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Mansfield’s critique challenged that consensus. Deepening the U.S. involvement in the war would exacerbate rather than alleviate the nation’s security problems, he told the president. Given existing commitments to some forty-two “countries or groups of countries scattered around the world,” the United States was already facing the risk of overextension. Although Mansfield couldn’t specify a solution to the particular predicament posed by South Vietnam, he felt certain that “the trend toward enlargement of the conflict . . . is not going to provide one.”64

Mansfield may not have articulated an alternative to the Washington rules, but he was implicitly questioning the principles on which they rested. He was, after all, inviting the president to consider reducing the U.S. global military presence. He was suggesting that, for all the money the country had invested in configuring its forces for power projection, the utility of those forces might be limited. When it came to intervention, he was suggesting that the United States ought to exercise greater self-restraint.

President Johnson assigned Bundy the task of rebutting this critique, which the national security adviser did in a long letter dated February 9, 1965. Bundy refused to give an inch. There was no need to reassess administration policy. Things were essentially on track. “[T]he vast majority of the Vietnamese people do not wish to fall under Communist domination,” Bundy assured Mansfield. Recent events on the battlefield showed that ARVN soldiers “are tough and resilient fighters and that their morale remains high.” For their part, American soldiers were learning “important lessons” from whatever setbacks they might be experiencing. “More generally,” Bundy wrote,

it does not appear to me that the power of the United States around the world is “stretched too thin.” We have been able to keep our commitments around the world for a quarter of a century and our country has never been richer or more at ease.

That Americans were dying in South Vietnam “gives the President personal sorrow.” Even so, Bundy continued, “we cannot say that the current level of sacrifice in Southeast Asia is unduly heavy.” In short, there was no need for the Johnson administration to consider a different course in Vietnam, nor to reevaluate its posture globally.65

A day later, the senator fired back. In a second letter to the president, Mansfield predicted that U.S. air attacks against the North would succeed only in increasing the level of violence in the South. “They are not fools,” he wrote in reference to the North Vietnamese leadership, “and they are not going to play the game as fools.”

They are going to continue to play their strength against our weakness. Our weakness is on the ground in Viet Nam, where isolated pockets of Americans are surrounded by, at best, an indifferent population and, more likely, by an increasingly hostile population.

Mansfield anticipated air strikes against the North producing a “tit-for-tat pattern” of mutual retaliation, putting U.S. installations in the South at ever greater risk. To ensure their security, “the outposts will have to be vastly strengthened by American forces.” Air escalation, therefore, necessarily implied escalation on the ground. This Mansfield adamantly opposed, proposing instead that the United States launch a diplomatic initiative aimed at securing “a cease fire throughout Viet Nam and Indochina.”66

Again, Bundy replied on the president’s behalf, undertones of exasperation creeping into his response. “Let me try once again to comment,” he began. Yes, “the Vietnamese Communists will try as hard as they can to show that they have more determination than we.” Yet Bundy seemed unabashed at the prospect. Bring ’em on. As for Mansfield’s proposed cease-fire initiative, this Bundy dismissed as akin to applying “equal standards to the cops and to the robbers.” Negotiations were out of the question.67

With that, debate—such as it was—ended. That same day, the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam