Chapter Seven
Vietnam
While anti-Castro zealots directed hate and venom towards the Kennedys for refusing to invade Cuba and for cracking down on paramilitary radicals, Vietnam was quietly creating turmoil in Washington. Many Americans equated the failure to contain Communism in Vietnam with the willingness to appease Hitler by allowing him to cede the Sudetenland to Czechoslovakia in 1938 and they were understandably obsessed by the violent determination to reject another appeasement scenario. Others, like John F. Kennedy and Michael Forrestal, the President's Assistant for Far Eastern Affairs, were not subject to Munich invoked parallels and they tended to oppose what they viewed to be futile military engagement in Southeast Asia. Armed with a keener sense of history, they sought alternatives to waging war and their determination to avoid the ground troop commitment that Johnson believed was absolutely necessary, fell on deaf ears as soon as Kennedy was assassinated. As long as he was alive, he courageously resisted every effort to coax him to commit American ground troops to war in Southeast Asia and settled the uneasy standoff by introducing a plan of gradual withdrawal, to be completed by 1965. Kennedy's will was abruptly reversed on the 22nd of November 1963.
With Kennedy out of the way, Johnson secretively escalated the Vietnam war and publicly cloaked himself in the garb of a peace activist. The feigned commitment to pursue the policy of John F. Kennedy was absolutely disingenuous and removed from every single principle that Johnson held near and dear to his heart. Indeed, it makes absolutely no sense at all, outside of the context that Johnson was desperately seeking to disguise the motivation that had claimed the life of President Kennedy. Only the need to cover up the truth about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, was more urgent than the perceived need to prosecute the Vietnam war. If Johnson temporarily deferred his commitment to war in Southeast Asia and preached peace in the interim, it is because he desperately needed to obscure the fact that the primary motivation behind the Kennedy assassination was the perceived need to prosecute the Vietnam war. Indeed, if, as all the evidence indicates, Kennedy was murdered because he opposed the Vietnam war, nothing was more pressing or urgent than the need to obscure the stark contrast between the views of Kennedy and Johnson. And so, while Johnson claimed the Kennedy rhetoric, he rejected the intent, and instead of fulfilling the commitment to total withdrawal, win or lose, by 1965, he predictably did the exact opposite.
In retrospect, the Johnson charade is glaringly transparent. Johnson was emotionally committed to the need to win the Vietnam war since at least 1961, yet between the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the staged Gulf of Tonkin crisis which provided the opportunity to commit American ground troops in 1965, Johnson did not publicly acknowledge or provide the slightest clue about his determination to militarily contain communism in Southeast Asia. Indeed, as he secretively escalated the war effort and quietly reversed Kennedy's plans for withdrawal, Johnson publicly cultivated the impression that he was actually a peace advocate. Through it all, between 1961 and 1968, Johnson's determination to fight and to win the Vietnam war was absolutely constant. It is only the public relations preoccupation to cover up the truth about the Kennedy assassination which prompted Johnson to defer an American ground troop commitment to war in Vietnam until 1965, when he had carefully shifted the focus of attention away from Kennedy's commitment to withdrawal and towards a staged crisis [Gulf of Tonkin] which made military confrontation appear to be a reasonable response.
