The Arrogance of Power

McGeorge and William Bundy were high among those Americans best qualified, by training and aptitude, for public leadership in the period following World War II. Born into the Eastern Establishment whose basic reference points were military preparedness and internationalism, they were also proteges of its conspicuous leaders, including Henry Stimson, Dean Acheson and Walter Lippmann. Predictably, both Bundys rose to high policy positions in the national security establishment during the dangerous Cold War years of the 1960s. Mac Bundy served at the apex, as national security advisor to President Kennedy and later to President Johnson; Bill Bundy was the Pentagon official in charge of international affairs and then assistant secretary of state for the Far East. Both were deeply involved in the crises of that period, including the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the narrowly resolved Cuban missile crisis and the confrontation with Khrushchev over Germany and the Berlin Wall. But it was their pivotal participation in the self-reinforcing misjudgments and dramatic failures of the Vietnam War that made them emblematic figures in the demise of the Eastern Establishment as the preeminent influence in U.S. foreign policy.

Kai Bird’s keenly perceptive, thoroughly researched, fair and balanced book explores the major influences--their Boston Brahmin background; their education at Groton, Yale and Harvard; and eminent statesmen and intellectuals who served as their role models--which gave the Bundy brothers exceptional self-assurance, mental toughness, a powerful sense of duty to country, unswerving loyalty to established authority and the conviction that American interests must prevail in the Cold War against the phenomenon of international communism, which had emerged from World War II as the mortal new challenge to the survival of a democratic world order. Unfortunately, these admirable qualities, when applied without an intuitive sense of larger realities and values beyond the strictures of bureaucratic imperatives, led to hubris and disastrous failure in Vietnam. In this failure, of course, the Bundys were hardly alone. The author’s detailed account of their major roles in the Vietnam imbroglio adds significantly to the historical record. It also makes for depressing reading.

They were quite different personalities. Mac, younger by one year, possessed a quicksilver mind of astonishing range and versatility that charmed a striking collection of distinguished older men while he was still in his 20s: Oxford historian Isaiah Berlin wrote to columnist Joseph Alsop after meeting Mac, “I have never admired anyone so much, so intensely.” He was brisk to the point of brusque, enjoyed intellectual combat and irreverent wit but could be abrasive and cold. He had little time or talent for self-criticism. A half-admirer said: “[H]e is the iron priest of an iron faith in the definitiveness of his yes and no” and his “marvelous storehouse of language” makes everything he says “sound plausible. . . . He scares the hell out of me.” The brilliant dean of Harvard College at 34 and for seven years there-after, Mac departed for Washington in 1961 evoking a prescient observation from his friend and colleague, sociologist David Riesman: “I grieved for Harvard and grieved for the nation; for Harvard because he was the perfect dean, for the nation because I thought that very same arrogance and hubris might be very dangerous.”

Bill, the older brother, possessed a strong, self-assured intelligence but was more linear, more methodical than his fast-stepping sibling. Before his presidential appointments in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, he was a respected senior analyst at the CIA, to which he had gravitated after deciding he was bored with the practice of law, and he embodied many characteristics of a top-grade career civil servant. He was likable, a workaholic possessed of what friends thought “just the right amount” of ego; rather prim about irreverence and ribald humor, he was both an exacting superior and a reliable servant of higher authority. As assistant secretary of state for the Far East, he was the Johnson administration’s point man for day-to-day management of the Vietnam War, a progressively anguishing and thankless task. As frustration and fatigue mounted, he was increasingly gripped by tension and (unlike his brother) by doubt.

