John T. McNaughton and Vietnam: The Early Years as ... - Viet-studies

Blackwell Oxford, HIST History 0018-2648 © XXX Original JOHN BENJAMIN 2007 T. The UK Articles MCNAUGHTON Publishing Historical T. HARRISON Ltd Association AND and VIETNAM CHRISTOPHER Blackwell Publishing L. MOSHER Ltd. 

John T. McNaughton and Vietnam: The Early 

Years as Assistant Secretary of Defense, 

1964–1965 

BENJAMIN T. HARRISON and 

CHRISTOPHER L. MOSHER 

University of Louisville and Arlington, Virginia 

Abstract 

John T. McNaughton is one of the least understood of the major American officials 

involved in formulating US policy towards the Vietnam War. This article uses a newly 

discovered journal by McNaughton as well as his private papers to examine the reasons 

for his opposition to the Vietnam War and to suggest that his perceived image as a ‘hawk’ 

is inaccurate. 

Nearly four decades after his death in 1967, John T. McNaughton 

remains one of the least understood major players in the policy 

of the United States towards the Vietnam War. He served as 

assistant secretary of defense from 1964 to 1967 and was Secretary of 

Defense Robert McNamara’s right-hand man for what many writers 

consider to be ‘McNamara’s War’. 1 This current article on his early years 

in office from 1964 to 1965 is based primarily on a newly discovered 

journal by McNaughton as well as his private papers. 2 The sources reveal 

why McNaughton opposed the Vietnam War. Indeed, his perceived image 

as a ‘hawk’ is one of the great misconceptions concerning the war. 3 One 

can read his memorandums in the Pentagon Papers and easily come away 

with the impression that McNaughton was pro-war, and even Henry 

Kissinger has observed that the Pentagon study on Vietnam portrayed 

1 For example, see Paul Hendrickson, The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives 

of a Lost War (New York, 1966); Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson’s Secret White House Tapes, 

1964–1965, 

ed. Michael Bechloss (New York, 2001) [hereafter Johnson’s White House Tapes], 

p. 40; 

Deborah Shapley, Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara (Boston, 1993), 

p. 302. 

2 A second article is in progress dealing with McNaughton’s last two years in the Pentagon. It 

should be noted that one author of this work is a liberal Democrat and the other is a conservative 

Republican. 

3 

The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, 

ed. Senator Mike Gravel (5 vols., Boston, 1971) [hereafter GPP]. 

© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing. 

Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, 

Malden, MA 02148, USA.

BENJAMIN T. HARRISON AND CHRISTOPHER L. MOSHER 497 

him unfairly. 4 Moreover, Robert McNamara has categorically denied 

that his assistant was ever a ‘secret dove’. 5 Obviously the former secretary 

of defense, who made only a few obscure references to McNaughton in 

his memoirs, is best served by making his own evolution to dove status a 

solitary one to his own personal credit alone. But all is not so simple, as 

is made clear in this article which sheds new light on both McNaughton 

and McNamara. 

Obviously there were not many doves in the Kennedy and Johnson 

administrations. 6 John McNaughton was unusual not only as an opponent 

of the Vietnam War but also because he was a Midwesterner in what was 

a predominately Northeastern establishment. He grew up in Pekin, Illinois 

(b. 1921), where his father owned a newspaper. He became its editor 

(1951–2) after serving in the Second World War, a stint as a Rhodes 

Scholar and completing his legal studies. He ran unsuccessfully for 

Congress in 1952 and the next year joined the faculty of Harvard Law 

School. He became deputy assistant secretary of defense for arms control 

in 1961 and established his reputation as one of the leading experts of the 

day on nuclear disarmament as well as playing a role in negotiating the 

Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1963). His fervent support for limiting nuclear 

weapons would certainly endear him to Robert McNamara because 

McNamara has campaigned tirelessly for nuclear disarmament. 

Nevertheless, McNaughton and McNamara had their differences. 

Indeed, McNaughton’s previous involvement with elective politics and 

McNamara’s total lack of political experience would separate the two on 

Vietnam policy. The secretary of defense was more typical of the 

‘Camelot’ group associated with President John Kennedy that had never 

run for political office. These individuals lacked a feeling for American 

public sentiment on the war and for the Vietnamese thirst for independence. 

When President Lyndon Johnson bragged to his mentor, House 

Speaker Sam Rayburn, about the illustrious staff he had inherited from 

Kennedy, the response was the sage observation, ‘Well, Lyndon, you 

might be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I’d 

feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff 

once.’ 7 With elective office not in their background, it was easy for them 

to ignore public opposition at home and abroad. Johnson should have 

paid more attention to that reality, but it is one of the many facts he 

ignored concerning Vietnam. McNamara was once asked why he had 

turned down the vice-presidential ticket in 1964. ‘I really believed,’ he 

replied, ‘I was totally incompetent to run with no experience on an 

4 Inside the Pentagon Papers, 

ed. John Pradas and Margaret P. Porter (Lawrence, Kan., 2004) 

[hereafter Inside the Pentagon Papers], p. 78. 

5 Question posed by Benjamin Harrison during the ‘Question and Answer’ period following Robert 

McNamara’s talk on ‘World Security’ at University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky, 2 Dec. 

2002. Further attempts to interview McNamara were declined. 

6 David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York, 1972) [hereafter Halberstam, Best and 

Brightest]. 

7 Ibid., p. 53. 

© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing.

498 JOHN T. MCNAUGHTON AND VIETNAM 

elected office campaign.’ 8 It would be McNaughton, as will be seen, who 

had his hand on the pulse of the American electorate as well as the Vietnamese. 

At one point in 1965 when an assistant mentioned the difficulty 

of the United States getting out of Vietnam, McNaughton would make 

the comment, ‘Surely no one thinks we can perform lobotomies on all 

indigenous VC!’ 

9 

McNaughton’s reference to altering Vietnamese minds 

goes to the heart of his opposition to the Vietnam War. Had national 

elections under the Geneva Accords actually taken place, US officials 

estimated that Ho Chi Minh would have received perhaps 80 per cent of 

the vote. 

10 

It would have taken lobotomies to change that stark political 

reality and McNaughton appreciated the importance of popular will in 

the Vietnam situation. 

Few officials in Washington, however, were particularly interested in 

the domestic will of the Vietnamese people in the mid-1960s. One exception 

was John T. McNaughton, who became assistant secretary of defense for 

International Security in March 1964. He shared his views on Vietnam 

with his boss, Robert McNamara, and a close circle of colleagues. When 

his ideas were rejected, he kept trying alternative ways to get the United 

States out of Vietnam. He was, however, careful not to contradict 

McNamara in government meetings. President Johnson was not the 

type of individual to reward dissent and neither was McNamara. 

