A “fighting admiral in a fighting command,” my father was respected by his brother officers but loved by the bluejackets, the enlisted men who knew his respect for them was genuine and who returned his respect many times over.
He assumed command of the Pacific in the last year of the Johnson administration and held it until July 1972, the last year of Richard Nixon’s first term. My wife, mother, sister, and brother attended his change-of-command ceremony, which, at his request, was held aboard the Oriskany, the carrier I was flying off the day I was shot down.
Henry Kissinger once told me that whenever he suspected President Nixon’s resolve to make difficult decisions about the war was wavering, he arranged for my father to brief the President. My father’s no-nonsense determination, Dr. Kissinger claims, was infectious and served as a tonic for the President’s flagging spirits.
My father wasn’t much of a believer in fighting wars by half measures. He regarded self-restraint as an admirable human quality, but when fighting wars he believed in taking all necessary measures to bring the conflict to a swift and successful conclusion. The Vietnam War was fought neither swiftly nor successfully, and I know this frustrated him greatly. In a speech he gave after he retired, he argued that “two deplorable decisions” had doomed the United States to failure in Vietnam: “The first was the public decision to forbid U.S. troops to enter North Vietnam and beat the enemy on his home ground…. The second was… to forbid the [strategic] bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong until the last two weeks of the conflict…. These two decisions combined to allow Hanoi to adopt whatever strategy they wished, knowing that there would be virtually no reprisal, no counterattack.”
For the rest of his life, he believed that had he been allowed to wage total war against the enemy, fully employing strategic airpower, mining Vietnamese ports early on, and launching large-scale offensives in the North, he could have brought the war to a successful conclusion “in months, if not weeks.” He was exaggerating, I’m sure, to make a point. Given the resilience of the enemy, and their fierce willingness to pay a very high price and resolve to prevail over time, I doubt the war could have been wrapped up as quickly as my father envisioned even had we escalated our campaign to the extent he deemed necessary. But, given the dismal consequences of our haphazard, uncertain prosecution of the war, with its utterly illogical restraints on the use of American power, his frustration was understandable and appropriate.
Like other senior commanders, he believed the United States had squandered its best opportunity to win the war in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive, “when we had destroyed the back of the Viet Cong…. And when we had finally drawn North Vietnamese troops out into the open.”
He recalled with resentment Washington’s refusal to accede to the military’s plans for a major offensive to be launched from the old imperial capital, Hue. The plan called for an amphibious assault on Hue to spearhead a drive around the flanks of the North Vietnamese Army and across the country to the border, cutting the enemy’s supply lines from the North. “Permission for this operation was refused,” he lamented, “because Washington was afraid that the Red Chinese might then enter the war. It was a ridiculous conclusion based on no evidence. Just fear and anxiety.”
Even before he assumed command in the Pacific, when he was still the Navy chief in Europe, he had prepared and delivered a briefing to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the feasibility and necessity of mining the port of Haiphong. Like any other capable military strategist, he knew that the support the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong received from the Soviet Union and China was critical to their ability to simply outlast us. They hoped to suffer whatever losses were inflicted on them by their vastly more powerful adversary until they had exhausted America’s patience and will to see the war through to a successful conclusion. Without the massive support of their allies they would fail.
What my father didn’t share with his civilian commanders and many of his fellow military commanders was an overly acute fear that doing something about Chinese and Soviet support would involve us in a wider, perhaps global war. He doubted either country would be provoked to the point of war if we rightly decided to disrupt their efforts to aid our enemy, efforts that, after all, resulted in the deaths of many thousands of Americans. Indeed, he interpreted Soviet and Chinese actions as a far more reckless provocation of a great power than any response on our part was likely to be.
Like the men who flew missions to the North, he knew the enemy’s resolve was greatly strengthened by the material assistance their allies provided them, and he wanted to do something about it. As a submarine commander he had executed his country’s policy of total war, a policy that attacked the sources of the enemy’s material support just as vigorously as it attacked the enemy’s armed forces. He had sunk a great many merchant ships on his patrols in the Pacific. He couldn’t believe that the United States would simply leave unchallenged this clear threat to the war effort that he was now commanding.
Most of the arms and supplies used by North Vietnam’s armies entered the country through the port of Haiphong, with lesser amounts entering through the smaller ports of Cam Pha and Hong Gai. Thanks to the strategic foresight of Admiral Moorer, the Navy was well prepared to conduct mining operations in the enemy’s ports, and my father and other senior commanders repeatedly urged their civilian commanders to order the action. Washington invariably rejected their appeals on the grounds that the mining would probably result in damage to Soviet and Chinese merchant ships, and thus would seriously escalate the war by involving those countries further in the hostilities, and possibly even provoke a global war.
As early as 1966, military commanders began urging Washington to approve a mining operation, but they could not overcome Defense Secretary McNamara’s and President Johnson’s apprehension that the action entailed too great a risk of a wider war.
When the North Vietnamese launched a major offensive in December 1971, at a time when U.S. forces in Vietnam had been reduced to 69,000 men, President Nixon finally directed my father to mine Haiphong and other northern ports immediately. The Nixon administration had dispensed with much of the micromanaging of the war that had so ill served the Johnson administration, particularly the absurd target restrictions imposed on American bomber pilots. Relations between military commanders and their civilian superiors improved when President Nixon and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird entered office. The new administration was clearly more interested in and supportive of the views of the generals and admirals who were prosecuting the war. My father had a good relationship with both Nixon and Laird, as well as with the President’s National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger.
President Nixon had continued and even accelerated the drawdown of American forces in country begun by his predecessor, while seeking a negotiated end to the war. But he resolved to apply greater military pressure on the enemy while negotiations and “Vietnamization,” the name given to the strategy of preparing South Vietnam to ultimately fight the war on its own while simultaneously drawing down American forces, were under way. In the interim, Nixon intended to escalate hostilities, both to hasten his diplomacy’s successful conclusion and to strengthen the South Vietnamese regime.
In May 1970, with my father and General Abrams strongly urging it, the administration had authorized an incursion into Cambodia by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces. The enemy had used the sanctuary of the neighboring country to establish formidable military positions, especially along the border, from which they threatened much of the South, including Saigon. The incursion was of brief duration, and it was based on sound military reasoning. Nevertheless, given the considerable growth in domestic opposition to the war at the time, the decision provoked a firestorm of criticism. Neither the President nor his advisers nor his senior commanders wavered in their support for the action.