The String Runs Out

THE WAR

The String Runs Out

(See Cover)

Day after day, congressional leaders and Administration aides streamed into the White House for closed-door conferences and confidential briefings. Hour after hour, Lyndon Johnson consulted earnestly with his most trusted advisers in the Cabinet Room. Night after night, the President pored over memos arguing for and against the choice that confronted him. Finally, after interminable hours of anxious, even anguished debate, Johnson last week reached a decision that may well prove as pivotal to the course of the war as his announcement last July that the U.S. would "stand" in Viet Nam. He concluded that the protracted pause in U.S. bombing raids against North Viet Nam would have to end.

Delayed Resolve. Though the decision had been reached days earlier, Johnson set 6 p.m. Saturday as the irreversible deadline. Most of Saturday, the President and his advisers were closeted in the White House discussing which targets to bomb, how hard to hit, when to start. Militarily, limited bombing of the North could have only limited results. Still, its renewal signified in a much broader sense that the U.S., having gone to extraordinary lengths to seek peace in Viet Nam, was now prepared to win the war for that unhappy country.

The decision to resume bombing the North came far later than even the proponents of the pause originally expected. Yet, after 37 days, the Administration's massive peace offensive had yielded nothing but insults from Hanoi. "The evidence available to this Government," said Lyndon Johnson, "indicates only continuing hostility and aggressiveness in Hanoi, and an insistence on the abandonment of South Viet Nam to Communist takeover." In his latest and strongest rejection of Washington's peace bid, North Viet Nam's President Ho Chi Minh last week sent a letter to other Communist capitals denouncing the U.S. effort as an "impudent threat" and demanding that the Hanoi-sponsored National Liberation Front, the Viet Cong's political facade, be recognized "as the sole genuine representative of the people of South Viet Nam." In so doing, Ho unequivocally closed the door on negotiations in the foreseeable future.

Ho's thumbs down came in the midst of a last-ditch effort by the President to break the diplomatic impasse. For more than a week, he and his aides had been dropping hints designed, in the words of an Administration official, "to let the North Vietnamese know that they damn well better hurry up." The implication was clear that if they did not, the U.S. had no choice but to resume bombing.

Secretary of State Dean Rusk dropped one such hint when, in a press conference on the fifth anniversary of his oath taking as Secretary of State (a tenure exceeded by only eight of his 51 predecessors), he remarked that the response to U.S. peace efforts had been overwhelmingly favorable "except from those who could in fact sit down and make peace." At the same time, cables advising that air strikes might soon be resumed began flowing to U.S. ambassadors in the 40-odd nations that U.S. emissaries had visited when the peace offensive was launched at Christmas.

Never before in the 20th century has a major nation committed itself to war and then unilaterally limited its war-making potential in hopes of negotiating a peaceful settlement, not a surrender. As a demonstration of American good faith in its desire for peace in Southeast Asia, the pause and the diplomatic offensive had done much to convince skeptical allies and neutrals that Hanoi, not Washington, was barring the way to the conference table. But that was about all it had achieved--and at the same time it opened a Pandora's box of problems.

Guns v. Butter. Many Americans worried impatiently that the Administration was imperiling G.I. lives by allowing Hanoi to funnel arms and men into the South over bridges, roads and jungle trails exempt from air interdiction. On the other hand, the pause had fomented increasingly vociferous assaults on the President's policy in Viet Nam, largely from within his own party. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, challenged the very legality of U.S. involvement in the war. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield urged that the bombing be suspended "indefinitely." Nearly half of the Senate's Democrats are known to want Johnson to continue the lull; 77 House Democrats have formally expressed that hope in a letter to the President.

With most members of Congress facing reelection, Democrats in particular feared that the war would cut into vaunted Great Society programs; as one Republican cracked, they were asking the President to "hold up the guns until we can get the butter spread." While Fulbright in effect wanted the Administration to clear its war plans with his committee, Democratic Senators Ernest Gruening of Alaska and Wayne Morse of Oregon went so far as to propose that the Government be prohibited from sending a single draftee to Viet Nam unless he actually volunteered for duty there.

