On 2 March, CIA's senior representative on the subcommittee paraphrased this key judgment for DCI McCone: "The assessment's principal conclusions are . . . that we are not sanguine that the posited US actions would in fact cause Hanoi to call off the war in the South"; and that even if Hanoi did cease or reduce its support of the Viet Cong, "considerable political-military improvement would be necessary in SVN if the GVN were to have a chance of permanently reducing the VC threat."(93) This basic judgment, agreed upon by an interagency panel, closely paralleled positions CIA's Office of National Estimates had been taking since at least l96l, and foreshadowed judgments CIA representatives would continue to put forward in interagency forums throughout 1964.(94)

Robert Johnson's interagency intelligence officers did not confine themselves to questioning the efficacy of bombing the North; they raised broad political questions as well. Here again their judgments were somber. Their report suggested that the United States might get caught up in a situation in which the South Vietnamese or the Laotian Government might crumble in the midst of US escalation, thereby destroying the political base for the US actions. They also warned that if the US bombings of the North did not work, "the costs of failure might be greater than the cost of failure under a counter-insurgency strategy because of the deeper U.S. commitment and the broader world implications."(95)

The intelligence group's warnings had little if any effect on the policy decisions that were subsequently made--the fate of virtually all such intelligence inputs into the administration's 1964-65 contingency planning for expanding its role in Vietnam. In fact, even before the Johnson group had completed its deliberations, Walt Rostow met with his boss, Secretary Rusk, "to report to you the results of our individual review of the attached report on Southeast Asia prepared by the Policy Planning Council." Rostow told Rusk the concept of that report was that military and other sanctions against North Vietnam "could cause it to call off the war principally because of its fear that it would otherwise risk loss of its politically important industrial development; because of its fear of being driven into the arms of Communist China; and because of Moscow's, Peiping's and Hanoi's concern about escalation."(96)

There is no indication in available files that Rostow ever told the Secretary of State that Rusk's own study group had failed to support Rostow's assurance to the Secretary that bombing the North might save the South. Nor is there any indication that the group's judgments became known to or had any effect on top policymakers. Later in 1964, nonetheless, the Robert Johnson exercise did materially influence the administration's most outspoken senior skeptic, Under Secretary of State George Ball. In October he prepared a long, scathing criticism of President Johnson's entire Vietnam course. His critique specifically cited the judgment by Robert Johnson's interagency group that probably the most that could be expected "in the best of circumstances" from US bombings of the North would be that North Vietnam would ultimately slacken and ostensibly cease its support of the VC, but that "We can, of course, have no assurance that such 'best of circumstances' would obtain, even if considerable damage had been done the DRV."(97)

While the Robert Johnson group toiled and the initial covert pressures conceived in OPLAN 34-A were being applied against North Vietnam, a second coup occurred in Saigon: on 30 January 1964, Maj. Gen. Nguyen Khanh overthrew the junta that had murdered President Diem. In succeeding weeks, CIA officers showered policymakers with assessments detailing the GVN's political and military malaise.(98)

CIA Realism
DCI McCone told Secretary Rusk on 6 February that there was evidence of increased Viet Cong activities and victories.(99) On 9 February, CIA sent Secretary McNamara a Saigon Station appraisal that the South Vietnamese population at large "appears apathetic, without enthusiasm either for the GVN or VC sides but responsive to the latter because it fears the VC."(100) On 10, 11, 14, and 18 February, a special CIA mission to Saigon sent policymakers assessments which "instead of finding progress . . . reported a serious and steadily deteriorating situation."(101) On 12 February, the DCI and the Intelligence Community issued SNIE 50-64, "Short-Term Prospects in Southeast Asia," which held that the question at hand was whether the situations in South Vietnam and Laos "may be on the verge of collapse," and which judged that the South Vietnamese "have at best an even chance of withstanding the insurgency threat during the next few weeks or months."(102) On 18 February, Richard Helms, CIA's Deputy Director for Plans, wrote Secretary Rusk that the tide of insurgency in all four corps areas in Vietnam "appears to be going against GVN."(103) On 20 February, CIA Far East chief Bill Colby's briefing for the White House began, "The Viet Cong have taken advantage of the power vacuum . . . in Saigon to score both military and psychological gains in the countryside'; the belief appeared widespread among the Vietnamese that "the tide is running against the government in all areas of the country."(104) And on 29 February, McCone told Secretary McNamara that the outlook in Vietnam was "very bad, and that unless the Khanh government demonstrated an ability for leadership of the nation, we could expect further and perhaps fatal deterioration."(105)

Thanks in part to these CIA assessments, the growing appreciation in Washington of the fragile Vietnam situation led in mid-March 1964 to a landmark White House decision to begin contingency planning, backstage, for selective attacks against the DRV by US air and naval forces. The progression of steps in this direction were the President's decision to dispatch Secretary McNamara and General Taylor to assess the situation on the ground in Saigon; the President's acceptance on 4 March of the need to make Hanoi accountable for its actions in South Vietnam;(106) the return of McNamara and Taylor from their four-day trip to Saigon; and, based largely on their report of the grim situation there, a formal NSC action on 17 March which raised America's military commitment in Vietnam another notch. McCone was a member of the McNamara-Taylor party, and his pessimism about the Vietnam situation clearly contributed to the draining of the Pentagon leaders' remaining optimism about South Vietnamese conduct of the war.

On 3 March, in preparation for his Vietnam trip, McCone had drafted a gloomy personal appraisal of the situation. He held that many areas in the countryside were being lost to the Viet Cong, with the result that "there is a growing feeling that the VC may be the wave of the future." He complained that intelligence from the field had been spotty: "there has been submersion of bad news and an overstatement of good news"; for the past year, "we have been misinformed about conditions in Vietnam." Then the DCI directly challenged the concept that going North would save the South. In his view, carrying the action to North Vietnam would not guarantee victory in the absence of a strengthened GVN. And if present disruptive trends in South Vietnamese politics continued, bombing the North "would not win the war in South Vietnam and would cause the United States such serious problems in every corner of the world that we should not sanction such an effort."(107) On that same day Major General Krulak, who with McCone had criticized the NIE 53-63 estimators for not being sufficiently upbeat 12 months earlier, now registered a change of heart similar to that of the DCI. On 3 March, in the briefing book he was preparing for McNamara's Saigon trip, Krulak told the Secretary that South Vietnam now faced "the most critical situation in its nearly 10 years of existence," and that all available evidence pointed to "a steady improvement in the VC's military posture, both quantitatively and qualitatively, throughout 1963 and the first two months of 1964."(108)

In Saigon, McCone received briefings from Station officers which detailed South Vietnam's numerous political and military weaknesses. He did not contest their assessments. He concluded that the United States should stick with General Khanh; that consideration should be given to moving "two or possibly three" of Taiwan's Chinese Nationalist divisions into the southern tip of South Vietnam's delta; that the measures Washington's policymakers were proposing would prove to be "too little too late"; and that in any event, hitting the North would prove unavailing unless accompanied by considerable political improvement in the South.(109) Another champion of using combat forces from Taiwan at the time was DDI Ray Cline, who had recently returned from talks with President Chiang Kai-shek in Taipei and who in early March recommended that Chinese Nationalist armed forces, including an air commando unit, be used in Vietnam.(110) McCone and Cline, however, received no significant backing on this score from senior decisionmakers, who saw numerous drawbacks to the idea.(111)

