this decision, Secretary Rusk wrote "You should make it clear that Hanoi is most likely to denounce the project and thus free our hand after a short period...
...18 In 1954, the nations of Indochina were spared American military intervention, thanks to opposition in the U.S...
...The Pentagon narrative asserts that Washington was stunned by these raids...
...This covert warfare against the North was of course concealed from the American .public, as were the air operations in Laos, which began early in 1964 and "became a kind of preview of the bombing of the North...
...The Pentagon study adds something important to our knowledge of the process of American involvement in Vietnam by revealing that the military and some civilian members of the Kennedy administration, ever since the autumn of 1961, advocated the aggressive policy adopted only three years later under President Johnson...
...Harold Brown who spelled out more callously than anyone else how he thought the air war against the North could be made more effective...
...Indeed, the President still rejected negotiations (which to be serious required a willingness to compromise) as firmly in spring 1967 as he had, on the advice of McGeorge Bundy, in February 1965...
...The message stated that Hanoi "can expect to continue to suffer the consequences" if it persisted in its present course...
...21 It was a well-kept secret until publication of the Pentagon Papers that the decision against intervention which Eisenhower is said to have made on April 4 had, as the Pentagon analyst puts it, only been "tentative...
...should accept a coalition government including Communists, William Bundy not only opposed any role for the National Liberation Front in the political life of South Vietnam but even insisted that southerners who had gone North in 1954 and returned after 1959 "should be expelled as a matter of principle," unless they were "prepared to accept the Southern system of government...
...b° The Secretary of Defense ended his report on an ominous note, by saying we should be hoping for the best but also be "preparing more forceful moves if the situation does not show early signs of improvement...
...The U.S...
...78 These moves, the study continues, offered no compromise terms at all, but masked publicly unstated conditions for peace that weretantamount to a demand for the enemy's surrender,79 or, as Undersecretary Ball put it in his memorandum of July 1: "So far we have not given the other side a reason to believe there is any flexibility in our negotiations approach...
...141-43...
...Secretary McNamara looked for a way out of this impasse as early as July 1965 with a proposal to introduce, as part of a diplomatic initiative, a six- to eight-week pause in the bombing...
...88 1bid., Document no...
...McNamara through a section of the Joint Chiefs of Staff called the Office of the Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities...
...On May 19, 1967, McNamara argued that all important military targets in the North were destroyed, and he therefore proposed a cutback of the bombing to the 20th parallel...
...36 About the same time, Secretary of Defense McNamara, in a memorandum to the President, joined the ranks of those who wanted to "commit the U.S...
...and 10 percent to permit the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a better, freer way of life.128 It is more than doubtful whether the Chinese were ever interested in any kind of control of South Vietnam...
...McNamara was able to accommodate in his mind his early and recurrent doubts about the wisdom of U.S...
...Wilson said, on public opinion in England, "—and I believe throughout Western Europe —is likely...
...Nor is it far-fetched to assume that Roosevelt would not have disregarded the appeals of Ho Chi Minh, in at least eight letters to Washington in 1945-46 for United States and United Nations intervention against French colonialism . 4 "There is no record...
...111 Pentagon Papers, op...
...Navy jets delivered their bombs and rockets on North Vietnamese barracks at Donghoi, a training center 40 miles north of the 17th parrallel...
...80 Ibid., Document no...
...577-585...
...McGeorge Bundy had been an early, ardent advocate of the air war on the North, but now he called the bombing 98 Ibid., Document no...
...It would be tedious to enumerate all of General Westmoreland's requests for more troops which were always endorsed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...but for the opposition, the invasion of Cambodia and a simultaneous increase of ground and air operations in Laos were only new evidence that U.S...
...Despite all the warnings and pessimistic assessments by such men as Ball, McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, and also the CIA and a growing number of civilian officials in the Pentagon, the Administration entered the year 1968 in a spirit of optimism...
...Henry Cabot Lodge, twice ambassador to South Vietnam...
...The aim was "substantial destruction, economic loss and harassment" by hitting "targets identified with North Vietnam's economic and industrial well-being...
...Immediate steps should be initiated toward a continuation of the war in Indochina "without French support should that be necessary...
...sa Typical for his attitude was the memorandum, mentioned earlier, of December 7, 1965, to the President in which he expressed serious doubts about the possible results of the ground war yet recommended another increase in the number of American combat troops.90 The man who strengthened McNamara's doubts apparently more than Undersecretary Ball was his Assistant Secretary of Defense John T. McNaughton who—in memoranda written during the bombing pause of December 24, 1965, to January 31, 1966, and dated January 18 and 19—stated bluntly that "we have in Vietnam the ingredients of 87 Ibid., p. 471...
...No one at the top knew or considered it important that the Vietnamese had been fighting foreign invaders for almost 2,000 years...
...Johnson decided to seek the advice of a group of former and present high officials known as the Senior Informal Advisory Group but informally referred to in Washington as the "Wise Men...
