a cold man who could scarcely be called a moral one: in 1961 he endorsed the fiction of the strategic ‘missile gap’, and made shamelessly baseless attacks on his predecessor Thomas Gates.
McNamara’s office became a dynamo room: for programming a missile build-up; expanding the army in response to the Berlin crisis; promoting new weapons systems. During the October 1962 Cuban drama, it was McNamara who conceived the US Navy blockade. He seemed devoid of self-doubt, and believed that a good decision should also be a fast one. His obsession with control caused him to deplore loose talk: he waged war on military leakers, and sought himself to preside as the sole public voice of America’s armed forces.
McNamara told the Senate in September 1961: ‘There is no true historical parallel to the drive of Soviet Communist imperialism to colonize the world … [No dictator] has ever been so well organized, possessed so many instruments of destruction.’ He was unafraid of telling outright lies in the cause of countering the Soviet menace – a habit that would eventually destroy his reputation. Testifying to Congress, he reeled off data that was hailed as evidence of his extraordinary powers of recall: Lt. Gen. Fred Weyand, however, observed that many of the secretary’s ‘facts’ were simply wrong. Although a committed Cold Warrior, in the first year of the administration he opposed a penny-parcel commitment in Vietnam: ‘We would be almost certain to get increasingly mired down in an inconclusive struggle.’ Alternatively, if the US made a big troop commitment, ‘the struggle may be prolonged and Hanoi and [Beijing] may intervene overtly … Success will depend on factors many of which are not within our control – notably the conduct of Diem himself.’
But then McNamara changed his mind. In May 1962 he paid his first visit to Vietnam. Paul Harkins, the fantasist who commanded MACV, hosted the trip. The general was given an advance list of the defense secretary’s questions, so that he had time to frame plausible answers, founded on statistics such as McNamara loved, though wholly fanciful. Harkins asserted that American aid was empowering the Diem regime to defeat the communist insurgency, though even as the secretary was being briefed at Binh Duong, an ARVN convoy was attacked nearby, five men killed. While he toured the northerly base at Danang, the Vietcong blew up a troop train ten miles away, killing twenty-seven people and wounding thirty. McNamara told young UPI reporter Neil Sheehan, ‘Every quantitative measurement we have shows that we’re winning.’ He did not perceive that the ‘quantitative measurements’ were being pulled out of the air by Harkins, of whom Sheehan wrote later: ‘He willed himself to believe what he wished to believe and to reject what he wished to reject.’
McNamara’s admirers respected his aloofness as reflecting impartiality and incorruptibility: he was even touted as a possible 1964 running mate for Kennedy. Hanson Baldwin, the respected military commentator, wrote a piece in the Saturday Evening Post headed ‘The McNamara Monarchy’, describing the new defense bureaucracy. But the secretary’s enemies, many of them uniformed, deplored his hubris. He developed an ill-founded belief that he understood the military. James Reston later wrote shrewdly in the New York Times: ‘He has the sincerity of an Old Testament prophet, but something is missing; some element of personal doubt, some respect for human weakness, some knowledge of history.’ Between 1961 and 1967, McNamara nonetheless wielded greater influence on Vietnam policy than any of his fellow-countrymen save successive presidents.
The main thing those Americans who really knew about Vietnam knew was how little they knew. Military adviser Gordon Sullivan had volunteered, terrified the war would be over before he could get to it. The twenty-five-year-old lieutenant from Massachusetts landed in country after a six-week Vietnamese-language course which taught him a few staple phrases. He found Saigon ‘idyllic, just a sleepy town on the river: no bomb-screens, Filipino band music blaring across Tu Do. It wasn’t easy to be an adviser in those days: I had a radio, but there was nothing on the other end of it’ – from beginning to end of the war, US advisers were chiefly valued by the Vietnamese for their power to magic artillery and air support through a handset. Sullivan’s incoming group was warned: ‘Remember that you guys aren’t even supposed to be here.’ He landed at a two-bit airstrip near the Cambodian border, which boasted a wrecked H-21 beside the runway and a sign by the control tower announcing that it stood two feet above the water level in the dry season, two feet below in the wet. The officer who drove a jeep up to collect him greeted him with ‘Hi Sullivan. Do you like eeny-weenies and cocktail onions? Our team chief gets a fresh shipment every two weeks.’
In the months that followed, the lieutenant and an NCO drove all over the delta with a huge crate of medicines which they dispensed in the villages, between inspecting strategic hamlets. Looking back on the craziness of their wanderings across a region already teeming with Vietcong, Sullivan reflected: ‘It was an adventure … There was no logical reason why we survived.’ He ‘tried to reach out to the Vietnamese’, but they seemed to function on a different voltage. Another adviser, Lt. Col. John Paul Vann, told Frank Scotton soon after the latter’s arrival in country: ‘Hell, I don’t even know what is going on across the river at night.’ Special Branch officer Capt. Phan Tan Nguu said of his relationship with CIA counterparts, ‘I only told the Americans what I thought they needed to know.’
An important 1962 Pentagon war game, SIGMA I, estimated that half a million US troops would be needed to defeat the communists. A subsequent SIGMA II examined an air-war option, and concluded that no amount of bombing would deflect Hanoi. The conflicting evidence and projections put before the policy-makers caused the various factions in Washington to box the compass with rival proposals, repeatedly changing their minds. Throughout the Kennedy era Pentagon brass favoured bombing the North – and opposed the commitment of ground troops.
3 LE DUAN RAISES HIS STAKE
In the course of 1961–62 the North Vietnamese government tilted away from Russia, towards closer links with China, yet still neither power encouraged Hanoi to escalate. The communists felt enmeshed in a sufficiency of turmoil elsewhere – Cuba, Berlin, Albania, Congo. The North’s domestic difficulties persisted: its population was increasing by half a million a year, yet grain production per head had fallen. China was taking a substantial portion of the country’s rice output and three-quarters of its coal in return for a drip-feed of cash. There was a massive migration of hungry peasants towards the cities, and little for them to do when they got there: raw-materials shortages caused factories to languish.
From May 1961 North Vietnam’s allowance of meat, which included cat and dog, fell to barely four ounces a week per person. That summer hunger protesters set fire to rice stocks amid clashes with troops, and in August burned down a bicycle factory. A bomb exploded in the city of Dong Anh. There was a local army mutiny, and on two occasions Hmong tribesmen attacked army convoys. South Vietnam and its US advisers encouraged such acts, and ran a programme of risibly unsuccessful commando stabs into the North. However, the dissent among Ho Chi Minh’s people was overwhelmingly spontaneous, driven by hunger and met with repression, which worked. By October 1961 a French diplomat reported that people had been reduced to ‘passive resignation’. Duong Van Mai said of the Northerners: ‘People were incredibly uninformed. It was as if they were sitting at the bottom of a well, seeing only a patch of sky. The communists had so many mechanisms of control.’
Le Duan now dominated Hanoi’s policy-making, as he would continue to do for the next quarter-century, though the world did not know this. In the Hollywood epic El Cid, the corpse of the eponymous Spanish medieval hero is strapped into the saddle to lead his army to one final victory. Something of the same was true of Ho Chi Minh. He was haunted by fears that Vietnam would become a new Korea, a devastated battlefield on which Americans and Chinese contested mastery. As his health declined and younger men grasped the initiative, he abdicated mastery and even influence on war-making. But he remained an indispensable figurehead, commanding respect across much of the world. Ho and prime minister Pham Van Dong remained the public faces of North Vietnam’s leadership, while Le Duan was almost invisible. The Moscow-leaning Giap became the object of animosity from comrades who deplored his bloated personal staff and lust for celebrity.