Not a Squeak. The pressures of domestic and foreign opinion combined to make Johnson's decision to resume bombing one of the most arduous he has had to face in his 26-month presidency. The strain was evident--though with as consummate a showman as Lyndon Johnson it was often difficult to tell to what extent his gloomy, remote bearing was assumed for political effect. He bolted from receptions unwontedly early. After a dinner at which Chief Justice Earl Warren was one of his guests of honor, the President was in such a hurry to return to his deliberations over Viet Nam that he left without bidding Warren good night.

The President was supremely aware that for all the advice he received, the final choice and the responsibility for its consequences were his alone. "One man has the decision to make," said a high-ranking U.S. official in Saigon, "and until he does, no one here is going to utter a squeak. The ultimate implications of that decision are simply too big."

There could be no question of that.

By continuing the pause, Johnson would certainly have left himself open to censure by the voters--and by history--if it became apparent that the suspension of air strikes against the North had endangered the success of the war or needlessly cost allied lives. In deciding to resume bombing, the President had to weigh the risk that North Viet Nam would respond in kind and that Red China might even be jolted into making good its shrill threats of intervention.

No. 1. If the somber implications of the decision had allotted the Hamlet role to Lyndon Johnson, he was not entirely alone on the battlements. He was in almost constant touch with the three men who from the first have been his chief advisers and sounding boards on the Viet Nam war--Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. It was Rusk, in particular, who in recent days served as the President's busiest foreign-policy adviser, articulator and lightning rod.

Though the Georgetown cocktail circuit buzzes almost weekly with rumors that the Secretary of State is on his way out, Lyndon Johnson has always deeply respected the bland, imperturbable Rusk, feels a personal kinship with him because of his Georgian drawl and tenant-farm origins. "He is No. 1 in the Cabinet," said Johnson, when Rusk came under attack last summer in Arthur M. Schlesinger's history of the Kennedy Administration, "and he is No. 1 with me."

In all the briefings and conferences through the week, Rusk was almost invariably at the President's side. Even in his seventh floor State Department office overlooking the Lincoln Memorial, the Secretary of State was only an arm's length away from Johnson. A white phone near Rusk's uncluttered desk reaches Johnson directly. Alongside it, a pale green phone with a black receiver hooks him up to the new KY3 super-security network that links the President, the Pentagon and major military commands. Behind his desk hangs a Norman Rockwell watercolor of Johnson inscribed by L.B.J.: "To Dean Rusk, my wise counselor."

All in a Day. When Rusk was not conferring with the President, he was wading through a herculean schedule: writing memos, sifting intelligence reports, receiving ambassadors, speechmaking, conferring with aides, answering Congressmen's questions. Among his visitors during the week: British Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart and Defense Minister Denis Healey, who brought the welcome news that any "adjustments" in British commitments east of Suez would be made "without significant loss of strength." On normal days, 1,200 cables cascade into Foggy Bottom; when things are bubbling, 1,800. They are usually bubbling. "The world is round," says Rusk. "Only one-third of its people are asleep at any given moment. The other two-thirds are awake and probably stirring up mischief somewhere."

Rusk also sparred with journalists in Washington and four European capitals on the topic of Viet Nam in an hour-long Meet the Press session that was transmitted by Early Bird satellite. Four times he went up to Capitol Hill for hearings on the war, and despite his well-deserved reputation for wizardry at handling Congressmen, some of the sessions were so grueling that even Buddha-faced Rusk came out looking haggard and upset. Said Pennsylvania's Democratic Senator Joseph Clark after the Foreign Relations Committee had kept Rusk on the griddle for three hours: "The poor guy had a pretty hard time between the hawks and the doves. I don't know who gave him the hardest time. The hawks were unhappy, the doves were unhappy, and Rusk was unhappy."

Scared to Death. Rusk was even unhappier after his second confrontation with the committee. He expected to spend no more than an hour explaining a $415 million supplemental aid appropriation, mostly for Viet Nam, for he had already repeatedly and eloquently rehearsed all the arguments for the Administration's war policies in the same walnift-paneled hearing room of the Senate Office Building. Last week he declared in an opening statement that "a central issue in the dispute between the two leading Communist powers today is to what extent it is effective--and prudent--to use force to promote the spread of Communism. If the bellicose doctrines of the Asian Communists should reap a substantial reward, the outlook for peace in this world would be grim indeed."