...He also complied, perhaps reluctantly, with most of General Westmoreland's requests for additional troops, though not with a proposal, made in April 1967 by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to extend the ground war into Cambodia and Laos, and possibly North Vietnam...
...assistance...
...Whether the President was glad to have this advice or "deeply shaken" by it, as one account claims, 120 it undoubtedly strengthened his disinclination to widen the war...
...But nothing at all, either in the statements or the actions of the President, indicated that he had learned the lesson that seven years of costly American failure taught to anyone with a minimum knowledge of Vietnam's recent history...
...cannot shut its eyes to the fact that there are two sides to this problem...
...24 When President Eisenhower approved this program, the decision was made to commit the United States to assume the burden of maintaining a separate anti-Communist state in the South...
...weekly casualty figures still stood between 200-300 well into 1970, proving that ground action against the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese in the South remained intensive...
...If this should happen in South Vietnam (which is quite likely), it would again be only further proof that the case of Vietnam is unique.130 129 Ibid., Document no...
...Yet the Truman administration's policy 2 Pentagon Papers, op...
...W. Kenworthy) p. 593...
...A CIA report challenging the domino theory only prompted William Bundy to demonstrate the urgent need of a public-relations campaign "to get at the basic doubts of the value of South East Asia and the importance of our stake there," 55 an idea the President warmly endorsed...
...On September 6, 1963, at a meeting of the National Security Council, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy returned to the question Paul Kattenburg had first raised in a meeting of the Council on August 31...
...However, what is more important is his "full support" for Lodge's maneuvers and his promise that Washington would do everything possible "to help you conclude this operation successfully...
...A year after the start of the invasion, two-thirds of Cambodia was under Communist control, and the prospect of an end to the war was as remote as ever...
...No less than 6,000 sorties—one flight by one aircraft—were flown, with heavier bomb loads than ever before, during December 1971, and altogether 108 strikes were conducted against the North in 1971...
...s5 Ibid., Document no...
...1e Hannah Arendt, in the New York Review of Books, November 18, 1971...
...It also demanded that the U.S...
...Pacification, he said, "has been set back badly...
...HOW WE SANK INTO VIETNAM Altogether, American losses at the end of 1971 stood at 45,627 killed in battle, 10,823 dead from nonhostile causes, and 302,396 wounded...
...The case is stated clearly: "For the military coup d'etat against Ngo Dinh Diem, the U.S...
...Division of the Institute of Defense Analysis at Wellesley, Massachusetts, in June, July, and August 1966...
...89 1bid., p. 464...
...obtain French support for this position...
...On the basis of what must be regarded as major disclosures of the Pentagon Papers, it is clear that the President went along with this thinking and was therefore less than honest in his famous barbecue speech of August 29, when he said: "I have had advice to load our planes with bombs and drop them on certain areas that I think would en 5s Ibid., Document no...
...Plans for these actions began on November 3, the day Johnson was elected president in his own right.83 "A set of tactical considerations," the Pentagon analyst explains, "prevented action for the time being," adding that "the President was in the midst of an election campaign in which he was presenting himself as the candidate of reason and restraint as opposed to the quixotic Barry Goldwater" who was publicly advocating the bombing of North Vietnam.84 But already in September, the President had ordered a resumption of the provocative De Soto patrol missions...
...But three weeks later, on April 1, when it had become evident that bombing the North would not soon break the will of Hanoi, not prevent infiltration, and not improve the military and political situation in the South, the President decided that only the use of American ground troops in offensive action against the Vietcong could prevent the collapse of the Saigon regime...
...On January 13, 1972, he made another withdrawal announcement, reducing the level to 69,000 as of May 1, 1972...
...and that failing this, the U.S...
...He left the Administration in February 1968, almost three months after Mr...
...20 As reported in U.S...
...105 A similar view was held as early as October 1966 by McNamara, and this undoubtedly was the reason why he proposed to the President "to increase the credibility of our peace gestures in the mind of the enemy...
...48 Ibid., p. 174...
...115 Apart from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and General Westmoreland, the major opponents of a change in policy were General Taylor, 112 Ibid., p. 598...
...Yet this denial was made meaningless by another sentence, which in good official doubletalk stated that "if help is requested...
...126, pp...
...But in June, while at Geneva at last some progress was being made, "President Eisenhower had his aides draft a resolution requesting Congressional authority to commit American troops to Indochina...
...A first announcement on June 8 said that 25,000 U.S...
...can doubt the sincerity, the generosity, the altruism of U.S...
...George W. Ball, undersecretary of state in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations (but now in private) business...
...85 Ibid., Document no...
...cit., Document no...
...553-55...
...demands were met...
...involvement even in case of success, something Ambassador Lodge willingly accepted as long as he had a free hand in keeping the U.S...
...II, p. 808...
...Douglas Dillon, undersecretary of state under Eisenhower and secretary of the trea 119 Ibid., p. 601...
...HOW WE SANK INTO VIETNAM an enormous miscalculation...
...The President waited until December 24 before ordering the new pause which, not surprisingly, merely resulted in resumption of the raids on a larger scale...