McNaughton could see that Undersecretary of State George Ball was 

not receiving any promotions for being a nay-sayer. His closest friend in 

government to whom he confided was Michael Forrestal of the National 

Security Council and Forrestal’s own government career would end in 

shambles. He left government service convinced that Johnson did not 

tolerate differences and that people were afraid to speak their minds. 

That atmosphere is well illustrated by a story in which President Johnson 

tells his aides, Jack Valenti and Walter Jenkins, that when they considered 

government appointees, they were ‘to swear ’em into loyalty and devotion 

and do or die, right or wrong’. 

12 

With that environment, it is little wonder 

few people spoke up and voiced dissenting views at government meetings. 

McNaughton noted in his diary that the atmosphere in the nation’s 

capital was like ‘the last days of Stalin’ when ‘no one could tell his woes 

to anyone for fear he would be turned, and done, in.’ 13 

8 Oral Interview by Robert Dallek, 26 March 1993, Lyndon B. Johnson Library [LBJL], Austin, 

Texas. 

9 Papers of John T. McNaughton [JTM Papers], found in the Paul Warnke Papers, LBJL Box 1, 

File 1, #15, memo dated 12 Dec. 1965. 

10 Dwight D. Eisenhower, The White House Years, 

i: Mandate for Change, 1953–1956 (New York, 

1963) [hereafter Eisenhower, Mandate for Change], 

p. 372. British Intelligence placed the figure at 

90 per cent. William Bundy confirmed the support for Ho in a memo of 15 April 1965. See Kai 

Bird, The Color of Truth: McGeorge and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms (New York, 1998) [hereafter 

Bird Color of Truth], 

p. 451, fn. 62. Also see GPP, 

i. 52. 

11 Oral Interview by Paige E. Mulhollan, 3 Nov. 1969, LBJL, pp. 29–30. 

12 Johnson’s White House Tapes, 

p. 122. 

13 McNaughton Diary, 6 Jan. 1966, p. 13, Alex McNaughton’s Files, with a photocopy in the 

current author’s files. 


11


George Ball is generally regarded as the lone dove in the Kennedy 

and Johnson administrations. He was known to be a eurocentrist so that 

colleagues easily ignored his opposition. 14 But McNaughton’s views were 

not so easy to dismiss. Besides, Ball’s job in the state department was to 

develop strategies and policies. McNaughton’s job in the Pentagon was 

to formulate options and tactics for implementing policy. When Ball 

dissented, he made it clear that whatever policy was decided upon, he 

was ‘committed’. 15 By contrast, McNaughton saw himself in the role of 

an unbiased attorney defending a client. He would make his case to 

McNamara and, if his arguments were rejected, he would move on to 

fight another day. After all, it was clear that Johnson could not conceive 

of defeat in Vietnam. Moreover, the commitment that led to a major 

escalation of the Vietnam War had already been made by the time 

McNaughton became assistant secretary of defense in 1964. He had to 

select bombing targets even as he presented reasons for getting out of 

Vietnam. His colleague at Harvard, Roger Fisher, explained: 

McNaughton did more sustained thinking about the benefits of both 

escalation and withdrawal than any of the advocates of either position . . . 

He was an expert on dealing within the realm of the possible. If it seemed 

certain that an idea would not now be accepted, he would bide his time. 16 

Alternatives were not easy to come by in a war that McNaughton had 

already said would require lobotomies for success. As he so shrewdly 

observed, the situation in Vietnam was a case of the United States giving 

illegitimate birth to South Vietnam. 


17 

In his opinion, the United States 

had given birth to a country that had no legitimacy because its own people 

did not support it. 

John McNaughton was convinced that the lack of popular support for 

the government of South Vietnam was the main reason why the United 

States should not even be there in the first place. James C. Thomson, Jr., 

an aide to the Bundy brothers 

18 

at various times, talked to McNaughton 

about what was wrong with US involvement in Vietnam. The assistant 

secretary of defense sarcastically responded, ‘You don’t really think we 

should be there?’ When Thomson left government in 1966, McNaughton 

tried to persuade him to stay on as a staff member in the Pentagon. 

Thomson responded that would be hard for a ‘through and through 

deep-dyed peacenik’. McNaughton quickly replied, ‘Do they know that 

on the outside?’ Thomson answered that he did not think anyone outside 

the government knew of his dovishness. McNaughton was ecstatic, 

See David L. DiLeo, 

14 

1991). 

15 

George Ball, Vietnam and the Rethinking of Containment (Chapel Hill, NC, 

A. J. Langguth, Our Vietnam: The War, 1954–1975 (New York, 2000) [hereafter Langguth, Our 

Vietnam], 

p. 378. 

16 ‘Letter to the Editor’, New Republic, 

5 Sept. 1967, p. 44. 

17 JTM Papers, Box 2, File V, #34, 5 Nov. 1964, LBJL. 

18 McGeorge Bundy served as National Security Advisor. His brother, William P. Bundy, was 

McNaughton’s predecessor at the Pentagon before becoming assistant secretary of state.


saying, ‘That’s all we want. What we need here is peaceniks.’ 19 His wit 

similarly shines through in so many of his memorandums found in his 

private papers. In perhaps the most revealing memo on why he opposed 

the war, he hand-drafted six reasons in June 1965. To begin with, 

McNaughton did not believe Vietnam was in the ‘sphere of influence’ of 

the United States. Furthermore, he insisted the enemy in Vietnam had 

no other option but to resort to arms because there was no available 

democratic process to obtain political power. He then noted that he 

admired the spirit and morale of the enemy in Vietnam and criticized the 

Saigon government as ‘slobs’. He was convinced that the weak and poor 

in Vietnam should prevail over the ‘elite’. And lastly, McNaughton 

concluded that Vietnam should be an independent, unified country with 

its destiny determined by the Vietnamese themselves. 


20 

No one knew 

better than John McNaughton that the vast majority of Vietnamese 

would vote for Ho Chi Minh. Thus, South Vietnam was a congenital 

impossibility and he believed the only hope of successfully maintaining 

its existence would be to perform lobotomies on all Vietnamese. 

When McNaughton arrived at the Pentagon early in 1964, the war in 

Vietnam was in the process of becoming ‘Americanized’. Officially, the 

year began with the United States ‘assisting’ the South Vietnamese 

governments in their efforts against the ‘eighty per cent’ of Vietnamese 

who supported Ho Chi Minh. By the end of the year, the government of 

South Vietnam (GVN) would be going through the motions of ‘assisting’ 

the United States. McNaughton faced the daunting task of developing 

policy options to remedy the deteriorating situation in Vietnam, which 

was so bad that he believed the Saigon government might ‘go down the 

drain’. 