Rusk's interrogators refused to be convinced. Led by Chairman Fulbright, Democratic hoplites jabbed at him for four hours. Tennessee's Albert Gore questioned whether the Administration had any right to justify its actions in Viet Nam merely by citing the August 1964 joint resolution of Congress passed unanimously in the House and 88 to 2 in the Senate after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Rusk noted that Gore had a copy of the resolution and asked to borrow it. "Oh, sure," said Gore, pitching a 233-page pamphlet from a high rostrum to the well where Rusk sat, thirty feet away. Gore's aim was off, but when an aide retrieved the pamphlet and handed it to Rusk, the Secretary found the words he was looking for. The resolution empowers the President, he noted, "to prevent further aggression."

Confessing that "I am scared to death we're running into nuclear World War III," Pennsylvania's Clark asked if a resumption of bombing would really reduce infiltration. Rusk replied that the raids had in the past "undoubtedly made infiltration more difficult and more costly." Clark persisted, and Rusk, on the edge of annoyance, finally snapped: "Look, when a truck goes 45 miles in five days because of air attacks, that is some advantage over its covering the same ground in five hours."

Puff, Puff. Idaho's Frank Church insisted that South Viet Nam was experiencing an "internal revolution," even though North Vietnamese troops were present, just as the U.S. experienced an internal revolution, even though there were "French revolutionary soldiers at Valley Forge." Rusk found that comparison hard to swallow. "I can't identify for a moment," said he, "the purposes of the Hanoi-inspired revolution of the 1960s with the purposes of the American Revolution in the 1770s."

Rusk, who usually betrays anger only by puffing faster and harder at his Larks, ran out of cigarettes but not out of patience. A Secret Service man finally located a pack in a briefcase; the Secretary lit up, and the inquisition was resumed. At 12:55 Rusk pointed to his watch, announced "an important appointment at 1 o'clock that I should meet if I can." The appointment was at the White House for another meeting on Viet Nam strategy, and the Senators obligingly let him go.

Clap Hands. It had been quite an ordeal. Characteristically, Rusk allowed later: "They're concerned. People ought to be. But the central issue is what you do if Hanoi, backed by Peking, continues to push into Southeast Asia. We're going to meet this commitment." Actually, he added, "there's much more international support on this than many people realize. I have no doubt that if we succeed in assuring the safety of South Viet Nam, there will be a hundred small countries all over the world who will clap their hands in relief."

For the time being, many foreign countries were stamping their feet instead, demanding a prolongation of the pause. The Japanese, for example, wanted more time to explore the possibilities of a breakthrough, even though Foreign Minister Etsusaburo Shiina had found no hint of one in a week-long visit to Moscow. Besides, Tokyo has built up a thriving trade with Hanoi and fears that renewed U.S. bombing might force its ships to steer clear of Haiphong, North Viet Nam's major port. Though the British bravely agreed to support the President, they would clearly have preferred that he prolong the pause until after Prime Minister Harold Wilson's visit to Moscow this month.

Call to Prague. The President and his advisers were aware that no matter when the bombing was resumed, there would be howls of protest from an assortment of students and statesmen, professors and preachers. Last May, Johnson was more criticized than cheered for ordering a pause in the bombing and ending it after only five days. Similarly, he was faulted last week because he was considering ending the latest pause after only "a brief, one-month trial." There would undoubtedly be complaints if he ended the pause after six months. Said one Columbia University scholar: "The more you try to satisfy the peaceniks' demands, the more they escalate them."

A case in point was Yale History Professor Staughton Lynd, hero of the New Left and a recent pilgrim to Hanoi, who chided the President for not doing all he could to make contact with the Viet Cong. Why, said he, it was as simple as picking up a phone and calling Prague. "I did it myself last Friday morning. Within an hour and a quarter I was speaking to a front representative who, incidentally, was fluent in English." CBS Radio decided to give it a whirl, spent 24 hours trying to contact a Viet Cong agent in Prague, got one who spoke neither French nor English, finally gave up and asked the professor just who it was he had spoken to. "An interpreter and translator, a very cosmopolitan and sophisticated person," was Lynd's airy reply, "but not an authoritative spokesman."

