Gordon Goldstein: Lessons in Disaster

Introduction: The Legend of the Establishment (pp. 2-3):

Bundy spoke with great energy and focus for more than five hours, discoursing on a wide range of themes late into the day. There was a dramatic difference between Kennedy and Johnson on the question of Vietnam, he once more insisted, recapitulating a perspective central to our study. "Kennedy didn't want to be dumb," he said. "Johnson didn't want to be a coward." Bundy was still struggling to understand the significance of the air-strike strategy he had advocated in the winter of 1965. What were its implications? Bundy asked aloud. Did it precipitate a chain of events that dramatically accelerated the Americanization of the war? He also revisited the failure of diplomacy in Vietnam, which he described as a delusion mistakenly embraced by opponents of the war. Why, Bundy now asked, didn't we settle the war at the negotiating table? He promptly answered his own question: After the American escalation of 1965, he declared, a diplomatic solution in Vietnam was simply not viable. On the question of Kennedy and Vietnam, Bundy instructed me to marshal the evidence once more and prepare an outline describing the choices Kennedy would have confronted in Vietnam had he lived to serve a second term. Clearly there was a great deal of work to be done to consolidate the rich but diffuse content of our collaboration.

Bundy died a few days after this session. Goldstein inherited the research and ultimately wrote the book.

(pp. 7-8):

The legend of McGeorge Bundy -- first in his class, the editor in chief of the monthly Grotonian, president of the drama society, and captain of the debating team -- begins at Groton. "The story is told," recounts David Halberstam, "that a group of outstanding students were asked to prepare papers on the Duke of Marlborough. The next day Bundy was called upon to read his paper in class. As he read his classmates began to giggle. The giggles continued all the way through the reading of his excellent paper." The next day the teacher asked one of his students for an explanation. "'Didn't you know?' said the student. 'He was unprepared. He was reading from a blank piece of paper.'"

Clever as that seems, it mostly tells me that Bundy's knack was his ability to impersonate brilliance within the conventional wisdom without having to put any research or forethought into the subject. Bundy learned his debate tricks at home, then honed them in the elite company of Groton, Yale, and Harvard, picking up invaluable alliances at each stop.

(p. 8):

In his senior year [circa 1940] Bundy wrote an essay arguing for intervention against European fascism. It was published in an anthology entitled Zero Hour: A Summons to the Free. "Let me put my whole proposition in one sentence," Bundy wrote. "I believe in the dignity of the individual, in government by law, in respect for truth, and in a good God; those beliefs are worth my life and more; they are not shared by Adolf Hitler."

Maybe the longer version was deeper, but that strikes me as an awfully shallow reason to pitch into a war that ultimately killed fifty million people. He risks his life in rhetoric with scarcely a thought to the consequences of confronting a personal demon who isn't identified by any traits that aren't shared by numerous other irritating cranks and fools.

During WWII, Bundy's father was an aide to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, working on the Manhattan Project. McGeorge Bundy "leveraged his family connections to secure an appointment as an aide to Rear Admiral Alan G. Kirk," observing the D-Day landing "from the flag bridge of the USS Augusta off the coast of Normandy." After the war he worked on a book with Stimson, was offered but turned down a clerkship by "close family friend" Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter (Bundy had no legal training), became Thomas Dewey's foreign policy speechwriter (working for Allen Dulles), edited a book by Dean Acheson's speeches and papers, and secured a job teaching in Harvard's government department (again, through Frankfurter), soon becoming dean of the department (pp. 11-12):

And after just two years lecturing at Harvard, Bundy was recommended for tenure by the government department. "Though Bundy was a good teacher, he was not in the classic sense a great expert in foreign affairs, since he had not come up through the discipline," Halberstam notes. "He was not particularly at east with Ph.D. candidates, those men who might be more specialized in their knowledge than he." But because Bundy was the rising star of the government department, the consensus among his colleagues was to award him tenure. As Halberstam recounts, the case was presented to Harvard president James Bryant Conant, who had served as a distinguished member of the chemistry department before running the university. Was it in fact true, asked Conant, that Bundy had never taken a single undergraduate or graduate class in government?

"That's right," said the professor representing the govnerment department.

Conant was puzzled. "Are you sure that's right?" he asked.

"I'm sure," the government professor replied.

"Well," said Conant with a sigh, "all I can say is that it couldn't have happened in chemistry."

(p. 13):

The [Harvard] government department, in particular, was a remarkable incubator of talent in the 1950s, producing three future national security advisers: Bundy, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Henry Kissinger, for whom Bundy helped secure tenure by coupling a pair of half-time appointments into a single permanent position. Nonetheless Bundy and Kissinger shared an uneasy relationship. "I thought him more sensitive and gentle than his cocasionally brusque manner suggested," Kissinger said of Bundy. "He tended to trreat me with the combination of politeness and subconscious condescension that upper-class Bostonians reserve for people of, by New England standards, exotic backgrounds and excessively intense personal style." [David] Riesman, the influential sociologist poached from the University of Chicago, called Bundy's management of the faculty a form of "aristocratic meritocracy."

(p. 16):

Bundy was determined to answer the administration's critics, and in doing so he espoused grand objectives for U.S. foreign policy. "We cannot limit outselves to one objective at a time. We, like Caesar, have all things to do at once," Bundy professed in a May 1965 memorial speech at Franklin Roosevelt's grave site. "And this is hard. In Vietnam today we have to share in the fighting; we have to lead in the search for peace; and we have to respond, in all that we do, to the real needs and the real hopes of the people of Vietnam."

In early 1966, after the essential decisions in Vietnam were made but before their true costs were apparent, Bundy left government service to become president of the Ford Foundation. [ . . . ] Yet despite his good works the question of Vietnam remained. His friend Kingman Brewster, who had been named the president of Yale University, remarked, "Mac is going to spend the rest of his life trying to justify his mistakes on Vietnam."

Out of office, Bundy remained adamant in his refusal to criticize the Johnson administration and was completely intolerant of former government colleagues who did. He made his conviction clear in a debate held at Harvard in March 1968, when Bundy faced off against the political scientist Stanley Hoffman, whom he had recruited to the faculty the previous decade. "Particularly when you go to work as a staff assistant, you acquire an obligation of loyalty, which tends to increase through time," Bundy explained to a restive audience of students and faculty. "I have very little sympathy with those who write criticisms which appear over the heading 'former White House assistant.'" Bundy described such dissent as a form of political assassination aimed at the president."

In 1995 Robert McNamara published his mea culpa, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. This finally provoked Bundy to review his own mistakes (pp. 21-22):

On April 17, 1995, Bundy appeared on The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, on public television, as one of a panel of commentators invited to discuss the fierce national argument McNamara's book had generated. "I think Bob McNamara has tried very hard to tell it as he now understands it," Bundy said. "It's an honest contribution and it will be a very much valued one."

The anchor, Jim Lehrer, asked about McNamara's retrospective appraisal. "'We were wrong, terribly wrong.' Would you accept that yourself?" he asked Bundy.

"Sure," Bundy replied, with a casual shrug. An awkward beat followed before he added: "I think it's very unlikely that we were right looking at the evidence as we now have it."

Another panelist, the Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer, quickly seized on the significance of Bundy's admission. "You have a guest on your program, McGeorge Bundy, who was certainly as complicit as McNamara," he told Lehrer. "I don't know why McNamara should take all the heat."

The camera cuta away for a reaction shot. Scheer's attack appeared to rattle the seventy-six-year-old Bundy. His sharp blues eyes darted back and forth behind his thick glasses with the clear plastic frames, the same signature style he had worn in the Kennedy and Johnson years. When his gaze finally steadied, Bundy appeared to betray an emotion utterly inconsistent with his cool, confident Vietnam persona. It was not a look of fear, exactly, but something related to it: a thinly suppressed expression of sudden alarm. The fierce anger directed at McNamara had suddenly been focused on him, and for an instant, he appeared uncharacteristically vulnerable. Within days of his television appearance, however, I received a call from Bundy seeking my help in composing his own memoir and retrospective analysis of America's path to war in Vietnam.

Lesson One: Counselors Advise but Presidents Decide (pp. 28-29):

While the McGeorge Bundy who reigned as a legend of the Establishment was reputed to be brisk, quick, calculating, and overconfident, the retrospective Bundy of thirty years later was in many ways the opposite: patient, reflective, curious, and humble. In fact, on the question of Vietnam Bundy appeared tentative and unsure -- maybe on some level even mystified. Although he never said so explicitly, he seemed to be as perplexed by the disaster of Vietnam as any of the historians who studied the decisions in which he had been a central participant. How did Bundy, the star of his generation and the preeminent mind of the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies, get Vietnam so terribly wrong? And how would he explain his failures of judgment three decades later?

It was clear from the beginning that Bundy was distinctly uninterested in the topics of Vietnamese nationalisma nd the origins of the communist insurgency. Early in our collaboration Bundy's friends and colleagues from Brown University, James Blight and Janet Lang, lobbied him strenuously to chair an American delegation with McNamara that would travel to Hanoi in 1997 for a historic meeting with the surviving members of the Vietnamese political and military leadership. The purpose of the exercise was to revisit the origins of the war from both American and Vietnamese perspectives and to fill the gaps in the historical record about the key inflection points that fueled the war's escalation in the mid-1960s. While McNamara was driven to seize the historical opportunity of an unprecedented dialogue with America's former enemy, Bundy had no enthusiasm for examining the Vietnamese calculus of interests that contributed to war with the United States. The decision to Americanize the Vietnam War in 1965, Bundy told me, was a decision made in Washington and not in Hanoi. It was inherently a presidential decision, he argued, and thus had to be studied through the prism of the two men he served who held ultimate authority for questions of war and peace -- President Kennedy and President Johnson.

(pp. 30-31):

As I compiled various outlines and research memoranda for Bundy about the history of Kennedy's firstyear in office, it became obvious that the prospect of intervention in Vietnam was among the major challenges he confronted. In fact, in the fall of 1961 Kennedy's most senior advisers almost unanimously warned him that the odds were sharply against avoiding a catastrophic defeat in Vietnam unless the president approved the first increment of a ground combat force deployment that might ultimately reach six divisions, or more than two hundred thousand men. Among the president's advisers to join that recommendation was McGeorge Bundy. "Remarkable," he told me when I brought the 1961 recommendation to his attention. "I have no memory of this whatsoever." But there it was in the documents for Bundy to see -- the narrative of an emerging crisis in Saigon and Kennedy's struggle with his counselors, including his national security adviser, over how to respond.

Kennedy's management of Vietnam in 1961 became a central focus for Bundy and an inflection point in his retrospective conclusions about the history of the war. While he did not complete his history of Kennedy's decisions of that year heleft no doubt about the importance he ascribed to them. "The policy I want to consider was in fact adopted by President Kennedy late in 1961, and sustained -- though not explained -- through his time as President," Bundy explained in a draft fragment. "It was maintained by Lyndon Johnson through the election year 1964, and abandoned as quietly as possible in 1965. It was the course of not engaging American ground combat troops in the war."

(p. 31):

Pivotal to Kennedy's [1960 presidential] victory was his adept and opportunistic positioning on national security. Relentlessly attacking from the right -- campaigning aggressively against President Eisenhower's foreign policy record and, in part, on a mythical "missile gap" -- the Democratic challenger crafted a message of toughness. That same message of resolve would be infused in Kennedy's soaring inaugural address in January 1961, which promised the world, "We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty."

Bundy, a lifelong Republican, supported Kennedy in 1960. After the election Bundy expressed interest in some possible job in the Kennedy administration. He turned down the post of Under Secretary of State for Administration (pp. 33-34):

The next call from Kennedy came two days later, with an offer to serve as special assistant tothe president for national security affairs. Although Bundy did not know it at the time, he was not Kennedy's first choice for that position. The president-elect had already offered it to Paul Nitze, a veteran government official who had been the architect of NSC-68, a government strategy document drafted in 1950 for President Truman that became the foundation of America's Cold War containment policy. Doubting the influence he would have as a White House staffer, Nitze declined that post and instead accepted a senior assignment in the Pentagon.

(p. 35):

While much of the coverage of Bundy's appointment was fawning, the conventional wisdom was accompanied by another, less flattering perspective on his arrival in the White House. "He was bright and he was quick but even this bothered people around him," David Halberstam wrote. "They seemed to sense a lack of reflection, a lack of dpeth, a tendency to look at things tactically, functionally and operationally rather than intellectually; they believed Bundy thought that there was always a straight line between two points."