21 

He was ready to say good riddance to Vietnam. A working 

paper found in McNaughton’s files for 1964 asked the question: ‘What if 

the GVN collapses . . . ?’ A section addressed the issue of ‘answers’ with 

these possibilities: 

a. Seek to reestablish viable government . . . 

b. Establish figurehead. . . . 

c. If all of above fails, cut losses and negotiate settlement. 22 

The assistant defense secretary was evidently thinking the unthinkable: 

the United States should ‘cut losses’ and get out of Vietnam. 

McNaughton confided his dark thoughts to individuals like presidential 

aide Michael Forrestal, who in 1964 was still opposed to the option of 

cutting losses just as was McNamara. He would say, ‘the trouble with 

you Forrestal is that you think we can turn this thing off, and that we can 

get out whenever we want. But I wonder. I think if it was easy to get off 

19 Oral Interview by Paige Mulhollan, 22 July 1971, LJBL. 

20 JTM Papers, Box 1, File IV, 1965, #59, June 1965, LBJL; although it is unsigned, his son has 

confirmed it is his father’s handwriting and it indeed matches his journal penmanship. 

21 Memo found in JTM Papers, Box 2, File V, #32, File for 1964 memos, undated. 

22 JTM Papers, Box 8 File III, unsigned and undated, #16 and 16a.


of it, we would have gotten off.’ McNaughton was convinced that, as the 

United States got deeper and deeper into the Vietnam War during 1964, 

it would become harder and harder to pull out. He insisted, ‘each day we 

lose a little control, each decision that we make wrong, or didn’t make 

at all, makes the next decision a little bit harder because if we haven’t 

stopped it today, then the reasons for not stopping it will still exist 

tomorrow and we’ll be in even deeper’. 


23 

In 1964, McNaughton must 

have felt as if he was beating his head against a brick wall in the Pentagon, 

and his views were made known to all his close associates and above all 

to Robert McNamara. In the end, McNaughton concluded that progress 

in Vietnam was ‘unlikely despite our best ideas and efforts’. 

24 

It was an 

impossible situation with no solution available. 

In March 1964, the National Security Council (NSC) Paper #288 

(also known as NSAM 288) was completed. Although McNaughton 

has mistakenly been credited as its author, 25 William P. Bundy, assistant 

secretary of state for Eastern Affairs, has stated in his unpublished history 

of the war that he wrote NSAM 288. It was a very bellicose document 

putting forth the domino theory at the heart of American strategy. 

fact, the domino theory was soundly rejected by McNaughton. In 1964, 

a memo in his files concludes, ‘We do not believe that the loss of South 

Vietnam and Laos would be followed by the rapid, successive commun- 

ization of the other states of the Far East.’ 

27 

26 

In 

By May 1964, even Forrestal 

was having second thoughts about Vietnam policy and this time it was 

McNaughton who got an earful from his confidant about the economic 

costs of counter-insurgency. Forrestal later apologized and wrote to 

McNaughton, ‘Pardon my “reactive” logic in the elevator this afternoon’. 

He added that he had ‘come to the point myself where I am beginning to 

question whether we can learn fast enough to avoid disaster in Southeast 

Asia’. 

28 

Forrestal was actually recognizing what McNaughton had known 

all along. The United States was not winning the hearts and minds of the 

Vietnamese people. National Security Council staffer Chester Cooper 

also came to acknowledge the validity of McNaughton’s view on the 

23 Halberstam, Best and Brightest, 

p. 368; and H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, 

Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam (New York, 1997), 

p. 183. 

24 GPP, 

iii. 212. Forrestal apparently remained a ‘soft hawk’. On this see Andrew Preston, ‘The 

Soft Hawk’s Dilemma in Vietnam: Michael V. Forrestal at the National Security Council, 1962– 

1964’, International History Review, 

xxv (2003), 63–95. Joseph Kraft came to similar conclusions 

in his December 1964 article for Harper’s titled ‘A Way out of Vietnam’, based on clandestine 

interviews with members of government. 

25 Halberstam, Best and Brightest, 

p. 354. 

26 William P. Bundy, Vietnam Manuscript, William P. Bundy Papers, Box 1, ch. 12, p. 21, LBJL. 

27 JTM Papers, Box 2, File V, #36, ‘memorandum for the director’, 9 June 1964, LBJL. The memo 

was in his files because he considered himself to be one of the ‘we’ referred to in the quote. It was 

drafted by CIA staff member, Sherman Kent, for the Board of National Estimates as found in US 

Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: 1964, Vietnam, 

i (Washington, DC, 

1965–2000) [hereafter FRUS], 

p. 995. 

28 Michael Forrestal to John McNaughton, 1 May 1964, Papers of Lyndon Johnson, National 

Security File – Vietnam, Box 4, LBJL.


war. Cooper was later asked if the dovish views on Vietnam within the 

government came from ‘McNaughton’s shop, particularly’. He answered 

in the affirmative. 29 

With the autumn of 1964 bringing the Gulf of Tonkin Incident30 

and 

the excuse the administration would use for retaliatory military escalation, 

McNaughton found himself in a personal dilemma. Forrestal insisted, 

‘There were a number of people, and I was part of that number, who 

didn’t believe in this retaliatory thing at all.’ 31 McNaughton was part of 

the group opposing retaliatory bombing of North Vietnam, but that 

group notably did not include McNamara. The situation in South 

Vietnam was deteriorating and pressure mounted from within the Johnson 

administration to bomb North Vietnam. As David Halberstam has said, 

‘no one argued more forcefully with his immediate superior’ against 

escalation than John McNaughton. 32 However, if one relies only on 

McNaughton’s writings which have been published in the Pentagon 

Papers, 

the opposite appears to be true because he authored countless 

memoranda focusing on the bombing programme even as he opposed 

the war. One of his staffers observed that, when seeing McNaughton’s 

private papers after he was killed in the plane accident of 1967, it was 

like looking at a secret McNaughton. 33 Memo after memo in these files 

show that he urged a negotiated settlement on even unfavourable terms 

believing the GVN ‘had almost no legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens’. 34 

His diary presents the same evidence. McNaughton believed ‘the situation 

is deteriorating rapidly in South Vietnam, and the trend is not likely to 

change.’ 35 He urged direct communication with the government in 

Hanoi. But in September, after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, few officials 

in the Johnson administration were eager to open lines of communication 

with Hanoi. The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and McNamara favoured 

bombing. So the ‘options man’, John McNaughton, proposed a ‘Plan of 

Action’ that aimed to satisfy the demands of his boss. The memo outlined 

air strikes on infiltration routes, coastal raids on North Vietnam and more 

naval patrols in the Gulf of Tonkin, but as the analysts of the Pentagon 

Papers concluded, he urged that the pace of escalation ‘be slowed down’. 

