The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [200]
In discussion, Ball found the three chief officers of the Administration, McGeorge Bundy, McNamara and Rusk, “dead set” against his views and interested only in one problem: “how to escalate the war until the North Vietnamese were ready to quit.” When his memorandum was submitted to the President, the result was the same. Johnson looked it over, asked Ball to go through it with him point by point and handed it back without comment.
Why did these advisory voices of the CIA, the Working Group, the Under-Secretary of State, have so little impact? Advice on the basis of collected information was the business of the first two, of the Working Group specifically on Vietnam. If Johnson read its report—and one would like to think that government agencies write reports for more than wallpaper—he refused the message. Ball could be tolerated as an “in-house devil’s advocate,” and was in fact useful in that role as showing the White House open to dissenters. But minds at the top were locked in the vise of 1954—that Ho was an agent of world Communism, that the lesson of appeasement precluded yielding at any point, that the United States’ undertaking to frustrate North Vietnam’s drive to control the country was right and must be carried out. How could it not succeed against what Johnson called “that raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country”? Despite the Working Group’s warning, the President, his Secretaries and the Joint Chiefs were sure that American power could force North Vietnam to quit while the United States carefully avoided a clash with China.
Hanoi too could be ill-advised. Two days before the American election, as if to provoke belligerency, the Viet-Cong took the first offensive action against a specifically American facility—a mortar attack on the Bien Hoa airfield. This was an American training base where a squadron of old B-57s had recently been moved in from the Philippines for training purposes, making it a tempting target. Six of the planes were demolished, five Americans killed, and 76 other casualties sustained. Certain that the attack was instigated by Hanoi, General Taylor, then Ambassador in Saigon, telephoned Washington for authority to take immediate reprisals. All chief advisers in the capital concurred. Waiting for the election, Johnson held back, and because of his nagging worries about China and despite reports of accelerating decay in Saigon, he was to hold back for three months more.
Cautious and hesitating, he sent McGeorge Bundy and McNamara’s Assistant Secretary, John McNaughton, to find out whether air war was really necessary to save the South. While they were in South Vietnam, the Viet-Cong made another attack, this time on American barracks at Pleiku, in which eight Americans were killed and 108 injured. Inspecting the shattered field, Bundy was said to have been outraged by the deliberate challenge and to have telephoned a highly charged demand for reprisals to the President. Whether he did or not, emotion was not the deciding factor. Bundy’s memorandum, drafted on his way home in company with Taylor and General William C. Westmoreland (the commander who had replaced Harkins), was cold and hard: without “new United States action, the defeat of South Vietnam appears inevitable.… The stakes in Vietnam are extremely high.… The international prestige of the United States is at risk.… There is no way of negotiating ourselves out of Vietnam which offers any serious promise at present.” Consequently, “The policy of graduated and continuing reprisal,” as planned, was the most promising course. Negotiations of any sort should not now be accepted except on the basis of an end to Viet-Cong violence.
Here were the essentials that were to hold United