Bundy's first job was evaluating the Bay of Pigs [Operation Zapata] adventure. He assembled two papers, one from deputy CIA director Richard Bissell ("a Groton graduate and Yale economic professor whom Bundy had known and been friendly with for years"), the other by Thomas C Mann, a former assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, then ambassador to Mexico, who was "highly dubious of the overthrow plot" (pp. 36-37):

Bundy was inclined to accept Bissell's sanguine projections. "Defense and CIA now feel quite enthusiastic about the invasion," he reported to President Kennedy in early February. "At the worst, they think the invaders would get intothe mountains,a nd at the best they think they might get a full-fledged civil war in which we could then back the anti-Castro forces openly." [ . . . ]

Bundy received private expressions of caution about Operation Zapata from his own colleagues. The young presidential aide Richard Goodwin anticipated the Unitd States would fall into an untenable trap. "Even if the landings are successful and a revolutionary government is set up," he told Bundy, "they'll have to ask for our help. And if we agree, it'll be a massacre. . . . We'll have to fight house-to-house in Havana." Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who had also come to Washington from Cambridge tos erve as an assistant to the president, sent Bundy a pair of memos opposing the invasion. "I am against it," he bluntly declared.

Despite these pointed internal critiques of Operation Zapata -- Goodwin's heresies so annoyed the national security adviser that the young speechwriter was banished from White House meetings on Cuba -- Bundy continued to support the CIA plot. In mid-March he told President Kennedy the agency had done "a remarkable job of reframing the landing plan so as to make it unspectacular and quiet, and plausibly Cuban in its essentials. I have been a skeptic about Bissell's operation, but now I think we are on the edge of a good answer."

(pp. 38-39):

On Monday morning, April 17, 1961, the 1,300 members of the Cuban exile brigade landed on teh beaches of the Bay of Pigs on Cuba's southwestern coast. Fighting with its back to the ocean and already infiltrated by Castro's agents, the exile brigade was outnumbered and outmaneuvered. Within a day it was surrounded by 20,000 Cuban troops. There were no stirrings of a spontaneous popular revolt that would sweep across Cuba. And in a stunningly inept lapse in planning, the exile force soon realized that eighty miles of swamp blocked its escape route intothe mountains. A crushing defeat was imminent.

As the grim reports poured into the White House, Rostow drove to CIA headquarters to meet with Bissell, his former professor, who was haggard, unshaven, and panicked. As the journalist and historian David Talbot notes, President Kennedy had insisted throughout the planning for the invasion that he would not intervene militarily to salvage the operation, at one point sending a military aide to the exiles' Central American training camp to reiterate that the U.S. Marines would not come to their rescue. As Rostow met with Bissell and his aides, however, he soon realized that the CIA planners did not believe Kennedy would continue to withhold American military support if the success of the operation was imperiled. Such an outcome, Rostow later wrote, "was inconceivable to them."

(p. 40):

Kennedy had anticipated Bissell's attempted manipulation. "They were sure I'd give in to them and send the go-ahead order to the Essex [a destroyer Admiral Arleigh Burke wanted to move into support of the operation]," Kennedy told his confidant Dave Powers. "They couldn't elieve that a new president like me wouldn't panic and try to save his own face. Well they had me figured all wrong." In 2005 a government document surfaced that confirmed the CIA expectation that the Bay of Pigs invasion would fail without direct American military support. The intelligence memorandum, dated November 15, 1960, concluded that an invasion would be "unachievable, except as joint Agency/DOD action" -- in other words, a dual invasion conducted by both the CIA and the Department of Defense. But this conclusion was never shared with the White House.

By the end of the week, 114 Cuban exile fighters had been killed and 1,189 had been captured. American responsibility for the operation was quickly exposed, humiliating the Kennedy adminstration and prompting a wave of global condemnation. The debacle ensured that Kennedy and his top military advisers would never have confidence in one another again. "Pulling out the rug," General Lemnitzer later remarked, was "unbelievable . . . absolutely reprehensible, almost criminal."

Bundy offered to resign after Bay of Pigs. He was kept on, but Dulles and Bissell were sacked. (p. 42):

In the aftermath of the failed invasion, Kennedy transferred authority for covert paramilitary operations from the CIA to the Department of Defense and fired Dulles and Bissell. Looking back on the Bay of Pigs disaster, Bundy wrote sympathetically about Bissell, suggesting that his "mistakes, large as they are, pale in comparison to his achievements," such as the implementation of the Marshall Plan and the creation of the CIA's U-2 aerial surveillance system. Yet Bundy also admited that "one of the reasons I was inefficient was that my favorite college teacher was in charge, Dickie Bissell." Bundy's close relationship with Bissell may have compromised his judgment and thus his counsel to President Kennedy. "It never occurred to me," he explained, that Bissell "was so captured by his own goddamned invention of this invasion that he would accept adjustments and limitations, because his political judgment was when you really get down to it you need to be rescued or surrender. The president will have to act. So it was an entrapment."

Interesting contrast here between Bundy's assertions of undying loyalty to his president, the leader he (perhaps unwittingly) helped to scam and entrap.

Then came Laos (pp. 46-47):

With disorder reigning among his advisers, on May 1 Kennedy convened another meeting of the National Security Council. The Bay of Pigs humiliation was very much on his mind. "That operation had been recommended principally by the same set of advisers who favored intervention in Laos," recalled Theodore Sorensen. "But now the President was far more skeptical of the experts, their reputations, their recommendations, their promises, premises and facts. He relied more on his White House staff and his own common sense; and he asked the Attorney General [his brother, Robert F. Kennedy] and me to attend all NSC meetings." The majority of Kennedy's advisers favored the deployment of combat troops to South Vietnam, Thailand, and government-controlled positions in the Laotian panhandle. If that failed to produce a cease-fire, Kennedy was advised to use tactical nuclear weapons and air strikes against the Pathet Lao. If China or North Vietnam intervened, those countries should be bombed and, if necessary, attacked with nuclear weapons.

Confronted with his military adivsers' apocalyptic scenarios, Kennedy commenced a fairly withering interrogation: If the United States used nuclear weapons where would it stop? What other communist powers would the United States have to attack? Without nuclear weapons would the United States have to retreat? Or would Washington be forced to surrender in the face of a massive Chinese intervention? Is this, Kennedy asked, the best bet for a U.S. confrontation with China -- in the mountains and jungles of its landlocked neighbor? Would deployments to Laos weaken the reserves to defend Berlin? Would forces landing in Vietnam and Thailand assume the reesponsibiity of defending those regimes, too?

Keenly doubtful of his military guidance, Kennedy decided to use the threat of force and press for a diplomatic outcome to the crisis. He conspicuously put ten thousand marines stationed on Okinawa on high alert, after which the communist and noncommunist factions agreed to a ceasefire. "If it hadn't een for Cuba," Kennedy told Schlesinger on May 3, "we might be about to intervene in Laos." He dismissively brandished a pile of memos from General Lemnitzer, adding, "I might have taken this advice seriously." That summer Harriman successfully brokered a neutralization agreement at the Geneva conference, and American military action in Laos was averted.

(p. 50):

Back in Washington [in 1954], President Eisenhower proclaimed his opposition to any deployment of U.S. combat troops to assist the French [in Indo-China]. At a meeting of the National Security Council on January 8, 1954, Eisenhower called U.S. intervention "simply beyond contemplation." He presciently insisted, "There was just no sense in even talking about United States forces replacing the French in Indochina. If we did so, the Vietnamese could be expected to transfer their hatred of the French to us." Eisenhower added (with "vehemence," according to the official notes), "I cannot tell you . . . how bitterly opposed I am to such a course of action. This war in Indochina would absorb our troops by divisions!" The president also rejected the appeals made by some of his more hawkish advisers. "When we talk about Dien Bien Phu, maybe I need to tell you this," he later confided to the newspaper publisher Roy Howard, in a secretly taped conversation, "but I was the only one around here who was against American forces going in. I tell you, the boys were putting the heat on me." On May 7, 1954, after repeated "human wave" assaults by Vietminh troops and fifty-five days of bombardment with an estimated 1,500 tons of ammunition, the French garrison was finally overwhelmed.

(pp. 55-56):

The deployment of U.S. combat troops to South Vietnam -- to serve variously as a deterrent, a symbol of determination, or a means to train Saigon's army -- had now been proposed five times: twice through the Gilpatric report and three times through the Joint Chiefs and by McGarr and Lansdale. Soon the Joint Chiefs found a fourth rationale to deploy American combat forces to the region. In a July 12 memorandum to McNamara, the chiefs asked for a formal decision to withdraw from the Laos negotiations at the next breach of the cease-fire. They recommended militaryintervention -- with or without SEATO allies -- to bolster the American negotiating position. Walt Rostow supported the chiefs' proposal, recommending to Dean Rusk that the United States take air and naval action against North Vietnam as a means to influence the settlement in Laos. [ . . . ] On July 15, General [Maxwell] Taylor instructed the chiefs "to produce an outline plan for military action in Southeast Asia.

Twelve days later, Taylor and Rostow submitted their own memorandum to Kennedy that proposed three alternative approaches to Vietnam. In the time-honored tradition of Washington bureaucrats, they offered two extreme options that the president would be compelled to summarily reject and a middle course leading Kennedy down a path they ostensibly wished him to follow. One option called for the United States to "disengage from the area as gracefully as possible," ensuring a disatrous strategic loss that Taylor and Rostow characterized as unacceptable. Another option proposed that Washington "find a convenient political pretext and attack . . . the regional source of aggression in Hanoi," thus risking an immediately enlarged conflict in Vietnam and a potential war with China. By comparison, the middle option they adovocated was both less damaging to American strategic interests and less precipitous in the risks it posed. It called for the United States to "build as much indigenous military, political and economic strength as we can in the area, in order to contain the thrust from Hanoi while preparing to intervene with US military force if the Chinese Communists come in or the situation otherwise gets out of hand. We assume it is the policy of this administration to pursue the third strategy," Taylor and Rostow advised, helpfully adding, "but some discussion of the alternatives may be useful."

(pp. 58-59):

An undaunted Taylor continued to press his recommendation. He reported on October 31 that ten days of discussions in South Vietnam reflected "a virtual unanimous desire" for American forces. His conclusion was "based on unsolicited remarks from cabinet ministers, National Assembly Deputies, university professors, students, shopkeepers, and oppositionists." There was similar support outside Saigon. In Hue, said Taylor, "opinion among intellectuals and government officials in that city is almost unanimously in favor of introduction of American combat troops." [ . . . ]

Secretary of Defense McNamara joined the emerging consensus in support of Taylor's recommendation. The time had come, he argued at a November 4 meeting, to "tell the world and the US what our commitment really is; the '8000 man' force does not convine anyone of our resolve." Raising the stakes enormously, McNamara now declared that six to eight divisions would be required to meet communist escalation in Southeast Asia. With one swift game-changing maneuver, McNamara shifted the debate from a focus on a small initial American deployment to the potentially broader commitment of perhaps more than 200,000 combat troops.

(pp. 62-63):

On November 15, Bundy joined the combat troop debate with his own recommendation to the president. "So many people have offered their opinions on South Vietnam that more may not be helpful," he noted in a memo to Kennedy. "But the other day at the swimming pool you asked me what I thought and here it is. We should now agree to send about one division when needed for military action inside Vietnam. . . . I would not put in a division for morale purposes. I'd put in later, to fight if need be." [ . . . ]

"Laos was never really ours after 1954," Bundy explained to Kenedy at the time. "South Vietnam is and wants to be." If Kennedy supported combat troop deployments, predicted Bundy, "the odds are almost even that the commitment will not have to be carried out." Reminding Kennedy that "your Vice President, your Secretaries of State and Defense, and the two heads of your special mission" share this "inner conviction," Bundy chided the president for his unwillingness to make the combat troop commitment to defend South Vietnam. "I am troubled by your most natural desire to act on other items now, without taking the troop decision," he scolded. "Whatever the reason," Bundy added, implicitly challenging Kennedy's fortitude, "this has now become a sort of touchstone of our will."

Bundy's recommendation, along with the other combat troop proposals that preceded it, were all acutely unwelcome. "They want a force of American troops," the president confided to Arthur Schlesinger Jr. "They say it's necessary in order to restore confidence and maintain morale. But it will be just like Berlin. The troops will march in; the bands will play; the crowds will cheer; and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. It's like taking a drink. The effect wears off and you have to have another. . . . The war in Vietnam could be won only so long as it was their war. If it were ever converted into a white man's war, we would lose as the French had lost a decade earlier."