Kennedy was the only high-level official who had the power and the will to resist an American ground troop commitment to war in Vietnam. Even a sterling prize like Kennedy's Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, was a fierce advocate who was determined to prosecute the Vietnam war. The persistent "can-do" businessman viewed every problem in terms of its "manageability", and did not entertain a single doubt about the power of aggression -if he could conquer the corporate jungle at Ford he could do it in Vietnam, and nobody, not even the President of the United States was big enough to stand in his way. What's a single obstacle when you have your eye on the shareholders? As far as McNamara was concerned, the Vietnam war was just another business challenge, and with the Pentagon in his control, he was ready, willing and determined to deploy the resources that the "company" demanded. As Secretary of Defense, McNamara was a force to reckon. Armed with statistics that supported his determination to impose a military solution, McNamara characteristically surrounded himself with Vietnam war enthusiasts and proceeded to plan the conquest of Southeast Asia. Kennedy had learned to reject superficial military assessments and fiercely resisted pressure to engage a prolonged military war effort. The supremely confidant McNamara did not entertain a single doubt. Historically ignorant, McNamara did not know anything about the people of Vietnam, the nature of their struggle or their views of independence, and the belief that he could manage the conflict was ultimately pure fantasy. American military hardware and know-how reflected technological superiority, it did not fill the void that only a better understanding about the poverty and the struggles of the people of Southeast Asia, could satisfy. Unfortunately, the Vietnam war was too complex a conflict to yield to a McNamara-style resolution. McNamara customarily created his own reality and worked on the assumption that he was right and anybody who disagreed with him was wrong. At Ford, he constantly battled other executives who wanted to build flashy, wide-bodied cars, loaded with dazzling options and "unnecessary" frills. McNamara believed that cars were strictly utilitarian and anyone who violated the assumption that the purchase of a vehicle was strictly a rational act, was vigorously opposed. His overwhelming capacity to drown the voices of critics who claimed that cars were also status symbols, routinely triumphed. McNamara insisted that rationality alone determined automobile sales, and other factors did not merit consideration. The commanding presence of Robert McNamara was unchallengeable and absolute. Indeed the only ideas that survived a McNamara business meeting were the ones that he had deliberately arrived at beforehand. Like the Ford executive who ignored every possibility except his insistence that the decision to purchase a car was strictly rational, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara confronted the Vietnam conflict with a single-minded focus that refused to consider anything beyond his own "rationality". By 1961, the McNamara "rationality" had determined that Vietnam would be lost to the Communists unless American combat troops were committed to the conflict: end of discussion. If Robert McNamara believed that the only point worth discussing was an aggressive, military plan of action in Vietnam, withdrawal was not an option. The Joint Chiefs had developed the belief that a limited war was necessary to contain Communist aggression, and since McNamara wholeheartedly agreed, contradictory views did not merit attention. Kennedy rejected the perceived need to wage war over Vietnam and believed that the conflict in Southeast Asia was primarily a Vietnamese challenge which demanded a political resolution rather than a large scale American military commitment. His determination to avoid a land war in Vietnam was in fact so fierce that the task of restraining the military was pursued with a significant measure of anger. Repulsed by the general tendency to risk war, Kennedy denounced zealots and warmongers within his own Administration with the angry denunciation: "The first advice I'm going to give my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that just because they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn."1 War hawks like General Curtis Le May, Chief of Staff of the Air Force, reflected the zealous determination to wage war through commentary like; "We are swatting flies, [in Vietnam] when we should be going after the manure pile."2 The public pitch of the Johnson and McNamara rhetoric may have been an octave or so lower, but the relentless determination to win the Vietnam war was the same. With the brilliant McNamara at the helm in the Pentagon, Johnson was entirely confident about the capacity to wage and to win the Vietnam war. The smartest man he ever met, according to Johnson's estimation, and how could a brilliant ally like Robert McNamara possibly miscalculate? But in the absence of a sense of history, Robert McNamara, who tended to view every problem as a straightforward assets/liabilities balancing act, was oblivious to the needs of the Vietnamese people. Indeed, his "quantity-over-quality" thinking was so apparent that it prompted a shrewd Vietnamese General to say: "Your Secretary of Defense loves statistics. We Vietnamese can give him all he wants. If you want them to go up, they will go up. If you want them to go down, they will go down..."3 The belief that the war could be won through the manipulation of statistics