McNaughton wanted ‘to preserve where possible the option to have no 

U.S. military action at all’. 36 

29 Oral interview by Paige Mulhollan, 9 July 1969, LBJL. 

30 In August 1964, US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin were fired upon by the North Vietnamese. 

31 Oral Interview by Paige Mulhollan, 3 Nov. 1969, LBJL. 

32 Halberstam, Best and Brightest, p. 362. 

33 Ibid. Halberstam identified the source of that reference as Richard Ullman in a correspondence 

dated 5 April 2001, David Halberstam to Benjamin Harrison, author’s private files. Ullman did not 

respond to this reference in e-mail correspondence. 

34 Robert Topmiller, ‘A Missed Opportunity for Peace, Victory – 1966’, Peace and Change, xxvii 

(2002), 60; see also Topmiller’s The Lotus Unleashed: The Buddhist Peace Movement in South Vietnam 

(Lexington, Ky., 2002), p. 362. 

35 FRUS, 1964, Vietnam, i. 793. 

36 The Pentagon Papers as Published by the New York Times, ed. New York Times (New York, 1971) 

[hereafter NYTPP], pp. 308–9, 355–7; GPP, iii. 204–5, 222. 



McNaughton’s job at the Pentagon may have required the formulation 

of bombing plans, but he believed the United States should never have 

been in Vietnam at all. Others within the administration spoke out 

against military escalation when the Tonkin crisis occurred. For example, 

George Ball continued to argue against involvement in Vietnam and he 

and McNaughton were briefly joined by William P. Bundy, who was 

McNaughton’s predecessor in the Pentagon. Bundy wrote a 42-page 

memo saying, ‘Americans should walk away from Vietnam’. His biographer 

says never again would Bundy attempt to make such a case because of 

the criticism it received from Rusk and McNamara. 37 Clearly, ‘American 

decision makers in 1964–1965 did not walk blindly into the Vietnam 

quagmire . . . They were under no illusions’, as one scholar has so ably 

argued. 38 The voices of criticism make it untenable to argue in favour of 

the quagmire theory, which maintains that the United States accidentally 

got pulled into Vietnam without planning and against its will. At the 

time administrative officials were well aware of what they were getting 

into in the mid-1960s. As Chester Cooper has previously remarked, 

‘McNaughton’s Shop’ was dovish. McNaughton’s was not the only 

dovish voice in government, but it was the most consistent and persistent 

voice directed at Robert McNamara during ‘McNamara’s War’. It was 

also the one voice that could not be so easily rationalized away as was 

the case with George Ball’s eurocentric views. It may have been limited in 

terms of who heard the dissent, but his private papers and journals make 

it clear McNamara knew, as well as others. Even McGeorge Bundy 

informed Johnson that both the state and defense departments had 

‘second level men’ who were pessimistic about South Vietnam’s future 

and, of course, this was referring to ‘McNaughton’s shop’. 39 

McNaughton made his views known to colleagues but because of his 

sense of loyalty to his boss and the repressive atmosphere of the Johnson 

bureaucracy, he would not openly contradict McNamara at meetings. 40 

McNaughton believed that American credibility as a world leader 

was not at stake in Vietnam. He felt the United States had ‘assisted’ the 

Saigon government in its efforts to remain non-communist and had been 

a ‘good doctor’ who had simply lost a patient that was beyond repair. In 

a memo titled ‘Aims and Options in Southeast Asia’ dated 13 October 

1964, he insisted, ‘It is essential . . . however badly SEA [Southeast Asia] 

may go over the next 2–4 years – that U.S. emerge as a “good doctor”.’ 41 

37 Bird, Color of Truth, pp. 293–4, and William Bundy, ‘Vietnam Manuscript’, Bundy Papers, Box 1, 

ch. 17, pp. 8–9 and 16, LBJL. 

38 Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam 

(Berkeley, Calif., 1999), p. 255. 

39 McGeorge Bundy to Lyndon B. Johnson, 1 July 1965, FRUS, June–December 1965, Vietnam, 

p. 116. 

40 Halberstam, Best and Brightest, pp. 368, 516; Michael Forrestal’s Oral Interview, 3 Nov. 1969, 

pp. 29–30, LBJL; George Ball: Oral Interview by Paige Mulhollan, 8–9 July 1971, tape 11, pp. 37–8, 

LBJL; Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (New York, 2002) 

[hereafter Ellsberg, Secrets], p. 53. 

41 JTM Papers, Box 2, File V, #35, LBJL. 



America had done its best to preserve a non-communist Vietnam, but 

the Saigon government had failed to do its part. Forrestal later used the 

metaphor almost word for word in his own oral interview: ‘If the patient 

died, well, that wasn’t the fault of the doctor. He had done his best.’ 42 

Having lived up to obligations to assist Saigon, McNaughton believed it 

was now time to move on. In his view, the rest of south-east Asia was not 

going to fall like a row of dominos. But Lyndon Johnson did not see the 

situation in that light. He believed his personal reputation was on the 

line, as well as the country’s, and he was not going to be the first president, 

as he saw it, to lose a war. 43 

Consequently, McNaughton was pinned into a very limited corner on 

Vietnam. He became part of a working group 44 that first met on 3 

November, the day of the presidential election, and was assigned the 

unenviable task of preparing a set of options for courses of action for 

Vietnam. A few days later, the working group proposed three options: 

‘Continue present policies’; ‘Full Squeeze’ (which included mining 

Hanoi’s harbours and major strategic bombing) and ‘Limited Squeeze’ 

(which was somewhere in between the other two options and included 

peace talks). McNaughton favoured the last option and spoke of the 

‘congenital impossibility . . . of the South Vietnam case’ as legitimate 

grounds for ‘South Vietnam[’s] collapse beneath us’. 45 Once again 

McNaughton’s reference to the Saigon case being a ‘congenital 

impossibility’ speaks volumes. The Saigon government was a creation of 

the United States, yet intelligence reports suggested the overwhelming 

majority of Vietnamese supported the enemy. 46 With that public sentiment 

so strongly against the GVN, it was clearly an illegitimate government 

owing its existence to the United States. No doctor, no matter how ‘good’, 

could bring about a birth that had so little life support. McNaughton 

was a realist and disturbed by the old Manifest Destiny desire of the 

United States to have everyone think the way America thinks. Nor did he 

accept the cold war myth that ‘we’ were always right and ‘they’ were 

always wrong. For him, the ‘hearts and minds’ of the Vietnamese created 

a real problem which no amount of military escalation could change. 

On 23 November, McNaughton informed William Bundy that he 

favoured bringing about a situation in Vietnam where ‘risk is not high of 

escalation to major conflict or of having to disengage later when we have 

even more chips on the table’. 47 Escalation of commitment in Vietnam 

42 Oral Interview Michael Forrestal, pp. 43–4, LBJL. 

43 Robert Dallek, ‘Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam: The Making of a Tragedy’, Diplomatic History, 

xx (1996), 151–4; see also Dallek’s Flawed Giant: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1960–1973 (New York, 1998), 

pp. 97 ff. 

