24 October 2001

The North Vietnamese would soon realize . . . that although their timetable for victory might be slowed, their ultimate objective was not seriously threatened. While the concern for America's credibility was the most noble aspect of U.S. war planners' calculations, there was insufficient concern given to how a half hearted and ineffectual war plan would affect American credibility. Above all, the American war effort lacked credibility with the one party to whom it mattered most: North Vietnam. Johnson's fear that China might intervene on the side of North Vietnam as it had in North Korea 15 years before caused Johnson and McNamara to limit the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign. At the outset of Rolling Thunder, McNamara told the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the limitations on the bombing campaign were designed to make sure the North Vietnamese did not get "the wrong signal and think we are launching an offensive."

To ensure that neither North Vientam nor China would mistinterpret the "signals" the American military force was intended to convey, the United States sent a Canadian diplomat, Blair Seaborn, as an intermediary to reassure North Vietnam that the United States "had no designs on the territory of North Vietnam, nor any desire to destroy the D.R.V." (Johnson also had the ambassador to Poland convey a letter to the Chinese envoy to Poland stating that the United States had no intention to destroy North Vietnam.) When the United States later sent Seaborn back to Hanoi to tell the North Vietnamese that the United States would increase bombing if the North Vietnamese that the United States would increase bombing if the North Vietnamese did not restrict the Viet Cong in the South, North Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong refused to see Seaborn. Maxwell Taylor cabled Washington that Seaborn sensed "a mood of confidence" among the North Vietnamese; "Hanoi has the impression that our air strikes are a limited attempt to improve our bargaining position and hence are no great cause for immediate concern. . . ."

Nothing in the bombing campaign caused the North Vietnamese to change their assessment of U.S. weakness and reluctance. The tonnage of bombs dropped increased over the next two months, but Johnson and McNamara, who approved all targets ("They can't even bomb an outhouse without my permission," Johnson boasted), refused to attack key military installations, such as antiaircraft radar sites, Soviet-made planes, harbors, rail lines, and, above all, political leadership in Hanoi. American pilots throughout the war were forbidden to attack surface-to-air missile sites that were under construction, for fear of killing a Soviet or Chinese technical adviser who might be supervising the project. Much of the bombing was ineffectual. The United States dropped 432 bombs on a single bridge in April, and though damaged the bridge was not put out of use.

A navy pilot commented bitterly: "At times it seemed as if we were trying to see how much ordnance we could drop on North Vietnam without disturbing their way of life." (75-76).

The basic premise of "corporate liberalism" or the "administrative state" is that the world's "complexity" requires active expert management, properly enlightened by social science. The corporate liberals of the 1960s brough this same attitude to its management of the Vietnam War. Air Force General Curtis LMay thought that McNamara's "Whiz Kids" at the Pentagon were "the most egotistical people that I have ever seen in my whole life. They had no faith in the military at all. They felt that the Harvard Business School method of solving problems would solve any problem in the world."

. . . A special Pentagon war games Unit conducted its SIGMA I study in April 1964, and concluded with eerie prescience that graduated pressure starting with bombing would lead the United States inevitably to commit sizeable ground forces, to which the North Vietnamese would effectively respond by stepping up the tempo of guerrilla attacks in South Vietnam. McNamara and his aides were unimpressed. "This is a different kind of war," one of McNamara's aides lectured the Joint Chiefs.

"Every quantitative measure we have shows we're winning," McNamara had been saying since 1962. "North Vietnam will never beat us; they can't even make ice cubes," the former Ford man contemptuously remarked. He had dozens of wall charts tracking dozens of variables -- body counts, weapons captured, aircraft sorties, river patrols, ad nauseum, ad infinitum -- to prove it. If McNamara had been Moses, a joke ran, he would have come down from Mount Sinai with one stone tablet and three wall charts. It was at this time -- March 1964 -- that McNamara famously said that "I don't object to it being called McNamara's war." His bureaucratic approach to the war led him to linguistic contortions to deny that conventional escalation was underway. When a reporter asked McNamara in 1966 whether a slight buildup in American troops signified an escalation, McNamara coolly replied, "Not at all. It is merely an incremental adjustment to meet a new stimulus level." (70-71)