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

BENJAMIN T. HARRISON AND CHRISTOPHER L. MOSHER 513
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
93 Halberstam, Best and Brightest, p. 363.
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.
© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing.