The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [215]
Analysis of North Vietnam’s responses indicated to Washington “a deep conviction in Hanoi that our resolves will falter because of the cost of the struggle.” The analysts were correct. Hanoi’s intransigence was indeed tied to a belief that the United States, whether from cost or from rising dissent, would tire first. When Secretary Rusk indignantly added up 28 American proposals of peace, he was half right; they did not want it until they could get it on their own terms. Since the American overtures not only met none of their required conditions but never indicated the extent and nature of the ultimate political settlement, Hanoi was not’ interested.
At one moment real movement seemed to take place when the Soviet Premier, Aleksei Kosygin, visited Prime Minister Harold Wilson in Britain. Acting as intermediaries in communication with the principals, they came close to arranging an agreed basis for talks. It was shattered when Johnson, at the last moment, as Kosygin was already leaving London, unaccountably altered the wording of the final communiqué, too late for consultation. “Peace was almost in our grasp,” Wilson ruefully said. That is doubtful. The impression is hard to avoid that Johnson was indulging in all these maneuvers in order to placate criticism at home and abroad, but that he and the advisers he listened to still aimed at negotiations imposed by superior strength.
A cloud was rising on the domestic horizon. Progressive escalation, growing like the appetite that increases by what it feeds on, with no stated limits, was not accepted without question for a war only vaguely understood. Westmoreland’s method of calling for increments of 70,000 to 80,000 at a time postponed the issue of calling up the Reserves but, as McNaughton warned his chief, only postponed it “with all its horrible baggage” to a worse time, the election year of 1968. McNaughton drew attention to mounting public dissent, fed by American casualties (there were to be 9000 killed and 60,000 wounded in 1967), by popular fear that the war might widen and by “distress at the amount of suffering being visited” on the people of both Vietnams. “A feeling is widely and strongly held that ‘the Establishment’ is out of its mind … that we are carrying the thing to absurd lengths.… Most Americans do not know how we got where we are.… All want the war ended and expect their President to end it. Successfully, or else.”
If the “or else” meant “or out he goes,” that alternative was not unimaginable. It was slowly becoming clear to Johnson that there was no way the Vietnam entanglement could end to his advantage. Military success could not end the war within the eighteen months left of his present term, and with an election ahead, he could not disengage and “lose” Vietnam. The Reserves, the casualties, the public protest would have to be faced. He was caught and, in Moyers’ judgment, “He knew it. He sensed that the war would destroy him politically and wreck his presidency. He was a miserable man.”
Johnson was under pressure too from the right and from the growing resentment of the military and their spokesmen at the restraints holding them back. The Armed Services Committee gave the resentment a public forum in August 1967 in subcommittee hearings under the chairmanship of Senator John Stennis. Even before taking testimony, Stennis stated his opinion that it was a “fatal mistake” to suspend or restrict the bombing.
Admiral Ulysses Grant Sharp, Air Force Commander at CINCPAC, carried the point further in a passionate argument for air power. He proclaimed a splendid record for the B-52s of damage inflicted on barracks, ammunition depots, power plants, railroad yards, iron, steel and cement plants, airfields, naval bases, bridges and in general a “widespread disruption of economic activity” and transportation, damaged harvests and increased