...By the end of 1971, over 8,000 aircraft had been lost, and the overall cost of the war had risen to over $130 billion...
...Yet McNamara's and Taylor's optimism paled before that of General Paul D. Harkins, Chief of the American Military Assistance Command in Saigon...
...commitment now was not just to deny victory to the enemy but to defeat him and "win the war...
...cit., Document no...
...Arthur H. Dean, negotiator of the Korean armistice...
...141-43...
...Nixon refused to be the first American president to lose a war, not realizing that in terms of accepted contemporary international conduct, this war should never have been started...
...But in a meeting with his advisers on March 16 Johnson said: "Let's get one thing clear...
...HOW WE SANK INTO VIETNAM ington's concept of a plot by an imaginary Communist "bloc" to conquer Southeast Asia...
...It is indeed one of the important conclusions of the Pentagon Papers "that the Truman Administration's decision to give military aid to France in her colonial war against the Communist-led Vietminh `directly in volved' the United States in Vietnam and `set' the course of American policy...
...McNaughton called South Vietnam "an unholy mess...
...In May 1961, Kennedy ordered 400 Special Forces troops and 100 other Americans as military advisers to South Vietnam—a move that was kept secret, most likely because Washington knew this to be a breach of the Geneva accords, which limited the military personnel of the U.S...
...Johnson rejected McNamara's proposal of a cutback in the bombing, although public opposition had grown as a result of the reports from Hanoi by Harrison E. Salisbury of the 94 Ibid., Document no...
...Rusk also said that bad weather would anyhow limit bombing above the 20th parallel for the next four weeks or so, "which we tentatively envisage as a testing period in any event...
...In contrast to the mood in spring, these views were now "advanced with a sense that such actions were inevitable...
...This dramatic change was brought about by the 6 Ibid., pp...
...The remark was made in a cable to McGeorge Bundy, the President's special assistant for national security affairs...
...434 JOSEPH BUTTINGER would not "tuck our tail and violate our commitments...
...101, pp...
...Did the considerations that determined the course of American foreign policy after World War II make this involvement inevitable or could it have been avoided in spite of the tensions that arose after 1945 between the West and the so-called Communist bloc...
...strategy, despite Mr...
...146-48...
...It is unlikely that this question will ever be answered with any degree of certainty...
...must accept its full share of responsibility...
...126 The ignorance of the pertinent historical background was amazing...
...insurgency against Diem was started, despite their orders, only sometime during 1956-57...
...294-98...
...78, pp...
...cit., Document no...
...The 8,000 men, Taylor proposed, should be introduced to Vietnam as a "flood relief task force" into the Mekong delta (which suffered a flood at the time), but should be largely military in composition and include "combat troops...
...Johnson had embarked with his decision to send combat 68 Ibid., p. 343...
...69 The Joint Chiefs of Staff subscribed to Taylor's call for air raids against the North, calling them "essential to prevent a complete collapse of the U.S...
...sury under Kennedy...
...This figure was almost reached in March 1968 when the same man who had predicted the defeat of the enemy "by the end of 1967" wanted another 206,000 men for a ceiling of 731,000...
...Militarily, he said, we will be at the same place a year from now.92 The failure of the oil strikes to reduce infiltration was another great disappointment for McNaughton and McNamara, and approval of these strikes was the last major escalation recommended by the Secretary of Defense...
...Vigorous American opposition to it would probably have led to the acceptance of Roosevelt's concept of a United Nations Trusteeship for French Indochina as a first step toward full independence...
...Despite President Johnson's bombing halt and the Nixon administration's troop withdrawals, reducing enemy strength in order to obtain peace on Saigon's unnegotiable terms remained Washington's aim—an only slightly modified version of the old policy of "winning the war...
...After the U.S...
...Moreover, air power now used north of the 20th parallel can probably be used in Laos (where no policy change is planned) and in SVN...
...Although Wheeler claimed that the enemy had suffered 40,000 killed, at least 3,000 captured, and perhaps 5,000 disabled, his conclusion was that the enemy's "recovery is likely to be rapid" and that "his determination appears to be unshaken...
...As one rather peculiar way of fighting the enemy, this mission conducted Englishlanguage courses—not for secret agents charged with "political-psychological warfare," but "for the mistresses of important personages at their request...
...Infiltration of men and supplies" to the South continued "undiminished," as the Pentagon account puts it...
...Johnson's momentous decisions of March 1968, kept growing all during 1968 and '69, and was certainly one of the reasons why President Nixon started, rather timidly, his program of troop withdrawals from Vietnam in June 1969...
...A report by the Cornell University Center for International Studies showed that—despite a reduction in sorties—the heavy increase of bomb tonnage per flight, the increase in the bombing of Laos, and the extention of the raids into Cambodia meant that the total of the tonnage dropped over Indochina since Mr...
...JOSEPH BUTTINGER New York Times about the extent of damage to civilian areas...
...Among the civilian opponents of a cutback in the bombing were Mr...