On 16 March, upon his return from Vietnam, McNamara gave President Johnson a detailed accounting of the fragile scene in Vietnam and offered a number of recommendations for improving the situation. Most of these concerned strengthening the GVN's political and military effectiveness. The Secretary concluded that direct US attacks on the North were premature, but that preparations should go forward that would permit the United States "to be in a position on 30 days' notice to initiate a program of 'Graduated Overt Military Pressure' against North Vietnam."(112) On 17 March the NSC issued National Security Action Memorandum 288, in which President Johnson accepted McNamara's recommendations and directed that the creating of a standby capability to bomb the North should "proceed energetically."(113)

Domino Thesis Questioned
"US Objectives in South Vietnam" were listed under that title on 17 March in National Security Action Memorandum 288, in which, inter alia, the National Security Council made the domino thesis an integral part of formal US policy. Unless South Vietnam could be changed into a viable, independent non-Communist state, NSAM 288 asserted, all of Southeast Asia would probably fall under Communist dominance or accommodate to Communist influence. "Even the Philippines would become shaky, and the threat to India on the West, Australia and New Zealand to the South, and Taiwan, Korea, and Japan to the North and East would be greatly increased."(114) The Johnson administration did not bother to ask for a CIA intelligence evaluation of these assumptions until some weeks later--and then ignored the response.

It was the Board of National Estimates, CIA's permanent panel of "wise men," that the White House at length asked to pronounce the analytic judgment on the domino thesis. The loss of Vietnam would of course be a shock, replied the Board on 9 June, but with the possible exception of Cambodia, the rest of East Asia would probably not fall rapidly to Communist control, and there would be much the United States could do to shore up the area.(115) It is noteworthy (1) that the Board called into question one of the primary theses on which US policy and military planning were being based and, by June, briskly executed; (2) that CIA had not been asked for its view of the domino thesis until 10 weeks after the NSC had already inscribed it as formal US policy; and (3) that the Board's conclusions had no apparent impact on existing or subsequent policy.

March 1964 closed with new doubts being expressed by the NSC Staff's Michael Forrestal, one of those officials who had rejected the NIE 53-63 draft a year before for being too pessimistic. On 30 March 1964 he wrote his boss, McGeorge Bundy, that "warning indicators" were now flashing, and that "Chet Cooper is completely right. This is a Greek tragedy, and the curtain is slowly descending."(116)

War Gaming Heightens Doubts
The thesis that bombing the North would save the South was examined again in April, this time by a JCS military-political war game titled SIGMA-I-64. CIA and Intelligence Community officers were well represented in all three of the game's teams, Blue, Red, and Control, staffed mostly by lieutenant colonels through brigadier generals and their civilian equivalents. Although the Blue Team fielded some true believers in victory through airpower, the game's posited US escalation did not work: the DRV did not knuckle under to the heightened pressures but counterescalated by pouring more troops into the South. As the game progressed, the military-political situation played out in South Vietnam went from bad to worse, and the United States ended up in a no-win situation, its policy options essentially narrowed to two unpromising alternatives. On the one hand, it could try to seek a military decision by greatly expanding hostilities against the DRV--which SIGMA-I's players judged might risk repeating the Korean experience of massive Chinese intervention. Or, Washington could begin deescalating--which the players held could cost it a marked loss of US credibility and prestige.(117) The thesis of escalated punishment of North Vietnam had again been tested by interagency experts and found wanting.

Two of the CIA officers who participated in the war game, the author and the Deputy Chief of DDP's Far East Division, were so upset by some of SIGMA-I's assumptions and outcomes that they sent DCI McCone a critique that went beyond mere intelligence questions. In their view, the concept that hitting the North would save the South was "highly dubious" because "the principal sources of VC strength and support are indigenous, and even if present DRV direction and support of the VC could be cut off, these would not assure victory in the South." Attacking the North should be considered a supplementary course of action, not a cure-all, and such action could be effective "only if considerable GVN political-military improvement also takes place." Further, they observed, the war game seriously underestimated the impact and influence of adverse public, Congressional, and world opinion: "There would be widespread concern that the U.S. was risking major war, in behalf of a society that did not seem anxious to save itself, and by means not at all certain to effect their desired ends in the South." These officers concluded that "the United States should not move against the DRV blithely, but know beforehand what we may be getting into, military and politically;" unless there is enough military-political potential in the South to make the whole Vietnam effort worthwhile, they concluded, "the U.S. would only be exercising its great, but irrelevant, armed strength."(118)

The war game's failure to validate the thesis that punishing the DRV would save the South failed to derail or even slow the administration's deliberate pace toward a Northern solution. According to available files, the only significant high-level attention to SIGMA-I's negative outcome was given by Under Secretary of State George Ball a few weeks later when he asked Secretary Rusk why the United States was contemplating air action against the North "in the face of a recently played war game that demonstrated the ineffectiveness of such a tactic."(119) Ball's question apparently went unanswered.

Planning for the Northern Option
In April-June, the tempo of the Johnson administration's Vietnam planning rose several more notches with a top-level conclusion that the military situation in the South had deteriorated to the point that the Pentagon's role had to be significantly expanded. Many officials who had been confident of South Vietnamese progress now expressed dismay at the worsening situation. Most significantly, Secretary McNamara now reversed earlier strategic policy by at last canceling plans made under President Kennedy to begin withdrawing US military personnel from Vietnam, and announced that more might have to be sent there. CINCPAC and the JCS began quietly drawing up folders of bombing targets in North Vietnam. Senior White House, State, and Defense officials held conference after conference, with McCone and Colby present on virtually every occasion, to discuss means of carrying the war to North Vietnam--with never a reference to the conclusions of the earlier Robert Johnson interagency study group and the Sigma-I war game that bombing the North would not work. Other officials began making ready a draft enabling resolution against the day when Congressional approval might be sought. When at this time French President de Gaulle proposed that Vietnam be neutralized, the White House sought to counter de Gaulle by asking Canada to tell Ho Chi Minh that the Johnson administration was prepared to carry the war to the North if it did not markedly cut back its support to the Viet Cong.

One of the clearest examples of policymakers' dismay at this time was Secretary McNamara's private admission, contrary to his continuing public assurances that things would ultimately be well in Vietnam, that the situation there was in fact shaky. As recorded by William Colby, at a meeting with President Johnson and Director McCone on 14 May, McNamara termed the Saigon Country Team "a mess," criticized Ambassador Lodge for keeping COS DeSilva at arm's length, and described Country Team morale as "extremely low" because no direction was being given the counterinsurgency program. He observed that Ambassador Lodge was becoming despondent and had recently stated that, if General Khanh's government should fall, the US should establish a base at Cam Ranh Bay and "run the country." At this 14 May White House meeting, President Johnson confided that his principal concern was American public opinion, given what he considered to be a widening belief that the United States was losing the war and that the administration was pursuing a no-win policy. Johnson told McNamara that the administration must do more but, as recorded by Colby, "he does not know what. . . . He said he does not want to get into a war but he is willing to take some risks if necessary. The overall posture must be improved beyond 'more of the same.'"(120)

Four days later, DCI McCone joined Secretary McNamara and State's William Bundy(121) in telling President Johnson that the situation in Vietnam had become so precarious that the chances were now "at least 50-50" that in the absence of action against North Vietnam, both Vietnam and Laos would "deteriorate by the latter part of this year to a point where they would be very difficult to save." According to a CIA file copy of Bundy's record of this agreement, "a select group" had been working since early March on a "possible sequence of actions to be followed if a decision were taken to hit the North."(122) CIA files do not record whether Bundy told the President that in March that group's intelligence subcommittee had concluded that the Rostow bombing thesis would not work.

