The United States found itself particularly unable to cope with the Vietcong insurgency, first through the Saigon military regime of Gen. Duong Van Minh and later through that of Gen. Nguyen Khanh, who seized power in a coup d’état on Jan. 30, 1964. Accordingly, attention focused more and more on North Vietnam as “the root of the problem,” in the words of the Joint Chiefs.
Walt W. Rostow, the dominant intellectual of the Administration, had given currency to this idea and provided the theoretical framework for escalation. His concept, first enunciated in a speech at Fort Bragg, N.C., in 1961, was that a revolution could be dried up by cutting off external sources of support and supply.
Where North Vietnam was concerned, Mr. Rostow had evolved another theory—that a credible threat to bomb the industry Hanoi had so painstakingly constructed out of the ruins of the French Indochina War would be enough to frighten the country’s leaders into ordering the Vietcong to halt their activities in the South.
In a memorandum on Feb. 13, 1964, Mr. Rostow told Secretary of State Rusk that President Ho Chi Minh “has an industrial complex to protect: he is no longer a guerrilla fighter with nothing to lose.”
The Administration was firmly convinced from interceptions of radio traffic between North Vietnam and the guerrillas in the South that Hanoi controlled and directed the Vietcong. Intelligence analyses of the time stated, however, that “the primary sources of Communist strength in South Vietnam are indigenous,” arising out of the revolutionary social aims of the Communists and their identification with the nationalist cause during the independence struggle against France in the nineteen-fifties.
The study shows that President Johnson and most of his key advisers would not accept this intelligence analysis that bombing the North would have no lasting effect on the situation in the South, although there was division—even among those who favored a bombing campaign if necessary—over the extent to which Vietcong fortunes were dependent on the infiltration of men and arms from North Vietnam.
William Bundy and Mr. Rusk mentioned on several occasions the need to obtain more evidence of this infiltration to build a case publicly for stronger actions against North Vietnam.
Focus Turns to Bombing
As the Vietcong rebellion gathered strength, so did interest in bombing the North as a substitute for successful prosecution of the counterinsurgency campaign in the South, or at least as an effort to force Hanoi to reduce guerrilla activity to a level where the feeble Saigon Government could handle it.
This progression in Administration thinking was reflected in Mr. McNamara’s reports to President Johnson after the Secretary’s trips to Vietnam in December and March.
In his December memorandum recommending initiation of the covert 34A raids, Mr. McNamara painted a “gloomy picture” of South Vietnam, with the Vietcong controlling most of the rice and population heartland of the Mekong Delta south and west of Saigon. “We should watch the situation very carefully,” he concluded, “running scared, hoping for the best, but preparing for more forceful moves if the situation does not show early signs of improvement.”
Then, in his memorandum of March 16 on his latest trip, Mr. McNamara reported that “the situation has unquestionably been growing worse” and recommended military planning for two programs of “new and significant pressures upon North Vietnam.”
The first, to be launched on 72 hours’ notice, was described as “Border Control and Retaliatory Actions.” These would include assaults by Saigon’s army against infiltration routes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail network of supply lines through southeastern Laos, “hot pursuit” of the guerrillas into Cambodia, “retaliatory bombing strikes” into North Vietnam by the South Vietnamese Air Force “on a tit-for-tat basis” in response to guerrilla attacks, and “aerial mining . . . (possibly with United States assistance) of the major . . . ports in North Vietnam.” The words in parentheses are Mr. Mc-Namara’s.
The second program, called “Graduated Overt Military Pressure,” was to be readied to begin on 30 days’ notice. “This program would go beyond reacting on a tit-for-tat basis,” Mr. McNamara told the President. “It would include air attacks against military and possibly industrial targets.” The raids would be carried out by Saigon’s air force and by an American air commando squadron code-named Farmgate, then operating in South Vietnam with planes carrying South Vietnamese markings. To conduct the air strikes, they would be reinforced by three squadrons of United States Air Force B-57 jet bombers flown in from Japan.
