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By Root 1064 0

Johnson brought home General Westmoreland, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, Lodge’s successor, and other important personages to issue optimistic predictions and declare their firm faith in the mission “to prevail over Communist aggression.” Incoming evidence not shared with the public was less encouraging. CIA estimates concluded that Hanoi would accept no level of air or naval action as “so intolerable that the war had to be stopped.” A CIA study of bombing, unkindly calculated in terms of dollar value, brought out the fact that each $1 worth of damage inflicted on North Vietnam cost the United States $9.60. Systems Analysis at the Department of Defense found that the enemy could construct alternative supply routes “faster than we could choke them off,” and estimated that more American troops would do more harm than good, especially to the economy of South Vietnam. The Institute of Defense Analysis, in a renewal of the JASON study, could find no new evidence to modify its earlier conclusions, and contrary to the claims of the Air Force, frankly stated, “We are unable to devise a bombing campaign in the North to reduce the flow of infiltrating personnel.”

When objective evidence disproves strongly held beliefs, what occurs, according to theorists of “cognitive dissonance,” is not rejection of the beliefs but rigidifying, accompanied by attempts to rationalize the disproof. The result is “cognitive rigidity”; in lay language, the knots of folly draw tighter. So it was with the bombing. The more punitive and closer it came to Hanoi, the more it foreclosed the Administration’s own desire to negotiate itself out of the war. At the end of 1967 the Defense Department was to announce that the total tonnage of bombs dropped on North and South together was over 1.5 million, surpassing by 75,000 tons the total dropped on Europe by the Army Air Force in World War II. Slightly more than half had been dropped on North Vietnam, surpassing the total dropped in the Pacific theater.

One limit had been reached. In July, Johnson had placed a ceiling on the escalation of ground forces at 525,000, just over the figure General Leclerc, 21 years before, had declared would be required, “and even then it could not be done.” At the same time a new overture had been made by the United States with a slight relaxation of insistence on reciprocity. Two Frenchmen, Raymond Aubrac and Herbert Marcovich, the former a friend from old times of Ho Chi Minh and both eager to help end the war, had offered, through conversations with Henry Kissinger at a Pugwash conference, to act as envoys to Hanoi. After consultation with the State Department, they carried the message that the United States would stop the bombing if Hanoi gave assurance that this would lead to negotiations and on the “assumption” that the North would reciprocally reduce infiltration. The reply seemed to imply that talks might go forward on this basis, but further discussion was angrily cut off by Hanoi when Admiral Sharp launched a major bombing campaign to isolate Hanoi and Haiphong from each other and from their supply routes. The Tuesday lunch must have been napping over target selection on that day—unless the carelessness was deliberate.

A month later, with the noise of dissent rising and evidence that a political challenge to Johnson within his party was in the making, the President made a major effort of his own. In a speech at San Antonio on 29 September he publicly repeated the formula of the Aubrac-Marcovich mission, saying that “We and our South Vietnamese allies are wholly prepared to negotiate tonight.… The United States is willing to stop all … bombardment of North Vietnam when this will lead promptly to productive discussions.” The United States would “of course assume” that while talks were in progress the North Vietnamese would not take advantage of the bombing halt. Hanoi flatly rejected the overture as a “faked peace” and “sheer deception.” As their channel, Wilfred Burchett, a pro-Communist Australian journalist in Hanoi, reported “deep skepticism” about public or private