LBJ’s Flawed Plan
When President Johnson weighed sending American troops, aircraft, and ships to Vietnam in 1965, Korea was foremost in his mind. The Korean War had sunk the Truman presidency, and President Eisenhower had ended that war only by threatening to use nuclear weapons. With big, costly plans for his Great Society and War on Poverty, Johnson wanted to keep the conflict in Vietnam short and cheap. Above all, he wanted to forestall a Chinese intervention that would lengthen the war and suck funds from his cherished domestic programs. Like Eisenhower and Kennedy before him, he yearned to wash his hands of the war. But he didn’t dare.
The consequences would have been severe. Senator Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare had only flickered out in 1954, and Washington in the 1960s was still in the grip of a “China Lobby” inflamed by Mao Zedong’s victory over Chiang Kai-shek in 1949. Henry Luce’s popular Time and Life magazines, which gave busy Americans their worldview, purveyed the opinions of the China Lobby, chief among them the need to prevent any more defeats in Asia to communism. American voters wanted their politicians tough too. They didn’t want Goldwater, but they didn’t want to lose either. Getting out of Vietnam never would have been easy.
And so LBJ launched America’s Vietnam War under the most bizarre circumstances. To fight the war on a low-cost basis without giving China any excuse to intervene, he opted for “graduated pressure” in North Vietnam. Instead of overwhelming the North with military power, LBJ would increase air strikes and ground troops gradually, each added increment theoretically demonstrating to the North Vietnamese the futility of resistance to the richest power in the world, which, the enemy would have to assume, was only getting started. Johnson didn’t come up with this strategy on his own. It was fashioned for him by the presidential advisers he had inherited from Kennedy, chiefly Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy.
LBJ hoped that graduated pressure would also reassure the Chinese and Soviets that he was not aiming at the total destruction of North Vietnam. He hoped that his decision not to attack the neutral sanctuaries of Laos and Cambodia, where North Vietnamese troops and supplies moved on their way into South Vietnam, would serve as proof that Washington sought nothing more than a “free and independent South Vietnam.” Naturally, this graduated pressure strategy succeeded only in persuading Hanoi, Beijing, and Moscow that Washington was not serious. A superpower that shrank from invading or even heavily bombing North Vietnam and that feared the odium of invading the “neutral” sanctuaries of Laos and Cambodia to close the Ho Chi Minh Trail was clearly a superpower fighting with one arm tied behind its back.
Graduated pressure, unfortunately, was never applied in South Vietnam. America’s ally in the war was exposed to the full fury of the American arsenal: B-52s, batteries of field artillery, helicopter gunships, airmobile assaults, and “herbicide operations” with Agent Orange that stripped and poisoned much of the lush green country. Whatever affection the South Vietnamese people had for Americans withered away on a battlefield that spanned the entire country and led to the death of half a million civilians, mainly from American firepower.
The contrast between the deference and delicacy afforded North Vietnam and the ultraviolence unleashed in South Vietnam highlighted one of the war’s great sins—its lack of strategy. Kennedy saw it not as a war but as a problem to be managed. Johnson saw it as a war that had to be artfully contained. “I am going to control from Washington,” he said in 1965, a position from which he never deviated.
Neither JFK nor LBJ came up with a winning strategy, some way to fit military operations to political outcomes. The presidents talked about fighting to create a free South Vietnam, but they knew—and, one or two years into the war, most Americans knew—that the South Vietnamese nation was hopelessly corrupt and divided. As a result, there was no viable strategy, no way to segue from war to peace in an environment where the Viet Cong communists were always more feared and respected than the government in Saigon.
Starting in 1965, General William “Westy” Westmoreland filled the strategic void with his concept of “search and destroy.” Westmoreland reasoned that if he would not be given the forces and authority to defeat North Vietnam and invade the neutral sanctuaries, he would defeat the enemy by killing so many of them that Hanoi would reach a “crossover point,” where American-inflicted casualties would outnumber Viet Cong recruiting and North Vietnamese infiltration.
Search and destroy was what the American military did in Vietnam from 1965 to 1969. In view of its colossal ineffectiveness—only about 10 percent of search and destroy operations actually found the enemy—the body count it did inflict on the communists was a grim tribute to the efficacy of American firepower. An estimated 1 million enemy troops were chewed up by American ground and air attacks during the war.
And yet search and destroy failed because North Vietnam had 2.4 million young men of military age with 120,000 more reaching military age every year, and because corrupt, dysfunctional South Vietnam produced a steady stream of young recruits for the Viet Cong. Search and destroy failed because the Johnson administration and its generals did not appreciate just how different North Vietnam and the United States were. The United States was an affluent Western democracy that would tire of Vietnam as soon as it became a painful burden. North Vietnam was an authoritarian state fighting to unify and revolutionize Vietnam. Its aims and energy, buttressed by the resources of Moscow and Beijing, were unlimited.
And search and destroy failed because instead of securing South Vietnam, it destroyed it—literally. The United States defoliated one-seventh of South Vietnam’s territory, obliterated countless villages, and created 5 million internal refugees in the course of the war. Through it all, Westmoreland was unmoved, obtusely assuring a journalist in 1967 that this self-inflicted devastation served a purpose: “It does deprive the enemy of the population, doesn’t it?”
Westmoreland’s robotic approach to the war explained why President Kennedy had been so wary of letting the US military into Vietnam. “Watch the generals,” JFK remarked, “and avoid the feeling that just because they are military men their opinion on military matters is worth a damn.” Once the US military got into any contingency, JFK complained, the demands of the generals—for money, personnel, and facilities—always soared. True to form, Westmoreland paved South Vietnam, built container ports and air bases, and positioned field artillery everywhere in the country, but never even sniffed victory. He made the war about operational art, not strategy. He focused entirely on planning, launching, and sustaining his costly and inefficient operations without ever fitting them to an achievable endgame and an enduring peace.
Critics argued then, and still do, that had Johnson only permitted Westmoreland to do more—to attack Laos and Cambodia, to invade and pulverize North Vietnam—then the war could have been won. Beguiling as such arguments are, they are founded on nonsense. In fact, the Johnson administration looked at all of these possibilities and rejected them all not because of Johnson’s caution but because none of them were feasible.
Vietnam became such a big war so quickly that there was never any slack in the system that would permit new commitments in Cambodia, Laos, or North Vietnam. There were many reasons for this. All are explored in this book. Casual observers regard 1969’s peak American strength of 543,000 troops in Vietnam as a lot of manpower. It wasn’t. Half a million American troops never yielded more than 80,000 combat troops, so great were the demands of logistics, maintenance, and other support functions. There was a moment in 1968 when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, crushed by the war and its demands, calculated the total number of American personnel on the ground, in the sky, and on the seas around Vietnam and responded this way to a request from Westmoreland for more troops: “You have 1.2 million forces in Southeast Asia, and yet you’ve only got 50,000 or 60,000 in combat.” In view of the military’s high tail-to-tip ratio, there were never enough troops even to fight effectively in South Vietnam, let alone Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam.
Geoffrey Wawro is Professor of history at the University of North Texas and the author of The Vietnam War: A Military History.