President Johnson approved Mr. McNamara’s recommendations at a National Security Council meeting on March 17, 1964, directing that planning “proceed energetically.”
Mr. McNamara had advocated trying a number of measures to improve the Saigon Government’s performance first, before resorting to overt escalation. “There would be the problem of marshaling the case to justify such action, the problem of Communist escalation and the problem of dealing with pressures for premature or ‘stacked’ negotiations,” he remarked in his March memorandum.
His description of negotiations echoed a belief in the Administration that the Government of General Khanh was incapable of competing politically with the Communists. Therefore, any attempt to negotiate a compromise political settlement of the war between the Vietnamese themselves was to be avoided because it would result in a Communist take-over and the destruction of the American position in South Vietnam.
Similarly, any internal accommodation between the opposing Vietnamese forces under the vague “neutralization” formula for Vietnam that had been proposed by President de Gaulle of France that June was seen as tantamount to the same thing, a Communist victory. In his March memorandum, Mr. McNamara mentioned the dangerous growth of “neutralist sentiment” in Saigon and the possibility of a coup by neutralist forces who might form a coalition government with the Communists and invite the United States to leave.
William Bundy would later refer to this possibility as a “Vietnam solution” that must be prevented.
In a glimpse into the President’s thoughts at this time, the study shows he was concerned with the problem. Mr. Johnson told Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in a cablegram to Saigon on March 20, 1964, that he was intent on “knocking down the idea of neutralization wherever it rears its ugly head, and on this point I think nothing is more important than to stop neutralist talk wherever we can by whatever means we can.” [See Document #65.]
Mr. Lodge was opposed to planning for “massive destruction actions” before trying what he described as “an essentially diplomatic carrot and stick approach, backed by covert military means.”
This plan, which Mr. Lodge had been proposing since the previous October, involved sending a secret non-American envoy to Hanoi with an offer of economic aid, such as food imports to relieve the rice shortages in North Vietnam, in return for calling off the Vietcong. If the North Vietnamese did not respond favorably, the stick—unpublicized and unacknowledged air strikes, apparently with unmarked planes—would be applied until they did.
The President’s message of March 20 shared Mr. Lodge’s opinion that it was still too early for open assaults on the North.
“As we agreed in our previous messages to each other,” Mr. Johnson cabled, “judgment is reserved for the present on overt military action in view of the consensus from Saigon conversations of McNamara mission with General Khanh and you on judgment that movement against the North at the present would be premature. We . . . share General Khanh’s judgment that the immediate and essential task is to strengthen the southern base. For this reason, our planning for action against the North is on a contingency basis at present, and immediate problem in this area is to develop the strongest possible military and political base for possible later action.”
Mr. Johnson added that the Administration also expected a “showdown” soon in the Chinese-Soviet dispute “and action against the North will be more practicable” then.
This and the other sporadic insights the study gives into Mr. Joh
nson’s thoughts and motivations during these months leading up to the Tonkin Gulf incident in August indicate a President who was, on the one hand, pushing his Administration to plan energetically for escalation while, on the other, continually hesitating to translate these plans into military action.
The glimpses are of a Chief Executive who was determined to achieve the goal of an “independent, non-Communist South Vietnam” he had enunciated in a national security action memorandum in March, yet who was holding back on actions to achieve that goal until he believed they were absolutely necessary.
Above all, the narrative indicates a President who was carefully calculating international and domestic political conditions before making any of his moves in public.
By the latter half of April, 1964, accordingly, planning for further attacks against the North had matured sufficiently through several scenarios for Secretary Rusk, William Bundy and Gen. Earle G. Wheeler, the Army Chief of Staff, to review the plans with Ambassador Lodge at a Saigon strategy meeting on April 19 and 20.
The scenario envisioned escalation in three stages from intensification of the current clandestine 34A raids, to “covert U.S. support of overt . . . aerial mining and air strike operations” by Saigon to “overt joint . . . aerial reconnaissance, naval displays, naval bombardments and air attacks” by the United States and South Vietnam.