During May and June specific clues began to appear as to what the scope of expanded US participation in the war might involve. According to CIA files, a scenario prepared by the State Department dated 23 May recommended that US and South Vietnamese aircraft bomb DRV communication lines, harbors, and industries, and suggested that the use of nuclear weapons be considered in the event Communist China entered the war in force.(123) On 25 May, according to DCI McCone's notes, Secretary McNamara told President Johnson that "any action against North Vietnam must anticipate the commitment of at least seven divisions in Southeast Asia."(124) At a policy conference in Honolulu on 1 and 2 June, according to McCone's account, Secretaries Rusk and McNamara agreed that "we must prepare for extreme contingencies even though we consider them improbable."(125) On 2 June, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended that the United States should take "positive, prompt, and meaningful military action" to "accomplish destruction of the North Vietnamese will and capabilities" to support the Communist insurgencies in South Vietnam and Laos.(126) And on 5 June, Ambassador Lodge in Saigon recommended heightened US actions against the DRV: "Not only would screams from the North have a very tonic effect and strengthen morale here; it is also vital to frighten Ho."(127)

All the while DCI McCone was persistently warning policymakers that South Vietnam was in deep trouble. In early May he had told House and Senate intelligence subcommittees that the situation was bleak. On 12 May, he cabled Bill Colby, then in Saigon, that he was "deeply concerned that the situation in South Vietnam may be deteriorating to a greater extent than we realize," and commissioned Colby to check on whether intelligence reporting "is providing proper appreciation of the actual situation . . ."(128) McCone reported that at the Honolulu conference of 1-2 June he took exception to certain of the optimistic assessments of the situation in South Vietnam advanced by the new MACV commander, Gen. William Westmoreland, averring instead that there was an "erosion of the will of the people to resist" and that "the downward spiral would continue."(129)

By now McCone shared the belief that the war must be taken to the North, though he differed with some of the military particulars being suggested. As we have seen, on 18 May he had agreed that the South might be lost unless the United States took military action against the North. The following week, at a meeting of the NSC's Executive Committee, 24 May, he had urged that "if we go into North Vietnam we should go in hard and not limit our action to pinpricks."(130) And at the June conference in Honolulu he agreed with Secretaries Rusk and McNamara that the United States must prepare for extreme contingencies.(131)

McCone felt strongly at this time, however, that US airstrikes against the North would suffice to contain and deter the enemy and that US ground forces should not be committed in the South. After a meeting with the President and the Secretary of Defense on 25 May, he wrote that he had differed sharply with McNamara's assessment that any US action against the DRV should anticipate the commitment of at least seven divisions in Southeast Asia. "I took issue with this point," wrote McCone, because he felt that air attacks would be more decisive and possibly conclusive. He argued that "we had better forget" the idea of sending US troops to Vietnam because "the American people and Congress would not support such an action under any conditions."(132) Contrary to McCone's expectation, as we will see, the President did receive widespread public support, at least for some months, when in early l965 he at last made his decision to dispatch combat troops to Vietnam.

Although McCone had long since come around to the more pessimistic views of Vietnam held by his staff, the months of May through July 1964 saw some distinct gaps open up between these officers and the Director over how to save the situation. Whereas he now felt that this could best be accomplished by carrying the war to the North, most of his Vietnam specialists--in the DDP, DDI, O/NE, and elsewhere--continued to insist, as they had for some time, that the war had to be won in the South through substantially improved GVN political-military performance.

On 21 May, just three days after DCI McCone had joined McNamara and Bill Bundy in telling the President that South Vietnam might be lost unless the United States went North, CIA officers Bill Colby and Chet Cooper championed an alternative course, one they termed "massive counterinsurgency" in the South.(133) Meanwhile, on 27 May O/NE prepared a draft memorandum for the United States Intelligence Board (USIB) addressing McNamara's recommended deployment of seven US divisions to Southeast Asia. This, it was argued, would "tend to convey precisely what it was not supposed to, that the US was resolved to transform the struggle over South Vietnam into a war against North Vietnam in which the survival of the DRV regime would be at stake." Furthermore, according to O/NE, the expanded US commitment "would provoke a generally more adverse world reaction" than previous NIEs had indicated; meanwhile, the enemy would not cease and desist.(134)

The Johnson administration received additional unwelcome views from CIA when on 8 June, O/NE Board member Willard Matthias ventured to surmise that the situation in South Vietnam had so deteriorated that "some kind of negotiated settlement based upon neutralization" might develop in the world. (This senior CIA officer's judgment would precipitate a flap in August when his heresy was leaked to the press.)(135) On the same day the CIA General Counsel (1) advised the DCI that there was "a serious domestic problem in [the administration's] taking increasingly militant steps without any specific congressional approval," and (2) seconded the DCI's earlier expressed view that the President would not be able to obtain a meaningful joint resolution from the Congress.(136) And it was on the next day that O/NE questioned the embrace the NSC had given the domino thesis in March.(137)

In July, developments in South Vietnam seemed to strengthen the case for hitting the Vietnamese Communists harder and more directly. On 24 July, McCone cautioned President Johnson that the Viet Cong were growing stronger and the situation increasingly critical.(138) Confirming McCone's analysis, Saigon Station Chief Peer DeSilva reported two days later that a crisis appeared at hand, "possibly involving the will of the present leadership to continue the war." General Khanh now purported to believe that war weariness in the South had reached such an acute state that "heroic new measures, beyond the borders of South Vietnam" were now necessary to bring any prospect of victory. (139) In a parallel cable, the new Ambassador in Saigon, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, reported that Khanh had apparently come to believe the Viet Cong could not be defeated by counterinsurgency means alone, and therefore he had launched a deliberate campaign to get the United States to "march North." Taylor added that if Khanh and his colleagues were not successful in this effort, strong pressures might develop within the GVN to seek a negotiated settlement: "there are signs that this possibility cannot be excluded . . ."(140) The Ambassador requested that he be authorized to tell Khanh that although the idea of expanding hostilities beyond South Vietnam "has not been seriously discussed up to now . . . the time has come for giving the matter a thorough [joint] analysis."(141)

Washington's answer was a cautious OK. Following Presidential conferences on 25 July, attended by DDCI Carter and C/FE Colby, Ambassador Taylor was instructed that joint planning should go forward focused primarily on improving counterinsurgency efforts in the South, but stopping short for the moment of measures involving overt US military action against the North.(142) At the same time, the White House gave CIA the high-priority task of estimating Communist reactions to various new courses of action which might include "selected air missions using non-US unmarked aircraft against prime military targets" in the DRV.(143) Thus, just three months before the November Presidential election, the Johnson administration was preparing contingency plans for expanding US participation in the war but was keeping both the plans and the act of planning quiet.

Within a week's time, events in the Gulf of Tonkin changed the situation. In early August, in response to what were perceived as attacks by DRV patrol boats on the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy, US Navy planes bombed military targets along 100 miles of North Vietnam's coastline, and President Johnson had whiffed his long-prepared Joint Resolution through the Congress.(144)

August-October 1964 saw more heated backstage policy debate on whether to "go North," principally between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense. The JCS maintained that only airstrikes against the North could save the South; others who held similar views included MACV General Westmoreland, Secretary of State Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, and Walt Rostow. By contrast, McNamara insisted that the prime requirement remained stability in the South, and that bombing the North would not ensure that result; weighing in with similar arguments were Ambassador Maxwell Taylor and his Saigon country team, the Pentagon's International Security Affairs bureau, and State's William Bundy. These conflicting arguments were aired during a September-October interagency policy examination led by DoD/ISA, which specifically revisited Walt Rostow's thesis that bombing the North would save the South.(145) The President and his senior advisers, who might have entered or refereed the debate, were besieged at this time by more pressing developments external to Vietnam, chief among them the fall of Soviet Premier Khrushchev, Communist China's detonation of a nuclear device, crises in Africa, and--not least--President Johnson's race against what he termed "the war candidate," Senator Barry Goldwater.