44 Johnson established the Working Group, which included McNaughton; Vice-Admiral Lloyd 

Mustin of the JCS, George Carver and Harold Ford of CIA, Robert Johnson, Marshall Green, 

Michael Forester, all from the State Department; William Bundy of the State Department was the 

chairman. See Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990 (New York, 1991), pp. 130–1. 

45 JTM papers, Box 2, File V, #34 and 35 and NYTPP, pp. 365–8. 

46 Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, p. 372 and GPP, i. 52. 

47 JTM Papers, Box 8, File IV, #7a, 11 Nov. 1964, LBJL. 



made it more difficult to pull out. The good doctor was ready to pull the 

plug in 1964 because of the impossibility of keeping South Vietnam noncommunist. 

December 1964 would be the first occasion, McNaughton 

later wrote, on which he presented his case for getting the United States 

out of Vietnam. He knew full well that failure in Vietnam could destroy 

McNamara’s career and ‘would prevent LBJ’s reelection’. Even so, he 

still opposed America’s presence in Vietnam. Officials of the Saigon 

government were making ‘public asses of themselves’ and the assistant 

defense secretary was convinced the time had come to give up on the 

patient. In 1966, he wrote that he made two more futile attempts to get 

the United States to withdraw from Vietnam. 48 Actually, he had tried to 

do this on numerous occasions. Between 1964 and 1966, he wrote memo 

after memo remarking on the illegitimate nature of the South Vietnamese 

government’s existence. 

In January 1965, for example, McNaughton wrote to McNamara that 

South Vietnam was being ‘lost’ and he expected a government to emerge 

that was ‘not unfriendly to the DRV [Democratic Republic of Vietnam]’. 

Consequently, he did not agree with requests from the JCS for increased 

‘support troops’ because it would be trying to salvage a hopeless situation. 49 

He reiterated this theme at the end of the month telling McNamara that 

the incompetence of the Saigon government could give the United States 

an excuse to ‘dump’ the GVN. McNaughton urged that the United 

States ‘continue vigorous advisory efforts, but add no more U.S. men’. 

The narrators of the Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers have noted 

that on the same date McNamara ‘seemed a good deal less dubious 

than was McNaughton about the potential benefits to be derived from 

initiating air strikes against the DRV’. 50 In fact, McNaughton opposed 

any further escalation of American commitments in Vietnam. The Saigon 

government did not have the support of the people and the bombing had 

not changed anything. His old mentor at Harvard, Professor Thomas 

Schelling, had convinced McNaughton that if bombing did not succeed 

within the first three weeks, it was a hopeless strategy. 51 US Army General 

Westmoreland was furious with McNaughton because of his negative 

attitude towards bombing, referring sarcastically to McNaughton as 

part of the ‘superior Ivy League intellectuals’. 52 That year McNaughton 

even opposed sending military assistance to Latin America. 53 So military 

leaders and McNaughton were strange bedfellows indeed! 

An interesting memorandum exists in McNaughton’s private 1965 

files, undated and unsigned, and titled ‘Probable Reactions to the Cutting 

48 McNaughton Diary, 18 Oct. 1966, p. 1116 [sic] 117, Alex McNaughton’s Files. There is a typo 

on the journal’s page number: it is p. 116 not 1116. 

49 GPP, iii. 683, ‘Observations Re South Vietnam’, 4 Jan. 1965. 

50 Ibid., iii. 297, 686–7. 

51 Fred Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon (New York, 1983), pp. 333–6. 

52 William Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (New York, 1976) [hereafter Westmoreland, A Soldier 

Reports], p. 100. 

53 Stephen G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999), p. 145. 



of Our Losses in South Vietnam’. In that memo there is the conclusion 

that the United States has ‘tended to exaggerate the losses’ with a 

settlement in Vietnam. He added: ‘on balance I believe we would more 

seriously undermine the effectiveness of our world leadership by continuing 

the war and deepening our involvement than by pursuing a carefully 

plotted course toward a compromise solution’. 54 He was arguing that 

continuing involvement in Vietnam hurt, not helped, the global reputation 

of the United States. In February 1965, McNaughton and McGeorge 

Bundy visited Saigon and drafted a memorandum which not only stated 

that the situation in Vietnam was ‘deteriorating’ but added that ‘an 

eventual VC [Vietcong] take over’ was likely after the Pleiku incident. 55 

The narrators of the Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers concluded: 

‘these views were fully consistent with USIB [United States Intelligence 

Board] approved intelligence estimates’. 56 McNaughton’s assessment 

of the situation in Vietnam was not based on guesswork. He simply 

interpreted the situation differently from most at the top of the federal 

bureaucracy. Indeed, after the failed operation at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba 

four years before, the intelligence community was in disrepute. But when 

it came to estimates concerning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese, 

hindsight indicates, McNaughton and the intelligence community were 

far more on target than most other sources. 

March 1965 was a very important month for the United States in the 

Vietnam War. After the attack by the enemy on Pleiku the previous 

month with eight American soldiers killed, plans for major escalation 

swept through Washington like wildfire. The dispatch of American 

ground troops was perceived to be the answer by most of the Johnson 

administration. McNaughton disagreed. He screamed at a subordinate, 

‘Oh my God! We’re “sending in the Marines”. That means we’ll never get 

out!’ 57 He tried to ‘add a monkey wrench’, according to the narration 

of the Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers, by suggesting the 173rd 

Airborne be sent instead of ground troops because it would be less of 

a commitment and could be easily withdrawn. 58 General Westmoreland 

was furious. The ‘superior Ivy League’ intellectual was at it again and 

the military brass would not stand for this ‘monkey wrench’ messing up 

their plans. 59 McNaughton lost another battle and the last door was 

opened for a US commitment that would be virtually impossible to 

reverse. As he had told Forrestal the year before, it would not be easy to 

‘turn this thing off’ once ‘in’. The deeper the commitment the ‘harder 

54 JTM Papers, Box 1, File IV (1965), #58c, LBJL. The authorship determination is based on a 

comparison of typewriter characters that are consistent with his other memorandums. 

55 An American air base at Pleiku was attacked by the enemy on 7 Feb. 1965; eight Americans were 

killed and aircraft were destroyed. This became the excuse for the Johnson administration to send 

in ground troops to protect the planes. 

56 GPP, iii. 293. 

57 Ellsberg, Secrets, p. 73. 

58 NYTPP, p. 384, and GPP, iii. 433. 

59 Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, pp. 123, 149. 



and harder to pull out’ and the more difficult it becomes to end the 

disaster. 60 On 2 March 1965, McNaughton wrote a memorandum saying: 

‘I am concerned that we not rush in and take over the conduct of the war 

from the Vietnamese. I think that it would be a political and psychological 

mistake to change our past position that this is a Vietnamese war in 

which we are helping’. 61 Rush to make that very mistake the United 

States did, much against McNaughton’s better judgement. 