The analyst does not mention any provision in the April planning scenario for a Congressional resolution that would constitute authority to wage war; he refers instead to “Presidential consultations with key Congressional leaders.” But the idea of a resolution was already current by then. The author reports its first emergence in discussions in the State Department in mid-February, 1964, “on the desirability of the President’s requesting a Congressional resolution, drawing a line at the borders of South Vietnam.” He cites a Feb. 13 letter to Secretary Rusk to this effect from Mr. Rostow, then chairman of the State Department’s Policy Planning Council.
At the April Saigon meeting and in the weeks immediately afterward, the author says, “a deliberate, cautious pacing of our actions” prevailed over a near-term escalation approach being pressed by the Joint Chiefs and Mr. Rostow.
One reason for this, the study explains, was that the Administration recognized that it “lacked adequate information concerning the nature and magnitude” of infiltration of trained guerrilla leaders and arms from the North and was beginning a major effort to try to gather enough concrete evidence to justify escalation if this became necessary.
“For example,” the study reports, “citing the ‘lack of clarity’ on the ‘role of external intrusion’ in South Vietnam, Walt Rostow urged William Sullivan [chairman of the interagency Vietnam coordinating committee] on the eve of [a] March visit to attempt to ‘come back from Saigon with as lucid and agreed a picture’ as possible on the extent of the infiltration and its influence on the Vietcong.”
The direct outcome of Mr. Rusk’s April visit to Saigon was his agreement to try Ambassador Lodge’s carrot-and-stick approach. On April 30, 1964, the Secretary flew to Ottawa and arranged with the Canadian Government for J. Blair Seaborn, Canada’s new representative on the International Control Commission, to convey the offer of United States economic aid to Premier Dong when Mr. Seaborn visited Hanoi in June.
On May 4 General Khanh, sensing a decline in his fortunes and beginning to abandon the idea of strengthening his government to the point where it could defeat the Vietcong in the South, told Ambassador Lodge that he wanted to declare war quickly on North Vietnam, have the United States start bombing and send 10,000 Special Forces troops of the United States Army into the South “to cover the whole Cambodian-Laotian border.” Mr. Lodge deflected the suggestions.
Secretary McNamara, on a visit to Saigon May 13, was instructed to tell General Khanh that while the United States did not “rule out” bombing the North, “such actions must be supplementary to and not a substitute for successful counter-insurgency in the South” and that “we do not intend to provide military support nor undertake the military objective of ‘rolling back’ Communist control in North Vietnam.”
But on May 17, when the Pathet Lao launched an offensive on the Plaine des Jarres that threatened to collapse the pro-American Government of Premier Souvanna Phouma and with it “the political underpinning of United States-Laotian policy,” the study declares, this “deliberate, cautious approach” to escalation planning was suddenly thrown into “crisis management.”
The Administration immediately turned the Laotian air operations up a notch by intensifying the T-28 strikes and, on May 21, by starting low-altitude target reconnaissance by United States Navy and Air Force jets over areas held by the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese.
In Washington, the chief planner, William Bundy, assisted by Mr. McNaughton and Mr. Sullivan, worked up a 30-day program culminating in full-scale bombing of the North. He submitted it as a formal draft Presidential memorandum for consideration by an executive committee of the National Security Council.
For a number of reasons, this May 23 scenario was never carried out as written. The President, in fact, delayed another nine months the scenario’s dénouement in an air war.
But the document is important because it reveals how far the Administration had progressed in its planning by this point and because a number of the steps in the scenario were carried out piecemeal through June and July and then very rapidly under the political climate of the Tonkin Gulf clash.
For the military side of the scenario, the President’s order of March 17 to plan for retaliatory air strikes on 72 hours’ notice and for full-scale air raids on 30 days’ notice had borne fruit in Operation Plan 37-64.