The Bundys were pragmatic centrists who understood the Cold War was a long and complicated struggle requiring tenacity and patience, as opposed to zealots who seemed ready to bomb all communists into the Stone Age. As to South Vietnam, they were aware by 1963 that the sine qua non of success against the Viet Cong guerrilla insurgency was genuine political reform in Saigon; that there was little hope for a Western democratic solution as long as U.S. political advice, economic aid and military support were aimed at perpetuating a social order, inherited from the French, that had no legitimate roots in the population and was, indeed, the very cause of the rebellion. But in the context of the Cold War, the United States had been committed to this fragile structure since 1954, and effective reform had proved elusive. In 1963, Mac Bundy agreed that the incompetent and repressive government of Premier Ngo Dinh Diem was probably finished but thought the assessment irrelevant. His view was quite clear: If there was a shaky government in Saigon, Washington would simply have to concoct a better one, a strategy that was both an international and domestic political imperative.

President Kennedy had an instinctive aversion to deepening the U.S. commitment, especially to Americanizing the war. In 1962, he told Averell Harriman that we “should seize upon any favorable moment to reduce our involvement.” He repeatedly refused to send combat forces, as opposed to “advisors.” He discussed withdrawal with his trusted aide, Ken O’Donnell, aware that such an action would have to await his reelection in 1964; any earlier pullout risked “another Joe McCarthy scare on our hands.”

Growing political and military chaos in South Vietnam (including evidence that Diem’s brother-in-law, Nhu, was secretly negotiating with Hanoi) intensified the perceived need in Washington to replace Diem. On Oct. 30, the green light was given (in a cable signed by Mac Bundy) for a military coup organized by senior Vietnamese officers. Whether deliberately or by mishap, Diem and Nhu were murdered. Kennedy’s assassination a month later and a string of inept successor regimes in Saigon led to Americanization of the war, facilitated by the Tonkin Gulf Resolution; that Senate action, resulting from the disputed (and later refuted) attack on a U.S. destroyer in August 1964, gave Lyndon Johnson, the uncertain new president, carte blanche authority to use military forces “to prevent further aggression” in Vietnam.

Under-Secretary of State George Ball’s 67-page paper of October 1964 argued for a “political solution,” asserting the impossibility of controlling the risks of an open-ended U.S. takeover of the war: “Once on the tiger’s back we cannot be sure of picking the place to dismount.” Finding himself in agreement with much of Ball’s assessment and regarding Ball on a par with his father-in-law, Dean Acheson, Bill wrote his own long paper, a veiled prescription for fighting one’s way to negotiations and withdrawal: Create a pretext for a retaliatory airstrike, comparable to the Tonkin Gulf incident; bomb the hell out of North Vietnam for a week or 10 days to create an international crisis; then respond to “overwhelming pressures” from the international community to reconvene the Geneva Conference of 1954; stop the bombing and start negotiations aimed at U.S. withdrawal. The unpalatable outcome would be a neutralist coalition government in Saigon and ultimately a communist takeover, but this would be “bearable” because it would be an all-Vietnamese solution “without Chinese participation.”

This “get-out-of-Vietnam” memo went to Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara in late November and hit them like a bombshell. Bill was swiftly summoned to the secretary of state’s office where he found Rusk already in consultation with the secretary of defense. McNamara (still an ardent hawk) and Rusk (whose obsession with the lessons of Munich and fear of Chinese expansion were well-known) informed Bill Bundy that his paper “won’t wash.” A different man might have resigned. A man of lesser stature and connections might have lost his career right there. In effect, Bill saluted and went back to work. He never again made the case that the United States should try to walk away from Vietnam.

Two months after Johnson won the White House in his own right, the situation in Saigon was falling apart “more rapidly” than anticipated in November. Mac warned the president that the U.S. faced defeat unless “harder choices” were made to invigorate the current “passive” policy. Mac and McNamara wanted a program of calibrated bombing attacks that would force Hanoi to “pay a price” for its continued support of the Viet Cong insurgency. His memo delicately hinted that he and McNamara might feel compelled to resign unless more rigorous measures were approved. While Johnson hesitated in the face of conflicting advice, Mac in effect forced his hand. His first trip to Vietnam (early February 1965) coincided with a Viet Cong attack on the air base at Pleiku which destroyed helicopters and killed or wounded 126 Americans. From Saigon Mac persuaded Johnson to order an immediate retaliatory airstrike. As soon as he returned to Washington he urged, and Johnson approved, “a policy of sustained reprisal.” Thus began the permanent, inconclusive bombing of North Vietnam, a program called Rolling Thunder. The decisive factor in the decision was domestic politics. Neither Bundy nor the president wanted to be vulnerable to the charge that they had not responded to a dramatic communist action that killed Americans.