McNaughton was sent to Saigon for a week in the spring of 1965 in 

order to see first hand how the war was going and he drafted another 

memo during that time which suggested that, by introducing ground 

troops, the United States was making the mistake which could lead to 

‘undesirable escalation or defeat’. He believed the United States should 

be prepared to accept a negotiated settlement and cut its losses. 62 In a 

redraft of that memo, dated 24 March, McNaughton introduced his 

famous equation of US Aims in Vietnam: 

70% – to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat 

(to our reputation as a guarantor) 

20% – to keep SVN (and the adjacent) 

territory from Chinese hands 

10% – to permit the people of SVN to 

enjoy a better, freer way of life. 63 

The United States was not in Vietnam mainly for democracy but more 

so for its own perceived credibility. McNaughton had already argued 

that the United States’ global reputation was hurt more by being in 

Vietnam than by withdrawing. He seemed to suggest that the stakes in 

Vietnam were not laid in concrete and that the United States could exit 

without serious consequences. He added that it was important to emerge 

from the Vietnam conflict ‘without unacceptable taint from methods 

used’. It pained him that a superpower was crushing a small, primitive 

country with incredible force. He concluded that the United States was 

‘NOT’ in Vietnam ‘to help a friend, although it would be hard to stay in 

if asked out’. 64 He would have loved the GVN to ask for US withdrawal 

and speculated that an incompetent Saigon government could provide 

the excuse for a US exit with a request that Americans leave Vietnam. In 

his view, the country’s reputation and credibility would be kept intact 

because the United States had assisted the fight against communism 

and been asked to leave. The scholars narrating the Gravel edition of the 

Pentagon Papers said that at the time ‘no one put it as starkly as Assistant 

Secretary of Defense John McNaughton’. 65 That included George Ball. 


61 FRUS, 1964–1968, Vietnam, ii. 390–2. 

62 JTM Papers, Box 1, File IV, 20 March 1965, LBJL; FRUS, 1964–1968 Vietnam, ii. 193, drafted 

memo dated 9–10 March 1965. 

63 NYTPP, pp. 432–40. 

64 Ibid. 

65 GPP, iv. 22. 



Ironically, on the same day as that powerful memo of McNaughton’s, 

he was recommended as the new US ambassador to Saigon by none 

other than Johnson’s National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy. In a 

memo, dated 24 March 1965, Bundy wrote to the President: 

The one thing we have never had out there is a fully coordinated U.S. 

effort under the leadership of an ambassador who understood the essentially 

political nature of the problem . . . I have a feeling that if this war could be 

given an operational Chief of Staff like John McNaughton . . . we might 

have the right team. If McNaughton went in the capacity, moreover, we 

might easily convert Bob McNamara . . . 66 

This memo is very important not only because McNaughton was held 

in such high regard by key figures in the Johnson administration (next 

year he would also be recommended for the same post by the Head of 

Pacification Program on Vietnam, Robert W. Komer) but it was significant 

that Bundy perceived McNaughton as favouring a political rather than a 

military solution. Bombs and troops were not going to determine the 

outcome of a war for the ‘hearts and minds’ of the Vietnamese. No one 

understood that better than McNaughton, and as Bundy implies, 

McNamara could eventually be won over to that point of view. However, 

Bundy failed to convert the President and McNaughton would later 

bemoan Bundy’s exit from government. Of course, the fact that Bundy 

was McNaughton’s ‘next door neighbor and tennis doubles partner’ only 

added to his sense of loss. 67 However, it has been observed that Johnson 

always favoured McNamara over Bundy because the former was a 

self-made man and not from inherited wealth. Furthermore, it was also 

noted that the defense secretary was ‘the more adroit courtier, quicker at 

deducing Johnson’s inclinations, smoother at advancing the president’s 

ideas as his own’. 68 

Developments in Vietnam would not change McNaughton’s point 

of view on Vietnam even though McNamara disagreed. He had a 

conversation about Vietnam with the distinguished British military expert 

Robert G. K. Thompson and concluded, ‘there is no cause for optimism’. 69 

A week later he said the situation in South Vietnam ‘was deteriorating’. 70 

He went even further on 25 April 1965, writing that ‘the bombing policy 

is bankrupt and always has been’ and indeed ‘it has really strengthened 

their [DRV/VC] will’ and ‘alienated world opinion’. 71 At the time 

McNamara and McNaughton both agreed that ‘bombing alone was not 

66 Papers of William Conrad Gibbons, Box 6, McGeorge Bundy to Lyndon B. Johnson, 6, 24, 31 

March 1965, LBJL; see also William Conrad Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War: 

Executive and Legislative Roles and Relationships (4 vols., Princeton, J, 1986–95), iii. 153, 191, 196. 

67 Oral Interview of John McNaughton conducted by Larry McQuade, Nov. 1964 at the Pentagon, 

p. 27, John F. Kennedy Library. 

68 Langguth, Our Vietnam, p. 277. 

69 JTM Papers, Box 1, File IV, #65, LBJL. 

70 GPP, iii. 409. 

71 JTM Papers, Box 7, File 1, #17, June 1965, LBJL. 



the answer’. 72 At least he and his boss agreed on something. By June 

1965, McNaughton’s comments on the war revealed his innermost 

reservations about American involvement. It is in that month that he 

wrote a hand-written note which summarized what he described as the 

‘minuses’ of American involvement in Vietnam. As previously mentioned, 

it spelled out brilliantly why he was a dove. Moreover, not only did his 

wit stand out as in so many of his memos but his wording also reflected 

the times: 

1. Wrong ‘sphere of influence.’ 

2. Overthrow by force ‘accepted’ where no other means. 

3. The ‘spirited’ should prevail over the ‘slobs.’ 

4. The ‘peeful’ should prevail over the ‘elite.’ 

5. The country should be unified. 

6. Yellow men should settle yellow men’s trouble. 73 

He noted that there were no ‘pluses’. Vietnam was not in our ‘sphere of 

influence’, the western hemisphere was, and even there he had wanted 

military aid ended. The government in Hanoi may have been established 

by force, but that is acceptable because no other means existed for 

coming to power in that country given the absence of a fair election. The 

dedication and determination of the enemy should prevail over a Saigon 

government that did not seem to care if it won or lost. The ‘little man’ 

in Vietnam struggled against the ‘elite’ landlords and wealthy colonial 

collaborators, and deserved victory. He believed no one could argue 

against Vietnamese national unity and independence. Last but certainly 

not least, McNaughton insisted that the Vietnamese should settle their 

own troubles without any outside power being involved. Few doves have 

ever articulated the opposition to the war better, even if the wording was 

far from politically correct. 

