Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam - Hardcover

Goldstein, Gordon M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805079718 ISBN 13: 9780805079715

Publisher: Times Books, 2008

Synopsis

A revelatory look at the decisions that led to the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, drawing on the insights and reassessments of one of the war€™s architects"I had a part in a great failure. I made mistakes of perception, recommendation and execution. If I have learned anything I should share it."These are not words that Americans ever expected to hear from McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. But in the last years of his life, Bundy€”the only principal architect of Vietnam strategy to have maintained his public silence€”decided to revisit the decisions that had led to war and to look anew at the role he played. He enlisted the collaboration of the political scientist Gordon M. Goldstein, and together they explored what happened and what might have been. With Bundy€™s death in 1996, that manuscript could not be completed, but Goldstein has built on their collaboration in an origi

About this title

About the Author

Gordon M. Goldstein is a scholar of international affairs who has held executive positions in international security policy and finance. He received a Ph.D. in political science and international relations from Columbia University, and his articles have appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, and The Washington Post. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

LESSON ONE

COUNSELORS ADVISE BUT PRESIDENTS DECIDE

In my meetings with McGeorge Bundy, time seemed to stop and reverse course, back to the years of the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies, as Bundy would recall the storied cast of characters with whom he had served three decades earlier—men like Robert McNamara, the Ford Motor Company president whom Kennedy tapped to run the Pentagon; Dean Rusk, the former Rhodes Scholar and famously reserved foundation president who served as secretary of state; and Richard Bis-sell, Bundy’s old friend from the Yale economics department, who led the CIA’s so-called Black Operations to overthrow foreign leaders in Central America, Africa, and Southeast Asia.

Bundy would ruminate out loud, reconstructing the power structure of the two different administrations and the proximity of the key players to the president. He revisited bureaucratic and policy turf battles, elucidating the tactics that won influence with the president or preempted rivals. Bundy would test various historical propositions about the Cold War or American politics, circuitously weaving his observations back to the question of Vietnam. He would continually return to the theme of personality, which he treated as an intangible variable of the decision-making pro cess. The real state of play, Bundy often reminded me, could not be discerned by the documentary record alone. He advised me to be wary of the "paper trail way of missing the political point."1 Throughout all of these varied discussions, Bundy seemed content to follow a subject of interest until it yielded some insight of value or, perhaps, until it yielded nothing at all. No phones would ring. No interruptions would be allowed. Outside, the business of Manhattan bustled but the traffic below on Madison Avenue would glide by silently. Inside, free of distraction, the hours would pass, the two of us simply talking.

These initial meetings, although untethered to a formal agenda, were nonetheless instructive, producing a checklist of questions, themes, events, and personalities that Bundy would want to elaborate on in the course of our work together. But these first discussions had a deeper value as well. They captured something impalpable and difficult to distill—a sensibility specific to Bundy, a quality of perspective, a basic orientation of how he conceived of Vietnam as a subject of historical inquiry.

While the McGeorge Bundy who reigned as a legend of the Establishment was reputed to be brisk, quick, calculating, and overconfident, the retrospective Bundy of thirty years later was in many ways the opposite: patient, reflective, curious, and humble. In fact, on the question of Vietnam Bundy appeared tentative and unsure—maybe on some level even mystified. Although he never said so explicitly, he seemed to be as perplexed by the disaster of Vietnam as any of the historians who studied the decisions in which he had been a central participant. How did Bundy, the star of his generation and the preeminent mind of the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies, get Vietnam so terribly wrong? And how would he explain his failures of judgment three decades later?

It was clear from the beginning that Bundy was distinctly uninterested in the topics of Vietnamese nationalism and the origins of the communist insurgency. Early in our collaboration Bundy’s friends and colleagues from Brown University, James Blight and Janet Lang, lobbied him strenuously to chair an American delegation with McNamara that would travel to Hanoi in 1997 for a historic meeting with the surviving members of the Vietnamese political and military leadership. The purpose of the exercise was to revisit the origins of the war from both American and Vietnamese perspectives and to fill the gaps in the historical record about the key inflection points that fueled the war’s escalation in the mid-1960s. While McNamara was driven to seize the historical opportunity of an unprecedented dialogue with America’s former enemy, Bundy had no enthusiasm for examining the Vietnamese calculus of interests that contributed to war with the United States. The decision to Americanize the Vietnam War in 1965, Bundy told me, was a decision made in Washington and not in Hanoi. It was inherently a presidential decision, he argued, and thus had to be studied through the prism of the two men he served who held ultimate authority for questions of war and peace—President Kennedy and President Johnson.