...72 In the ground war too, American actions became increasingly aggressive, partly in response to a Vietcong offensive in May–June 1965, with which the South Vietnamese army was unable to cope...
...47 There was apparently only one man in the Kennedy administration who was strongly opposed not only to the totally unrealistic view of a favorable trend in the military situation but also to the expectation of a great improvement through the removal of Diem...
...The men of the National Security Council who had vainly tried to torpedo the Geneva Conference called the agreement it produced on July 21, 1954, a "disaster...
...Edward G. Lansdale, then of the CIA, who headed teams of saboteurs operating both in the North and the South from June 1954 to August 1955...
...On June 8, Press Officer of the State Department Robert McCloskey caused a public outcry with "an honest and superficially inocuous statement...
...Not even great damage, the panel stated, would have "a lasting effect on the daily lives of the overwhelming majority of the North Vietnamese population...
...There has been much speculation about the question whether American massive military intervention in Vietnam might not have been avoided if President Kennedy had been alive...
...Opposition against the war, which had no doubt strongly influenced Mr...
...capabilities...
...In the meantime, the peace movement in the United States reached a peak on October 15, 1969, with mass meetings against the war all over the country, and a demonstration in Washington of more than 200,000 people a few weeks later...
...But it is certain that the "freer way of life" has been denied to the people of South Vietnam ever since their governments, after the end of colonialism, were sponsored by the "Free World...
...At the same time, Truman took another decision, undoubtedly without realizing that it was another step toward irretrievable American involvement in Vietnam...
...But nothing is said about the crucial question that has to be settled before any peace agreement and cease-fire can be concluded: what will be the composition of the government under which the elections are to be held...
...THE DIEM REGIME continued to decline after 1958, despite increasing American aid...
...105 New Republic, July 10, 1971...
...This new widening of the war ended catastrophically for the Vietnamese ("withdrawal became a scramble for survival" 124), and briefly 124 Time, January 3, 1972...
...29 The Pentagon study also destroys some myths about the beginning of infiltration of Northerners into South Vietnam...
...Moreover, "the bombing clearly strengthened popular support for the [Hanoi] regime by engendering patriotic and nationalistic enthusiasm to resist the attacks...
...Nixon, but also apparently by all the other men who have decided American policy in Vietnam...
...53-66...
...At this point, the strongest advocates of deescalation had become the civilian hierarchy at the Pentagon, whose most forceful spokesmen were Secretary of the Pentagon's Office of International Security Affairs Paul C. Warnke and his young assistants Morton H. Halperin and Richard C. Steedman...
...HOW WE SANK INTO VIETNAM now President Johnson's military adviser, and Secretary of the Air Force Dr...
...97, pp...
...Less than three weeks later, on April 20, the heads of the military, at a conference at Honolulu, asked for an American commitment of 82,000 men...
...faced in Vietnam, because bombing to the extent of making "a radical impact," which could be done, "would not be stomached either by our own people or by world opinion...
...We have no evidence," he said, "that more troops than the 470,000 I am recommending would subtantially change the situation...
...Both sides intensified the struggle to win the President over to their views, which became ever more irreconcilable...
...The only high Administration official who opposed as early as April 1965 both the policy of bombing the North and of sending combat troops to the South was Undersecretary of State George W. Ball, who saw "ab 7 5 Ibid., p. 412...
...By July 1, 1965, the Pentagon study concludes, "the specter 72 Ibid., p. 396...
...go Ibid., p. 466...
...In later congressional hearings and press conferences, both McNamara and Secretary Rusk deniedthat they knew of these attacks or that there was any connection between them and the North Vietnamese attack on the destroyer Maddox...
...Bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong was supposed to reduce "the enemy capability for waging war in the South," an argument the Pentagon analyst dismisses as a "non sequitur," in view of the "evident ineffectiveness of the bombing in preventing the offensive...
...91 But pessimism in regard to all these efforts and a readiness to accept a compromise solution of the war were for the first time expressed by someone who, unlike Ball, up to this time had been a "hawk...
...This is the account by Stuart H. Loory of the Los Angeles Times, which the Pentagon account reprinted verbatim, saying that it"has been generally considered to be a reliable ac count," p. 610...
...As early as August 29, he stated that "there is no possibility, in my view, that the war can be won under a Diem administration...
...mission to 685 men...
...This the enemy achieved while committing only 20-35 percent of his North Vietnamese forces, employed as gap-fillers wherever Vietcong strength was not sufficient...
...It must have come as a surprise to many, including the President himself, when his newly appointed Secretary of Defense Clark M. Clifford, an old supporter of the President's policy, displayed a strong inclination to question the policy of "more of the same" "l Ibid., pp...
...But because the U.S...
...502-509...
...Secretary McNamara, in a memorandum of November 30, 80 Ibid., Document no...
...Yet what the Pentagon study adds is of considerable historical interest, since it removes all doubts about the role Kennedy played and the degree of responsibility Washington had in the overthrow of Diem...