With precious few exceptions Kennedy's war council was encircling him, indifferent to his conspicuous denunciations of proposals to transform the American military commitment to Vietnam. Kennedy's abundant doubts about the combat troop proposal, his repeated refusal to endrose it, his aggressive efforts to rebut and thwart it in the press -- all had been ignored. McNamara, Rusk, Taylor, Rostow, the Joint Chiefs, various interagency task forces, and his national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, had now all joined the same position: President Kennedy must be prepared to stand and fight the insurgency in South Vietnam, intervening on a possibly massive scale with ground combat forces.

As Kennedy continued to reject this advice, McNamara and Rusk wavered, calling for increased military assistance and advisers but no ground troops (pp. 65-66):

The National Security Council convened once more on November 15, 1961, when Kennedy eviscerated the argument for combat troops more forcefully than he ever had before. He began by dismissing the frequently invoked comparisons with the Korean War. "The conflict in Vietnam is more obscure and less flagrant," said Kennedy, adding, "The United States needs even more the support of allies in such an endeavor as Vietnam in order to avoid sharp domestic partisan criticism as well as strong objections from other nations of the world." Kennedy told his advisers he could "make a rather strong case against intervening in an area 10,000 miles away against 16,000 guerrillas with a native army of 200,000, where millions have been spent for years with no success."

The following day the president spoke at the University of Washington in Seattle, delivering a major foreign polcy speech. Kennedy dramatially recast the rhetoric of global activism so apparent in his inaugural address, replacing it with a new realism no doubt influenced by lessons learned in his first year in power. "We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent or omniscent, that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent, that we cannot fight every wrong or reverse each adversity, and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem." Ted Sorensen retrospectively pointed to the Seattle speech, with its emphasis on pragmatic realism and a recognition of the limits of American power, as the quintessential expression of Kennedy's foreign policy beliefs.

(p. 67):

Bundy ascribed Kennedy's clarity in enforcing a no-combat-troop policy to the president's inherent pessimism about the American capacity to fight and prevail in a Vietnamese war of counterinsurgency. "Kennedy decided sometime in 1961 that he was not going to send in combat troops to South Vietnam," Bundy told James blight of Brown University. "He was not going to do it because it was not going to work." That certitude, Bundy observed, flowed in part from a belief the president shared with some of his advisers that counterinsurgency could not be fought through conventional forms of intervention. "Kennedy did not see South Vietnam as a war, in the traditional sense," said Bundy. "JFK saw this as a new kind of communist insurgency that had to be dealt with as such. Kennedy never believed it could be turned into a war that we could win." Yet Bundy also noted the pitfalls of Kennedy's effort not to arouse the administration's hawkish critics by declining to make his no-combat-troop policy a declaratory doctrine for his administration. "The policy that is not acknowledged," Bundy often noted in our discussions, "is easily reversed."

Lesson Two: Never Trust the Bureaucracy to Get It Right (p. 72):

By the close of 1962 there were more than nine thousand U.S. military advisers and support personnel in South Vietnam, roughly three times the number of the previous year. The total amount of military hardware more than doubled between 1961 and 1962, including new shipments of armored personnel carriers and more than three hundred military aircraft. [ . . . ]

On the political front, the government's control over the country was unraveling. President Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, where widely perceived to be corrupt and authoritarian rulers, exercising rigid control over the National Assembly, Special Forces, police, and the press. All public gatherings, even funerals, requird official state approval. Diem also resisted American leadership of counterinsurgency operations. "All these soldiers," the South Vietnamese president complained to the French ambassador, "I never asked them to come here. They don't even have passports."

Then there was the Cuban missile crisis (p. 73):

In the first phase of the crisis, Bundy favored a limited preemptive military attack to take out the missiles. On the evening of October 16 he argued that "the political advantages are very strong, it seems to me, of the small strike. . . . The punishment fits the crime in political terms. . . . . We are doing only what we warned repeatedly and publicly we would have to do." Former secretary of state Dean Acheson joined Bundy in favoring air strikes. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy violently objected. Secretary of Defense McNamara warned the president that a surgical air strike to destroy the missiles was simply not possible and that bombing would likely trigger a full-scale American invasion.

(p. 75):

Kennedy ultimately rejected military preemption in favor of the quarantine and a diplomatic back channel that facilitated a secret deal to extract the missiles in Cuba in exchange for the removal of American Jupiter missiles from Turkey. As a result of groundbreaking scholarship on the missile crisis, we now know that if Kennedy had accepted Bundy's advise it could have triggered a nuclear war. Soviet forces in fact possessed a total of 162 muclear warheads in Cuba, including at lesat 90 tactical warheads to be used to repel a U.S. invasion or attack.

In Spring 1963 in Vietnam (pp. 75-76):

In Hue, a center of religious scholarship in South Vietnam, protestors defied a government ban against flying the Buddhist flag at a large rally. Government troops in armored carriers opened fire, killing nine and wounding fourteen civilians. Another wave of protests followed, incluidng hunger strikes by Buddhist religious leaders. On June 11, 1963, an elderly monk named Thich Quang Duc sat down at the center of a busy intersection in Hue, drenched his body with gasoline with the help of three other monks, and then set himself on fire. The haunting image of the monk remaining serenely fixed in the lotus position as the flames engulfed him appeared on the front pages of newspapers around the world. Diem's sister-in-law, the politically invasive Madame Nhu, ridiculed the public suicide as a "barbecue" and expressed her hope that others would emulate the monk's example. "Let them burn," she exclaimed, "and we shall clap our hands."

(p. 77):

[Michael] Forrestal, a Harvard Law School graduate and Wall Street lawyer [also son of former Defense Secretary James Forrestal, also virtually adopted by Averell Harriman], would actually play a far more important role in the Kennedy White House. The president granted him unusual access to the Oval Office and encouraged him to share his unvarnished views on the real progress of the war in Vietnam. Working through Bundy to see the president, however, was an ordeal Forrestal compared to a sterilizing bath. "Bundy wanted to know precisely what Forrestal intended to say and then hectored him about it with variations of 'Have you thought that out?'" notes the historian A.J. Langguth. "Forrestal found Bundy the least creative thinker on the NSC, always two cautious steps to the rear of a discussion. He suspected that Kennedy felt the same and kept Bundy out of his political decisions."

Forrestal, with his privileged access to Kennedy, was a key figure in producing the cable that led to the coup against Diem, an event that somehow occurred over a weekend when Bundy was absent (pp. 78-79):

This cable, drafted by Hilsman and authorized without the usual vetting and approvals, sent new instructions to the U.S. ambassador in Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge. "U.S. Government cannot tolerate situation in which power lies in Nhu's hands," the cable stated. "Diem must be given chance to rid himself of Nhu and his coterie and replace them with best military and political personalities available. If in spite of all your efforts, Diem remains obdurate and refuses, then we must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved." Taking an extraordinary leap, the cable then instructed Lodge to begin planning for a potential coup d'état to overthrow Diem: "Ambassador and country team should urgently examine all possible alternative leadership and make detailed plans as to how we might bring about Diem's replacement if this should become necessary." [ . . . ]

Bundy recalled that "this particular subject" was discussed in a channel that ran through Forrestal "dirctly to the President." Forrestal, Bundy said, was a very bright, straightforward young man, "but he's working for the President with one hand and Averell Harriman with the other,and he's got the Vietnam account with me, but not when I'm out for the weekend." It was in this context that Forrestal, "inexperienced" but possessed of "a clear point of view," takes the initiative to gain approval for the August 24 cable. "And he clears it in ways that are still disputed," said Bundy, who asked, "How much did people sign on?"

(p. 80):

Fueling momentum for a coup was a conviction within the Kennedy administration that the Diem family's exercise of power had become dangerously dysfunctional The president's brother "exercises an overriding, immutable influence over Diem," wrote Thomas L. Hughes, the director of intelligence and research at the State Department. Nhu was also a problem, Hughes suggested, because he despised the United States: "He has frequently claimed that the American presence must be reduced because it threatens South Vietnam's independence. . . . Nhu has claimed privately that should United States aid be cut he would seek help elsewhere. Should that fail, Nhu asserts he would negotiate a settlement with Hanoi. Nhu has convinced both Vietnamese and foreign observers that such a prospect is likely. . . . His megalomania is manifest in his claim that only he can save Vietnam."

(pp. 81-88):

Concerned that the Saigon regime was increasingly unstable, Kennedy dispatched McNamara, accompanied by Taylor, for a broad reappraisal of the war effort. "The event sin South Vietnam since May," noted Kennedy, "have now raised serious questions about both the present prospects for success against the Viet Cong and still more about the effectiveness of this effort unless there can be important political improvement in the country." [ . . . ]

Following a ten-day tour of South Vietnam, the McNamara delegation produced a draft report containing a striking recommendation. President Kennedy was advised to set the end of 1965 as a deadline to transfer essential responsibilities carried out by American military advisers to the Vietnamese. "It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that time," the report noted, further proposing an announcement "in the very near future . . . to withdraw 1000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963." The new policy should be dislosed quietly, "as an initial step in a long-term program to replace U.S. personnel with trained Vietnamese without impairment of the war effort." [ . . . ]

"What's the point of doing it?" queried a skeptical Bundy.

"We need a way to get out of Vietnam," McNamara replied. "This is a way of doing it. And to leave forces there when they're not needed, I think, is wasteful and complicates both their problems and ours." [ . . . ]

"Well, let's say it anyway," Kennedy instructed, leaving open the possibility that the date for an American withdrawal could be revised if necessary.

McNamara jumped in, determined to persuade Kennedy that a public withdrawal date was essential. "I think, Mr. President, we must have a means of disengaging from this area," he said firmly. "We must show our country that means . . ."

(pp. 84):

The White House announcement of the 1965 withdrawal date was accompanied later by a formal directive, National Security Action Memorandum 263, issued under Bundy's signature. Bundy remarked at a White House meeting that he "was surprised that some people were taking as 'pollyanna-ish' the McNamara-Taylor statement that we could pull out of Vietnam in two years. . . . Two years was really a long time," he said, "considering that by then the war would have lasted four years -- or longer than most wars in U.S. history."

With the debate over of a public withdrawal date resolved, an attentive White House returned its focus to plot to overthrow the Diem regime. Bundy cabled Ambassador Lodge to emphasize President Kennedy's expectation that "no initiative should now be taken to give any active covert encouragement to a coup," but that there should be "urgent covert effort with closest security . . . to identify and build contacts with possible alternative leadership as and when it appears." Bundy warned Lodge to keep American fingerprints off of the plot to overthrow President Diem: "essential . . . effort to be totally secure and fully deniable . . . We repeat . . . effort is not to be aimed at active promotion of coup but only at surveillance and readiness." [ . . . ]

(pp. 86-88)

Bundy cabled Lodge again on October 29 to reiterate the president's concerns. If the coup was not executed decisively, he cautioned, avoiding either "prolonged fighting or even defeat," the result might be "serious or even disastrous for U.S. interests." Bundy stressed that the "burden of proof must be on coup group to show a substantial possibility of quick success; otherwise we should discourage them from proceeding since a miscalculation could result in jeopardizing [the] U.S. position in Southeast Asia." At a White House meeting that afternoon, Robert Kennedy voiced his doubts about fomenting regime changein South Vietnam. "I mean, it's different from a coup in . . . Iraq or [a] South American country," he admonished. "We are so intimately involved in this. . . . . To support a coup would be putting the future of Vietnam and in fact all of Southeast Asia in the hands of one man not now known to us."

The plot to overthrow Diem was launched on the first day of November. Major General Tran Van Don, the commander of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, telephoned Paul Harkins, America's top military official in Vietnam, explaining that his senior generals "were assembled with him . . . and were initiating a coup." The CIA station chief, Lucien Conein, reported that the coup leaders had imprisoned several military officers loyal to Diem and had stated their demands: "If the President will resign immediately, they will guarantee his safety and the safe departure of the President and Ngo Din Nhu. If the President refuses these terms, the palace will be attacked within the hour by Air Force and Armor." At 3:00 p.m., as 103 truckloads of troops were reported to be entering Saigon, Diem's presidential guard was deployed around his palace. At 4:00 p.m. the American embassy in Saigon informed Washington that a ground and air attack was under way. Conein huddled with the coup plotters of the South Vietnamese Joint General Staff. He reported that Major General Duong Van "Big" Minh, the military adviser to President Diem, had made contact with the president's brother. The general warned that if Diem did not resign and surrender within five minutes, "the Palace will sustain a massive airborne bombardment. At this, Minh hung up." Finally, at 4:30 p.m., Diem called Ambassador Lodge. [ . . . ]

"I am trying to re-establish order," said Diem, as their conversation concluded. Hsi rule over South Vietnam and failed relationship with the United States had come to a decisive end.