In June 1965 McNaughton had a conversation with U. Alexis Johnson, 

a notable ‘hawk’ who served at various times as deputy undersecretary of 

political affairs and other times as deputy ambassador to Vietnam. The 

two used to ‘argue very vigorously’ 74 about Vietnam and on this occasion 

McNaughton asked Johnson if more American troops in Vietnam 

would make a positive difference. When the reply was in the negative, 

McNaughton asked if he thought some current troops should be withdrawn 

and again the response was negative. At that point, McNaughton 

asked Johnson, ‘What if you are wrong about whether Vietnam has gone 

downhill over the last year, how would that affect your judgment about 

deploying more U.S. troops?’ Johnson must have been a little exasperated 

as he replied once again, ‘It is still doubtful that more U.S. troops would 

72 Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: 1995), 

p. 183. 

73 JTM Papers, Box 1, File IV, #59 LBJL. His son, Alex McNaughton, confirmed that this was his 

father’s handwriting and the penmanship matches that of his journal. 

74 Oral Interview of Alexis Johnson by Paige Mulhollan, 14 July 1969, LBJL. 



make the difference.’ 75 Neither person stated what he thought could 

make a real difference or even if there existed such a possibility. It is always 

strange to see how hawkish state department officials generally were 

during the Vietnam War versus McNaughton in the war department! 

Secretary of State Dean Rusk often advocated military solutions for 

problems in Vietnam, while McNamara often called for diplomatic 

negotiations. However, convinced that no number of American troops 

would be able to turn the tide in Vietnam, McNaughton had reached the 

end of his rope. That summer his aide, Daniel Ellsberg, said his boss was 

furious with the war. At one point he reportedly pounded his fists on 

his desk screaming, ‘you don’t understand Dan. I don’t want to be in 

Vietnam six months from now! I want out! Out! Out! Out!’ 76 The story 

illustrates well McNaughton’s frustration, which contrasted so vividly 

with McNamara’s views at the time. Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s 

Magazine, described the defense secretary’s bombing policy as ‘bomb-ograms’ 

in the summer of 1965. Furthermore, he argued that McNamara 

‘defined the bombing raids that eventually murdered upwards of two 

million people north of Saigon as a means of communication. Bombs 

became metaphors meant to win the North Vietnamese to a recognition 

of America’s inevitable victory’. 77 McNaughton believed, however, that the 

bombing alienated the people of Vietnam and was counter-productive. 

In July 1965, McNaughton plotted behind the scenes for a way out of 

Vietnam. In effect, McNamara generally urged military escalation, while 

his assistant urged withdrawal. However, on 1 July, the secretary of defense 

drafted a memo urging escalation to force a favourable settlement. The 

alternative, McNamara concluded, was to ‘lower our sights considerably’, 

which one scholar said was a ‘bow, in all probability, to McNaughton’s 

views’. 78 McNamara would eventually come to the realization that US 

sights in Vietnam had to be lowered totally, but in the summer of 1965, 

he still echoed the president’s determination to achieve victory. The next 

day McNaughton wrote to the assistant to the chairman of the JCS, 

General Andrew Goodpaster, that ‘winning’ in Vietnam was simply 

a stalemate. The analysts of the Pentagon Papers concluded that 

McNaughton was asking the ‘key question’ in this memo as to ‘whether 

or not we would become involved more deeply in a war which could not 

be brought to a satisfactory conclusion’. 79 On 13 July 1965, McNaughton 

considered that the Vietnam ‘situation is worse than a year ago (when it 

was worse than a year ago before that) . . . the DRV/VC seem to believe 

75 JTM Papers, 25 June 1965, Box 1, File IV, #62, LBJL. 

76 Ellsberg, Secrets, pp. 86–7. Clearly Ellsberg’s credibility is open to question because of his leaking 

the Pentagon Papers to the press; it would support his actions if he could have argued that other 

government officials shared his views. Nonetheless he worked closely with McNaughton and there 

is no way to confirm or deny Ellsberg’s assertions on such conversations. 

77 Lewis Lapham, Waiting for the Barbarians (1997), pp. 29–30. 

78 David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson and the Origins of the Vietnam War 

(Cambridge, Mass., 2000) [hereafter Kaiser, American Tragedy], p. 459. 

79 GPP, iv. 291–3. 



that South Vietnam is near collapse’. 80 In that memo, one scholar 

has concluded that McNaughton was saying he believed ‘the chance 

of victory for the US . . . was near zero’. 81 The month of July did not 

end without McNaughton arguing that the US terms for negotiations 

amounted ‘to capitulation by a Communist force that is far from 

beaten’. 82 

That autumn McNaughton once again prepared a critical ‘Analysis of 

the Program of Bombing North Vietnam’. He reiterated that the bombing 

had actually increased the morale of the enemy ‘reinforcing the North’s 

determination not to negotiate’ because ‘they cannot appear to “bug 

out” on the VC in the south’. What was needed was ‘A UN or other 

third-party initiative asking us to stand-down the bombing’ and pursue 

a peaceful settlement to the conflict. 83 During this time period, 

McNaughton lunched with Washington Post reporters, Murray Marder 

and Chad Roberts. He asked them if they had any idea on how to convince 

the enemy in Vietnam that the United States was serious about getting 

out of that country. The suggestion was made to make an offer to place 

US military bases there under United Nations control as an act of good 

faith. McNaughton thought it was a promising idea, but when he later 

brought it up at a Pentagon meeting he was laughed at by the JCS. 84 The 

next month McNaughton wrote to McNamara stating that escalation 

requests by the JCS should be denied. 85 

By the autumn of 1965, the secretary of defense was apparently 

becoming worried about his chief Vietnam aide’s views. On 28 September 

1965, he told George Ball that ‘there should be no communication back 

to Pentagon except at their [meaning McNamara’s and Ball’s] level’. 86 

He must not have wanted Ball’s dovishness to feed McNaughton’s and 

vice versa; so Ball agreed to talk to McNamara as the only person he 

would communicate with in the Pentagon. In November, McNaughton’s 

confidant, Forrestal, wrote that withdrawing from Vietnam where ‘the 

people we were trying to help seemed unable to help themselves’ might 

encourage Chinese expansion. He still believed the United States should 

delay ‘China’s swallowing up Southeast Asia until (a) she develops better 

table manners and (b) the food is somewhat more indigestible.’ 87 But 

McNaughton disagreed, continuing his criticism of US involvement by 

pointing out that in the direction that the Vietnam involvement was 

going, ‘war costs at a rate equal to 10–20 times the GNP of the people 

80 JTM Papers, Box 1 File IV, #53, ‘Analysis and Options for South Vietnam’, 13 July 1965, LBJL 

and GPP, iv. 21. 

81 Kaiser, American Tragedy, p. 465. 

82 NYTPP, pp. 470–2, 20 July 1965. 

83 Gibbons Papers, Box 11, File 2, #43, 8/5/65, LBJL. 

84 Inside the Pentagon Papers, p. 49. 

85 John T. McNaughton to Robert S. McNamara, 8 Sept. 1965, FRUS, 1964–1968, Vietnam, iii 

377–8. 