...Johnson, apparently determined to get rid of him, had appointed him, on November 28, 1967, president of the World Bank...
...to get out of Vietnam...
...41 For weeks— and the White House informed every step of the way—the American mission in Saigon maintained secret contacts with the plotting generals through one of the Central Intelligence Agency's most experienced and versatile operatives, an Indochina veteran, Lieut...
...440 ON JANUARY 25, 1972, President Nixon revealed that secret negotiations between Washington and Hanoi have been conducted in Paris during the past two years and that his national security adviser Dr...
...McNaughton's sentiments and views were definitely also those of McNamara, as was proved by a memorandum to the President of January 24, 1966...
...Marshall found that the French lacked understanding of the other side and had a dangerously outmoded colonial outlook on Indochina...
...615-21...
...44 Kennedy himself, although convinced that Diem must go, was deeply concerned about the consequences of the coup's possible failure and was ready, if necessary, to give a "reverse" signal...
...127-30...
...4T Ibid., Document no...
...25 American actions to undermine whatever agreement might result from the Geneva Conference in fact were initiated several weeks before the Geneva accords were concluded...
...61, pp...
...policy to accept nothing short of a military victory in Indochina...
...They were Dean Acheson, secretary of state under President Truman...
...What these teams had planned and only partly succeeded in doing is described at length in an explicit document dealing with the Lansdale Mission, called after Col...
...al., op...
...10 The French-imposed puppet regimes of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos had become the "legal governments" of these countries...
...Yet, said the CIA analysis, the bombing in 1966 "accomplished little more than in 1965...
...449-54...
...More likely, he is afraid that, given the smallest legal foothold, the Communists would soon become the leading political force in the South, too...
...General Wheeler also confirmed in this secret report much of what several American correspondents had written during and immediately after the Tet offensive...
...81 But negotiations were no more the order of the day in June 1965 than they had been in February...
...In a memorandum circulated on June 28, he said he was "convinced that the U.S...
...92 Ibid., p. 474...
...30, pp...
...But warnings were never heeded...
...No less important is another conclusion of the Pentagon study: it asserts that President Kennedy never accepted as an "unqualified commitment" the goal of saving South Vietnam from Communism 39 Kennedy and the Overthrow of Diem TOWARD THE END of 1961, strong doubts about Diem's chances of surviving an insurrection were no longer confined to the intelligence community...
...106 Four days later, this enemy started his great Tet offensive, in which he was able, according to a report of February 12 by the same General Westmoreland, to attack 34 provincial and 64 district towns, as well as all autonomous cities...
...Not only was the 31 Ibid., p. 71...
...Johnson's decision against further escalation had already become evident on March 22, when he appointed General Westmoreland army chief of staff quite obviously in order to remove him from his post in Vietnam...
...As regards the military effort, he proposed to limit the increase of U.S...
...could immediately withdraw from South Vietnam and "all of Southeast Asia would remain just as it is for at least another generation...
...For example," he said, "the VC/NVA [Vietcong and North Vietnamese] apparently loose only about one-sixth as many weapons as people, suggesting the possibility that many of the killed are unarmed porters or bystanders...
...Intensification of the covert war supported by the De Soto patrols of U.S...
...In effect," he said in a memorandum of April 2, 1965, "we will find ourselves mired down in combat in the jungle in a military effort that we cannot win and from which we will have extreme difficulty extracting ourselves...
...In a memorandum to the Clifford group and the White House, Taylor argued that deescalation would mean "to accept needlessly a serious defeat for which we would pay dearly in terms of our worldwide position of leadership, of the political stability of Southeast Asia and of the credibility of our pledges to friends and allies...
...Ultimately, the Pentagon study says, it was fear of a collapse of the Saigon regime and the "lack of any alternate proposals" for action that led to the air strikes...
...HOW WE SANK INTO VIETNAM 1965, proposed a ceiling of 400,000 for the end of 1966, but warned that this "will not guarantee success...
...what he wanted was "to erode the will of the population by exposing a wider area of NVN [North Vietnam] to casualties and destruction...
...While the latter continued to ask for more troops, made contingency plans for invading Laos and Cambodia, and wanted to extend the bombing raids to the North Vietnamese ports, a growing number of civilian advisers began to favor McNamara's proposals of limiting the number of ground troops and of cutting back the bombing of the North to the 20th parallel...
...Ball believed that neither more bombing nor the sending of more combat troops would ever bring decisive results...
...More bombing, he said, was no solution of the problem the U.S...
...John J. McCloy, high commissioner in West Germany under Truman...
...One such request was made in a message to Ambassador Frederick E. Nolting, Jr., who was instructed on November 14, 1961, to demand a "concrete demonstration by Diem that he is now prepared to work in an orderly way [with] his subordinates and [to] broaden the political base of his regime...
...will go to Congress for authority to intervene with combat forces...
...On December 15, Mr...
...113 Ibid., pp...
...involvement in a major Asian ground war...