President Diem and his brother were bound and shot tod eath in the rear hold of a South Vietnamese army personnel carrier. General Minh reported to Conein that the brothers had killed themselves while hiding out in a Catholic church, but CIA photographs depicted their mangled bloody bodies with their hands tied behind their backs. "This is not the preferred way to commit suicide," Bundy archly observed in the White House staff meeting on the morning of November 4.

I skipped over the conversation between Diem and Lodge, which was mostly Diem's attempt to figure out whether Lodge was behind the plotters -- clearly he was. RFK's offhand mention of coups in Iraq as ordinary business is interesting: the most recent Iraqi coup was in Feb. 1963 where Col. Salam Arif overthrew the Qasim regime, the first of several short steps to Saddam Hussein.

(p. 88):

When he learned that Diem and Nhu had been murdered, "Kennedy leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before," General Taylor recalled. The killings, said Forrestal, "troubled him deeply . . . bothered him as a moral and religious matter, shook his confidence in the kind of advice he was getting in Vietnam."

Of course, no one in Washington had actually ordered the murders. They merely recruited the henchmen and advised them to do the job quickly and decisively. Kennedy's reaction is a rare case where it dawns on one what sort of consequences such casual manipulations actually have. The bigger question is why if Kennedy, McNamara, et al. were set to withdraw they bothered to wreck the Diem regime at the same time. No one seems to have seen a contradiction there, partly because the withdrawal was aways imagined as a success even if deep down one knew that it was slip away from inevitable failure.

On Nov. 4, 1963, Bundy dictated a memorandum for the record (pp. 89-90):

As for President Kennedy, Bundy speculated that he tilted toward the pro-coup camp. "The President's own inner conviction, I believe, was very close to that of Dean Rusk and Bob McNamara,but he was determined not to be in the position of having pushed anyone into something which did not work." But later that day Bundy amended this conclusion, citing a conversation that afternoon with Mike Forrestal -- who once again appeared to be closer to the president on the question of Vietnam than his boss -- that prompted the national security adviser to concede "that I may not have been right." Bundy explained that President Kennedy had asked Forrestal to review the origin of the August telegram and to explain why the Pentagon "seemed so urgent to give an instruction to Lodge that would seem to commit the United States Government to support of a coup attempt." Bundy now understood that "as he looks back at it, the President is clearly uncertain that it was wise to place the weight of Washington's advice so sharply on one side, in a single weekend cable. My own belief is . . . the decision itself was probably basically correct."

Kennedy himself was killed on Nov. 22, 1963, and Lyndon Johnson succeeded him as president (p. 93):

At the time of President Kennedy's death the American military command had recorded a total of 108 U.S. military personnel killed in Vietnam. The final tally of U.S. fatalities would exceed 58,000.

(pp. 93-95):

In his reappraisal of the war, Bundy did not ascribe great significance to the violent overthrow of Diem and Nhu, which preceded the Kennedy assassination by just three weeks. "In the end," Bundy wrote, "the death of Diem was the result of a Vietnamese conspiracy, and in the end the Americans had done no more than make it clear that they would not be opposed to such action." Neither did Bundy seem to hold himself particularly responsible for the coordination and performance of the national security bureaucracy that initiated the coup. While conceding that the process of instigating the coup was "hasty and imprudent," Bundy believed there was "no point in a post-mortem -- the misunderstanding had been between the president and Forrestal." About the August 1963 authorization to green-light the plot, a glib Bundy was fond of observing that Forrestal's hurriedly approved cable to Saigon was evidence of Bundy's dictum, "Never do business on the weekend." He used this quip often, seemingly untroubled by the appearance of the former national security adviser shrugging off a pivotal breakdown in the bureaucracy that culminated in the murder of two leaders of an American proxy regime. President Kennedy and his brother were less forgiving. "This shit has got to stop!" the president told Forrestal. In the aftermath of the bungled weekend cable, when Kennedy learned that both McNamara and CIA director John McCone had strong reservations about initiating a coup, Forrestal had offered his resignation. "You're not worth firing," Kennedy told his aide. "You owe me something, so you stick around." Robert Kennedy placed some of the blame on the national security adviser. "Mac Bundy wasn't particularly helpful," he said, acting too much as a "gatekeeper" and not enough as an adviser.

In other comments about the coup Bundy was more critical and reflective. "The weekend cable is inexcusable," he told me. "You're damned if you do and damned if you don't," said Bundy about Diem's overthrow. "Can we do it with Diem? No, we can't. Should we be the ones who force a change? No we shouldn't. So do we sit still and just wait for pot luck? JFK was not that kind of patient man." Bundy remarked that the troika of Harriman, Forrestal, and Hilsman was similarly impatient. "And the rest of us who may have been a little more patient were a little less attentive. . . . . What do you do if you honestly think that you can't get there from here?" Bundy answered his own question by citing guidance that contrasted dramatically with his activist counsel on Cuba and Vietnam. "You can begin with the presumptive negative, that we ought not to ever be in a position where we are deciding, or undertaking to decide, or even trying to influence the internal political power structure," of another country, he said. With this pronouncement disavowing a broad category of intervention, Bundy had cleary traveled a great distance in his thinking since his years as national security adviser.

And a great distance away from standard US operating procedures. Ever since WWII, and in Latin America much longer than that, the US had repeatedly attempted to manipulate the internal political power structures of other governments -- not just through more coups than I can list but by fixing or influencing elections, bribing officials, or just pumping the airwaves full of propaganda. This persistent taking of sides in other peoples' affairs has profoundly corrupted our view of the world, yet it's so second nature that few foreign policy pundits and practitioners even give it a thought.

Lesson Three: Politics Is the Enemy of Strategy (pp. 97-98):

The 1964 election, Bundy observed, was the imperative force driving Lyndon Johnson. "The preemptive concern: win, win, win the election, not the war." From Johnson's first day as president, Bundy wrote, the new president was consumed with "the inescapable reality" that he would face an election in less than a year, compelling him "to run and win and win as big as possible." Johnson confided in Bundy in the winter of 1964 that he felt he had only inherited the presidency and was simply a "trustee" who would not command a real political mandate to determine major policy questions unless he prevailed in a national election in November. "And then you can make a decision," Johnson explained. Meanwhile, Bundy would later observe, "Vietnam is sort of going to hell . . . while all the center of political energy of the Executive Branch is on the election."

As Bundy came to depict it, the forthcoming 1964 presidential election was a powerful deterrent for Johnson to take any definitive action regarding the American commitment in Vietnam. "My own impression, then and through the early summer," he recalled, "was that he wanted firmness and steadiness in Vietnamese policy, but no large new decisions."

(pp. 102-103):

On Sunday, November 24, 1963, Bundy recalled getting a black vest for the president's funeral, planning for the arrival of various dignitaries, and processing papers and memos for a meeting that afternoon between Johnson and Ambassador Lodge, who had flown in from Saigon. "I did now know then what the President told me later, that he had always found Lodge a headline-hunting 'phony,'" Bundy noted. "Nor was it as clear then as it became later that the President never liked the idea of a coup in the first place." After huddling briefly with McNamara and Rusk, the president "gave Lodge a good firm piece of his mind," demanding that the ambassador pull his country team together, end the "backbiting," and get on with the war. Johnson told Lodge that "he would hold him personally responsible for progress."

(pp. 107-108):

The Joint Chiefs lobbied for a more aggressive American strategy. They argued in a memorandum of January 22, 1964, that Washington should renounce "self-imposed restrictions" and authorize "aerial bombing of critical targets in North Vietnam" and the deployment of "U.S. forces, as necessary, in direct actions against North Vietnam." Exactly two months after Kennedy's death, the chiefs were proposing air strikes against Hanoi and the deployment of U.S. troops, not just in an advisory role but in offensive operations against the North. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were proposing, in essence, the initial steps to Americanize the Vietnam War.

One week after the chiefs issued their recommendation, the cabal of generals who had removed President Diem from power were themselves overthrown by a clique of younger military men led by General Nguyen Khanh. [ . . . ]

Responding to a request from McNamara for military recommendations, the Joint Chiefs proposed on March 2 that U.S. "air and naval elements" directly participate in attacks on military and industrial targets in North Vietnam, in addition to the mining of North Vietnamese harbors, imposition of a naval blockade, and in the event that China intervened, the possible use of nuclear weapons.

(p. 109):

As Johnson desperately tried to buy time until November, support grew for the neutralization of South Vietnam. From Paris, Charles de Gaulle insisted that the U.S. mission was doomed and that negotiations constituted the only realistic alternative course. Walter Lippmann, the influential Washington columnist, endorsed the French position. "The official American view is to say unreservedly that the war will be won and refuse to think about what we shall do if it cannot be won," Lippmann wrote. "A competent statesman, like any competent military strategist, never locks himself into a commitment where there is no other position on which he can fall back. In Southeast Asia we have bolted the doors and do not have that indispensable part of any strategy, a fall-back position." Lippmann argued that the French leader was correct to observe that a fundamental absence of realist analysis was pushing Washington to the precipice of a "disaster which will leave us an intolerable choice between humiliating withdrawal and engaging in a much larger war, at least as large as the Korean War."

(p. 110):

Bundy was scornful of the arguments for neutralization, warning Johnson in a January 6 memo that if a diplomatic settlement were allowed to prompt an American withdrawal from South Vietnam, it would result in a cascade of dire geopolitical consequences: "A rapid collapse of anti-communist forces in South Vietnam, and a reunification of the whole country on Communist terms . . . Neutrality in Thailand, and inreased influence for Hanoi and Peking . . . Collapse of the anti-Communist position in Laos . . . Heavy pressure on . . . Malaysia . . . A shift toward neutrality in Japan and the Philippines . . . Blows to U.S. prestige in South Korea and Taiwan which would require compensating increases in American commitments there -- or else further retreat." Bundy further cautioned the president that neutrality for South Vietnam would be viewed by "all anti-communist Vietnamese" as a "betrayal," thus alienating a constituency with sufficient size and influence "to lose us an election." Here was Bundy brandishing the ultimate threat -- not the loss of South Vietnam but the loss of a presidential election. And here was Bundy conflating the domino theory as it applied to Southeast Asia and the soft underbelly of Johnson's bid for victory in November -- in a way that would be especially threatening to a president with Johnson's insecurities. Bundy elaborated on the risks of appearing soft in response to the communist threat in a second memo to Johnson. Reminding the president that he was an "ex-historian," Bundy invoked the legacy of Harry Truman, driven from Washington in disrepute and blamed by many Americans for not doing enough to avert China's fall to communism or to win the Korean War. "That is exactly what would happen now if we seem to be the first to quit in Saigon. . . . When we are stronger, then we can negotiate.

(pp. 113-114):

Johnson was obviously asking for a substantive statement of his military options in South Vietnam. Just two days earlier Bundy had submitted an emphatic but sketchy proposal to the president recommending a major military escalation "backed by resolute and extensive deployment" of an undefined number of combat forces. Bundy had warned the president that "in making this decision . . . we must accept two risks . . . the risk of escalation toward major land war or the use of nuclear weapons" and "the risk of a reply in South Vietnam itself which would lose that country to neutralism and so eventually to Communism." Bundy proposed a conference in Honolulu "which might occur early next week" to consult with Ambassador Lodge and others. [ . . . ] The final element of Bundy's plan was an unspecified "initial strike against the north" that would be "carefully designed to have more deterrent than destructive impact, as far as possible." The American attack would be quickly followed by an "active diplomatic offensive in the Security Council, or in a Geneva Conference, or both, aimed at restoring the peace throughout the area. This peakcekeeping theme," Bundy assured the president, "will have been at the center of the whole enterprise from the beginning." [ . . . ]

Not surprisingly, in his conversation with President Johnson on May 27, Bundy was unprepared to explain what precise form of military action he was suggesting. He therefore dodged the question.

On July 30, 1964, four South Vietnamese patrol boats attacked two North Vietnamese islands, Hon Me and Hon Ngu. On August 2, the USS Maddox, patrolling in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of North Vietnam, was (or was not) fired on by North Vietnamese boats. Bundy had previously proposed getting a congressional resolution to give the president broad powers as commander-in-chief. Johnson capitalized on this incident to rush the Tonkin Gulf resolution through Congress (pp. 125-127):

On that Tuesday morning, McGeorge Bundy was ensconced in his White House basement office intently monitoring the flow of cable traffic. The summer torpor of Washington had been replaced by a heightened sense of expectation. No attack had been reported, but what would happen next? It was a political moment that Bundy had prepared for and to some degree predicted, but he was nonetheless suprrised by an unnanounced visit from the president.