translated to an assault upon objectivity. Military appraisals were no longer reports to be studied and analyzed, but body counts, troop projections and reports of unbridled optimism. Dissenters who questioned military effectiveness were ignored, muzzled or "sanitized". If Roger Hilsman questioned military effectiveness, he exacted the wrath of the Robrert McNamara who refused to tolerate even the slightest objection. To sustain the view that Vietnam was being won, McNamara simply dispatched supportive Generals who confirmed the claim that everything was going well, and muzzled those who raised doubt. The task of loyal allies like General Krulak, Mcnamara's special adviser on guerilla warfare, was to "sanitize" negative reports, to "downgrade pessimism" and to discourage dissent by jeopardizing career prospects. When lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann reported the fact that the division he had advised in Vietnam was badly beaten, General Harkins instinctively wanted to fire him but prudently ignored him to avoid a public debate on the issue. As a Vietnam expert and an able statistician, Vann commanded a great deal of respect with friends at the Pentagon because he produced reliable reports based on hard facts and General Hamlett was so impressed by his briefings that he arranged a meeting between Colonel Vann and the Joint Chiefs. The briefing was set for 2:00 p.m. July 8, 1963 but General Maxwell Taylor blocked the meeting because Vann's briefing would have challenged the optimistic forecasts of other military advisers. Whenever possible, negative reports on Vietnam were shielded before they reached the President of the United States. David Halberstam reflects the common practise, when he says: "This charade was a microcosm of the way the high-level military destroyed dissenters, day after day in countless little ways, slanting the reporting lest the top level lose its antiseptic views, lest any germ of doubt reach the high level."4
When Kennedy was alive, the military had tried and failed to quarantine the "germs of doubt" that preoccupied the President of the United States. Kennedy knew as much about Vietnam as McNamara knew about production and technology, and he was not about to be hoodwinked by the zealous determination to win the Vietnam war. Having been to Vietnam on two occasions in the 1950's, where one by one, the French Garrisons were felled to the tune of Generals who insisted that the war was being won, Kennedy knew firsthand, that Vietnam was not, as McNamara later insisted, being won. As hard as the Pentagon tried to shape Kennedy's view about Vietnam, the President chose to rely upon independent sources, and he was thus essentially immune to the effort to deceive him about the actual state of affairs in Vietnam. Indeed, the attempt to manipulate Kennedy invariably backfired. As a young Congressman, Kennedy had relied on the news reports of the brightest journalists, he did not accept the charade that the French military engineered, and in the last analysis, everything that he knew about the bloody history of Vietnam convinced Kennedy that withdrawal was the only prudent course of action to pursue. Veterans of guerilla warfare, Viet Minh forces had slaughtered division after division of heavily equipped French forces, and Kennedy was was not prepared to subject American combat troops to the same fate. After six years of fighting, 16,000 French troops had perished in the jungles of Indochina, and despite the apparent hopelessness, the French endured two additional years of war. Dien Bien Phu was the final straw. On November 20, 1953, French combat battalions were parachuted into Dien Bien phu, a small town in the heart of Viet Minh territory, 300 kilometres away from Hanoi. The French troops occupied the village and even parachuted a bulldozer which was used to build an airstrip. Within a month, eleven combat battalions were transported to the base, but despite all the tanks and all the military hardware, the French could not penetrate the hills which surrounded the plain. The French believed that their military base was impregnable because Viet Minh headquarters was 300 kilometres away and they didn't think that Ho Chi Minh would be able to supply his troops quickly enough. Day in and day out however, an endless chain of Vietnamese men and women used 10,000 bicycles to transport over 15,000 tons of equipment. Thousands went to work building a road through the jungle, and Vietnamese combat troops were eventually transported to the front. Within two months, thirty-eight canons were installed in the hills around the French camp. In March of 1954, Viet Minh forces opened fire and Vietnamese combat troops launched a devastating attack. The French, eventually trapped within four square kilometres, dug trenches around the camp. The Viet Minh forces captured outpost after outpost, to the point where French parachuted combat troops were falling into Vietnamese occupied territory. The entrenched camp, which was supposed to have been a launching ground for a French offensive, had become a trap. In May of 1954, the French retreated. The Dien Bien Phu military disaster had clearly defined the futility of deploying combat troops in Indochina and while anti-Communist zealots ignored the fact, Kennedy did not. Even as a young Congressman in the 1950's, Kennedy had criticized the futility of American foreign policy in Southeast Asia and while that courageous dissent was ridiculed and ignored in the face of anti-Communist hysteria, in 1963, he was the Commander-In-Chief, and he called the shots until he was assassinated.