Although they were not major participants in the Vietnam strategy debates, DCI McCone and his officers did not hesitate to offer numerous judgments concerning related events and policy issues. On 4 August, at the height of the argument over how to respond to the Tonkin Gulf attacks, McCone told the President and the NSC that those attacks had been a defensive reaction by the North Vietnamese to prior covert gunboat raids (part of OPLAN 34A) on North Vietnamese islands: "They are responding out of pride and on the basis of defense considerations." In the DCI's view, the North Vietnamese attacks did not "represent a deliberate decision to provoke or accept a major escalation of the Vietnamese war," but were a signal to the United States that Hanoi was determined to continue the war and was "raising the ante."(146) On 9 September, McCone told Ambassador Taylor that the Intelligence Community now considered the situation in the South so fragile that it was doubtful national unity could be established there. The DCI in addition judged that the DRV would match any introduction of US ground forces in the South: "The Communists would pin our units down by matching them with equal or superior force."(147) Also on 9 September, McCone participated in a Presidential conference on Vietnam, where he remarked that CIA was "very gravely concerned" about the situation in the South. Then, contrary to views his Board of National Estimates had been maintaining for some time, McCone held that the loss of Vietnam would lead, dominolike, to the loss of Southeast Asia.(148) Later in September, DDCI Carter told Secretaries Rusk and McNamara that the situation in Vietnam was deteriorating "quite rapidly," and that there was some doubt that the GVN could hold on in the face of internal disintegration and increasing Viet Cong pressures.(149)

During the busy weeks of August-October, the Intelligence Community estimators were fed a series of Vietnam strategy options to ponder, and they responded with some new judgments that strengthened the logic that extraordinary new policy measures were necessary. On 1 October, SNIE 53-2-64 held that the outlook among the South Vietnamese was one of "increasing defeatism, paralysis of leadership, friction with Americans, exploration of possible lines of political accommodation with the other side, and a general petering out of the war effort."(150) SNIE l0-3-64 of 9 October, written specifically to address the Rostow thesis, muted previous CIA skepticism and judged that the North Vietnamese, if subjected to a program of gradually increasing US air attacks, would probably suspend military attacks in the South temporarily but would renew the insurgency there at a later date. The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research dissented from this conclusion, contending that it was more likely Hanoi's reaction would be to raise the tempo of Communist attacks in South Vietnam. As events would prove before October was over, and as Gen. Bruce Palmer later wrote, "the SNIE was dead wrong while INR was right on the money."(151)

C/FE Colby, participating in many policy forums during these weeks, was also very pessimistic about the South's situation. On 14 October, for example, he told the White House's Mike Forrestal that the Viet Cong's regular forces had "grown considerably," that GVN political fragmentation was evident not only in Saigon but also in the countryside, and that local GVN authorities lacked the force to deal with Viet Cong attacks.(152) In making these judgments, however, Colby did not offer his own policy recommendations.

Not so O/NE officer George A. Carver. Shortly after the Gulf of Tonkin attacks, for example, he gave DCI McCone a sharp critique of the modest reprisals then being proposed by Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy.(153) Carver argued that the proposed measures were not likely to have much effect on the situation, North or South. Later he sent Bundy a similar critique, noting for the record that it had not been seen or approved by any member of the Board of National Estimates and that "Bundy understands it is for his personal use only."(154)

More War-Gaming, More Skepticism
In September 1964, Johnson administration officers tested the Rostow thesis once more in a second JCS political-military war game, SIGMA II. Here the players for the most part were not working-level officers, but JCS Chief Earle Wheeler, Gen. Curtis LeMay, Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance, McGeorge Bundy, and other principals. But, like its predecessor war game, SIGMA II ended up a stalemate, US bombing of the North not having brought victory nearer. Robert J. Myers, one of CIA's participants in SIGMA II, thereafter made a sharp critique of US policy, holding that the war game had illustrated that bombing the North would have only limited effect, and that the deployment of up to five US divisions in Southeast Asia "would not materially change the situation." Given the results of SIGMA II, Myers drew a searing conclusion: if bombing the North would not work, he wrote, and if the United States was reluctant to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam, then "there is a grave question of how the US is supposed to win the type of war being fought on the ground by large numbers of combat forces of the enemy deployed in small units and spurred by a very able political and propaganda program."(155)

Like the SIGMA I war game played earlier in 1964, however, SIGMA II and its depressing outcome had no apparent dampening effect on senior decisionmakers' certainty that the way to save South Vietnam was to bomb the North and employ US combat forces in the South. Strategists continued their contingency planning toward those ends as if the outcome of SIGMA II (plus SIGMA I and Robert Johnson's earlier NSC working group study) had not occurred. The realism of SIGMA II would, however, get an early confirmation: the officer playing the role of the President committed a US Marine expeditionary force to South Vietnam's defense on 26 February l965 of the game's calendar. President Johnson did send just such a Marine force on the actual date of 8 March 1965, only 10 days later than in the war game.(156) According to Walt Elder, McCone's former Special Assistant, the DCI participated in only one session of Sigma II because he "hated all war games"; on this one occasion he went out of "innate snobbery, when he learned that the other seniors would be there."(157)

In the meantime, the slide toward escalation was again being tilted by dramatic events in the field: in their most devastating raid to date, on 1 November the Viet Cong destroyed five B-57 bombers at the Bien Hoa airfield near Saigon and damaged eight more; four Americans were killed and many others wounded. The Joint Chiefs of Staff immediately recommended "a prompt and strong response," including US air strikes on the DRV.(158) Instead of accepting these recommendations for reprisal on the eve of the US presidential election, President Johnson commissioned a special NSC Working Group, headed by Assistant Secretary of State Bill Bundy, to draw up and evaluate various political and military options for direct action against North Vietnam.(159) Their milestone mandate was not to determine whether the United States should expand its participation in the war, but to recommend how to do it.

Shortly following President Johnson's landslide election victory, the Bundy group offered up three theoretical options for US air action against the DRV: (1) reprisal strikes; (2) a "fast squeeze" program of sudden, severe, intensive bombing; and (3) a "slow squeeze" option of graduated airstrikes. The "slow squeeze" option was essentially the course the United States employed when it began systematically to bomb the DRV some weeks later.

The NSC-commissioned Bundy exercise provides a relevant gauge of the influence--or the lack thereof--that intelligence had on Vietnam policymaking. Basing their views on existing National Estimates, the panel of intelligence officers within the Bundy group judged that bombing the North would probably not work; it would not impel Hanoi to lessen its direction and support of the Viet Cong's war effort.(160)

Several considerations produced this skepticism. First, these officers argued that Hanoi's leaders, in launching and maintaining their war effort, had made a fundamental estimate that the difficulties facing the United States were "so great that US will and ability to maintain resistance in that area can be gradually eroded--without running high risks that the US would wreak heavy destruction on the DRV or Communist China."