It was time to take the draft resolution to Congress, Johnson explained. "I know the firmness and strength of the President's decision because I was one of the first to question it," Bundy wrote years later of his encounter with Johnson in the White House basement that morning. [ . . . ]

President Johnson returned to the Oval Office and spoke by phone with the secretary of defense. Although an attack had not yet been reported, Johnson instructed McNamara to identify North Vietnamese tarets, "one of their bridges or something," for potential reprisal action. "I wish we could have something that we've already picked out and just hit about three of them damn quick and go right after them," the president explained.

"We will have that," McNamara replied. "And I talked to Mac Bundy a moment ago and told him . . . we should . . . be prepared to recommend to you a response -- a retaliation move against North Vietnam -- in the event this attack takes place within the next six to nine hours." At about 11:00 a.m. Washington time, more than an hour after McNamara's conversation with Johnson, a North Vietnamese attack was reported. McNamara later informed the National Security Council that nine or ten torpedoes were launched at the American vessels, which returned fire and reportedly sunk two North Vietnamese ships.

At the time, the details of this second attack were hazy and the sequence of events jumbled. As Bundy noted in a chronology he prepared for President Johnson and other senior officials, a cable sent from the Maddox within hours of the presumptive torpedo attack "makes many reported contacts and torpedoes 'appear doubtful.' 'Freak weather effects' on radar and 'over-eager' sonar-men may have accounted for many reports. 'No visual sightings' have been reported by the Maddox, and the Commander suggests that a 'complete evaluation' be undertaken before further action."

At a 6:15 p.m. meeting of the National Security Council, McNamara reviewed the evidence supporting the occurrence of a second attack. He recommended a reprisal raid, a proposal that enjoyed unanimous support among the president's advisers. Johnson ordered naval aircraft to launch sixty-four sorties of air strikes directed against North Vietnamese patrol boat bases and a supporting oil complex.

The debate over what happened that night in the Gulf of Tonkin has persisted for decades. The North Vietnamese, while acknowledging that an order was issued for the first attack on the Maddox, have consistently contested the facts about an alleged second attack. [ . . . ] In late 2005 the National Security Agency leaked an internal review concluding there were multiple intelligence errors in 1964 contributing to the determination that a second attack occurred. The documentary record of those errors had been deliberately altered and kept secret for more than forty years.

(p. 128):

At a 6:45 p.m. meeting with congressional leaders, the president formally set in motion the legislative strategy he had been preparing all summer. Flanked by McNamara, Rusk, and General Wheeler, Johnson explained that he would submit a resolution seeking congressional authority for U.S. combat operations in Southeast Asia if such escalation proved necessary. "In my time with Lyndon Johnson, I do not remember a large decision more quickly reached," recalled Bundy. Johnson had concluded that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was the ideal pretext for the swift passage of legislation "long proposed and debated" in the State Department -- a resolution that would deliver "clear cut" authorization from Congress "for a Presidential decision to conduct warfare in Southeast Asia."

On August 7, 1964, after eight hours of debate, the Senate passed the resolution 88-2, with the ten absent senators publicly endorsing the measure. The vote in the House was 416-0.

(pp. 129):

As Johnson campaigned across the country, he reiterated his opposition to deploying combat troops to South Vietnam. "We don't want our American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys," he declared on September 25 in Oklahoma. "We don't want to get involved in a nation with 700 million people and get tied down in a land war in Asia." Speaking in New Hampshire a few days later, Johnson pointedly assured voters that he would recognize a limitation on the American commitment, promising the Vietnamese "only to continue to try to get them to save their own freedom with their own men, with our leadership, and our officer direction, and such equipment as we can furnish them. We think that losing 190 lives in the period that we have been out there is bad. But it is not like 190,000 that we might lose the first month if we escalated that war.

(p. 131):

Lyndon Johnson won a massive victory over Senator Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election, consolidating his power and confirming his primacy independent of his predecessor, John F. Kennedy. Johnson won forty-four states and 61 percent of the vote. His plurality was the largest in history. The Democratic Party dominated both houses of Congress, with a 68 to 32 margin over the Republicans in the Senate and 297 to 140 in the House of Representatives.

(p. 132):

As Bundy retrospectively reflected on the Vietnam decisions of 1964, he invariably returned to the litany of nondecisions produced in that year -- the decision not to withdraw, not to escalate, not to neutralize, not to debate the domino theory, and, fatefully, not to examine the military limitations and implications of a massive deployment of U.S. ground combat forces to South Vietnam. The cause of the disparate nondecisions of 1964 that emerges from Bundy's varied reflections and fragments is Lyndon Johnson's preoccupation with the domestic politics of an election year. In Bundy's appraisal it was politics -- specifically Johnsonian politics -- that created multiple disincentives to challenge the status quo and analyze rigorously the limited options and difficult choices in Vietnam.

Politics became the enemy of strategy in 1964. Because winning the presidential election was Johnson's overarching goal, he could not permit the situation in Vietnam to deteriorate to a deeper level of crisis. The impending election further constrained Johnson from either escalating the American commitment or embarking on a strategic withdrawal.

(p. 135):

But for Johnson, Bundy suggested, the White House narrative of the Gulf of Tonkin attacks had become a reality. "People who question the reality are on the other side. They are the enemy." Ultimately the potential authority of the resolution was so great, said Bundy, that Johnson was determined to ensure its passage. The Gulf of Tonkin is a "license for a later expansion of the war. . . . It gives him more power," Bundy continued, and "Lyndon Johnson never in his life turned down an opportunity to enlarge his own power." Most signficiantly, Bundy concluded, "Tonkin is very Johnsonian. It's not possible to imagine Kennedy doing that. He wouldn't have thought of the legislative parlay."

(pp. 136-137):

The record demonstrates that Bundy did not shield himself from the politics of 1964. To the contrary, he chose various moments to plunge into the fray. Why did Bundy lobby Lyndon Johnson to select Robert Kennedy as his running mate? When rebuffed, why did Bundy agree to help push Kennedy into the political wilderness? When asked, why was Bundy so vague in defining military options for Johnson but so forthcoming in proposing political strategies to market the American commitment to Vietnam? Why was Bundy advising the president on the domestic political implications of the neutrality option, warning him that it could alienate a constituency with sufficient leverage "to lose us an election"? Why was Bundy so engaged in planning a congressional resolution to be deployed before the election but so inactive in contingency planning for military options after the election? His passivity was particularly striking in light of the fact that in the summer of 1964 Ray Cline, the CIA's deputy director for intelligence, privately informed Bundy that the military situation in South Vietnam was so dire that "we will just barely squeak through" the election without a collapse of the regime in Saigon. More broadly, why did a self-described "academic manager" and "political zero" insinuate himself in so many questions where his expertise was questionable at best? Was this the proper role for the national security adviser? Were these not precisely the questions Bundy should have avoided to ensure his own independence and credibility? Bundy did not ask these questions of himself in the course of his retrospective study. Perhaps he should have?

With so many questions, perhaps we should venture an answer. The first thing that seems clear is that Bundy is not really much of an expert on anything, certainly not on foreign countries like Vietnam nor on how military strategy might be applied there. He knows a bit about history and politics, and he has an evident knack for debate. As we've seen before, he knows how to talk about things in ways that are often convincing to people who don't know much more than he does. Given all this, it's easy to see why security issues are political to him: they are first of all political to the people he works for and must convince, so he's safest and surest working the political angles. That he is full of shit isn't much of a handicap. So are most of the people he works and competes with.

(pp. 137-138):

Bundy believed that the historical legacy of the Korean War informed the mind-set of senior policy makers confronting the challenge of Vietnam in 1964. He noted that approximately thirty-five thousand soldiers had died in the Korean conflict over a three-year period, at a rate roughly comparable to the death toll in Vietnam. Yet there was no protest. Many of his colleagues recalled the Korean conflict as he did, "a hard choice, but incontestably right, both in morals and politics." Bundy said that while Vietnam was different from Korea, "the cases were enough alike to encourage the comparison." But if the precedent of Korea was in fact relevant to decisions about Vietnam, that parallel would seem to suggest the need for deeper analysis. Korea, of course, ended in a military stalemate and triggered the partition of the country and a permanent American military deployment that has continued since 1953. Was that the strategic outcome Bundy anticipated in 1964? If not, then how would he propose the United States fight the war in Vietnam to ensure a different outcome? Beyond precluding what Bundy regarded as an ignominious Cold War defeat, what was his vision for the future of Vietnam?

(pp. 139-140):

In another fragment, he surmised that "for LBJ the domino theory was really a matter of domestic politics." Bundy told me, "No seroius contender for political office can propose letting go of Vietnam. Not because dominoes will fall, but because Vietnam must not fall." And he concluded. "It's an American political problem, not a geopolitical or cosmic matter." [ . . . ]

Despite President Johnson's identification with the domino theory, in June 1964 the CIA produced a major study sharply at variance with the theory's core predictions. Prepared by the respected intelligence analyst Sherman Kent for the Board of National Estimates, the study was known as the "Death of the Domino Theory" memo. In it Kent shared the intelligence community's dubious conclusions about one of the principal justifications for intervention in Vietnam: "We do not believe that the loss of South Vietnam and Laos would be followed by the rapid, successive communization of the other states of the Far East. . . . With the possible exception of Cambodia, it is likely that no nation in the area would quickly succumb to Communism as a result of the fall of Laos and South Vietnam." While Bundy was certainly aware of the CIA estimate -- it was recommended to him by his top Vietnam aide, Mike Forrestal -- he appears to have disregarded it. A unique opportunity for Bundy to test the assumptions underlying the potential American military escalation in Vietnam had been lost or perhaps simply ignored.

(pp. 140-141):

In early March the State Department's Policy Planning Council produced a lengthy study concluding that sustained air strikes -- even if they produced extensive physical destruction -- would fail to weaken Hanoi's determination to support the insurgency. In fact, the study predicted that bombing would probably strengthen the control of the North Vietnamese regime while doing little to boost morale in the South, an expectation roughly consistent with what Charles de Gaulle had been arguing privately.

Other studies, SIGMA I and SIGMA II, showed the same thing. Bundy showed an escalated bombing proposal to James Thomson, a China expert (pp. 142-143):

"Look, sir, I don't know anything about firepower," Thomson explained to Bundy. "But this document is trying to tell us that we can bomb them into submission,and my fear, since I know China, and I have learned something about Indo-China, is that those people we're bombing will survive our taking out everything they've built over these past many years, their infrastructure and so forth." The insurgency will retreat into the jungle, Thomson predicted, evading and enduring a bombing campaign for as long as necessary. Why? "Because they know they have no place to go. And eventually we will go home. And so I'm not sure this is going to work. . . . They know that we know that we will have to go home, someday, quite soon."

Bundy sat in silence, staring at Thomson and pondering his reply. "Well, James," he said finally, "that's a good point. You may well be right. Thank you so much."

Their exchange ended and with it a window of opportunity in 1964 was essentially sealed shut. SIGMA I did not matter. SIGMA II did not matter. The views of an expert like Thomson did not matter. Other well-known estimates questioning the efficacy of bombing from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the State Department's intelligence directorate also did not matter. "As soon as the election was over," Bundy recalled after leaving the White House, "it became apparent, as indeed it had been right throught he year that we werwe living on borrowed time. The President hadn't wanted to make and the government did not press him to make those hard decisions during an election year." Within just three months McGeorge Bundy would recommend to the president that the United States initiate a strategic bombing campaign against North Vietnam.

Lesson Four: Conviction Without Rigor Is a Strategy for Disaster: Starts with several pages on Bundy's post-Vietnam War research, especially into everything written about Bundy. David Halberstam wrote a long and famous essay, "The Very Expensive Education of McGeorge Bundy" for Harper's, which he then expanded into his book about the Kennedy administration elites, The Best and the Brightest (pp. 148-149):

In rereading The Best and the Brightest, Bundy was inclined to focus less on how he was depicted and more on teh characterization of the two presidents he served. "Thus one of the lessons for civilians who thought they could run small wars with great control," wrote Halberstam of Kennedy, "was that to harness the military, you had to harness them completely; that once in, even partially, everything began to work in their favor. Once activated, even in a small way at first, they would soon dominate the play." Bundy rejected this proposition. During one of our meetings we discussed his comment in the margins of The Best and the Brightest. "As if inevitable," he had written derisively. In another passage HAlberstam wrote, "The illusion would always be of civilian control; the reality would be of a relentlessly growing military domination of policy." Bundy's response was dubious. "President and Commander-in-Chief Cease to Exist?" he asked. And finally there was this generalization about Kennedy: "What the president was learning . . . (once again, the Bay of Pigs had been lesson one), was something that his successor Lyndon Johnson would also find out the hard way; that the capacity to control a policy involving the military is greatest before the policy is initiated, but once started, no matter how small the initial step, a policy has a life and a thrust of its own, it is an organic thing. More, its thrust and its drive may not be in any way akin to the desires of the President who initiated it." Again, Bundy rejected Halberstam's conclusion; "Not so," he countered. But not all of Bundy's responses took the form of disagreement. Halbstam was "right," Bundy observed, about the great "sadness" of the war.