...Allthese people believed what General Taylor had said in November 1961, namely that "North Vietnam was exceedingly vulnerable to conventional bombing," 64 and they came to regard bombing the North as a substitute for success against the Vietcong 53 Ibid., P. 241...
...42 Ibid., p. 159...
...HOW WE SANK INTO VIETNAM than to make Diem angry and even less cooperative, Washington retreated...
...and even more radical, to seek a political settlement by developing "a realistic plan providing a role for the VC in negotiations, postwar life and government of the nation...
...123 But if Mr...
...48 Kattenburg's analysis, which foretold that the war effort would go downhill, was immediately dismissed by Vice-President Johnson, Secretary Rusk, and Secretary McNamara, who all insisted that the war must and could be won...
...A memorandum to Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson of May 20, 1954, reflected the views of those who, like Army Chief of Staff General Matthew B. Ridgway, thought that a war in Indochina would be tougher than the war in Korea had been 2° "From the point of view of the United States," the Joint Chiefs said, "Indochina is devoid of decisive military objectives and allocation of more than token U.S...
...He painted a dismal picture of the political and military situation in the South and of the prospects ahead, stating that pacification was a bad disappointment, that full security existed nowhere, and that Hanoi's determination appeared as firm as ever...
...79, pp...
...If the CIA were the authority it tried to be during the entire Vietnamese adventure, this statement could be called the official demise of the "domino theory...
...112 McNamara's sucessor also found the "Saigon forces ineffective" and the bombing of the North "unproductive or worse...
...The Pentagon study concludes, significantly, that 55 Ibid., p. 259...
...This so-called Tonkin Resolution, for which William Bundy had prepared a draft as early as May 23, 1964, was adopted by Congress, and opposed by only two votes, on August 7. Congress was not informed about the commando raids by the South Vietnamese on July 30 and August 3, and of U.S...
...Official propaganda presented this widening of the conflict as necessary in order to shorten the war...
...Yet the President claimed in his TV address to the nation on the evening of August 4, while the bombs were being dropped, that "we still seek no wider war...
...forces not been compensated by a new and steadily increasing use of American air power all over Indochina...
...to support a native government which by failing to develop appeal among Vietnamese might become virtually a puppet government separated from the people and existing only by the presence of French military forces...
...4, pp...
...88 Althoughthese pressures on President Kennedy increased as the military position of the Saigon regime deteriorated in 196263, Kennedy did not give in to these drastic demands...
...would never intervene alone...
...Johnson was obviously also unmoved by a study of the CIA in January 1967, which estimated the casualties of the air war against the North at 36,000, of which 80 percent were civilians...
...troops, 1.2 million tons of bombs a year...
...74 Ibid., p. 411...
...35 In the same spirit, Taylor demanded more secret offensive operations in the North as well as in Laos and South Vietnam by U.S...
...Praise for the French and their puppet government was combined henceforth with abuses heaped upon the Vietminh and with a propaganda campaign depicting in the blackest colors the consequences for the "Free World" of a French defeat in Indochina...
...He was "the first official on record in a high-level Vietnam policy meeting to pursue to its logical conclusion the analysis that the war effort was irretrievable, either with or without Diem...
...Since the situation, far from improving, continued to deteriorate (a fact systematically hidden from the public), it did not take long before these "forceful moves" were taken...
...JOSEPH BUTTINGER nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one...
...83 Ibid., pp...
...In a paper of October 11, 1961, entitled "Concept for Intervention in Vietnam," the Joint Chiefs of Staff estimated that no more than 40,000 U.S...
...98, pp...
...It was opposed by Nationalist China under Chiang Kai-shek and certainly not favored by Stalin...
...153-54...
...He also questioned, as all critics of the war had done before him, the estimates of enemy losses...
...McNamara asked Admiral Sharp to check and make sure that the attack had really occurred before launching the planes, but the order to attack was given by Washington 35 minutes before Admiral Sharp called back to say he was now "satisfied" that the attack had been genuine...
...Johnson and Mr...
...T Ibid., p. 8. a Ibid., p. 9. JOSEPH BUTTINGER victory of Mao Tse-tung's armies over those of Chiang Kai-shek and the establishment of a Communist regime in China...
...27-32...
...Henry A. Kissinger, on October 11, 1971, had submitted to the enemy an eight-point program for a settlement of the Vietnamese conflict to which Hanoi and the Vietcong had failed to "respond...
...According to a memorandum by the President's Executive Assistant Robert Cutler it was decided to propose to the French government that if certain conditions were met, "the U.S...
...position in Southeast Asia...
...In December 1961, 400 men and 33 H-21 C helicopters were sent 3T Ibid., Document no...
...Johnson approved only a level of 40,000, but already in June he was moved, by arguments demonstrating a continuous deterioration of the military situation in the South, to raise this level to 70,000, and on July 28 he announced that the number of American soldiers in Vietnam would be increased to 125,000...
