DERELICTION OF DUTY: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies That Led to Vietnam.<i> By H. R. McMaster</i> .<i> HarperCollins: 352 pp., $27.50</i>
Our nation’s Founding Fathers--prominent among them George Washington, general of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War--consciously and deliberately put control of the military in the hands of a civilian commander-in-chief elected by, and thus directly accountable to, the American people. Wise men, they did this knowing that civil-military relations, like all human affairs, would inevitably be marked by ups as well as downs when, under the strain of events and pressures and battlefield carnage, goodwill and shared vision would occasionally give way, regrettably, to misunderstanding and even outright disagreement.
But the Founding Fathers structured the Constitution--which all in the United States military swear an oath to defend--so that those moments of misunderstanding and disagreement would always be resolved in favor of the elected president, rather than in favor of high-ranking generals and admirals. They did so to guarantee what they rightly considered two cardinal principles of democracy: keeping the military subordinate to the society that it exists to serve through an elected civilian superior and ensuring political control over policy at all times during war.
Such moments of misunderstanding and disagreement between civilian and military leaders have, thank goodness, been few in the history of the Republic. In the 19th century, they arose most notably between President Abraham Lincoln and the senior Union Army generals--especially George B. McClellan--during the first years of the Civil War. In the 20th century, they arose most dramatically during the Truman-MacArthur controversy of the Korean War and, most poisonously (if measured by long-term consequences), between presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson (and, to a lesser extent, Richard Nixon) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the long and failed war in Vietnam.
A product of many shortcomings and blunders in all areas and at all levels of the American government, the Vietnam War produced many hard feelings--not least of which was the perception among some in the military that the civilian leaders, who ultimately caused the debacle, were not just flawed but wicked.
It is never easy for individuals or organizations to admit failure, especially when doing so requires looking in the mirror and, for some in the American military, this has proved difficult indeed. Tending to view the world more in black and white than in shades of gray, asked (and willing) to make the ultimate sacrifice for the country they serve and love, ingrained with a powerful (and understandable) ethos of mission accomplishment, many to this day find it hard, when all is said and done, to accept the idea that the military, too, was fundamentally responsible for America’s Vietnam disaster and to accept the equally unsettling, but very human, notion that decent civilian leaders can do profoundly unwise and damaging things.
Something of this regrettable spirit pervades “Dereliction of Duty,” the thoroughly researched, clearly written and forcefully argued new book on the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War by H. R. McMaster, a West Point graduate, a courageous Gulf War combat veteran, a professionally trained historian and an up-and-coming Army officer currently stationed at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan. It is McMaster’s main contention that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were not the principal military advisors to the president during the escalation of the Vietnam War and, therefore, he implicitly suggests, were not responsible for what went wrong. He assigns that role--and therefore blame for the Vietnam debacle--to the be^te noire of many in the military, then and now: Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. McMaster asserts that McNamara, in the name of presidents Kennedy and Johnson, usurped the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s role and prevented them from doing what they do best--namely, winning wars, including Vietnam. “The war in Vietnam was not lost in the field, nor was it lost on the front pages of the New York Times or on the college campuses,” McMaster argues. “It was lost in Washington, D.C.”
The trouble with McMaster’s thesis is that it misses deeper points, the most fundamental of which is: The Joint Chiefs of Staff did fulfill their role as principal military advisors to the president during the Vietnam War. It was just that their advice was not taken.
At various stages of the Vietnam War, the chiefs advocated various measures--heavier bombing, mining of North Vietnamese harbors, mobilizing reserves, declaring war, deep pursuit into Cambodia and Laos, an amphibious invasion above the demilitarized zone, more United States combat troops--that in their professional judgment would bring about a successful conclusion to the war. The geopolitical wisdom and military effectiveness of these steps have been (and will be) debated rationally and emotionally until the proverbial cows come home. Some of these steps--with all that we know now but that the decision makers did not know then--might have proved effective. But that is not the fundamental point. The fundamental point is that Kennedy and Johnson, through their designated head of the Defense Department, considered and then rejected the Joint Chiefs’ advice. Kennedy, Johnson and McNamara may have been wrong, but they had every constitutional right to be wrong.
McMaster supports his contention that the Joint Chiefs were not the principal military advisors during the escalation of the Vietnam War by noting that “. . . under the Kennedy-Johnson system, the Joint Chiefs lost . . . direct access to the president and thus . . . real influence on decision making.” But they could not “lose” anything that presidents Kennedy and Johnson did not wish to give them. Both presidents preferred to use McNamara as their intermediary with the Joint Chiefs. At the direction of the Oval Office, McNamara became a conduit for information, back and forth, between Kennedy and Johnson and the military. Both Kennedy and Johnson used McNamara to collect and report the generals’ and admirals’ views and recommendations and, yes, to absorb the heat of their protests and complaints. Was this what the Joint Chiefs wanted? Certainly not. Was this an ideal arrangement for the frankest and fullest exchange of views between civilian and military leaders and, therefore, the wisest formulation of policy? Almost certainly not; Vietnam suggests as much. But that is not the fundamental point. The fundamental point is that it reflected the legitimate wishes of the commanders-in-chief.