Go for the Jugular. Respected and persuasive colleagues have pressed the President to take me antithetical course. Johnson told of a telephone call from a Congressman last week that went this way:

Congressman: Mr. President, you've got to resume the bombing. You've got to win this thing now. You've got to go for the jugular. I urge you to turn this war over to your military commanders.

Johnson: Not as long as I am President. As long as I sit here, that control will stay with the Commander in Chief.

Congressman: We've got to win it. That's why Roosevelt and Truman were so great. They let their military leaders do the job.

Johnson: I was around in those days. There were not many decisions made that Roosevelt didn't know about. And Harry Truman watched everything close. I am not going to let the hounds loose.

Nor was the President willing to accept retired General James Gavin's theory that U.S. troops should pull back to a series of coastal enclaves. This notion is chiefly supported by Pundit Walter Lippmann, former Korean War Commanding General Matthew Ridgway, who has long argued against committing U.S. troops to the Asian mainland, and others who see it as the first stage of a phased withdrawal from Viet Nam. To Richard Nixon, proponents of enclave warfare were neither hawks nor doves but "turtles" who, he said last week, want to withdraw into their shells and "turn the Vietnamese people over to the Communists." Lyndon Johnson reacted even more acerbically to General Gavin's proposal: "I'm not going to have our troops return to the coast and let our marines go fishing while the Viet Cong ravage the countryside. I'm not going to hunker up and take it like a mule in a hailstorm."

"The Time Is Coming." In the face of such wide and widening divergence, the President decided that it was time to lay it on the line to Congress and simultaneously put Hanoi on notice that "the string is running out." Rusk reviewed the futile peace probes of the past five weeks.

Highlight of the conference was a detailed intelligence report, illustrated with reconnaissance photos, on how Hanoi had used the pause to rebuild, recuperate and resupply. Between 20,000 and 40,000 Red Chinese coolies were at work repairing railroads north of Hanoi, while scores of thousands of North Vietnamese laborers worked south of the capital on bridges, roads and other bombed facilities. A major project: establishing a primitive "grid" of interconnecting roads to offer alternative routes if the bombings resumed. Antlike swarms of work gangs took an average of only 48 hours to repair bombed roads, as little as 72 hours to fix shattered rail lines. Where the rail damage was too extensive to repair, work battalions often ran one train up to a bombed-out stretch, then transferred its entire cargo to a train waiting on the other side.

New Hazards. With no U.S. planes to harass them, 200 trucks daily--ten times the pre-pause average--moved war materiel southward. Routes 1A and 15 bustled with daylight traffic headed for Mu Gia pass, gateway to the Laos spur of the Ho Chi Minh trail. Men moved over the trail too--at least 2,500 during the pause, including 1,000 on Christmas Day alone. Some officials in Saigon unofficially numbered the infiltration at as many as 6,000, and they estimate that there are now at least nine North Vietnamese regiments, and possibly twelve, in the South.

U.S. bomber pilots over the North will face greater hazards then ever as a result of the pause. Around key targets, said one officer, antiaircraft installations have been increased "to the point of saturation." Some 65 Soviet SAM sites (v. 30 or so pre-pause) are in place in the Hanoi-Haiphong area alone, half of them manned by Russian crews and many equipped with sophisticated new radar systems. MIG-21s have been spotted on airstrips in the North. In the South, there was evidence that the Viet Cong guerrillas might be equipped for the first time with 20-mm. and 37-mm. antiaircraft guns, which could seriously threaten the U.S. planes and helicopters that fly vital strafing and bombing missions. One U.S. F-4 Phantom hit by ground fire last week limped back to Danang airbase with a three-foot hole in its fuselage--big enough to have been caused by such A.A. batteries.

