BOOK MARK : In the Vietnam War, Power Won at Truth’s Expense

If ever an event marked the outer limit of American power, it was Vietnam. As individuals we may have come to terms with what went wrong, but we never have as a nation. The most articulate architects of it, who talk privately about what went wrong, have yet to say publicly they made a mistake; Richard M. Nixon, who was, in no small measure, elected President in 1968 because of the wrenching divisions Vietnam created within the Democratic Party, went on to call it our finest hour. As such, Vietnam remains out there like a meal that has never been finished--and never taken off the table, either.

In June, 1950, when America still had not felt its super-affluence, President Harry S. Truman instinctively committed troops to Korea, but he hated doing so. He feared what it would do to his small defense budget.

In 1954, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower pondered whether to send bombers and troops to rescue the French troops at Dien Bien Phu, Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway, acting on his own, sent a study team to find out the actual logistics of intervening in Vietnam. He concluded that air power would not bring about a French victory. It would only involve America even more deeply.

The military needs for ground troops would be huge, Ridgway believed--at least five and possibly 10 divisions (between 50,000 and 1 million men)--and because of the primitive conditions that would favor the indigenous troops, it would require 55 engineering battalions. Draft calls would be higher than Korea, perhaps 100,000 a month, and unlike the Korean War, this war would be fought with a hostile population in the background.

Ike saw the report, realized as a professional soldier how exhausting the war would be and how destructive it would be to his budget. So the idea of intervention died despite the grandiosity of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s rhetoric. This was a nation still in touch with its limits, a democracy, not yet an empire.

A decade later, after 10 years of unparalleled affluence, those restraints were gone. No one worried about costs anymore. There was no one in the government to play the role of Ridgway, to force the architects of the war to see the full costs of any such adventure.

Thus, when it became clear, in the fall of 1965, that a commitment of perhaps only 20,000 men was not going to work, that the North Vietnamese Army was coming into the country faster than we were, President Lyndon B. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara geared up for a big war of 500,000 men or quite possibly more.

Johnson wanted more than anything else to push the Great Society through Congress. He was sure that the Congress would, if given a choice, choose the war over the Great Society, so he and McNamara, the war’s principal architect, deliberately decided to lie about the size of the war and not to go, despite the pleas of his economists, for the rather small tax increase needed to pay for it.

It was a moment of supreme arrogance. We were so rich we could have not merely guns and butter but tricky bookkeeping as well. So not only did we enter an unwinnable war, but by lying to ourselves, we started running a deficit that began a crushing inflation, which helped emphasize rather than eradicate class lines in America.

Vietnam, even more so than Korea, showed how seriously the belief in our vastly superior technology could mislead our policy-makers. Here we were heliborne, and we brought the ultimate mechanized force to fight a jungle war against an enemy that was among the least mechanized forces of the modern era. At one point, in 1965, during arguments over whether or not to intervene, Curtis E. LeMay, the famed Air Force general of World War II, the architect of the highly successful low-level bombing of Tokyo, talked about the need to bomb the other side into the Stone Age. What if they’re already there? asked McGeorge Bundy, the President’s national-security adviser, in a prophetic moment.

Vietnam made us understand in some terrible way that we were no longer a mere democracy; we were a superpower, a democracy become empire. A democracy functions on the basis of shared truths, but an empire is far grander, it is about power, and truth often becomes obstruction.

We journalists in Vietnam did not realize that America had become an empire, run by men suited to running empires, men who did not necessarily value the truth. They were far too grand for that; they valued power over truth. They had created their own truth: In power there was truth. We journalists, too innocent for our own good, still believed in the power of truth, believed that if only they, the good people of Washington, knew what we knew, if we could get over the heads of their somewhat dim-witted military proxies in Saigon, we might change the perceptions of those giving the marching orders.

One episode remains remarkably clear. In the early fall of 1963, McNamara was on one of his many flying visits to Vietnam. Henry Cabot Lodge was the new American ambassador and, unlike his predecessors, he thought the reporting from Saigon very good and the war itself in bad shape.

He asked a group of us to brief McNamara privately. We debated the wisdom of doing this, for it is not the job of reporters to hold private briefings for high public officials, but we agreed because Lodge had been helpful to us.

That day we were suddenly instructed that there were new ground rules for the briefing. We could talk to the secretary about the political situation in Vietnam but not the military situation.

I was stunned. Our military sources, including the now-legendary John Paul Vann, were brilliant. We had been primed to tell McNamara that, far from being virtually won, as his generals were claiming, the war was virtually lost. In retrospect, I wish I had walked out then and there.

At the time, I did not understand the shrewdness of what McNamara had done. It was the typical act of a man who was one of the most skillful bureaucratic infighters and dissemblers of his time. He had understood immediately how important it was not to hear the truth. If he could set such ground rules, he could go back and say in good conscience--for he was always a man of good conscience--that everything he had heard about the military situation was relatively positive. He knew the rules of the empire far better than we did.

In the end, we both were naive, he about Vietnam, and we journalists about Washington. In the ensuing years, thanks in no small part to meetings like this, both of us became a great deal less naive. That is but one example of how the Cold War crushed truth, how the need for power overwhelmed the need for truth.

1991 by David Halberstam. Reprinted by permission of the William Morrow & Co., Inc.