Second, although the intelligence panel recognized that North Vietnam's leaders were "acutely and nervously aware" that their transportation system and industrial plant were vulnerable to attack, the DRV's economy was "overwhelmingly agricultural and to a large extent decentralized in a myriad of more or less economically self-sufficient villages." Hence, even though US bombing was expected to cripple North Vietnamese industry, seriously restrict its military capabilities, and to a lesser extent degrade Hanoi's capabilities to support guerrilla war in South Vietnam and Laos, it would probably not have a "crucial effect on the daily lives of the overwhelming majority of the North Vietnam population." Nor would the posited US bombing be likely to create unmanageable control problems or cause Hanoi's leaders to shrink from suffering some damage in the course of a test of wills with the United States.

Third, the intelligence panel concluded that Hanoi "probably believes that considerable international pressure" would develop against a US policy of expanding the war to the North, and that negative world opinion "might impel the US to relax its attacks and bring the US to an international conference on Vietnam."(161)

According to CIA files, one of the issues raised in the course of the NSC Working Group's study was whether under certain circumstances the United States should use nuclear weapons. By personal memo Chairman William Bundy quietly asked two of his group members to consult with their principals on whether, in the event there were extreme Communist reactions to a new course of punishing the DRV, the United States might be compelled "to choose between sharp territorial losses or even defeat on the ground, or the use of at least tactical nuclear weapons." Bundy himself held that such US action would have "catastrophic" consequences, and the Working Group, per se, did not pursue the question or report on it.(162) That this extreme issue was raised nonetheless attests to both the quandary US policy faced at the time and the depth of Bundy's probing.

Intelligence Panel Disregarded
In the end, the views of the Bundy group's intelligence panel failed to carry any weight when the final policy decisions were made. For one thing, not all the NSC Working Group's members, especially the representatives of the JCS, shared the intelligence panel's skeptical view of the efficacy of going North. And when President Johnson met with his principal advisers on 19 November for a progress report on the Bundy group's efforts, Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy himself refrained from mentioning the doubts the group's intelligence officers had raised. Two days later, moreover, when the NSC Working Group's final report was passed upwards, it bore no indication that its intelligence officers had dissented. Once again, senior policy advisers had brushed aside intelligence judgments they found uncongenial or unlikely to sell.(163)

The NSC Working Group's examination of the Rostow thesis proved to be Washington's last testing of the premise that drastically expanding US participation in the war would turn the tide, although debate continued among the President and his senior advisers through the waning weeks of 1964.

On l6 November, for example, Walt Rostow stressed that the central purpose of bombing the DRV should be the sending of a signal to Hanoi that the US is "ready and able to meet any level of escalation" the North Vietnamese might mount in response.(164) The Joint Chiefs of Staff were concerned especially with the domino consequences of South Vietnam's fall: in a memo dated 23 November they warned McNamara that its loss would weaken India, isolate Australia and New Zealand, undermine US prestige and influence throughout the world, and encourage the Communists to extend their "wars of national liberation" into new areas.(165) In late November, Gen. Maxwell Taylor made a flying visit from his post as Ambassador to Saigon to warn that "we are playing a losing game in South Viet-Nam," that it was "high time" we changed course, and that the United States should launch "immediate and automatic reprisals" against the DRV in the event of further enemy atrocities--but only after prior steps had been taken to shore up the security position of Americans in South Vietnam.(166) In December, McGeorge Bundy struck a fairly cautious note in holding that "No matter which course is taken, it seems likely to us that we face years of involvement in South Vietnam. . . . We do not want a big war out there," but neither do "we intend to back out of a l0-year-long commitment."(167)

Enemy saboteurs came close to provoking major US reprisals against the DRV when they bombed an American officers' billet (the Brinks Hotel) in Saigon on Christmas eve. President Johnson made a temporizing response to the many recommendations from the US military and the Saigon Embassy that the United States retaliate strongly. He spelled out his concerns in a 30 December cable to Ambassador Taylor. Emphasizing that he was especially concerned about protecting Americans in Vietnam from a concentrated VC attack against them, a threat the Intelligence Community had told him was the most likely enemy reaction to a US reprisal against DRV targets, Johnson explained: "Every time I get a military recommendation it seems to me that it calls for large-scale bombing. I have never felt that this war will be won from the air." In his view, what was needed was a larger and stronger US force on the ground: "We have been building our strength to fight this kind of war ever since l96l, and I myself am ready to substantially increase the number of Americans in Vietnam if it is necessary to provide this kind of fighting force against the Viet Cong."(168)

This policy debate about whether to expand the war and, if so, how, was again rudely interrupted--and at last decided--by a shattering Viet Cong attack on US installations at Pleiku in central South Vietnam, 7 February 1965. That attack killed eight Americans, wounded l09, and damaged numerous aircraft. A significant influence upon the policy debate that ensued was the fact that President Johnson's Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, McGeorge Bundy, happened just then to be visiting South Vietnam--his first visit, incidentally, to East Asia--at the same time as by coincidence Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin was visiting Hanoi. Four days prior to that attack, DCI McCone had told President Johnson that Kosygin would shortly be visiting the DRV and that this signalled a more active Soviet policy in Southeast Asia. According to Johnson's later account, McCone told him on this occasion, 3 February, that the Soviet leaders "may have concluded" that Hanoi was about to win the war in Vietnam and had accordingly decided to move in to share credit for the DRV's anticipated victory. Therefore, McCone held, Moscow would probably give Hanoi greatly increased economic and military aid, including antiaircraft missiles, and would encourage Hanoi to step up its subversion of the South.(169)

In Saigon, McGeorge Bundy immediately telephoned Washington that the Viet Cong, in collusion with Soviet Premier Kosygin, had "thrown down the gauntlet," and recommended that the United States retaliate at once against the DRV. Bundy was not "losing his cool," according to Chester Cooper, an NSC staff officer and former senior O/NE official who at the time was accompanying Bundy. On the day before the Pleiku attacks Cooper and Bundy, assisted by the Pentagon's John McNaughton and State's Alexis Johnson, had drafted a recommendation that US forces retaliate against North Vietnam. As Cooper later characterized that draft, "You just couldn't start bombing North Vietnam de novo," what was required was a Communist act "so atrocious" that it would justify the new US course; in the meantime, "We would take our lumps until something very dramatic and very obscene happened."(170) Bundy and his colleagues had had to wait only one day.(171)

In recommending that US forces strike North Vietnam, McGeorge Bundy may not have lost his cool, but his assumption that Pleiku was a carefully timed and orchestrated Communist provocation has remained open to doubt. Among the doubters is George Allen, at the time a senior CIA analyst in the Saigon Station: "I never met anyone who shared Bundy's view that the Pleiku incident was deliberately arranged to coincide with his visit and with that of Kosygin to Hanoi." Allen bases his skepticism in part on the testimony of a VC sapper taken prisoner at Pleiku, who disclosed that he and his party had been rehearsing the attack for l00 days before they struck. Allen noted, "Not even Bundy knew at that time that he would be visiting Saigon in February."(172)

Bombing of North Begins
By a month's time following the Pleiku attack and a subsequent VC attack on a US base at Qui Nhon on 10 February, the die had been cast. By 9 March, US and South Vietnamese planes were bombing targets in North Vietnam, 3,500 Marines had landed at Danang "to protect its perimeter," many more US troops were in process of being committed to combat operations, and the policy debate had narrowed largely to ways and means of winning what had now become essentially a US war. We had at last gone big in Vietnam.