Unhappy Wretch. After detailing the effects of the pause, the President asked the Congressmen for their views. When Mansfield's turn came, he pulled out a hurriedly written two-page statement urging continued restraint. The President's face, said one participant, was "frozen as concrete." When Fulbright began to air his views, Johnson pointedly turned to Rusk and chatted away intently, completely ignoring the Senator. Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen said he would support whatever course the President decided upon, but declined to make any judgment himself because "I don't like to have the sidewalk fly up and hit me in the face." His refusal to take a stand was elemental politics; by leaving the choice to the President, he also left the G.O.P. free to criticize Johnson, no matter what he did. Even so, Johnson was so delighted by his old friend's support that he seated Dirksen at the center table at last week's formal White House dinner. Mansfield was parked in a corner. Fulbright was not invited.

Of all congressional demands, L.B.J. was most irked by Fulbright's suggestion that Administration officials "consult with the committee before they decide to resume bombing." Johnson regarded that as a challenge that could not go unanswered. Just before the 21-hr. White House briefing ended, he picked up a copy of Never Call Retreat, the last volume of Bruce Catton's Civil War trilogy, and read a passage describing how a group of Senators demanded that Lincoln reshape his Cabinet to their specifications to assure greater harmony. "Mr. Lincoln had no intention of doing this," the President drawled. "He had told a friend that all of the responsibilities of the Administration 'belong to that unhappy wretch called Abraham Lincoln,' and as he tried to meet those responsibilities, the last thing he needed or wanted was a contrived or enforced harmony."

In Congress, despite the President's quest for a broad consensus, the division of opinion to some extent has continued to follow party and regional lines. Republicans and Southern Democrats generally favored resuming the bombing, while Northern Democrats and liberal Republicans mostly hoped to prolong the pause.

Unexpected support for the Administration came last week from New York's Senator Jacob Javits, a liberal Republican and sometime critic of the U.S. role in Viet Nam. Fresh from a week's visit to Saigon, Javits rose on the floor of the Senate to declare that "the President would and should have the support of the overwhelming majority of the American people if he decides to resume the limited bombing." Challenging Mansfield's recent jeremiad foreseeing a "bottomless Asian land war," Javits argued that "militarily, the situation is at least encouraging"; that "the impact of our buildup is just beginning to be felt," and that most South Vietnamese now believe, as they plainly did not a year ago, that the Viet Cong will be defeated--possibly in as little as two years.

"I have frequently been called a liberal--and I have always been proud of it," Javits continued. "But what I have just said in support of our military operations in Viet Nam finds me obviously at variance with some part of the liberal community, which has at times severely challenged our objectives and policies in South Viet Nam. I have given long and studied consideration to this point of view. But I cannot agree with it. I believe the struggle in Viet Nam is worthy of the U.S. I believe it is worthy of the cause of freedom. I believe it needs to be waged and I believe it deserves the support of the liberals. South Viet Nam is the zone of contact in the struggle for the freedom of Asia, and those who see it as anything else are fooling themselves."

Consent v. Coercion. As Rusk sees it, the great conflict in today's world is between the "forces of consent" and the "forces of coercion"--and to yield to coercion is to invite catastrophe. "Can we build peace," he asks, "by standing aside in the face of aggression?"

A man of almost glacial calm, Rusk considers diplomacy a slow, dull business--and he is grateful that it is. "Let's not have too much excitement these days," he observes. "It's too damn dangerous." Addressing a group of State Department visitors last week, he counseled: "Reserve judgment to a degree until you dig into the heart of a problem. Glandular reactions are not good enough any more." He is uncharacteristically cutting toward "these third-party amateurs who are so busy trying to mediate the Viet Nam war," mostly without any suspicion that hundreds of existing diplomatic channels have been exhaustively employed in the attempt to bring Hanoi to the conference table.

Rusk is commonly labeled "colorless" and--notably by Schlesinger--"indecisive." Yet, as he points out, "the course of wisdom lies in reducing the impact which accidents of personality have upon the relations among nations." He deplores "making policy by phrase," usually writes statements and memos in tinder-dry language. Not that he is totally incapable of turning a wry phrase or cracking a joke. During the Cuban missile crisis, it was Rusk, after all, who commented: "We're standing eyeball to eyeball and I think the other fellow just blinked." Addressing 200 college-age members of the Senate Youth Forum on foreign-policy problems, he assured them: "If you think you're confused, take heart. You're only in touch with reality."