...Wilson, led to the collapse of these talks and the resumption, on February 13, of the bombing, soon to be conducted on an even larger scale.104 On the subject of peace negotiations, this is what Eugene McCarthy had to say in an analysis of the Pentagon Papers: "It is difficult to find in a most careful reading of the papers any indication that our offers to negotiate or our sending negotiators were ever meant to be anything more than devices by which criticism of the war might be blunted and justification for further escalation of the war established...
...The war had by then become "open-ended," and the U.S...
...57, pp...
...In March 1966, under pressure from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, McNamara recommended an extension of the air raids to the petroleum supplies of the North, a move that Admiral Sharp predicted would "bring the enemy to the conference table or cause the insurrection to wither...
...soldiers were to be withdrawn by the end of August...
...The issue was whether or not to support the army officers who by then were plotting to overthrow Diem...
...After more than a month of haggling the site for the peace talks was agreed upon and the first meeting of American and North Vietnamese representatives took place in Paris on May 13, 1968...
...It was again McNaughton, devoted to his country and loyal to his chiefs McNamara and President Johnson, who, while military intervention was being considered in 1964, nevertheless realized that South Vietnam may "disintegrate completely beneath us," and that in this case we should hold together the country "long enough to permit us to try to evacuate our forces and to convince the world to accept the uniqueness (and congenital impossibility) of the South Vietnamese case...
...On October 14, the Secretary of Defense submitted a memorandum to the President in which the doubts he had nourished for almost a year led him to challenge the basic trend of U.S...
...Between June and December 1965, these requests jumped from a ceiling of 175,000 to that of 443,000 to be reached by the end of 1966...
...Only a few people in the Administration are known to have been frightened by the specter of U.S...
...110 Ibid., p. 592...
...The effect of this contemplated extension of the air raids, Mr...
...McNamara's other suggestions were all based on his view, which apparently he had held for some time, that the war could not be won...
...On June 17, 1967, McNamara commissioned the Pentagon study, which was to bring to light, four years later, his disenchantment with President Johnson's Vietnam policy...
...Only 12 days after ordering his cutback of the bombing raids to below the 20th parallel, Mr...
...military intervention, without any serious consideration of what might be America's long-term interests in "saving" South Vietnam...
...21, pp...
...In June 1965 he was succeeded by another military regime, which was headed by Air Vice-Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky and General Nguyen Van Thieu...
...Even such aggressive proponents of a "win the war" policy as William Bundy were against attacking the North, for fear of provoking China into entering the war...
...365-68...
...General Omar N. Bradley, World War II commander...
...In their brutality and their blunt repudiation of Diem's solemn word to Nolting, they were a direct, impudent slap in the face of the U.S...
...combat forces to Vietnam...
...18 Ibid., Document no...
...Roosevelt had still been alive...
...it lacked popular support and achieved no success in the struggle against the Vietcong...
...Although such intervention did not come about in 1954, the Pentagon study contends that "the American people have never been told how seriously the Eisenhower inner circle debated intervening...
...29, pp...
...43 Lodge's instructions were unambiguous...
...448-49...
...The first session of the enlarged talks took place on January 18, 1969...
...276-87...
...During July and August 1967, he approved all but a dozen of 57 new targets proposed by the Chiefs of Staff, targets of which many were not only close to Hanoi but also close to the Chinese border...
...85 To this must be added that bombing the North also had failed to improve the political situation in the South, where General Khan had been ousted in February 1965 as head of the Saigon government...
...With Diem, Kattenburg argued, the U.S...
...cit., p. 9. 11 Ibid., p. 6. 12 Ibid., Document no...
...but McNamara was far from correctly assessing the U.S...
...267-68...
...82 But on September 7, only nine days later, the Pentagon study reveals, the Johnson administration reached a "general consensus" at a White House strategy meeting that air attacks against North Vietnam would probably have to be launched...
...82 He could hardly have been more right, since General Westmoreland raised the required ceiling already in June 1966 to the new high of 542,000 men...
...whether that be by successful military action or a clear concession of defeat by the Communists...
...and on March 18, 139 members of the House of Representatives (98 Republicans and 41 Democrats) sponsored a resolution for a congressional review of the Administration's policy in Southeast Asia...
...McGeorge Bundy, now president of the Ford Foundation...
...Escalation on the Ground and in the Air ON MARCH 8, 1965, 3,500 MARINES LANDED at Danang, bringing the total of U.S...
...On this point, see also Ralph Stavins, et...
...96 Nevertheless, the President had authorized the bombing raids close to Hanoi on December 2-14, apparently, as the Pentagon account puts it, "to undercut what appeared a peace feeler from Hanoi...
...Asked if the announced increase of U.S...
...The same paper, drafted by Deputy UnderSecretary of State for Political Affairs Alexis Johnson, says that the possibility of North Vietnamese intervention in the South "must be frankly faced...
...491-93...
...119 On March 13, the President was narrowly beaten by Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire democratic primaries...
...The President, however, while disinclined to go along with all demands of the military for escalating the ground war, sided with them against McNamara and his supporters by still further extending the air war against the North...
...432-40...
...108 Ibid., Document no...
