The opportunity to execute the long-planned air strike had come. An NSC interagency working group, chaired by Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy, met to consider options. They chose “Option C,” described in a memo by John McNaughton as “Progressive squeeze-and-talk. Present policies plus an orchestration of communications with Hanoi and a crescendo of additional military moves against infiltration targets, first in Laos and then in the DRV, and then against other targets in North Vietnam. The scenario would be designed to give the U.S. the option at any point to proceed or not, to escalate or not, and to quicken the pace or not.” The threat of greater pain and pressures was at least as important as any damage inflicted; the target was the will of the North to continue its aggression, rather than its ability to do so. The problem was that nobody knew quite how to make it work.
Faced with this puzzle, McNaughton consulted his old friend Tom Schelling. McNaughton explained that there was great interest in escalating the conflict in order to intimidate the North. For prompt results, air power was the logical instrument, but what kind of bombing campaign did Schelling think would best ensure that the North Vietnamese picked up on the proper signals and responded accordingly?
Schelling first thought that the campaign should not last more than a few weeks; it would succeed by then or, if not, the effort should be called off since it would never succeed. He and McNaughton talked about what the U.S. might want the North to do or stop doing: sending trained troops or supplies or both to the South, rehabilitating sanctuaries, providing headquarters for central communications. The question became: what could the U.S. ask the North to stop doing that they would obey, that we would soon know they obeyed, and that they could not simply resume doing after the bombing had ceased?
Schelling pondered the problem with McNaughton for more than an hour. In the end, he failed to come up with a single plausible answer to the most basic of questions. So assured, at times glibly so, when writing about sending signals with force, inflicting pain to make an opponent behave and weaving patterns of communications through tactics of coercive warfare in theory, Tom Schelling, when faced with a real-life “limited war,” was stumped, had no idea where to begin.
The bombing commenced on March 2, 1965. It changed nothing in the plans or operations of the North Vietnamese or the Viet Cong. If Rolling Thunder sent signals or established a “pattern of communications,” the opposition wasn’t listening. The U.S. intensified the signals, dropping more bombs on a wider variety of targets, deploying more troops. The North and the VC stayed fast. When the U.S. upped the ante, so did they. The “graduated pressure” from the U.S. scarcely dented, much less conquered, their “will.”
Tom Schelling had told McNaughton that the campaign should be given three weeks to produce results. On March 24, almost three weeks to the day, McNaughton wrote McNamara, “The situation in Vietnam is bad and deteriorating.” To McNaughton, the most important aim at this point was merely to “avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor).” Thus, a “program of progressive military pressure” should continue, in order to affect the North’s “will” and to provide the U.S. and the South “with a bargaining counter.” It was essential “that the U.S. emerge as a ‘good doctor.’ We must have kept promises, been tough, taken risks, gotten bloodied and hurt the enemy very badly.”
In April, the CIA reported, “If anything, the strikes to date have hardened [the enemy’s] attitude,” but then urged, “We must hit them harder, more frequently, and inflict greater damage.” On April 21, McNamara, McNaughton, William Bundy, Maxwell Taylor and the Joint Chiefs met in Honolulu and agreed, as McNamara recorded in his report on the session, “that it will take more than six months, perhaps a year or two, to demonstrate VC failure in the South.”
Ten years and more than 59,000 American fatalities later, it became clear that the DRV and VC had never paid much attention to our signals.
Vietnam brought out the dark side of nearly everyone inside America’s national security machine. And it exposed something seamy and disturbing about the very enterprise of the defense intellectuals. It revealed that the concept of force underlying all their formulations and scenarios was an abstraction, practically useless as a guide to action.
The disillusionment for some became nearly total. Not least affected was Robert McNamara. In May 1966 in Montreal, before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, he regretted the “almost ineradicable tendency to think of our security problem as being exclusively a military problem…. We are haunted by this concept of military hardware,” The man who, two years earlier, had written Lyndon Johnson that the Vietnam War must be “regarded as a test case of U.S. capacity to help a nation meet a Communist ‘war of liberation,’” now warned that it was “a gross oversimplification to regard Communism as the central factor in every conflict throughout the underdeveloped world…. The United States has no mandate from on high to police the world and no inclination to do so.”
McNamara was coming to believe that wars in the underdeveloped world were caused by economic impoverishment and the failure or refusal of regimes “to meet the legitimate expectations of their citizenry”; that “security means development” and development “means economic, social and political progress”; that while military force still had its place, the goal was to achieve security through world order. At the end of the Montreal speech, McNamara turned philosophicaclass="underline" “Who is man? Is he a rational animal? If he is, then the goals can ultimately be achieved; if he is not, then there is little point in making the effort.”
McNamara was still the supreme rationalist, but he managed to move away from the notions of “graduated reprisals” and “coercive strategy” to the more fundamental rationality of sharing “international peacekeeping responsibilities.”
From mid-1966 on, McNamara found it increasingly difficult to defend the Vietnam War, especially the bombing. When faced with critical questions from the press, his famous cool façade crumbled. He became increasingly moved by student protests, by calls for social change. He was very affected when John McNaughton, his close aide, died in an airplane accident in the spring of 1967. McNamara started to urge that the U.S. should train armies in the third world to be productive for their people, to assist in the development of education and agriculture. At home, he bore down on landlords who discriminated against black soldiers in providing off-base housing; he started programs in job counseling and training for men who left the military.
In November 1967, he finally told Johnson that the bombing should cease, that it was clearly useless as a bargaining chip. “McNamara’s gone dovish on me,” Johnson complained to a friend in the Senate. Later that month, McNamara was offered a new job as president of the World Bank, a position that had been tentatively held out the previous May when it became known that the post was about to be vacated. McNamara snapped up the offer with relish and relief. A few months later, he told friends that it was much more satisfying to be working for the development of nations than for their destruction.
The disillusioning blows of Vietnam struck a few of the defense intellectuals as well. Most notorious was the case of Daniel Ellsberg, a former hawkish Cold Warrior of unusual intensity who in 1969 turned first against the war, then against the tenets of his profession, delivered speeches likening himself and his friends to the war criminals of Nazi Germany, and cleansed his soul most dramatically by leaking the Pentagon Papers—the official Defense Department history detailing America’s involvement and duplicity in the Vietnam War—to The New York Times. Later, Ellsberg joined fledgling socialist organizations and became an eloquent activist in the anti-nuclear movement.