Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [52]
But I started to have concerns in May 1965, when a Vietnam War appropriation bill came before the House, and President Johnson urgently requested an additional $700 million for the Department of Defense. The vote turned into a proxy fight between supporters and opponents of the war. I could see no reason for Johnson to try to ram through an appropriations bill so quickly. It seemed to me it was another maneuver designed to show the American people that Congress supported the war. But in the end, I voted for the appropriations, basing my decision, as I wrote at the time, “on the more fundamental fact that we cannot know what is in the mind of the President and certainly we cannot function if we operate on the assumption that his motives are bad.” I concluded, “Frankly, I do not have the vaguest idea whether I voted properly or improperly.”12
Shortly after our memorable White House briefing in February 1966, it was clear that the war in Vietnam had become the single most important issue facing the country.13 Many members of Congress were questioning Johnson’s credibility, including his use of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to justify any action he took.14 While LBJ and others in the administration would offer comforting words like “the tide is turning” and that there is “light at the end of the tunnel,” for the first time in history the world was watching a war on television and was beginning to sense that the words did not match what they were seeing. The administration’s rhetoric gradually evolved into clichés associated with what was beginning to feel like a failing effort.
As I had seen firsthand, President Johnson avoided difficult questions about the conduct of the war from members of Congress and the press. He believed that media reporting was providing aid and comfort to the enemy and said as much. I concluded that if I wanted to better understand what was going on in Vietnam, I should go there myself.15
In May 1966, our House Subcommittee on Foreign Operations and Government Information traveled to Vietnam to look into charges of waste and mismanagement of taxpayer dollars by the Agency for International Development (AID). I saw this trip also as an opportunity to talk to the troops without a filter and to hear from the military and diplomatic leadership in Vietnam firsthand.
Almost immediately I observed one telling sign about our difficulties in Vietnam. When we arrived at the AID office in Saigon, the television set wasn’t working. The picture was on but there was no sound. The AID employees tried to fix the set, but couldn’t. Then someone tried to ask the Vietnamese personnel on duty there for assistance. But none of the Americans around were able to communicate with the Vietnamese to tell them what was needed. If the folks on the ground at AID were not able to communicate well enough with the Vietnamese they worked with to fix a television set, I wondered how they could work together to win a war.
The language barrier extended well beyond the AID office. We were told that of 260,000 U.S. personnel then stationed in Vietnam, roughly 1,500 could speak some Vietnamese.16 While language differences could be manageable in a conventional war, they posed particular difficulties in a conflict where U.S. forces needed to appeal to local populations for support.
There were other revelations ahead. When our delegation traveled to the port of Cam Ranh Bay, we noticed a mammoth construction project underway. I asked an engineer how many U.S. troops the new port facilities would be capable of supporting. The answer was, up to a half million. Since there currently were fewer than three hundred thousand troops in Vietnam, this suggested that the administration might be preparing for a sizable increase in the U.S. military presence in