I was in college in the spring of 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson announced he was sending combat troops—two Marine battalions—to South Vietnam. Thus, my professional life began in the decade of public debate, turmoil, and tragedy surrounding Vietnam.
What I didn’t know (among many other things, of course) was that the announcement of combat troops was disingenuous, one in a long line of disingenuous public statements from the president and his close associates. U.S. “advisers” had been quietly taking part in combat missions since 1961.[1]
Nor did I know that the seemingly sudden “Americanization” of a previously foreign war had been years in the making. Arch T. Allen, a retired attorney, brought this to my attention recently in a paper he wrote about the war. [2]
The Vietnam War, Allen points out, was managed behind a veil of duplicity. I suspected that in 1965, and the fact was confirmed in 1971, when the Pentagon Papers were leaked to major newspapers.
But I never knew how deep that duplicity ran.
The Americanization of the Vietnam War Begins
Eisenhower had started America’s involvement in the 1950s, after the Vietnamese defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu. But active commitment started in 1963, says Allen. In that year, the Kennedy administration supported, and partly engineered, the coup against Ngo Dinh Diem, who had been president of South Vietnam since 1955.
John F. Kennedy was assassinated shortly after the Diem coup, and Johnson became president.
One of Allen’s major sources is H. R. McMaster, and I would like to share some details from his book Dereliction of Duty. You may have heard of McMaster—he was briefly National Security Advisor to President Donald Trump. More important for our purposes, he wrote a doctoral dissertation in history at UNC-Chapel Hill. The subject was the intensification of the war. It was published as a trade book, Dereliction of Duty, in 1997.[3] I understand that it is popular with military personnel.
The nature of this book can be stated simply: It is page after page of deceptions by President Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs, and others.
How to Hide the Truth
What I have just written is not new. U.S. entry into the war is now widely viewed as a mistake, although there is a “revisionist” view that says it was the appropriate response to the Cold War. The problem, from this perspective, is how it was executed. [4]
What strikes me is how readily top officials hid the truth about their intentions. It is possible, of course, that they hid their intentions from themselves as well. In any case, duplicity is at the heart of Dereliction of Duty.
McMaster considers President Johnson a highly insecure person whose prime goal in 1964 was to win the presidential election—showing that he wasn’t just president by default. So throughout 1964, any Vietnam activity was viewed in the light of how it would affect Johnson’s chances against Barry Goldwater in the November election.
The true engineer of the war was Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense. The president of Ford Motor Co. when Kennedy hired him in 1961, he had started out at Harvard Business School applying quantitative analysis to business operations. As a young lieutenant colonel in World War II, he had done something similar for military logistics, maintenance, and other activities.[5]
Without much appreciation for military history, McNamara and his “whiz kids” considered Vietnam a “war without precedent” that they could tackle with modern organizational techniques. [6] As conditions in the South got worse, both Johnson and McNamara settled on a compromise path of “graduated pressure.” This meant more American fighting and bombing, but not so much as to upset the public, or, as Johnson described important constituencies, “sob sisters and peace societies.” [7]
Misleading the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Both Johnson and McNamara were alarmed by the preferences of the military to bomb harder, farther north, and more frequently. Thus, they often misled the Joint Chiefs of Staff—who oversaw the actual execution of the war. As McMaster puts it, Johnson and McNamara ”appeared sympathetic . . . and held out the promise of future action,” whether they intended it or not. [8] Maxwell Taylor, the Kennedy-appointed chairman of the joint chiefs, toned down and slow-walked the chiefs’ memos to McNamara . Their actual views rarely reached President Johnson.
The chiefs were loyal military men who would not criticize Johnson’s prosecution of the war publicly while they served. But Johnson rightly feared that they would speak out if they retired. Thus he made efforts to keep Curtis Lemay, Air Force chief of staff, from retiring—while also wanting to get him off the JCS. Johnson tried to make LeMay an ambassador, but ended up extending his service for one year.
Yet in his book McMaster is almost as hard on the Joint Chiefs of Staff as on Johnson and McNamara. They too withheld information at times. And they had their own rivalries, with the leader of each service proposing strategies that favored his own service (e.g., more bombing by the Air Force and more military landings by the Army).
The chiefs agreed on one thing—an American win demanded more extended bombing, deeper into the North, and, by one estimate, 700,000 troops. At the height of American involvement, the number was 543,000, so they may have been right. [9]
If there is a hero in this book, it is probably CIA director John McCone. He warned in a 1965 memo that if Johnson did not take more aggressive action, the U.S. would experience an “ever-increasing commitment of U.S. personnel without materially improving the chance of victory.” [10]
His advice unheeded, McCone resigned.
Conclusion
One way to sum up this long and complex story would be to collect telling words and phrases found scattered throughout McMaster’s book. Here are some:
-
-
- ”deliberately misrepresented” (63)
- “from distrust to deceit” (85)
- “hiding the true basis of their decisions” (135)
- “contriving consensus” (137)
- “empty promises” (176)
- “moved to suppress” (239)
- “a quicksand of lies” (243)
- “kept the service chiefs ignorant”(303)
- “rationalizations” (313)
- ”lying in the pursuit of self-interest”(334) . And there are more.
-
Does this experience teach us something about the wars of today?
Image above of Dean Rusk, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Robert McNamara is by manhhai and licensed under Creative Commons BY 2.0.
Notes
[1] H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 37.
[2] Arch T. Allen, “1963 and 1965—When and How the Viet Nam War Became an American War,” unpublished manuscript available by contacting me at janeshaw5966@gmail.com. (Allen received the Bronze Star for Meritorious Achievement for his service in Vietnam.)