This plan had been prepared in the Honolulu headquarters of Adm. Harry D. Felt, commander in chief of Pacific forces, or CINCPAC, and had been approved by the Joint Chiefs on April 17. It tabulated how many planes and what bomb tonnages would be required for each phase of the strikes, listed the targets in North Vietnam with damage to be achieved, and programed the necessary positioning of air forces for the raids. A follow-up operation plan, designated 32-64, calculated the possible reactions of China and North Vietnam and the American ground forces that might be necessary to meet them.
The Joint Staff had refined the bombing plan with more target studies. These estimated that an initial category of targets associated with infiltration, such as bridges and depots of ammunition and petroleum, could be destroyed in only 12 days if all the air power in the western Pacific were used.
For the political side of the scenario, recommendations from William Bundy and Mr. Rusk had produced more evidence of infiltration by the North for public release to justify escalation. William J. Jorden, a former correspondent of The New York Times who had become a State Department official, had gone to South Vietnam and had pulled together the data available there for a possible new State Department white paper.
Here is the scenario as the Pentagon analyst quotes it. The words in parentheses—and the numbers designating the length of time to “D-Day”—were in the original scenario and the words in brackets were inserted by the analyst for clarification:
“1. Stall off any ‘conference [Laos or] Vietnam until D-Day.’
“2. Intermediary (Canadian?) tell North Vietnam in general terms that U.S. does not want to destroy the North Vietnam regime (and indeed is willing ‘to provide a carrot’) but is determined to protect South Vietnam from North Vietnam.
“3. (D-30) Presidential speech in general terms launching Joint Resolution.
“4. (D-20) Obtain joint resolution approving past actions and authorizing whatever is necessary with respect to Vietnam.
“Concurrently: An effort should be made to strengthen the posture in South Vietnam. Integrating (interlarding in a single chain of command) the South Vietnamese and U.S. military and civilian elements critical to pacification, down at least to the district level, might be undertaken.
“5. (D-16) Direct CINCPAC to take all prepos
itioning and logistic actions that can be taken ‘quietly’ for the D-Day forces. . . .
“6. (D-15) Get Khanh’s agreement to start overt South Vietnamese air attacks against targets in the North (see D-Day item 15 below), and inform him of U.S. guarantee to protect South Vietnam in the event of North Vietnamese and/or Chinese retaliation.
“7. (D-14) Consult with Thailand and the Philippines to get permission for U.S. deployments; and consult with them plus U.K., Australia, New Zealand and Pakistan, asking for their open political support for the undertaking and for their participation in the re-enforcing action to be undertaken in anticipation of North Vietnamese and/or Chinese retaliation.
“8. (D-13) Release an expanded ‘Jorden Report,’ including recent photography and evidence of the communication nets, giving full documentation of North Vietnamese supply and direction of the Vietcong.
“9. (D-12) Direct CINCPAC to begin moving forces and making specific plans on the assumption that strikes will be made on D-Day (see Attachment B in backup materials for deployments).
“10. (D-10) Khanh makes speech demanding that North Vietnam stop aggression, threatening unspecified military action if he does not. (He could refer to a ‘carrot.’)
“11. (D-3) Discussions with allies not covered in Item above.
“12. (D-3) President informs U.S. public (and thereby North Vietnam) that action may come, referring to Khanh speech (Item 10 above) and declaring support for South Vietnam.
“13. (D-l) Khanh announces that all efforts have failed and that attacks are imminent. (Again he refers to limited goal and possibly to ‘carrot.’)
“14. (D-Day) Remove U.S. dependents.
“15. (D-Day) Launch first strikes. . . . Initially, mine their ports and strike North Vietnam’s transport and related ability (bridge, trains) to move south; and then against targets which have maximum psychological effect on the North’s willingness to stop insurgency—POL (petroleum, oil and lubricants) storage, selected airfields, barracks/training areas, bridges, railroad yards, port facilities, communications, and industries. Initially, these strikes would be by South Vietnamese aircraft; they could then be expanded by adding Farmgate, or U.S. aircraft, or any combination of them.