The Rolling Thunder decision quickly led to further American involvement: a permanent bombing campaign would be more efficient if the bombers were based in South Vietnam; this required anti-aircraft defense units and Marines to guard the air base perimeters. Johnson quickly approved these. By April there were 75,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and their mission included combat action. In June, McNamara, abandoning “incrementalism,” suddenly urged an open-ended U.S. build-up to whatever force levels were necessary to persuade the Viet Cong that it “cannot win”--200,000 troops right away, 375,000 within a year and a tripling of air sorties. Mac was appalled, telling McNamara that his proposals were “rash to the point of folly.” But Johnson’s frustration with nuanced advice and his powerful visceral need to control were making him increasingly ready to fight an American war. Mac now found himself “hanging on to the president’s coat tails,” to no avail.

In July the president had three options to consider: Ball’s blunt, impassioned recommendation to cut losses and withdraw; McNamara’s plan for a major U.S. military buildup; and a “middle way” proposal put forward by Bill Bundy to test the combat effectiveness of U.S. ground forces already in Vietnam for the balance of the summer but to postpone further decisions until that test was run. The day of decision was July 21 at a meeting between Johnson and his key advisors. Ball expressed grave doubts that a major U.S. combat effort could be easily disengaged and withdrawn; he thought the momentum would be inexorably toward reinforcement and escalation. Rusk, McNamara and Mac disagreed. Against the risks of withdrawal, Mac preferred to “waffle through.” Johnson’s fuzzed decision came closest to Bill’s “middle way.” Controlled escalation proved uncontrollable, and America plunged into the quagmire. Six months later, McNamara flipped 180 degrees, privately concluding that the war was unwinnable “short of genocidal destruction.”

Tom Hughes, the chief of State Department intelligence, thought in retrospect that if Bill had sided with Ball, it would have been difficult for Mac not to take the same line and that such solid opposition to escalation and American takeover of the war might have earned the day. Both Bundys shared Ball’s doubts that there could be any good outcome in Vietnam, but in July 1965, neither Bundy would argue for pulling the plug. The author believes their position reflected an awareness that their Bunyon-esque president would not abide a defeat in Vietnam; ingrained institutional loyalty and presidential intimidation prevailed. Nicholas Katzenbach, then attorney general and later under-secretary of state, confirms the author’s judgment; Johnson was a man of “enormous insecurity, enormous paranoia,” who feared a land war in Asia but feared far more to be blamed for “losing Vietnam,” for igniting the ugly political passions of a new McCarthyism. In Katzenbach’s view, he would never have bought a policy of disguised defeat; “he would have done what he did. . . . It was fear of the right wing.”

John McNaughton, McNamara’s principal assistant for Vietnam and a Harvard law professor, mordantly allocated the motivations behind the new U.S. policy: The effort was 70% to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat; 10% to secure democracy for the people of South Vietnam; 20% to contain Chinese influence.

Mac Bundy left government in February to begin 13 distinguished and notably liberal years as president of the Ford Foundation. Bill remained at his post until the end of the Johnson administration, ever more enmeshed in the illusions, tortured rationalizations, deceptions and mounting American casualties that made up the widening “credibility gap” of a doomed war. In 1972 he became editor of the prestigious quarterly journal Foreign Affairs, despite bitter protests from academic opponents of the still ongoing Vietnam War. The author concludes that the brothers were “complex men,” mandarins of the “vital center . . . whose ambitions for themselves and their country were shattered by the Cold War compulsion to wage an unjust and unwinnable war.” The persistence of this compulsion in Vietnam shattered the “vital center” itself.