Skepticism at CIA
In the months just prior to and immediately following this escalation, CIA provided decisionmakers a steady flow of intelligence data, while O/NE analysts calculated the probable reactions of North Vietnamese, Chinese Communist, Soviet, and Free World governments tailored to this and that theoretical US course of action; for this latter purpose, policy planners served up a series of graduated or alternative strategies to O/NE. While this exercise proceeded, and perhaps inspired by it, certain CIA officers also submitted unsolicited opinions on whether or not to expand the war and, if so, how to do it. Their skeptical offerings, which went beyond intelligence matters, were by now heretical. Though differing in focus and emphasis, these officers' views revealed a common, widely held doubt within the Agency that bombing the North would, by itself, do much to improve the US-GVN situation.

For example, on 5 November 1964, C/FE Bill Colby sent State's Bill Bundy and the White House's Mike Forrestal a private think piece on a possible negotiated solution in Vietnam. Citing as a model the successful modus vivendi that had recently been reached with the Communists in Laos, Colby suggested that Washington consider a somewhat similar solution to the stalemated situation in Vietnam. He proposed that Laotian Prince Souvanna Phouma and Cambodian Prince Sihanouk lead a conference in which Saigon's General Khanh and Hanoi's Ho Chi Minh would seek to end hostilities in Vietnam and so avoid an expanded war that might draw their people into a major US-Chinese Communist confrontation.(173)

In late November, DDI Ray Cline raised his own doubts about the efficacy of bombing the North. Offering DCI McCone certain propositions discerned "out of the fog of medieval scholasticism" in which the Vietnam policy debate was being conducted, Cline judged that US bombing would at best buy time for the GVN, but "would not in and of itself" ensure the creation of a stable and effective South Vietnam. Cline did consider the chances "better than even" that Hanoi would "intensify its efforts to negotiate on the best terms available," but only in the event the United States had taken "extreme" military actions against the DRV.(174)

The chief of FE Division's Vietnam-Cambodia Branch minced no words in also criticizing the momentum toward bombing the North. In his view, volunteered on 19 November, military action of this kind would be a "bankrupt" move, an admission of unwillingness to "engage ourselves other than in a military fashion in a struggle to establish the proper condition of man in the modern world." Victory could not be gained in Vietnam or in other troubled areas of the world by "rockets and bombs and napalm."(175) Saigon COS DeSilva also doubted the wisdom of bombing the North: according to journalist David Halberstam, in late 1964 DeSilva "accurately forecast that the bombing would have virtually no effect other than provoke Hanoi into sending more troops down the trails."(176) By early January 1965, CIA's Chet Cooper, by then a principal NSC staff officer, had also come to the view that bombing the DRV would not cause it to stop its support of the Viet Cong or become more amenable to negotiations. "There were many among my colleagues who shared this doubt and conviction."(177)

One of the last of these unsolicited judgments, chronologically, that CIA officers offered up concerning the wisdom of US policy came in early April 1965, following the landing of the Marines and the beginnings of sustained US bombing programs against the DRV. The author of the present study, who had represented CIA in interagency working groups on Vietnam, gave DCI McCone a sharp, across-the-board criticism of these new US military departures. He was unaware at the time that Vice President Humphrey, Under Secretary of State Ball, and several senior members of Congress already had privately voiced similar doubts when he based his critique on "a deep concern that we are becoming progressively divorced from reality in Vietnam . . . and are proceeding with far more courage than wisdom."

The critique judged that the United States did not have the capability to achieve the goals it had set for itself in Vietnam, "yet we think and act as if we do." There was no certainty that bombing the North would "work," and the most likely outcome of committing a few US combat divisions in the South would be "a long, drawn-out war, retention of the principal cities, and constant enemy attrition of the US and allied forces." Nor would the new US military measures necessarily prevent the collapse of the Army and the Government of South Vietnam: "We [must not] forget the sobering fact that--despite the rising DRV ingredient--the VC insurrection remains essentially an indigenous phenomenon, the product of GVN fecklessness, VC power, and peasant hopelessness." After observing that there seemed to be a congenital American disposition to underestimate Asian enemies--"We are doing so now. We cannot afford so precious a luxury."--the thinkpiece restated what had come out of several NSC working groups, National Intelligence Estimates, and war games: bombing will not in itself cause the DRV and the Viet Cong to cease and desist. "The enemy is brave, resourceful, skilled, and patient. He can shoot down our fancy aircraft, and he can shoot up and invest our bases." We cannot expect the enemy to reason together with us; his thought patterns are far removed from ours: "Tough and hard-bitten, he has been at the job of subverting all of Indochina for over thirty years." Hanoi is patient, prepared to go the distance, and now smells victory in the air. Hence US military pressures will not cause Ho Chi Minh to negotiate meaningfully with us. In sum, "the chances are considerably better than even that the US will in the end have to disengage in Vietnam, and do so considerably short of our present objectives."(178)

DCI McCone's Evolving Views
The most weighty CIA opinions were of course those the President's chief intelligence adviser, John McCone, carried to the White House during the key months of Vietnam policy formulation in late 1964 and early 1965--but even the DCI's counsel made little apparent impact on the President's policy decisions. McCone did share the Johnson administration's basic view that a much greater US military input was mandatory to keep South Vietnam from collapsing. He nonetheless differed with the President's choice of specific ways and means of implementing the policy. During these weeks the DCI also changed his mind on several key aspects of how best to commit US force against the enemy. And, although he looked more favorably on the idea of bombing the North than did most of his CIA experts, he took issue with the President's military advisers on a number of points.

Many other world questions were demanding McCone's attention at the time, President Johnson was increasingly holding him at arm's length, and the DCI had already decided that he wanted to return to private life, but during the key months of the Vietnam escalation debate he persevered in pushing his views on the White House.(179) After the Viet Cong's devastating raid on Bien Hoa on 1 November, he recommended to Secretary McNamara that a program to punish the North should be instituted with a clear signal that such punishment could be stopped when Hanoi stopped its "illicit operations" in the South and in Laos. At that time, however, McCone advocated that the United States should punish the DRV deliberately and slowly, as contrasted with the Joint Chiefs' recommendation that 400 aircraft be sent en masse to bomb the North. That option, he held, was unwarranted, one that world opinion would construe as the act of a "frustrated giant."(180)

The DCI was one of the few Presidential advisers who warned at this time that the United States should expect enemy reprisals within South Vietnam for attacks on the North; for this reason he advised that each bombing raid against Hanoi should be specifically authorized in Washington. When the Viet Cong blew up the US officers' billet in Saigon at Christmastime in 1964, McCone cautioned against immediate punishment of the DRV, arguing that it would be difficult to document that Hanoi, and not just the Viet Cong, was responsible, and that a stronger government should be in place in the South before the United States launched major reprisals against the North.(181)

In early February 1965, McCone still favored a cautious program of bombing, proposing that the United States conduct one bombing raid a day against the North, starting in the southern part of the DRV and working steadily northward. His rationale was that such a strategy would carry less danger of provoking major Chinese Communist intervention in the war than would deep strikes into DRV territory, as the JCS preferred.(182) But by early April, McCone had reversed this position. Reflecting on the audacious, damaging Viet Cong attacks on Pleiku (6 February) and Qui Nhon (l0 February), McCone on 2 April recommended that US air forces should strike hard and deep against the DRV.