Even as they relegated the Joint Chiefs to a peripheral position in the policymaking process, McMaster contends, Johnson and McNamara “were careful to preserve the facade of consultation” in order to prevent the Joint Chiefs from “opposing the administration’s policies either openly or behind the scenes.” This contention is not only inaccurate. Senior military officers whispered their grievances about Johnson and McNamara to powerful friends on key congressional committees and leaked their complaints to sympathetic journalists time and time again. This is what led to the so-called Stennis Hearings of August 1967, which provided the Joint Chiefs with a semipublic forum to criticize Johnson and McNamara for fighting the war in ways contrary to their advice. It was one of the problems of the Vietnam War that senior military officers failed either to argue vigorously for their point of view before a decision was made (and then go along with the decision) or to resign and openly express their disagreement.
McMaster makes much of the fact that when the Joint Chiefs (and their subordinate theater commanders, Gen. William Westmoreland for ground operations and Adm. U.S. Grant Sharp for air operations) requested permission to apply force consistent with their conception of United States objectives, Johnson and McNamara repeatedly rejected their requests or granted them only in part, decisions based on their understanding of American objectives in the war. But that is not the fundamental point. The fundamental point is that under our system of government, it is the president--not the Joint Chiefs--who properly define United States objectives in every war. Vietnam was no exception.
McMaster condemns the strategy of graduated pressure--what some in the military and conservative circles derisively call “half measures”--pursued by the United States in Vietnam. McMaster is correct in that this strategy was more Johnson’s and McNamara’s than the Joint Chiefs’; that it did not work in Vietnam; that the Joint Chiefs tended to present single-service remedies to a complex military problem, thus preventing them from developing a comprehensive estimate of the situation or formulating an effective strategy of their own; and that, in McMaster’s words--based on his battlefield experience--the Joint Chiefs “ignored the uncertainty of war and the unpredictable psychology of an activity that involves killing, death and destruction.”
But McMaster is incorrect in his analysis of why Johnson and McNamara adopted this strategy; he fails to take into account the fact that broad geopolitical factors properly controlled the nature and scope of American involvement in this (and every) war. McMaster asserts that Johnson and McNamara adopted graduated pressure “to avoid confronting many of the possible consequences of military action” and because this pressure “appeared cheap and could be conducted with minimal public and congressional attention.”
The latter is partially true in Johnson’s case. But not the former. Simply put, the United States was in Vietnam to prevent a nuclear World War III with the Soviet Union and/or China, not to hasten one. Despite vociferous military complaints, Johnson (and his hawkish Republican successor, Richard Nixon, who had a much better relationship with the Joint Chiefs, who viewed him as more sympathetic to their viewpoint) rejected stronger military steps such as unlimited bombing and invasion of North Vietnam to minimize the risk of widening the war. If a United States victory in Vietnam could not be achieved without jeopardizing the fundamental interest of avoiding a nuclear World War III, then America’s involvement itself--rather than the debatable but certainly legitimate geopolitical factors that constrained prosecution of the war--should be called into question and taken to task.
McMaster is on the mark, however, in one important but dismal respect: The Joint Chiefs’ relationship with Kennedy, Johnson and McNamara was not good. Why? In part, because Kennedy and Johnson upset their apple cart. Refusing to do business as usual, they used McNamara to assert civilian control over the Pentagon in a way unseen since the days of James Forrestal’s stewardship of the gargantuan department under Harry Truman (a stewardship that tragically helped drive Forrestal to suicide). Through McNamara, they sought to rationalize defense procurement, systematize roles and missions, reduce interservice rivalry and parochialism, minimize reliance on nuclear weapons and avoid superpower confrontations whenever possible. All of this stepped on a lot of toes, evoked a lot of emotions, went against a lot of tradition and bruised a lot of egos.
Combined with the strain brought on by Vietnam and other Cold War crises, McNamara’s brusque approach created an unsurprising, but nevertheless unfortunate, tension between himself, Kennedy and Johnson on one hand and the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the other. They did not explain their perspectives to one another. They did not share their concerns with one another and they hesitated to be frank with one another. In short, they did not fully trust one another. Because there was no forthright communication between top civilian and military leaders, there was no reconciliation of Johnson and McNamara’s intention to sharply limit the United States’ effort in Vietnam and the Joint Chiefs’ assessment that the United States could not possibly win the war under such conditions. “If they had attempted to reconcile [their conflicting] positions,” McMaster notes, “they could not have helped but recognize the futility of the American war effort.”
Such a relationship between America’s top civilian and military leaders is lamentable and must be avoided; it is simply too damaging to our nation in peacetime, to say nothing of wartime. What was surely lacking between civilian and military leaders then (and is surely needed now and in the future) are the simple, not always easy, but vitally necessary things: mutual respect, mutual trust, mutual candor and--when all is said and done--discipline to constitutional authority. Forthright and honorable individuals like McMaster represent the best hope that succeeding generations of American military officers and those civilian leaders who properly direct them will learn from the profoundly human, but no less serious, mistakes of those flawed but not villainous officials who came before them.