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

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BENJAMIN T. HARRISON AND CHRISTOPHER L. MOSHER 505 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. © 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing.
506 JOHN T. MCNAUGHTON AND VIETNAM 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. © 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing.
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