He argued that intense bombing would be necessary to impel the North Vietnamese to seek a political settlement through negotiation and thus avoid the destruction of their economy. If the United States continued to limit its bombing attacks to northern bridges, military installations, and lines of communication, wrote McCone, this would in effect signal to Hanoi that "our determination to win is significantly modified by our fear of widening the war." The Director argued that without effective punishment of the DRV, the United States would be starting down a track "which involves ground force operations [in the South] which, in all probability, will have limited effectiveness . . . [and will lead to] ever-increasing commitment of U.S. personnel without materially improving the chances of victory." In his view, US ground forces in the South would therefore become "mired down in combat in the jungle in a military effort that we cannot win, and from which we will have extreme difficulty in extricating ourselves." Instead, he recommended that the United States should shock the DRV by hitting it hard and all at once.(183)

The last occasion on which DCI McCone had an opportunity to tell President Johnson, face-to-face, of his many serious objections to the developing US military course in Vietnam was an NSC meeting on 20 April, to which McCone brought the new Director-designate, Adm. William F. Raborn, Jr. The discussion focused on Secretary McNamara's proposals to commit more US combat troops in the South and continue bombing secondary targets in the DRV. Air raids in the North would be targeted against lines of supply and infiltration in order to support and protect ground operations in the South; no longer would bombing targets be picked in expectation that their threatened destruction would cause Hanoi to seek a negotiated settlement. As McCone later recorded that meeting, McNamara's recommended course of action "troubled me greatly." McCone told those present that the proposed level of bombing would stiffen Hanoi's determination and lead to heightened Viet Cong activity in the South. This, said McCone, "would present our ground forces with an increasingly difficult problem requiring more and more troops." Thus the United States would "drift into a combat situation where victory would be dubious and from which we could not extricate ourselves." He concluded that he was not against bombing the North, but that the commitment of US combat forces in the South must be accompanied by a more dynamic program of airstrikes against "industrial targets, power plants, POL centers, and the taking out of the MIGs."(184)

The President and the NSC adopted McNamara's proposals, not McCone's, but on his last day as DCI, 28 April 1965, McCone repeated many of his cautions in a farewell note to President Johnson. The United States should "tighten the tourniquet" on North Vietnam, he argued: "In my opinion we should strike their petroleum supplies, electric power installations, and air defense installations . . . . I do not think we have to fear taking on the MIGs, which after all the Chi Nats (Chinese Nationalists) defeated in l958 with F-86s and Sidewinders . . ."(185)

The President's response to McCone's parting advice was to ask his successor, Admiral Raborn, to comment on it, and Raborn apparently left his swearing-in ceremony 28 April with McCone's memo of that date in hand. A week later he replied to the President in a letter that gave qualified support to the proposition of concentrated bombing attacks on Hanoi, closely coordinated with political efforts to get the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table. Raborn argued that, if the United States did not punish the DRV severely, then "we will in effect be pressing the conflict on the ground where our capabilities enjoy the least comparative advantage." The United States might then find itself "pinned down, with little choice left among possible subsequent courses of action: i.e., disengagement at very high cost, or broadening the conflict in quantum jumps." Raborn nonetheless placed more emphasis than had McCone on the centrality of winning the war in the South. In the Admiral's view, it would be the antiguerrilla effectiveness of US/GVN forces that would "almost certainly prove the key determinant of whether, over a period of some time, we can impel the enemy to meet our terms." Raborn cautioned that in its "preoccupation with military action," the United States must "not lose sight of the basically political aspect of the war. In the final analysis, it can only be won at the SVN hamlet level."(186)

The President also asked his close adviser Clark Clifford to critique McCone's parting counsel. Clifford later wrote that as he studied McCone's recommendations, "I reached a conclusion exactly opposite to his." According to Clifford, if McCone thought the only way to avoid defeat was by large-scale bombing, "then we should not escalate at all [because the] level of bombing he advocated would shock and horrify the entire world, and even he admitted that there was no guarantee we would prevail."(187)

It will of course never be known whether hitting the DRV hard at the outset of a US bombing campaign would have shocked Hanoi into materially lessening its support of the Viet Cong, at least for awhile, as John McCone (and others) had argued. Certainly the middle course subsequently chosen by President Johnson and his aides, that of cautiously bombing the North, made no crucial impact on Hanoi's determination to continue the war. And later, when the United States did hit the North hard, there was less shock effect because in the meantime the DRV had become inured to bombing, and its improved defenses now degraded the bombers' accuracy and effectiveness--in the process confounding the Rostow thesis of victory through air power. At the same time, there is certainly no guarantee that even McCone's recommended level of bombing in the North in 1964 would have substantially improved the situation on the ground in South Vietnam, where CIA officers and many of their Intelligence Community colleagues had long insisted the war would be won or lost.

Retrospect

As I analyze the pros and cons of placing any considerable number of Marines in Danang area beyond those presently assigned, I develop grave reservations as to wisdom and necessity of so doing. . . . White-faced soldier armed, equipped and trained as he is not suitable guerrilla fighter for Asia forests and jungles. French tried to adapt their forces to this mission and failed. I doubt that US forces could do much better. . . . Finally, there would be ever present question of how foreign soldier could distinguish between a VC and friendly Vietnamese farmer. When I view this array of difficulties, I am convinced that we should adhere to our past policy of keeping our ground forces out of direct counterinsurgency role.

Gen. Maxwell Taylor, 22 February 1965(188)

Whether accurately or not, most CIA officers had for years given policymakers skeptical evaluations of the outlook in Vietnam, similar in some respects to those Ambassador Maxwell Taylor privately voiced in February 1965 as the United States prepared to commit combat troops in the South and begin bombing the North. As far back as March 1952, as we have seen, CIA and the Intelligence Community had estimated that enemy forces would grow stronger, and the French would eventually withdraw from Vietnam.(189) Thereafter, with one principal exception, most working-level CIA analysts fairly consistently held that Washington should not underestimate the strength and staying power of the enemy, nor overestimate that of our South Vietnamese ally.

As noted earlier, that primary exception occurred when DCI McCone remanded the analysts' draft of NIE 53-63 in February 1963 because it did not mirror the optimism held by most of the makers and executors of US policy in Vietnam at that time. Less than a month after McCone had disseminated a reworked, much more optimistic NIE, the situation in South Vietnam began suddenly and swiftly to unravel. Thereafter, during the months when the policymakers and their assistants were deciding whether, how, and when to "go big" against the Communist insurgency, McCone shared the gloomy perceptions of most of his analysts about the Government of Vietnam and its armed forces. They did not agree, however, on many other Vietnam questions. McCone, for example, accepted the domino thesis; his officers in O/NE had several times questioned the relevance of that analogy to the struggle for Indochina. McCone appeared more convinced than most of his officers that bombing the North would markedly help the South; they consistently held that the war was essentially a political struggle that had to be won on the ground in the South.

CIA's Lack of Impact
Whatever the differences of emphasis between McCone and his CIA officers, the record suggests that McCone's advice about Vietnam only occasionally influenced White House decisions between l963 and l965, and that the collective and individual judgments of other Agency officers hardly registered at all. The fact that McCone agreed in early l963 that things were going fairly well almost certainly fed the administration's confidence that the South Vietnam Government was making sufficient progress in the war effort that some US military advisers could begin to be withdrawn. Later, the DCI's endorsement of the domino thesis may have helped blunt the effect upon decisionmakers of O/NE's doubt (registered in June 1964) that the loss of Vietnam would necessarily have a sudden and catastrophic effect on the security position in the rest of East Asia.