Double Standard. By that measure, at least, even Fulbright was a realist last week. After his committee's second session on Viet Nam, the Arkansas Democrat complained: "I have never seen an issue on which there has been such uncertainty. There were no such differences in the Korean War or World War II. One reason is that this situation isn't very clear-cut."

Perhaps not for Fulbright. As far as Dean Rusk is concerned, despite the immense and cruel complexities of the Viet Nam war, there are certain fundamental facts that cut through the confusion. In a session with the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rusk quoted Harry Truman's speech setting forth his containment doctrine in 1947: " 'I believe that it must be the policy of the U.S. to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.' That," he went on, "is the policy we are applying in Viet Nam."

When one of Rusk's questioners voiced moral doubts about whether the U.S. should resume bombing, Rusk puffed harder at his cigarette, replied: "There is a curious double standard on these things. What about the bombing going on in South Viet Nam all these years? The bombs that are delivered by a boy on a bicycle that blow up an embassy, or those at Danang, are bombs just as much as those dropped on the North."

Elephant Gun. Last week, as the Viet Cong again dropped mortar shells on several U.S. Marine cantonments in the perimeter around Danang, the President and his advisers were considering a problem that was a corollary to the decision to resume bombing. How heavily should U.S. war planes bomb the North? At the same level as before? More intensively? Initially, at least, the Administration plans to follow roughly the same bombing tactics as before. Nonetheless, commanders in the field are virtually unanimous in urging a more intensified, selective pattern. None suggest bombing the Hanoi-Haiphong population centers. But they point out that the U.S. has a scant 300 planes to plaster a 7,310-sq.-mi. area, whereas the Air Force in World War II used 1,700 planes to bomb a 2,900-sq.-mi. area of north and central Italy. Even making allowances for the greater speed of the modern jet, there remains a large gap. So abundant are planes for tactical use in the South, on the other hand, that military men in Saigon maintain: "In the South we have a baseball bat to kill a flea, in the North a popgun to bring down an elephant."

Beyond the need for additional aircraft, Air Force planners insist that the North can only be bombed effectively if they have permission to hit "source" targets--oil dumps to keep trucks from rolling rather than the trucks themselves or the roads they negotiate, thermal and hydroelectric plants to starve small workshops of power rather than the shops themselves, ammunition factories to cut production rather than smaller, harder-to-hit ammo dumps. The planners maintain that there are more than 50 such targets inviting attack in the North and that they should be hit at least every other day if the U.S. is to effectively impede infiltration of men and supplies. Any such program would require double the number of sorties now flown, as well as additional airstrips.

By contrast, ground and air combat in the South is being greatly intensified. Last week, while U.S. Army units fanned out in three big search-and-destroy operations, thousands of marines, intent on trapping a hard-core Viet Cong division, stormed a beach south of Quang Ngai in the biggest amphibious assault mounted by the U.S. since the Inchon landing in Korea.

There are now 197,000 American servicemen on duty in South Viet Nam, and once the supply logjam is finally broken, possibly by next month, the rate of flow may raise that total to 600,000. Mississippi's Senator John Stennis, a member of the Armed Services Committee whose forecasts have proved to be notably accurate in the past, cited that figure last week as the minimum needed to win the war.

The Cost. An inherent danger in Lyndon Johnson's order to resume bombing the North is that it may inspire exaggerated hopes that it will assure a quick and relatively inexpensive victory. It will not, for Viet Nam remains a ground war, and the bomber runs north of the 17th parallel, however effective, can only help protect the allied infantryman and harass the enemy.

As it is, the military cost of the pause will run high. Apart from the Communists' gains in manpower and materiel during the five-week interval, the President's long and agonizing deliberations over resumption of bombing could easily convince Hanoi and Peking that the Americans have no heart for a difficult defensive war in Asia. Many Americans, on the other hand, have been disquieted by a show of presidential indecision that continued long after the clear failure of the U.S. peace campaign.

Lyndon Johnson is understandably reluctant to be remembered in the history books as a war president. Nonetheless, now that he has irrevocably committed the U.S. to a long, hard war, he has the task of convincing all Americans that it is a necessary conflict and that it will be boldly and resolutely prosecuted. As his Secretary of State observed last week: "The qualities required for today, above all others, are courage and steadfastness." The emphasis was on steadfastness.

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