Drip by drip, America was being sucked in to war, and John F. Kennedy was determined to reverse the flow. In 1951, the United States agreed to provide financial assistance to the war effort and by 1954, the U.S. was supplying 85% of the arms to the French forces. Aware of the local rivalries between religious sects and political factions within Vietnam, Kennedy believed that the conflict demanded a political rather than a military solution. Having rejected the traditional tendency to react to Vietnam with a sense of urgency and paranoia, Kennedy repeatedly criticized the Eisenhower administration for paving what he called the "long and torturous road to war." In the words of Congressman Kennedy:
... the speeches of President Eisenhower, Secretary Dulles and others have left too much unsaid.. to pour money, material and men into the jungles of Indochina without at least a remote prospect of victory would be dangerously futile and destructive. Of course, all discussions of united action (by many nations) assume the inevitability of such victory, but such assumptions are not unlike similar predictions of confidence which have lulled the American people for many years. I am frankly of the belief that no amount of American military assistance in Indochina, can conquer an enemy which is everywhere, and at the same time nowhere.
The contrast between the beliefs of Kennedy and the Eisenhower/Nixon White House is very clear. In 1954, Eisenhower compared failure in Vietnam to the failure to halt Hirohito, Mussolini and Hitler, and that was a parallel that Kennedy clearly rejected.
When Kennedy became President, support for the traditional point of view that Eisenhower espoused was still strong and Kennedy had to contend with the Congress, the public, the press, and even his own Joint Chiefs who promoted the need for American military involvement in Vietnam. In contrast to the general willingness to engage the military, Kennedy was disturbed over the fact that "the U.S. had been sucked into the conflict little by little."5 If he could claim the power of a dictator, he could have ignored the entire country and could have demanded an immediate withdrawal from the conflict in Southeast Asia, but having won the election by a mere 118,000 votes, the mandate to exercise his will was clearly tempered by 35 million people who had voted for Nixon. An astute politician, Kennedy knew that he could not abruptly reverse the entire course of American foreign policy prior to having cultivated the necessary political clout. Recent history had clearly limited his options. In 1952, the Democrats lost the election over the "loss" of China to the Communists, and the last thing that Kennedy wanted to do was to give anti-Communist hardliners like Richard Nixon the opportunity to further exploit anti-Communist hysteria. Kennedy rejected Nixon-style hysterics and gravitated towards the advice of thoughtful experts like Mike Mansfield, the respected Senate Majority leader and Orientalist, who, after returning from a trip to Southeast Asia in December of 1962, advised the immediate withdrawal from Vietnam. The Senator told Kennedy that if they didn't withdraw, Americans would end up fighting someone else's war. Kennedy agreed with Mansfield but his own commitment to withdrawal and to the determination to avoid a land war in Southeast Asia was temporarily tempered by the knowledge that a hysterical anti-Communist backlash threatened his political existence. And so, realistically acknowledging the limit of his power, Kennedy said: "but I can't do it [absolute withdrawal] until 1965-after I'm reelected." John F. Kennedy was in fact so thoroughly committed to withdrawal that he had actually forecasted the consequences of his actions and had resolved to pay the price. In the words of John F. Kennedy:
In 1965 I'll become one of the most unpopular presidents in history. I'll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don't care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I'm reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I am reelected."6
On October 2 1963, Kennedy instructed McNamara to announce to the press that all American forces would be withdrawn from Vietnam by 1965. The announcement followed a National Security Council meeting. Given the general disdain for withdrawal, Kennedy had obviously pulled rank and had made it clear that he was ultimately responsible for determining the course of American foreign policy. Exasperated over the resistance that his plans provoked, Kennedy wanted to make sure that McNamara understood the fact that he was promoting unconditional withdrawal, and as McNamara was leaving the White House to announce the formal plans of withdrawal, Kennedy called after him, "And tell them that means all the helicopter pilots too."7McNamara and Taylor wanted to link withdrawal to "the overriding objective of denying this country to Communism and of suppressing the Viet Cong insurgency", but John F. Kennedy had repeatedly made it clear [win, lose or draw] that the commitment to withdrawal was not conditional.8 The fact that "they would close out Vietnam by '65, whether it was in good shape or bad", was clearly established.9The Pentagon strategy to impose a condition which essentially nullified Kennedy's plans for withdrawal reflected the deep, irreconcilable division between John F. Kennedy and his own nation security advisers: Rusk, Johnson, McNamara and Bundy. Deeply committed to the military rollback of Communism in Southeast Asia, they simply did not understand Kennedy's determination to reject the perceived need to deploy American ground troops. Just eight days before his assassination, Kennedy reiterated his commitment to withdrawal with the public announcement that "the first thousand men were already packing and on their way home for Christmas." The overriding objective, to win the Vietnam war, made a mockery out of Kennedy's public commitment to withdrawal, and reversed the foreign policy course of action the President had struggled to chart. Clearly, the murder of John F. Kennedy ultimately vetoed the President's determined effort to militarily disengage from the conflict in Southeast Asia, and all the lies and the disinformation in the entire world cannot excuse the betrayal.
