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

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BENJAMIN T. HARRISON AND CHRISTOPHER L. MOSHER 503 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. © 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing.
504 JOHN T. MCNAUGHTON AND VIETNAM 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. © 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing.
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