Bundy may be right but only in the very narrowness of his vision. I don't doubt that presidents retained policy control, but what they lost by bringing the military into action is control over the consequences of military action. I doubt that any president has ever accurately anticipated the human cost, especially collateral damage, of starting or expanding a war. They've also discovered that the military is exceedingly hard to control. In particular, once moving it has tremendous inertia to keep moving. Presidents are prone to think they're in control because they can start a war, then find themselves stuck in a military juggernaut that no longer responds to their commands. War seems to have its own, if not logic, at least sense of political destiny. Bundy may be right, for instance, that Johnson was always in command, but more often than not Johnson had no options to do what he wanted, at least within the political limits he was willing to accept.

(pp. 150-151):

After concluding discussions with Bundy and Rusk at his ranch in Texas, Johnson decided against authorizing retaliatory air strikes. But the president made it clear that while he doubted the efficacy of bombing attacks he was eager to consider recommendations for the deployment of ground troops. "Every time I get a military recommendation it seems to me that it calls for a large-scale bombing," Johnson vented in a cable to Ambassador Taylor in Saigon. "I have never felt that this war will be won from the air, and it seems to me that what is much more needed and would be more effective is a larger and stronger use of Rangers and Special Forces and Marines, or other appropriate military strength on the ground and on the scene." Johnson essentially instructed Taylor to produce such a proposal. "I am ready to look with great favor on that kind of increased American effort," he explained, "directed at the guerrillas and aimed to stiffen the aggressiveness of Vietnamese military units up and down the line. Any recommendation that you or General Westmoreland make in this sense will have immediate attention from me, although I know that it may involve the acceptance of larger American sacrifice. We have been building our strength to fight this kind of war ever sine 1961, and I myself am ready to substantially increase the number of Americans in Vietnam if it is necessary to provide this type of fighting force against the Viet Cong." The cable, dated December 30, 1964, was drafted by Bundy and reflects his handwritten revisions.

(p. 152):

For his own part, Taylor was dubious about whether ground combat forces could defeat the insurgency. "I do not recall in history a successful anti-guerrilla campaign with less than a 10 to 1 numerical superiority over the guerrillas and without the elimination of assistance from outside the country," the ambassador informed President Johnson. That ratio would be virtually impossible to achieve in Vietnam. It was also unlikely, Taylor argued, that the United States could "change national characteristics, create leadership where it does not exist, raise large additional [South Vietnamese] forces or seal porous frontiers to infiltration." Doubting the viability of ground action, Taylor also favored the use of coercive air power.

Bundy visited Vietnam for the first time, touring Pleiku after a commando attack that killed 9 American soldiers (pp. 155-157):

Various histories depict Bundy's swift recommendation for reprisal air strikes as a visceral reaction to witnessing later that day the damage of the Pleiku attacks, the explosive force of which dismembered its victims, scattering their limbs and body parts. General Westmoreland, for example, suggested that once Bundy "smelled a little gunpowder," the national security adviser "developed a field marshal psychosis." Bundy dismissed such accounts of an emotional overreaction as exaggerated and incorrect. "I did not 'take charge' . . . as some assert," he wrote. "I was called as a White House staff man in a useful place." Yet some of his colleagues recall the impact the Pleiku episode appeared to have on the national security adviser. Francis Bator, Bundy's deputy for international trade and economics, noted "the standard theory . . . that it was during Pleiku that he sort of caught the religion on Vietnam." Bundy rejected that notion, but Bator recalled, "I'm not so sure -- not on the basis of what he said, but I saw his face when he came back from Pleiku, literally when he walked into the Situation Room office, and I had sort of a sense that perhaps he'd become more emotionally caught up in it."

With the support of Ambassador Taylor and General Westmoreland, Bundy recommended an immediate reprisal strike against North Vietnam. [ . . . ] What Johnson approved in the wake of Pleiku was a single retaliatory attack code-named "Operation Flaming Dart," launched with American fighter jets from the carrier Ranger and targeting a North Vietnamese army camp sixty miles north of the seventeenth parallel. But what Bundy and his team sought to engineer was a perpetual bombing campaign, which they described as a generalized and continuing program of "graduated and sustained reprisal." Despite the internal studies and war games demonstrating that coercive bombing was an ineffectual strategy, Bundy and his team pressed ahead, ignoring not only the two SIGMA simulations but also the dubious estimates from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research. The national security adviser's objective was to break the will of the insurgency in ways consistent with the expectations of game theory, the study of how to escalate and prevail in dynamic conflict or bargaining situations. The team's proposal was formulated under the guidance of John McNaughton, a Harvard Law School professor who had succeeded Paul Nitze as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. McNaughton, an ardent student of game theory, enjoyed Bundy's strong support for importing intellectual precepts of conflict management developed in the classrooms of Cambridge and applying them to the guerrilla warfare of Vietnam.

(p. 158):

Bundy conceded that his recommended military strategy had limitations, but he argued that the shortcomings were acceptable because bombing would communicate a necessary message of resolve at home and abroad. "We cannot assert that a policy of sustained reprisal will succeed in changing the course of the contest in Vietnam. It may fail, and we cannot estimate the odds of success with accuracy -- they may be somewhere between 25% and 75%. What we can say is that even if it fails, the policy will be worth it. At a minimum it will damp down the charge that we did not do all that we could have done, and this charge will be important in many countries, including our own."

Unpacking this, he reframes the war as a "contest": much like a game. He implies a 50-50 proposition, weaseling it once by moving the endpoints, and a second time with a strategic "may." Such loose numbers imply no method, no checks. That failure would be "worth it" is asserted with no estimation or imagination of costs. In any case, the argument ultimately turns on nothing more than political considerations, especially domestic. That, of course, was Johnson's achilles heel, and Bundy freely jabbed whenever he wanted to push his point.

(pp. 158-159):

Thirty years later, the February 7 bombing proposal continued to preoccupy Bundy. He could not explain why Johnson sought to contain it and render it moot. Yet there was an obvious explanation for the president's dismissive reaction to the graduated and sustained reprisal recommendation. Johnson had already indicated his doubts about the efficacy of bombing and his preference for ground combat forces just weeks before, in response to the Christmas Eve terror attacks in Saigon.

(p. 161):

Ball believed that either method of escalation -- bombing or ground troops -- would fail. Added to this mix was the advocacy of former President Eisenhower, who believed the threat of using nuclear weapons had ended the Korean War in 1953. Eisenhower now informed Johnson that if given the opportunity, as commander in chief, "he would use any weapons required, adding that if we were to use tactical nuclear weapons, such use would not in itself add to the chance of escalation." [ . . . ]

In this conviction the president enjoyed "the powerful and steadfast support" of two figures whose solidarity Johnson coveted: the former president and war hero Dwight Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, whom Bundy described as Johnson's "totally discreet and loyal cultural cousin." Eisenhower believed that once war was embarked upon, "you must fight to win," and Rusk was persuaded that in a global contest with communist power the United States must remain "reliable" and "a friend who means what he says."

(p. 162):

On February 19, almost two weeks after the Pleiku attack, Johnson finally accepted Bundy's recommendation for a continuing campaign of air strikes in support of a strategy of "graduated and sustained reprisal." But Johnson rejected his national security adviser's advice to announce the decision publicly.

(p. 162):

In a pair of February memos, Vice President Hubert Humphrey implored the president to reevaluate the rapidly growing American military commitment to Saigon. "From a political viewpoint, the American people find it hard to understand why we would risk World War III by enlarging a war under terms we found unacceptable 12 years ago in Korea, particularly since the chances of success are slimmer," wrote Humphrey. The vice president argued that Americans recalled the "lessons" of the Korean war, which he identified as a recognition of the limitations of air power, a wariness of the risk of Chinese intervention, respect for the "never again club" precluding the deployment of American combat forces to fight a land war in Asia, and, finally, acknowledgment of the "Eisenhower administration's compromise which represented a frank recognition of all these factors." Humphrey urged Johnson to cut his losses in Vietnam, noting that the president was "in a stronger position to do so than any administration in this century." Johnson was livid over Humphrey's warnings and banished him from Vietnam deliberations for the following year.

Bundy's retaliation bombing proposal didn't anticipate the need for extra ground forces to protect the Da Nang air base the bombers were based at. Westmoreland immediately requested a marine expeditionary brigade for the base. Taylor objected, seeing where that would lead (p. 163):

"Such action would be a step in reversing long-standing policies of avoiding commitment of ground combat forces in South Vietnam," Taylor inveighed in a cable to the Joint Chiefs. "Once this policy is breached it will be very difficult to hold the line." When the first marines hit the ground, Taylor predicted, additional and expanded deployments would be inevitable. "If Danang needs better protection, so do Bien Hoa, Ton Son Nhut, Nha Trang and other key base areas," he pointed out. "Once it becomes evident that we are wiling to assume such new responsibilities, one may be sure [the Saigon government] will seek to unload other ground force tasks upon us." If the goal was the defense of the Da Nang air base from retaliatory mortar fire, "it would be necessary for marines to be in place on [the] ground in considerable strength," withup to six battalions. And what if the Johnson administration deployed ground combat units in a full-scale effort to suppress the insurgency in the jungles and forests of Southeast Asia? Taylor predicted that America would then suffer the same fate as France, "which tried to adapt their forces to this mission and failed; I doubt that US forces could do much better. . . . When I view this array of difficulties I am convined that we should adhere to our past policy of keeping our ground forces out of a direct counterinsurgency role."

Taylor's argument was rejected. Bundy urged Johnson to dismiss Taylor as ambassador, with McNamara and Rusk concurring ("Max has been gallant, determined, and honorable to a fault, but he has also been rigid, remote, and sometimes abrupt.") (pp. 164-165):

Precisely as Taylor had predicted, the military swiftly adapted to the breach of the no-combat-troop policy with ambitious new proposals. The army chief of staff, Harold K. Johnson, conducted a review mission in South Vietnam to generate recommendations for intensified military action. On March 15, one week after the first U.S. combat troops waded ashore in South Vietnam, he briefed President Johnson and other senior officials on proposals he had been developing with John McNaughton, the assistant secretary of defense who had argued the theoretical merits of "graduated and sustained reprisal." General Johnson stunned the president and his advisers, warning that "it could take 500,000 U.S. troops five years to win the war." According to McNamara, "His estimate shocked not just the president and me but the other chiefs as well. None of us had been thinking in anything approaching such terms."

(p. 167):

Bundy's projections about the use of American combat troops were conspicuously, if not purposely, vague. "A proper balance of readiness to act and real attention to real problems seems to be the best design for making the result endurable, however much we succeed or fail. For if we visibly do enough in the South (whatever that may be), any failure will be, in that sense, beyond our control." Even a failed intervention in Vietnam, Bundy asserted, would be better than no intervention at all. "Questions: in terms of U.S. politics which is better: to 'lose' now or to 'lose' after committing 100,000 men? Tentative answer: the latter."

Better still: to lose after 58,000 US soldiers killed? That would really establish that we tried. Even though history will eventually show that in 1965 before any significant troop commitments even the hawks were more conscious of inevitable failure than remote prospects for success. (p. 168):

John McNaughton, the law professor turned defense intellectual, shared the same fixation. In a March 24, 1965, memo he quantitatively ranked the hierarchy of American interests in Vietnam: "70% -- to avoid a humiliating US defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor), 20% -- To keep SVN (and the adjacent) territory from Chinese hands. 10% -- To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life."

(p. 169):

Jonson was "full of determination," Bundy noted, when he, Rusk, and McNamara met with the president on the afternoon of April 1. Johnson approved an 18,000-to-20,000-man increase in U.S. military support forces and the deployment of two additional marine combat battalions and a marine air squadron. More significantly, Johnson agreed to change the marines' mission from base security to active offensive counterinsurgency combat operations against the Vietcong. With this decree the Americanization of the war was arguably an accomplished fact.

(p. 171):

The momentum for an enlarged American escalation grew stronger. On April 19 and 20, Ambassador Taylor, General Westmoreland, and other senior officials met in Honolulu to chart the next phase of U.S. combat force deployments. The group collectively recommended a 150 percent increase of U.S. troops in South Vietnam, from the current level of 33,500 to 82,000.