As long as Kennedy was alive, the effort to lull America to a ground war in Southeast Asia was fiercely resisted. In the fall of 1963, the military was still promoting the "institutionalized lie" that all was well in Vietnam, but the false sense of optimism was merely a consequence of military "sanitization" efforts. Propagandists like General Krulak and General Harkins tried to make sure that all reports out of Vietnam were optimistic, but their campaign to censor the pessimistic reality frustrated Kennedy, who rejected imagined optimism. In September of 1963, General Krulak and Mendenhill, a senior officer with experience in Vietnam, reported their findings of a recent mission in Southeast Asia. The contrast between Mendenhill's pessimism and Krulak's optimism was so great that Kennedy was prompted to derisively say: "You did visit the same country, didn't you?"10Krulak's groundless insistence that the war was being won reflected the "fascinating insight into the way the military worked. Loyalty was not to the President of the United States, to truth or integrity, or even to subordinate officers risking their lives; loyalty was to uniform, and more specifically, to immediate superior and career."11
McNamara also embraced the notion that loyalty to the uniform was more important than loyalty to the president. Since 1961, when the Joint Chiefs had adopted the belief that Vietnam demanded an American ground troop commitment, Defense Secretary McNamara actively assumed the burden to manage an appropriate military response. But when Kennedy blocked military requests for an American ground troop commitment in Southeast Asia, McNamara confronted a brutal dilemma. Hostage to the fact that he could not be loyal to the "uniform" and to the President at the same time [since one evidently contradicted the other] the agony of the crossroad that McNamara had reached was intense enough to challenge his very sanity. Here was a man charged with the responsibility to activate, when deemed necessary, the most powerful military machine in the world, and a single man, the President of the United States, exercised the power to [in the eyes of the can-do McNamara] interfere with the process. Under the circumstances, McNamara confronted three plausible choices: to resign in protest over Kennedy's refusal to commit ground troops to war in Southeast Asia, to ignore what he saw as his responsibilities at the Pentagon or to replace the commander-in-chief, if that were possible. It was not easy to contemplate the need to replace Kennedy in order to give McNamara and Johnson the opportunity to prosecute the Vietnam war, but in the face of resign and ignore responsibility, the assassination of John F. Kennedy was a bittersweet pill to swallow.
Conflict over how to manage the Vietnam war effectively soured the relationship between Kennedy and McNamara. In the name of loyalty to the office, McNamara censored military reports, lied to President Kennedy, inflated statistics, ignored sceptics, and rejected every fact which challenged the preconceived belief that the Vietnam war was America's to be won. McNamara's corporate mentality was prone to cultivate the demand for action, a positive attitude, and the flexibility to respond to marketplace/military demands. Torn between loyalty to the office and loyalty to his friend, McNamara did what he believed was in the best interests of the United States of America. It is a tragic irony, but in the final analysis, McNamara was not even loyal to himself. He made himself believe in the statistics and the thought that he would fail to manage the conflict in Southeast Asia did not cross his mind. Brainwashed by his own extreme sense of rationality, McNamara was a single-track operator. Even at Ford, where McNamara had convinced himself that buying a car was always a rational decision, McNamara was oblivious to all alternate points of view. According to one of McNamara's colleagues: "...he should have been the head of production at the Moskva works in the Soviet Union, the utilitarian man producing the utilitarian car for the utilitarian society, no worry about frills there."12Always committed, always decisive and always loyal to his own perceptions, MoNamara was willing, able and "itching" to use the military force under his command. In 1961, as Kennedy struggled to neutralize the conflict in Laos, McNamara wanted to arm AT6's with 100-lb. bombs and to drop them on the bad Laotians.13 Spurred by the view that American force and technology was unconquerable, containment or withdrawal was certainly not an option that McNamara seriously entertained. An extraordinary challenge simply demanded greater resolve, discipline and perseverance, and in terms of the effort to win the Vietnam war, the translation was simple -military escalation. Like Lyndon Johnson, who believed that the failure to contain the Communists in Southeast Asia was the evil equivalent of the failure to contain Hitler, McNamara was essentially locked into a commitment with sinister implications -the assassination of John F. Kennedy was the necessary prerequisite to the determination to prosecute the Vietnam war.
The evidence is really quite explicit. The time that immediately preceded the assassination of John F. Kennedy was a period of extremely intense debate over what to do about Southeast Asia. Under normal circumstances, one would expect the debate to survive the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but the Johnson Administration immediately killed the consultation process. Indeed, the debate was instantly buried on the day that Kennedy was assassinated and power was immediately transferred from the hands of John F. Kennedy to a monolithic, dissent-free group of Vietnam war enthusiasts. The March 30, 1964 issue of Newsweek reported what amounted to be a foreign policy takeover, in the following terms:
Here's one way the making of foreign policy has changed since Lyndon Johnson became president. Under John F. Kennedy, the last word was usually written at informal meetings between the President and White House aide McGeorge Bundy. Now most of the big decisions come during weekly scheduled luncheons attended by Johnson, Bundy, Secretary of State Rusk, and Secretary of Defense McNamara.14
In particular, Bundy, McNamara, Rusk and Johnson monopolized the Vietnam debate to the point where even co-workers were excluded from the decision making process. In actual fact, the fundamental decision -to win the Vietnam war, was made behind closed doors and having accepted the commitment to "save" Southeast Asia, the only remaining challenge was to convince the Congress and the American public to give Johnson the authority to prosecute the war. And so, when the time was ripe for exploitation, Lyndon Johnson assumed the solemnity of a besieged peacemonger on national television and transmitted the grievous "news" that America was the victim of unprovoked attack in the Gulf of Tonkin. Only a select few, like Navy carrier pilot James Stockdale, were privy to the fact that the unprovoked attack that Johnson spoke of was simply a fabricated account. In the words of James Stockdale: "Well, I sat there on the edge of the bed realizing that I was one of the few people in the world who were going to launch a war under false pretences."15Beyond the fact that the Johnson White House launched retaliatory raids for an occurrence which was merely invented, Lyndon Johnson used the Gulf Tonkin resolution to begin full-scale U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia, even though he had sold the resolution which granted him the far-reaching power to escalate the Vietnam war as a vehicle, not of war, but of peace. Senator William Fulbright explained the con job which gave Johnson the power to widen the war while he preached peace when he said that Johnson "sold it as a means to prevent any widening of the war, that we were going to face this little country, of he said I think, 17 million people, and with the great might of the United States they would clearly be inclined to settle and to compromise, and have a peaceful settlement, and that there wouldn't be any war." Having convinced the Congress that it was voting for peace rather than for a dramatic escalation in Vietnam, the Gulf Tonkin resolution passed the House by a vote of 416 to 0.