86 George Ball Papers, Box 7, Telcon, Ball/McNamara, 28 Sept. 1968, LBJL. 

87 JTM Papers, Box 8, File II, #8, M. Forrestal to William Bundy, 4 Nov. 1965, LBJL. 



being fought for’ were likely in the future. He also bemoaned the lack of 

a ‘diplomatic offensive’ on the part of the US government. 88 

During the last month of 1965, McNaughton appealed even more 

strongly for negotiations to end US involvement in Vietnam. He drafted 

a memo, dated 1 December 1965, saying, ‘I believe that we should be 

prepared – in the dialogue during a pause, in negotiations or unilaterally 

. . . to present the other side with a ceasefire’. He justified a unilateral 

ceasefire on the basis that ‘we have already accomplished the important 

objectives of preventing a military take-over’. He concluded: ‘no course 

of action has more than a modest chance of assuring a more favorable 

outcome’. 89 When an aide drafted a memo on Vietnam for his consideration 

on 20 December 1965, it included a ‘McNaughton note’ in which 

his aide observed that ‘the costs of stopping [the war] now rather than 

later seem acceptable’. McNaughton, with his sarcastic sense of humour, 

added a note that ‘surely no one thinks we can perform lobotomies on all 

indigenous VC!’ 90 At one point he sarcastically observed in his personal 

diary that Secretary of State Dean Rusk was always claiming that no free 

election had ever resulted in a communist victory, but what he forgot to 

add was, ‘we’re going to see to it that none ever does’. 91 These comments 

speak volumes. McNaughton knew that most Vietnamese supported Ho 

Chi Minh and an independent, unified Vietnam. To change those hearts 

and minds would take lobotomies because the Saigon government was 

not a legitimate entity. In June he had noted that indigenous Vietnamese 

should solve their troubles themselves and a unified Vietnam was in their 

wishes. The only solution was for the United States to get ‘Out! Out! 

Out!’ The year ended with McNaughton repeating that, as another 

bombing pause was attempted, the United States should ‘unilaterally’ 

declare a ceasefire. Before getting deeper into an impossible situation, the 

United States had to reverse its current course of action in Vietnam 

immediately. 

In 1966 and 1967, McNaughton would continue his struggle to get the 

United States out of Vietnam even on disadvantageous terms. He was 

caught in an awkward dilemma. He wanted to be a team player; he 

wanted the support of McNamara; and he wanted to hang on to whatever 

position of authority he had in order to make his case. He was 

ambitious, 92 but he was also a realist who did his job as best he knew 

how. When he taught at Harvard, he used to walk into his law classes 

and pretend to shoot a student with a toy gun. Afterwards, he would 

88 John McNaughton to Robert McNamara, 9 Nov. 1965, FRUS, 1964–1968, Vietnam, iii. 554–6. 

89 JTM Papers, Box 1, File I, #14, LBJL. 

90 JTM Papers, Box 1, File I, #15, memo drafted by Adrian Fisher, deputy director for Arms Control, 

LBJL. Many third-country initiatives had tried to bring the warring factions to the peace table 

unsuccessfully, as McNaughton well knew. 

91 McNaughton Diary, 6 Jan. 1966, p. 9, Alex McNaughton Files. 

92 Halberstam, Best and Brightest, pp. 362–3, 527; Lawrence Freedman, ‘Vietnam and the Disillusioned 

Strategist’, International Affairs, lxxii (1996), 133–51; Thomas W. Janes, ‘Rational Man – Irrational 

Policy’, University of Harvard BA Honors Thesis, 1977. 



take different versions of what students thought they saw and show how 

views of the same event can be so different. He would carefully eliminate 

the conjectural and hearsay evidence and tell his students they needed to 

stick to the ‘facts always facts’. 93 He saw the war differently than most 

others in Washington. He provided facts to McNamara and others and 

framed his opinions in such terms that escalation in Vietnam looked 

horrendous. However, he would not contradict his boss in meetings. 

George Ball observed that, ‘John would get me aside and say “Gee, I agree 

with you, but Bob won’t quite buy this.” ’ 94 He knew he had first to 

convert McNamara who could then convert Johnson. 

Before the tragic plane crash that took his life in 1967, McNaughton 

sent McNamara what is perhaps the most quoted document in the 

Pentagon Papers. Of that memo, the New York Times journalist Neil 

Sheehan astutely observed that ‘only once in the history of the Pentagon 

study did anyone in a position of power’ express emotional and moral 

qualms about the war. That person was John McNaughton and his 

6 May memo noted: 

A feeling is widely and strongly held that the ‘Establishment’ is out of its 

mind. The feeling is that we are trying to impose some U.S. image on distant 

people we cannot understand (anymore than we can the younger generation 

here at home), and that we are carrying the thing to absurd lengths. 

Related to this feeling is the increased polarization that is taking place in 

the United States with the seeds of the worst split in our people in more 

than a century . . . 95 

At last someone was dealing with the moral and emotional issues of the 

Vietnam War. He was right in that the country was experiencing the 

worst polarization since the Civil War. He was right that many believed 

‘The Establishment’ was out of its mind trying to force the Vietnamese 

people to adopt the American way of life. McNaughton concluded that: 

‘The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 

1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward 

nation into submission on an issue whose merits are wholly disputed is 

not a pretty one.’ He sarcastically told his aide, Townsend Hoopes, ‘we 

seem to be proceeding on the assumption that the way to eradicate 

Vietcong is to destroy all the village structures, defoliate all the jungles, 

and then cover the entire surface of South Vietnam with asphalt.’ 96 His 

last memo outlined a ‘Plan for the Termination of Hostilities in Vietnam’ 

which proposed negotiations for exit on even unfavourable terms for the 

United States. 97 At the same time, McNamara was still telling Johnson 

the war in Vietnam could still be won. On 19 July 1967, McNaughton, his 


94 George Ball oral interview, 8 July 1971, pp. 37–8, LBJL. 

95 GPP, iv. 477–81. 

96 Townsend Hoopes, Limits of Intervention: An Inside Account of how the Johnson Policy of Escalation 

in Vietnam was Reversed (New York, 1969), pp. 50–1. 

97 Gibbons Papers, Box 29, File 1, #3, LBJL. 



wife, and one of his two sons were all killed in a tragic plane collision. That 

very day McNamara told the president that despite press rumours the 

war in Vietnam was not at a stalemate! 98 For the moment McNaughton’s 

arguments had apparently fallen on deaf ears, but he had been doing all 

he knew how to get the United States out of Vietnam. No dove made the 

arguments better than John T. McNaughton. 

98 Ibid., Box 29, File 7, #54a, ‘Notes of the President’s meeting’, 19 July 1967, LBJL.

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