(p. 173):

On April 20 the intelligence community concluded in a classified estimate that even an increase of U.S. combat strength in excess of 80,000 troops would fail to deter the Vietcong, North Vietnam, or China from engaging in or supporting the war; "They would likely count on time being on their side and try to force the piecemeal engagement of US troops under conditions which might bog them down in jungle warfare, hoping to present the US with a de facto partition of the country."

(pp. 173-174):

The American combat troop deployments in the spring of 1965 were made despite sustained political paralysis in Saigon and the South Vietnamese army's continuously deficient military performance. Following a flurry of intrigues and maneuvers within the government, in May a military coup mounted by the so-called Young Turks -- led by Air Marshall Nguyen Cao Ky and General Nguyen Van Thieu -- toppled the civilian government formed by Phan Huy Quat, marking the fifth change of government since the overthrow and assassination of President Diem in November 1963. On the battlefield, the Viecong -- now strenthened by as many as four regiments of North Vietnamese regulars -- decimated the government's army in battles north of Saigon and in the central highlands. And the first practical test of Bundy's "graduated and sustained reprisal" strategy suggested just how misguided Washington was in its assumptions about the potency of bombing.

(pp. 176-177):

On June 7 General Westmoreland informed McNamara that even the enlarged force levels agreed to that spring would not be adequate. Westmoreland requested an immediate inrease of 41,000 combat troops, to be followed by 52,000 later. His plan called for augmenting the thirteen American battalions already committed to South Vietnam with nineteen more U.S. battalions and ten from allied countries. Under Westmoreland's proposal the total combat troop commitment would grow from 82,000 forces under U.S. command to 175,000, and the general's combined command would grow to forty-two battalions, and by the end of the month to forty-four battalions.

"The basic purpose of the additional deployments," Westmoreland explained, "is to give us a substantial and hard hitting offensive capability on the ground to convine the VC they cannot win." Even with a more than 100 percent increase in combat forces -- following the previous 150 percent increase in April -- the top American commander in Vietnam still could not ensure an outcome better than the stalemate McNamara had recently predicted.

(p. 181):

Tran Quang Co, who served as [North Vietnam's] first deputy foreign minister, would make the case that the American bombing campaign was critical to national morale in North Vietnam. "Never before did the people of Vietnam, from top to bottom, unite as they did during the years that the U.S. was bombing us. Never before had Chairman Ho Chi Minh's appeal -- that there is nothing more precious than freedom and independence -- go straight to the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people." The limited utility of bombing and the massive determination and endurance of Vietnamese communist forces should never have beenin doubt to Bundy and other senior administration officials. After all, it was one of the principal insights generated by the SIGMA war-game exercises in which the national security adviser had participated.

(pp. 182-183):

By Bundy's own admission, the senior figures in the Johnson administration's war council did little to address the unanswered questions embedded in the drift to Americanization of the war. "No one asks ahead of time what kind of war it will be and what kind of losses must be expected," he wrote. "The military of 1965 are almost trained not to ask such (cowardly?) questions." Bundy believed Johnson did not want such an inquiry. "It would leak; it might not tell him what he wanted to hear; he could not control it." But as national security adviser it was Bundy's responsibility to compel the Pentagon to demonstrate the rigor of its recommendations to the president, even if Johnson himself was disinclined to stand up to his military advisers.

(pp. 184-185):

Should the administration have coldly conceded that South Vietnam could not be saved? This could have perhaps been the realist conclusion of Bundy's retrospective logic. The "doves" of 1965, he asserted, labored under a weakened argument predicated on the "fancifully hopeful" expectation that there existed a negotiated diplomatic settlement that could end the war in Vietnam and achieve a grand compromise with communist power. It was therefore necessary in our research, Bundy suggested to me, for us to identify in 1965 proponents of a dispassionate realpolitik solution to America's quandry. He wanted to know "who said straight -- it's a loser -- so lose it as cheaply as you can."

Bundy himself was not predisposed to wage such a difficult bureaucratic battle in 1965. He lacked the determination to do so because his core convictions -- a confidence in the power of coercion, a fixation with credibility, and a predisposition to support the president's political calculations -- each gravitated against the analytical activism the moment demanded. Instead Bundy watched as the Johnson administration launched an open-ended deployment of ground combat forces to South Vietnam to compete in an unconstrained contest of endurance, casualties, and numbers. This was, Bundy wrote, "a major error and we failed even to address it."

George Ball was the best-known dove in the administration at the time. He mostly wound up making proposals for negotiations, and he was tolerated most likely because his proposals were useful as straw men for the hawks to pick at. (I've skipped over a number of direct references to this.) The idea of a negotiated deal on Vietnam was always seen as an attempt to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. That is, for instance, why so many escalations -- especially later under Nixon -- were rationalized as attempts to gain leverage. So even Ball always felt the need to couch his dissent by adopting the unquestioned, foundational adherence to the anti-communist mission. No one within the administration could dare to raise the possibility that maybe a majority of Vietnamese would have wished, or would have been better off under, a communist government. That core assumption led to many other doctrines which were held so uniformly throughout the administration that no one could ever question them.

Lesson Five: Never Deploy Military Means in Pursuit of Indeterminate Ends (pp. 186-188):

"What can we say is the most surprising?" McGeorge Bundy asked himself in a fragment he composed on February 3, 1996, as he and Mary returned from a holiday in the Caribbean. His answer: "The endurance of the enemy." It was a dynamic of the war that fascinated him. Bundy marveled at the leadership of the insurgency, its political strength inside South Vietnam, the stamina of the armed forces of the Vietnamese communists, and the social cohesion that bound these variables together into an equation that allowed a small power, among the poorest countries in the world, to triumph over the United States. [ . . . ]

"Most histories of the war," wrote Bundy, establish that the U.S. ground combat operations were predicated "on a strategy of attrition." The capture and control of territory, although part of American military strategy, did not define its central purpose. The core function of U.S. combat troops was different. "Their mission," according to Bundy, "was to bring the enemy ground forces to battle and wear them down." [ . . . ]

Thus, beginning in 1965 the United States deployed considerable and escalating numbers of ground combat forces in a protracted effort to grind down the enemy -- depleting its numbers, breaking its will, and compelling its surrender or negotiated settlement on terms favorable to the United States.

That strategy was, of course, a great failure. The commitment of American ground combat forces in South Vietnam to a contest based on attrition was "plainly . . . a major error and we failed even to address it," as Bundy wrote in one of his previously noted draft fragments.

By Bundy's best metrics, the US managed to kill something like ten North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, from a population one-tenth that of the US, for each US soldier lost. Yet in the end it was the Americans who were worn down.

(p. 189):

On June 14, 1965, in what the Pentagon Papers later called "a textbook display of tactical ineptitude," forces of the South Vietnamese army were "frittered away piecemeal" and crushed in an engagement at Dong Xoai. With a decision about a troop escalation imminent, Lyndon Johnson reached out to former President Eisenhower for his counsel. Eisenhower advised not only supporting South Vietnamese forces in action but also urged direct offensive action by American troops. "We have got to win," he said.

(pp. 189-190):

George Ball understood that the administration was on the precipice of a major expansion of its commitment to South Vietnam. "In raising our commitment from 50,000 to 100,000 or more men and deploying most of the increment in combat roles we are beginning a new war -- the United States directly against the Viet Cong," Ball warned President Johnson. "Perhaps the large-scale introduction of American forces with their concentrated fire power will force Hanoi and the Viet Cong to the decision we are seeking. On the other hand," he presciently cautioned, "we may not be able to fight the war successfully enough -- even with 500,000 Americans in South Vietnam -- to achieve this purpose." Ball confronted President Johnson with lessons from recent history. "The French fought a war in Viet-Nam, and were finally defeated -- after seven years of bloody struggle and when they still had 250,000 combat-hardened veterans in the field, supported by an army of 205,000 Vietnamese."

(p. 191):

As the Johnson administration prepared to decide whether it should more than double its combat troop commitment in South Vietnam, General Earle Wheeler, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked General Westmoreland directly: Would the escalation be sufficient to break the insurgency? Westmoreland's response was unequivocal and shocking. The "direct answer to your basic question is 'no,'" he declared, admitting that the forty-four battalions would not "provide reasonable assurance of attaining the objective." Thus on the eve of the largest and most fateful expansion of the U.S. ground force commitment to Vietnam, the architect of that troop surge told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that it simply would not be sufficient to achieve the stated American goal of persuading the insurgency that its victory was impossible. An enduring question of historical significance is why General Westmoreland's reply was acceptable to either himself or his superiors in the Pentagon. If the military means proposed to break the will and capacity of the insurgency were inadequate, why was the forty-four-battalion proposal being pursued at all?

Bundy was eager to show off his debating skills, presumably thinking that by doing so he could buttress public opinion in favor of a more expansive Vietnam war policy -- something Johnson wasn't eager to publicize. Bundy went around Johnson to appear on a CBS live forum debating five professors -- Goldstein only identifies Hans Morgenthau, a realist who argued that Vietnam wasn't a vital US interest. (pp. 195-196):

For his part, Morgenthau challenged Bundy's claim that America's prior commitment to South Vietnam was binding on all future administrations. Noting tha tWashington had installed the Diem regime, Saigon's first government, Morgenthau observed that "the state of South Vietnam is in a sense our own creation. . . . We have contracted with ourselves, and I do not regard this as a valid foundation for our presence in South Vietnam." Morgenthau cited Alexander Hamilton, who in 1793 "laid down the principle that no nation is obligated to endanger its own interests, let alone its own existence, in order to come to the aid of another nation." In Vietnam, Morgenthau went on, "it would be very difficult for us to win a military victory and even if we win it, it means nothing politically." Morgenthau reminded the audience that the desertion rate in the South Vietnamese army was 30 percent (and in some areas even higher), hardly an inducement to enlarge the American military commitment. The wise course in Vietnam, he argued, would be for the United States to emulate France's historical example of divesting itself of its colonial obligations. "And certainly if you look at the prestige of France today, it is certainly higher than it was when France fought in Algeria, and certainly higher than when France fought in Indochina."

Johnson was furious (pp. 196-198):

One evening soon after Bundy's CBS appearance, Moyers was with Johnson in the presidential bedroom. The president asked Moyers to get his pajamas from the next room. "And after you've got my pajamas," Johnson added, "go downstairs and fire Bundy." Moyers protested, but in the end he went to the White House basement in search of the national security adviser, only to discover that Bundy had left for the night. The next morning, Moyers was grilled by the president. "You didn't fire Bundy, did you?" said Johnson. "I know you didn't. He called this morning and didn't say anything about it. Go down and do it now." Moyers descended once again to Bundy's basement office, where he found the national security adviser at his desk. "The President sent me down to fire you," Moyers explained. Bundy momentarily looked up from his papers. "Again?" he asked. Bundy then returned to his work. [ . . . ]

By the summer of 1965, Bundy recalled, his relationship with Lyndon Johnson had devolved into an "unseemly guerrilla warfare" between the president of the United States and one of his most important counselors. As for Bundy's conviction that the Johnson administration should provide a more transparent public explanation of its escalation plans, the president was simply incredulous. "You mean," Johnson said, "that if you mother-in-law -- your very own mother-in-law -- has only one eye, and it happens to be right in the middle of her forehead, then the best place for her is in the livin' room with all the company!" That one-eyed creature, of course, was the Americanization of the Vietnam War.

(pp. 199-200):

Bundy acknowledged that every president, including giants like Lincoln and Roosevelt, sought to communicate in a way that achieved the greatest political impact. Yet Johnson aspired for more. The president had "this really quite funnyinternal belief" that he could reshape facts to serve his interests. Johnson believed that "if he could get it stated his way in the papers it would be that way." This trait of Johnson's was "genuinely not present" with Kennedy, whom Bundy remembered as far more dispassionate about the media. "Yes, he wants a good press," Bundy said of Kennedy, "but it never occurs to him that getting a good press is getting a good reality." Johnson, in contrast, "thought he was the greatest manager of the press that ever happened. Every time he tried to manage the press he kicked himself smartly in the shins. He probably would have used a slightly more vivid physical metaphor."

In unguarded moments Bundy conveyed an antipathy for Lyndon Johnson nourished by deep and unresolved resentments. He often described Johnson as a compulsive liar. "He couldn't tell the truth, it was an act against nature," said Bundy. "He had to tell what fit his immediate objectives. . . . If you know more than your legislative rival about which six swing votes are going to swing and for what reason, you win." To disclose such information honestly was equivalent to "giving away the family jewels. . . . Somewhere in Texas he learned that the truth was not good for you if you told it too freely."