[3] McMaster, Dereliction of Duty.
[4] See Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
[5] McMaster, 2.
[6] McMaster, 106.
[7] McMaster, 262.
[8] McMaster, 175.
[9] U.S. Army Center of Military History, ” Vietnam War Campaigns,”n.d., accessed Nov. 6, 2023, https://history.army.mil/html/reference/army_flag/vn.html#:~:text=President%20Nixon%20announced%20the%20reduction,to%20505%2C500%20by%20mid%20October.
[10] John McCone memo, quoted in McMaster, 257.
David, quite a story! I remember a Harvard Law graduate who decided to go into teaching rather than be drafted. Another friend was exempted because he was the only living son of a veteran who had died in World War II. I bet there were a lot of interesting stories and difficult decisions—and sad results.
Jane, there is an entire wall of sad stories, the name of two of my classmates among them. And, we haven’t yet learned from that war. War is a terrible thing, but if one enters it, it has to be for complete destruction of the enemy until they sue for peace. Johnson simply didn’t “get” it. Nor did McNamara. Nixon did and he didn’t want to do it, so he sued for peace (in his own way). His son-in-law, David Eisenhower, was in my Naval Officer Candidate Class. Nixon wasn’t about to sacrifice him or any more Americans.
A very interesting read, as always, Jane. It really is sad to think how the truth “hides in plain sight”, and the extent to which “forever wars” in far off lands have persisted.
Thank you, Himesh. I am quixotically trying to develop a theory of history. Part of that theory must include the failure of one generation to learn from the previous generation.
Jane, I was a year or two behind you in college, so our memories of this terrible war are about the same.
Coming on the heels of a protracted Cold War, it was easy enough for us to accept the “domino theory”, and to think we needed to stop communist aggression in Vietnam.
What started to change my view was the emerging realization that a “war of containment” was not winnable, and that lives were being sacrificed to maintain what was essentially a stalemate. Once this realization took root, it was just a question of time for the American people to force an end to the madness.
Vladimir Putin is involved in a similar situation in Ukraine, with Russian lives being sacrificed for really no good reason, and I believe that his day of reckoning will also arrive. I just have no idea how long this will take.
As far as the deceptions of the Pentagon brass are concerned, not much has changed. I no longer have any trust in the DOJ as a whole, the FBI specifically, the IRS, DHS, local Boards of Elections, incompetent Congressmen who ignore the real issues in favor of spending all of their time seizing and holding power — and for what purpose, if they refuse to use it to correct the manifest problems in our country?
Like Rob, I’ll end my rant now.
Not a rant, Vic. Insight.
Of course instead of “social problems” I should have written “social programs.”—but the former is true as well
As someone who lived through the Vietnam war years and made a particular study of that war, the Cold War generally, and of Cold-War-era Communism, I strongly agree with what Jane calls the “revisionist” view. Vietnam, extending along the coast and within easy reach of overwhelming American naval and air power, was, in fact, a good place to make a stand. (In fact, I volunteered for military service at the height of the war, but was rejected because of a hearing problem contracted while a boy.)
I remember at the time that the “domino” theory was much discussed and much derided, as was the “bloodbath” theory. I believed both were true—and, after American withdrawal, both came true: Laos and Cambodia became Communist, and millions died. Our defeat there also was responsible for a global powershift in favor of Communist China.
On the other hand the way the war was fought—the lies, the meatgrinder approach, and the refusal to win—was reprehensible. It is a casebook example of sneaky politicians of minimal capacity outsmarting themselves. LBJ thought Ho Chi Minh was made of the same stuff as the Senators he bullied when he was majority leader. And he thought he could pull off a victory without offending the liberal political establishment. He thought the Tonkin Gulf resolution was a substitute for a Declaration of War. Etc.
This blog recently discussed rating of presidents. LBJ’s handling of Vietnam is only one reason why he should be ranked near the bottom. The only reason academic historians do not put him there is that they like his social problems—which, in the event, have destroyed the inner city family structure, and are now bankrupting us.
Rant ended.
I strongly agree with this. LBJ thought his veteran status as a politician (and a bully) blinded him and resulted in 58,220 Americans (most of them young) being cannon fodder.
Rapprochement with China during this time is also very interesting, given they were many times more radical under Mao than any post-Stalin leader!
Rob, that was not a rant. I checked LBJ’s ranking and it’s been consistently 10th or 11th. Amazing. It must be, as you say, that academic historians like what he did with “The War on Poverty,” but they can like it only because they do not understand the enormous impact of incentives.
Look at “The Best and the Brightest” by Halberstam for more on the duplicity and the political elements.
David, I remember when the book came out but I didn’t read it. (I was “done” with Vietnam.) It would be interesting to compare his book with McMaster’s, written 25 years later.
Jane, here’s a story you probably won’t see in any book. In my senior year in collage, in the spring of 1970, the draft numbers were assigned and mine was 29. I had been accepted into graduate school but President Nixon had gotten rid of the graduate school deferment. I was so angry that I called the White House, insisting on being connected with the President. After going through three other people, Bob Halderman took the call. I had no idea how senior he was at the time. He politely listened to my complaint that the lack of a deferment meant our nation was going to be sacrificing up to a third of its future scholars. He responded that the nation had already sacrificed an entire generation of poor black men, and that was a racial crime the President was unwilling to continue. As well, he made clear that the army was also sacrificing its best future senior officers, indeed a true fact I later learned from a two star general. He told me that it was my privilege as a citizen to take my place in the line of men standing on behalf of our nation. Shortly thereafter the Navy offered me a slot in their officer candidate program, which I accepted.