To understand his own role in shaping America’s fate in Vietnam, Bundy would have to see it illuminated by the presidents he counseled. We would therefore begin at the point of exposition most logical to Bundy, with a systematic examination of how Kennedy encountered Vietnam in his first year in office, and of the decisions he made about the deployment of American power there in the course of his presidency.

Bundy had, of course, read innumerable histories of the Kennedy administration, but in the decades since he left government he had not read the gradually accumulating body of declassified government documents on Kennedy and Vietnam, many of which were compiled by the State Department and published in the bound crimson volumes known as Foreign Relations of the United States. This voluminous chronological compilation of documents about Vietnam policy—memoranda, meeting summaries, cables, correspondence, intelligence estimates, defense analyses, mission reports—was unexplored historical territory for Bundy. It was here, in the thousands of pages of government documents rather than in a conference room in Hanoi, where Bundy wanted to search for insights into the Vietnam War. For Bundy it was the right course. He learned that sometimes pivotal episodes in history can hide in plain sight.

As I compiled various outlines and research memoranda for Bundy about the history of Kennedy’s first year in office, it became obvious that the prospect of intervention in Vietnam was among the major challenges he confronted. In fact, in the fall of 1961 Kennedy’s most senior advisers almost unanimously warned him that the odds were sharply against avoiding a catastrophic defeat in Vietnam unless the president approved the first increment of a ground combat force deployment that might ultimately reach six divisions, or more than two hundred thousand men. Among the president’s advisers to join that recommendation was McGeorge Bundy. "Remarkable," he told me when I brought the 1961 recommendation to his attention. "I have no memory of this whatsoever." But there it was in the documents for Bundy to see—the narrative of an emerging crisis in Saigon and Kennedy’s struggle with his counselors, including his national security adviser, over how to respond.

Kennedy’s management of Vietnam in 1961 became a central focus for Bundy and an inflection point in his retrospective conclusions about the history of the war. While he did not complete his history of Kennedy’s decisions of that year he left no doubt about the importance he ascribed to them. "The policy I want to consider was in fact adopted by President Kennedy late in 1961, and sustained—though not explained—through his time as President," Bundy explained in a draft fragment. "It was maintained by Lyndon Johnson through the election year 1964, and abandoned as quietly as possible in 1965. It was the course of not engaging American ground combat troops in the war."2

"We would not have called ourselves cold warriors," Bundy observed of the new Kennedy administration. But Kennedy’s men were united in their awareness that the Cold War was a global competition, and they shared a belief that the United States "should play our necessary part." Bundy described the New Frontier mindset as one in which foreign policy was to be guided by considerations of national interest and a calculus of "circumstances and capabilities," which might take the form of a formal alliance, foreign assistance, or—if appropriate—disengagement.3 He added: " To understand the American war in Vietnam we must understand the prevalence of strong political sentiment that it was right to oppose the world-wide expansionist effort of the Soviet Communists and their allies."4

The rising tensions of the Cold War contributed to an anxious political atmosphere in the 1960 presidential race between Senator Kennedy and Vice President Nixon. The election turned out to be the closest of the century. Of more than sixty-four million votes cast, Kennedy’s margin of victory was approximately one hundred thousand, about one-tenth of 1 percent. Pivotal to Kennedy’s victory was his adept and opportunistic positioning on national security. Relentlessly attacking from the right—campaigning aggressively against President Eisenhower’s foreign policy record and, in part, on a mythical "missile gap"—the Democratic challenger crafted a message of toughness. That same message of resolve would be infused in Kennedy’s soaring inaugural address in January 1961, which promised the world, "We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty."

McGeorge Bundy, a lifelong Republican, had spurned Nixon in 1960 to support Kennedy. The candidate was pleased to have his endorsement, said Bundy, "although reinforcement in Massachusetts was hardly his most urgent need."5 In the weeks following Kennedy’s razor-thin victory, prospective senior administration recruits—a talent pool drawn primarily from the Establishment waters between Washington and Boston—waited expectantly for an overture from the president-elect. Bundy was no exception. Sargent Shriver, the president-elect’s brother-in-law, queried Bundy about his interest in joining the new administration. "For an interesting job," Bundy told him, "I would indeed be interested." About a week later Kennedy and Bundy met in New York. Bundy was offered the chance to work with the ne...

Edition details

• Publisher: Times Books
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0805079718
• ISBN 13: 9780805079715
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320