There's a rather amusing section about Bundy wanting to groom Bill Moyers to be his successor when he would finally depart from Johnson; meanwhile they coexisted uneasily (pp. 200-201):

"The commitment" to Saigon, Bundy explained to the president on June 27, "is primarily political and any decision to enlarge or reduce it will be political. My own further view is that if and when we wish to shift our course and cut our losses in Vietnam we should do so because of a finding that the Vietnamese themselves are not meeting their obligations to themselves or to us. This is the course we started on with Diem, and if we got a wholly ineffective or anti-American government we could do the same thing again."

(pp. 207-208):

Bundy recalled a secret back channel the president used to bargain with Westmoreland, "a private defense wire system" through Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance that allowed McNamara to apprise Johnson of his discussions in Saigon while keeping the State Department and the rest of the government in the dark. In these private cables, "McNamara reports what Westy wants, and what he thinks Westy will accept. . . . And what in effect has happened is that Johnson has not committed himself to anyone else until he has Westy signed up. He hasn't decided anything about that number except that it's . . . the smallest number that will sign up Westy, and it's quite a big number."

Having decided on Westmoreland's plan, Johnson orchestrates a meeting (pp. 211-214):

A circuitous exchange followed. "Is anyone of the opinion we should not do what the memo says?" asked Johnson. "If so, I'd like to hear from them."

This was Ball's cue to register his dissent. "I can foresee a perilous voyage," he said, "very dangerous -- great apprehensions that we can win under these circumstances. But let me be clear, if the decision is to go ahead, I'm committed."

Dean Rusk regretted the failure to act earlier. "What we have done sine 1954 . . . has not been good enough," he said. "We should have probably committed ourselves heavier in 1961."

Henry Cabot Lodge, who would return as the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam at the end of the summer, bemoaned the dysfunctional nature of the regime. "There is no tradition of a national government in Saigon," he said. "There are no roots in the country. Not until there is tranquility can you have any stability. I don't think we ought to take this government seriously. There is no one who can do anything. We have to do what we think we ought to do regardless of what the Saigon government does."

"George," the presiden tasked Ball, "do you think we have another course?"

"I would not recommend that you follow McNamara's course," Ball contentiously replied. [ . . . ]

When discussion resumed that afternoon, George Ball was given the floor to present his challenge to the Pentagon escalation plan. "We can't win," he contended. "The most we can hope for is a messy conclusion." There remained the threat of China's intervention, Ball noted, and the possibility of replicating the "galling" stalemate of the Korean War, when public support plummeted as casualties mounted. If the Vietnam conflict was "long and protracted we will suffer because a great power cannot beat guerrillas. . . . Every great captain in history is not afraid to make a tactical withdrawal if conditions are unfavorable to him. The enemy cannot even be seen; he is indigenous to the country." There was serious doubt, Ball argued, that an army of Westerners could fight Orientals in the Asian jungle and prevail. [ . . . ]

"My problem," Ball shot back, "is not that we don't get thrown out, but that we get bogged down and don't win."

Ball had identified the essential weakness in Bundy's position. An escalation of combat forces designed to impose losses and stalemate on the insurgency did not ensure victory. To the contrary, a strategy predicated on the application of coercive military force to exhaust rather than vanquish the enemy risked a protracted and ultimately indeterminate conflict. But Bundy refused to engage Ball's counterargument, once more invoking the credibility imperative. "The world, the country, and the Vietnamese would have alarming reactions if we got out," he said. Achieving victory was apparently less important than the perception of pursuing it. "There will be time to decide our policy won't work after we have given it a good try," Bundy insisted.

"We won't get out," Ball retorted. "We'll double out bet and get lost in the rice paddies." Reviewing Ball's prediction three decades later, Bundy conceded: "he's right." In 1965, however, Bundy rejected Ball's withdrawal option as "disastrous." [ . . . ]

But the president showed little interest in the arguments for withdrawal "because George Ball . . . can't show him anything that doesn't translate as defeat in the politics of the United States. And he doesn't really expect George to do that because he doesn't see how it can be done himself."

(p. 216):

"The argument we face," said Bundy, "is, one, for ten years every step we have taken has been based on a previous failure. All we have done has failed and caused us to take another step which failed. As we got further into the bag, we got deeply bruised. Also we have made excessive claims we haven't been able to realize.

"Two, also after twenty years of warning about war in Asia, we are now doing what MacArthur and others have warned us about. We are about to fight a war we can't fight and win as the country we are trying to help is quitting.

"Three, there is a failure on our own to fully realize what guerrilla war is like. We are sending conventional troops to do an unconventional job.

Four, hwo long -- how muich? Can we take casualties over five years -- aren't we talking abouta military solution when the solution is really political? Why can't we interdict better? Why are our bombings so fruitless? Why can't we blockade the coast? Why can't we improve our intelligence? Why can't we find the VC?"

Robert McNamara pointed to Bundy's paper and said, "I think we can answer most of those questions posed." The meeting soon ended, however, and nowhere in the record is there any idnication that the questions identified by Bundy were rigorously examined by those advocating Americanization of the war -- including, most notably, by Bundy himself.

(p. 223):

The adoption of atrition as the de facto U.S. military strategy was determined, in part, by the absence of other viable options. As Bundy noted, the use of nuclear weapons was never seriously considered and was taken off the table. A ground invasion of North Vietnam was similarly dismissed because of its potential to trigger war with China. Destroying the dikes that crossed North Vietnam would flood the country, create a humanitarian crisis, and not necessarily staunch support for the insurgency in the South. Thus with the source of the war in the North subject only to air and sea actions that would prove ineffectual, contesting the guerrilla war in the South became the preponderant focus of U.S. strategy. As Westmoreland argued, "only by seeking, fighting, and destroying the enemy could that be done."

(pp. 224-225):

Scholars have projected that the military under Hanoi's command suffered five hundred thousand battle fatalities by 1968 and between two and three million additional losses by 1975.

Through its campaign of attrition, the United States presumed that a crossover point would be reached, when the accumulated pain of war would compel the insurgents to relent. But in practice this coercion strategy simply created an endurance contest. In that competition it was not the will of the Vietnamese communists that was broken. For each year of combat from 1965 to 1973, Bundy observed, the United States inflicted far greater casualties on the enemy than it absorbed. Yet despite this dramatic disparity, it was the United States that withdrew its forces "home without victory." As Bundy starkly confessed, "We had followed a losing strategy -- one that led us not to success but to the acceptance of failure." "Attrition is a brutal measuring stick," he affirmed. "Its use is not advertised and its authorship not eagerly claimed."

Lesson Six: Intervention Is a Presidential Choice, Not an Inevitability (pp. 229-230):

"I have never thought it wise to speculate in public as to what John Kennedy would have done about Vietnam had he lived," Bundy explained to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1978. "The public record shows him constantly asserting two propositions that could not have coexisted easily in later years: that we must not quit there and that in the end the Vietnamese must do the job for themselves. . . . Just what he would have done we shall never know." Bundy made the same argument to an audience at Hofstra University in 1985. "Those propositions," he said, "together with his clear determination not to be drawn into large-scale ground-based action could not have co-existed in 1965. I don't know what he would have done."

Yet in priate discussions Bundy was far more forthcoming. In 1964 -- several years before Vietnam would assume thej profile of a debacle -- Bundy suggested in the oral history conducted by the Columbia University political scientist Richard Neustadt that Kennedy had a dispassionate and independent perspective regarding the cahllenge in Vietnam. Bundy speculated that Kennedy would not have fallen captive to the intellectual constraints of the domino theory, that he harbored serious doubts about the viability of the war effort in South Vietnam, and that he questioned Vietnam's relevance to the U.S. national interest and domestic politics. [ . . . ]

Bundy went on to say that the President supported Robert Kennedy's efforts to develop a counterinsurgency capacity in South Vietnam and that he "liked" and was "amused" by the "methodical belligerence" of Walt Rostow, the former deputy national security adviser whom Kennedy had transferred from the White House to the State Department. "But he wasn't so sure himself. He was deeply aware of the fact that this place was in fact 'X' thousand miles away in terms both of American interest and American politics."

(p. 231):

In his final years, as he revisited the history of the Vietnam War through the prism of the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies, Bundy arrived at a firm judgment that he shared with me and discussed with various colleagues. It was a judgment consistent with aspects of his commentary in 1964. Bundy had become convinced that President Kennedy would not have deployed ground combat forces to Vietnam and thus would not have Americanized the war. With the 1964 election behind him, Kennedy would have arrived at a point of decision on Vietnam in 1965 just as his successor did, Bundy explained in one of our work sessions. "And what he wanted to do about Vietnam -- shorthand, in political terms -- was flush it. He didn't want it to be a big item. And he didn't think it was a big test of the balance of power. It was a test of American political opinion, but he could stand that in a second term." In a discussion with another colleague, James Blight of Brown University, "Mac said there were no missed opportunities," Blight noted. "None, except the 'opportunity' that was irretrievably lost when Kennedy was felled and replaced by Johnson. He said he believes both sides of the argument: Had Kennedy lived, there would have been no Vietnam War as we know it; and with Johnson in the White House, it was (in combination with Hanoi's total intransigence) destined to unfold like the tragedy it became."

(p. 235):

Despite his support for the Diem regime, Kennedy in the 1950s had publicly cited the disastrous French experience in Indochina as a cautionary rationale for the United States never to fight a ground war there. His doubts about a combat troop commitment to South Vietnam only deepened after he became president. In the summer of 1961, Kennedy invited General Douglas MacArthur to Washington for meetings with seleted senior advisers and members of Congress. In Robert Kennedy's account, General MacArthur said "that we would be foolish to fight on the Asiatic continent and that the future of Southeast Asia should be determined at the diplomatic table." According to Kenneth O'Donnell, MacArthur told the president, "There was no end to Asia and even if we poured a million American infantry soldiers into that continent, we would still find ourselves outnumbered on every side."

(pp. 237-238):

"In 1965, I'll become one of the most unpopular Presidents in history," Kennedy told O'Donnell after the meeting. "I'll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don't care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I'm reelected. So we had better make damn sure that I am reelected." Kennedy confided a similar sentiment to Charles Bartlett, a trusted friend in the press corps. "We don't have a prayer of staying in Vietnam," Kennedy told Bartlett. "Those people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at almost any point. But I can't give up a piece of territory like that to the Communists and then get the people to reelect me." But Kennedy realized that expulsion of the American msision from South Vietnam was in fact a viable exit strategy. At a press conference on May 22, 1963, the president had pledged to "withdraw the troops, any number of troops, any time the Government of South Vietnam would suggest it." Asked privately how he would engineer an American withdrawal, Kennedy made the same point more bluntly. "Easy," he told his political advisers. "Put a government in there that will ask us to leave."

(pp. 242-243):

Would a fear of acknowledging the shortcomings of the U.S. counterinsurgency program have locked Kennedy into persisting with a failed approach? An affirmative answer to this question depends on Kennedy's susceptibility to patently irrational logic -- the expectation that he would have pursued a losing course in Vietnam simply to prove he had a winning strategy. It is difficult to reconcile such strident egotism and rigidity with Kennedy's actual performance in office. The debacle at the Bay of Pigs once again provides a useful example. In the first months of his presidency, Kennedy initially accepted the recommendation of the CIA, the Joint Chiefs, Bundy, and others to launch the exile invasion. But when the mission teetered on the brink of failure and Kennedy was implored to authorize the air support the architects of the plan knew to be essential to its success, he refused. He accepted defeat rather than escalate the crisis. He then claimed responsibility for the disaster, fired the leaders of the CIA responsible for its planning and execution, subordinated the influence of the Joint Chiefs for the remainder of his term, and consolidated national security decision making in the White House. He also admitted the enormity of his mistake. "Not only were our facts in error," Kennedy said, "but our policy was wrong because the premises on which it was built were wrong."

The book carries this discussion on a few more pages, mostly concluding that given a second term, Kennedy would have cut his losses in Vietnam. Bundy resigned in 1966 to become head of the Ford Foundation. The Vietnam War continued for nine more years, with Johnson continuing to escalate to the 600,000 troops mark, and Nixon slowly, manically, sadistically prolonging a war that no one -- we now know as far back at 1964 -- thought winnable.

In 2009 President Obama was presented with Gen. McChrystal's plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan by sending an additional 40,000 troops, further Americanizing that war. As Obama cautiously considered what to do, opponents cited Goldstein's book as relevant history, while proponents were pushing another Vietnam War book, Lewis Sorley's A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam. Ever since the Vietnam War ended, recalcitrant hawks have attempted to put together a myth that Gen. Creighton Abrams had finally found a formula for winning that was undercut by antiwar politics back home -- our own homegrown version of the "stab-in-the-back" myth (Dolchstoßlegende) popular in post-WWI Germany, used by the Nazis to revive German militarism.

posted 2009-10-14