...To strengthen the President's resolve in considering the options the U.S...
...But his offer of "negotiations without any preconditions," like many later similar moves, aimed primarily at quieting critics and obtaining public support for the air war, as the Pentagon study puts it...
...combat forces, submitted on October 13, 1961...
...118, pp...
...McNamara's memorandum of May 19, 1967, was bitterly condemned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff who urged, on May 31, that his proposals "not be forwarded to the President," because they represented such a divergence from past policies that they were not worthy of consideration...
...4 Pentagon Papers, op...
...and Cyrus R. Vance, former deputy secretary of defense...
...The President was well aware of the country's growing disenchantment with the war, and the many signs of popular discontent must have helped in shaping his thinking toward the decision he reached at the end of March...
...On October 31, President Johnson ordered an end to all air attacks on the North...
...In telling the ambassadors of Australia, New 120 Ibid., p. 610...
...But, says the Pentagon study, many of these detainees were not Communists 81 While the Lansdale Mission, in one of its more ludicrous exploits, hired astrologers and paid them for making predictions of doom for the Vietminh and of great success for Diem, the National Intelligence Board expressed doubts about the viability of a South Vietnamese state as early as August 1954, when President Eisenhower was beginning to accept the idea of maintaining a separate anti-Communist state in the South...
...So trusted by the Vietnamese generals was Colonel Conein that he was in their midst at Vietnamese General Staff headquarters as they launched the coup 4 2 Conein, said Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge who had replaced Nolting in August, "has been punctilious in carrying out my instructions...
...426 stroy, North Vietnam's industry would pressure Hanoi into calling it quits, seems, in retrospect, a colossal misjudgment...
...But this request was to be carried out in a manner that introduced another important element into the picture of American actions in Vietnam: the element of conscious deception or, in plainer language, of lying to the American public...
...McNamara rejected the prognosis that the war could be brought to a satisfactory conclusion within the next two years...
...JOSEPH BUTTINGER It is easy to foresee that the Paris peace talks will remain stalled as long as Washington refuses to abandon its position, which in the eyes of the Vietcong amounts to nothing less than a demand to surrender the aims for which they have now fought for almost 15 years: the right to participate in the political life and eventually also in the government of South Vietnam...
...They were needed, said the generals, to defeat the enemy...
...General Westmoreland also has authority within the assigned mission to employ those troops in support of Vietnamese forces faced with aggressive attack when other effective reserves are not available and when, in his judgment, the general military situation urgently requires it...
...The picture of the world's greatest superpower" McNamara wrote, "killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward 101 Ibid., Document no...
...119, pp...
...Nor are any provisions made for the release of the thousands of opponents in concentration camps and prisons, or for an end of the Thieu government's interference with freedom of the press, speech, and assembly...
...The Pentagon analyst has no doubt that the Tet offensive came as a complete surprise and great shock to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and particularly to the President, who had discounted the negative analyses by the intelligence community and clung to the optimistic reports of General Westmoreland...
...In February 1967, the President decided to extend the air war against the North by authorizing strikes against the power plants of Hanoi and Haiphong...
...It came on the same day in a memorandum to the President demanding that the war be brought to a successful conculsion through more bombing and more American troops...
...2) it is questionable that the United States would ever have reached the point of even considering intervention in Vietnamese affairs if it had refused from the beginning to support the reestablishment of French rule in Indochina...
...As a result, Washington repeatedly tried to put pressure on Diem for reforms which were expected to strengthen his regime...
...FOR THE UNITED STATES, concern for Indochina— far from being considered a closed affair after Geneva—now developed into a preoccupation that became more obsessive with every passing year...
...But these documents make clear that once the U.S...
...The choice confronting the U.S.," said Acheson, "is to support the legal governments of Indochina or to face 9 State Department Bulletin, February 13, 1950...
...78Ibid., p. 388...
...government, which refused to recognize the Bao Dai regime...
...should "consider continuing the war itself, with the Indochina States, if France negotiated an unsatisfactory settlement...
...110 The near-hysterical reaction by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and General Westmoreland 109 Ibid., p. 594...
...This was followed in December by an agreement between Washington and Hanoi to widen the Paris talks through the participation of the Saigon government and the National Liberation Front, political arm of the Vietcong...
...Washington was buzzing with preparations for these raids when at 4 PM on August 4 McNamara received a telephone call from Commander in Chief of the Pacific forces Admiral Sharp, informing the Secretary of Defense that there was now confusion over whether another attack had actually taken place...
...10, pp...
...4o Ibid., p. 107...
...65 Ibid., p. 318...
...103 At this time the President still preferred to listen to advisers whose views excluded 103 Pentagon Papers, op...
...As in years past, they brushed aside intelligence reports arguing, as did an analysis by the CIA of June 9, that the real roots of Vietcong strength lay in the South, and warning against the idea that bombing the North would induce Hanoi to call off the insurgency (a warning apparently not heeded by CIA chief McCone...
...that any of these appeals were answered...
Vol. 19 • April 1972 • No. 2