The primary responsibility for all of the fraud and the deception that sucked America to war belongs to the "Tuesday lunch" membership -their weekly scheduled luncheons are credited with monopolizing the "big" foreign policy decisions that Kennedy had controlled until he was murdered. Former Johnson adviser Richard Goodwin, describes the unworldly quality of the purposeful deception that is ultimately responsible for the Vietnam war when he says: "It was as if, every Tuesday, a small group of men gathered in some space capsule, far removed from the turmoil and discords of a distant earth, to deliberate the destiny of the troublesome planet far below."16Goodwin elaborates with a quote from a Johnson biographer who wrote: "A typical discussion of the Tuesday lunch would begin with the alternative targets for bombing, continue with the lift capacity of the latest helicopters... conclude with the production figures for waterproof boots, never once calling into question the shared assumptions about the nature of the war or its... importance to national security.17
One of the tragedies of the zeal to prosecute the Vietnam war [and to assassinate Kennedy] is that the incredible potential of the Kennedy/McNamara alliance was never realized. The handling of the controversy over the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty reflects the lost opportunity. Unlike Vietnam, Kennedy and McNamara were on the same side of the issue where the Test Ban Treaty was concerned, and the President's Secretary of Defense proved to be an absolute powerhouse of support. Nuclear weapons offended the rationality of both Kennedy and McNamara, and the military Chiefs who opposed the ban were defanged by the mutual convictions of both the President and the Secretary of Defense. Like in the old executive meetings at Ford where McNamara's views always triumphed, the fact that the will of Kennedy's Defense Chief would not be denied, was never in doubt. The need to control the proliferation of nuclear weapons was a rational argument which was prone to forceful advocacy. And so, McNamara practically locked the military Chiefs in a room for a week and systematically destroyed every single objection they raised "... for a week, hour after hour, he went through every objection they had, breaking them down point by point, until finally he won." McNamara's presentation was so forceful that one of his aides indicated that "it was virtually a case of going along with him or resigning."18
Where the Vietnam was concerned, the wills of McNamara and John F. Kennedy were absolutely deadlocked. The contrast was stark. Robert McNamara vigorously challenged anyone who cast a doubt over the belief that American military force would prevail. John F. Kennedy questioned the wisdom of American military involvement throughout Southeast Asia and had serious misgivings about the prospect of winning the Vietnam war. McNamara was a decision maker who was single-mindedly loyal to the task at hand. As a keen student of history, Kennedy's ambition was tempered by a healthy degree of scepticism and the determination to provide a sense of morality and sanity to the Cold War. More action-oriented than sceptical, McNamara was entirely possessed by the belief that the Vietnam was militarily manageable. Kennedy rejected oxymorons like "military solution", acknowledged local rivalries between religious sects and political factions, and favored a political resolution.
Kennedy was deeply committed to withdrawal because he believed that America was being sucked into a futile war and he wanted to stop the flow before it was too late. It is popular to claim that Kennedy escalated the war, but in actual fact, the escalation that he authorized was made "almost by default" because in the fall of 1961, Kennedy's administration was heavily focused on the question of sending combat troops to Vietnam.19 The Joint Chiefs supported an open-ended ground troop commitment, and in 1961, they estimated that 40,000 United States servicemen were needed to "clean up the Vietcong threat". General Taylor requested an initial commitment of 6000-8000 American combat troops and McNamara indicated that "much greater troop commitments were likely in the future" and according to his best estimate the maximum U.S. forces required on the ground in Southeast Asia will not exceed six divisions or about 205,000 men."20 By the fall of 1961, even Lyndon Johnson, who was rarely outspoken during Kennedy's administration, "was appealing to the United States to become a co-belligerent."121 In the context of the fact that Kennedy repeatedly rejected the call to war, the habitual, voluntary military build-up which was authorized while he was President was relatively insignificant because it was made "without a careful consideration" and without a "precise expectation of what it would achieve."22 Kennedy had repeatedly resisted the effort to adopt objectives that demanded wide-scale military escalation, and as soon as he was murdered, Lyndon Johnson made his divergent plans absolutely clear when he said: "I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China did."23 It is no coinceidence that President John F. Kennedy had said the exact opposite.
John F. Kennedy had contemplated withdrawal and political resolution, and had publicly promoted the commitment to bring home every American technician, helicopter pilot, and military adviser by the end of 1965. That is the promise that was violently denied.