With these exceptions, the views of McCone and his senior officers on events and prospects in Vietnam during the 1963-65 period made little apparent impact on strategy and policy decisions. The Kennedy administration turned against President Diem and facilitated his overthrow despite McCone's cautions. The Johnson administration ignored the repeated judgments of intelligence officers in CIA and other agencies that bombing the North probably would not work, and that brightening the light at the end of the tunnel depended primarily on improving the South Vietnamese Government's political and military performance. Finally, in early l965, when the White House at last composed its policy of direct military engagement in Vietnam, President Johnson not only ignored McCone's urging that the DRV be bombed suddenly and severely, but froze the DCI out of the close relationship he had earlier enjoyed.

Why this lack of impact? Why did so many of CIA's professional judgments and analyses (and some informal views of CIA officers on policy ways and means) find so little resonance in the higher reaches of MACV, our Saigon Embassy, the Pentagon, State, and the White House? In a technical sense the US intelligence machinery had functioned well. Decisionmakers had repeatedly asked intelligence officers for their views, and, with only a few dissents and split opinions, the Intelligence Community had usually been able to respond with agreed judgments. From June l964 to June l965, O/NE and USIB had prepared a dozen National Estimates on Vietnam, eight of them on probable reactions to various possible US courses of action (which policymakers had supplied the Intelligence Community for the purpose of making its estimative judgments). Supplementing the estimates, many officers of the Agency and the Intelligence Community had prepared numerous additional assessments and had disseminated them to policymaking consumers.

Yet the impact of intelligence on the decisions to escalate America's role in the war was slight. Why? In essence, there was little impact because CIA's intelligence and policy-related inputs were not what these decisionmakers wanted to hear at the time. Prior to mid-1963, the cautions consistently voiced by CIA officers did not jibe with the images of progress that senior administration officials continued to hold, or at least continued to hold out to the American people. And by l964, when the GVN's perilous situation had at last become apparent to the policy managers, CIA skepticism about the newfound cure-all, bombing the North, was an unwelcome guest at the advisory table.

As of 1964-early 1965, the resistance of CIA's senior consumers to its views on Vietnam was deeply rooted. The Agency's no-clothes vision clashed with their widely held views that:

• World Communism is essentially monolithic, and the Vietnam war is part of a world conspiracy run from Moscow and Beijing.

• The United States cannot let Soviet Premier Khrushchev push us around; to make America's world commitments credible we have to take a stand somewhere, and that place will be Vietnam (despite the fact that, as we have seen, the JCS had held a decade earlier that Indochina was devoid of decisive military objectives).

• The domino thesis: if Vietnam "went," so would America's strategic position in East Asia (a judgment O/NE's estimators did not share, but DCI McCone did).

Hence the United States had little policymaking leverage in this very soft situation in South Vietnam, and it is understandable that frustrated US planners considered whether that situation might be remedied by taking the war to the North and by committing US troops to combat in the South. As momentum in Washington grew, if unevenly, for a major escalation, the bounds of policy debate narrowed and articulate advocates continued to assure President Johnson that only if the US took the war to the enemy in a big way could South Vietnam be saved. Even those senior advisers who might have been impressed by CIA's negative arguments may have decided the circumstances required a gamble, even at worse than 50-50 odds. In the end, however, it was the shocking attacks the Viet Cong made on American men and equipment, coincident with the sweeping reelection of Lyndon Johnson, that capped this long process and at last precipitated the President's decision.

Footnotes

(1) McCone, Memorandum for the Record (of a Presidential meeting, 24 November l963). FRUS, l96l-l963, Vol. IV, Vietnam, July-November l963, p. 637. This meeting, held two days following the assassination of President Kennedy, was Lyndon Johnson's first Vietnam policy outing.

(2) This study restricts itself to the Washington scene. Other CIA History Staff studies examine events in the field.

(3) Nolting, From Trust to Tragedy: The Political Memoirs of Frederick Nolting, Kennedy's Ambassador to Diem's Vietnam (New York: Praeger, l988), p. 95.

(4) EmbTel 375. FRUS, l96l-l963, Vol. IV, Vietnam, p. 21.

(5) EmbTel 624, l6 September l960. FRUS, l958-l960 Vol. I, Vietnam, p. 579.

(6) Mendenhall, Memorandum for Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs Edward E. Rice, "Vietnam--Assessments and Recommendations," 16 August 1962. FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. II, Vietnam, 1962, p. 598. Mr. and Mrs. Ngo Dinh Nhu were considered by most US officials to be prime sources of Diem's obstinacy and of the Diem regime's most repressive measures.

(7) EmbTel 888, 7 April l963. FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. III, January-June 1963, pp. 208, 2l2, 2l3.

(8) Nolting, letter to Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs Roger Hilsman, 23 May l963. FRUS, as above, pp. 3l6-3l7. This plan warned that although a coup might be pulled off so quickly as to bridge the gap of political power, it was "more than likely that even if coup leaders went so far as to kill Diem, there would be dissension and confusion." FRUS, p. 322.

(9) DeptTel l207, FRUS, as above, p. 383.

(10) Newman, John M., JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power (New York: Warner Books, 1992), p. 335.

(11) Department of State, S/P Files: Lot 70 D l99, Vietnam l963. FRUS, as above, pp. 405-409.

(12) Cooper, Memorandum for the Director, "Some Aspects of US Policy with Respect to President Diem," 11 April l963 (S). CIA/DDI Files, Job No. 79T01148A, O/D/NFAC, "Policy Files," Box 9, Folder "Policy: CLC: Oct 62-Dec 64." In that memo, Cooper acknowledged that "we do not yet really understand the fundamentals of Asian societies or peoples," and that "it is one thing to advocate a course of action leading to the removal of Diem; it is another to proceed on such a course, confident that what would emerge will be better than what we have."

(13) The text of this cable may be found in FRUS, as above, pp. 628-629.

(14) Colby, Memorandum to Walt Elder, at the time Director McCone's Special Assistant. Quoted in CIA/IG "Report on Vietnam," November 1964, p.12. IG files, Box 73-B-567, DCI/Inspector General, Box 2 of 2, "Surveys."

(15) Victor H. Krulak (Maj. Gen., USMC, at the time the JCS Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities), Memorandum for the Record, 3l August l963. Pentagon Papers (Gravel ed.), Vol. II, p. 743. DDCI Pat Carter and FE Division chief Bill Colby were present at that meeting. There State Department Southeast Asia expert Paul Kattenburg made a scathing criticism of the Diem government and of Washington policymakers' lack of understanding of the situation. As he later recalled, "There was not a single person there that knew what he was talking about . . . and I thought, 'God, we're walking into a major disaster,' and that's when I made what essentially was a very imprudent and also presumptuous remark, in a way. And the reaction to it was sort of what I had invited. They all just disregarded it or said it was not backed by anything." Kattenburg, remarks to historian William Conrad Gibbons, l6 February l979. Gibbons, Part II, p.161. The State Department subsequently gave Mr. Kattenburg Siberia-like assignments.

(16) Krulak, Memorandum for the Record, "Vietnam," 24 August l963. FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. III, pp. 630-63l.

(17) JCS cable 3368-63, 28 August l963. FRUS, as above, pp. 630-63l.

(18) Maxwell Taylor, Swords and Ploughshares ( New York: Norton, l972), pp. 60, 6l.

(19) Lyndon Johnson, The Vantage Point (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, l97l), p. 292.

(20) McCone, Memorandum for the Record of Lunch with Rusk (at McCone's home), 3 September l963, (S/Eyes Only). CIA/DCI files, Job No. 80B01285A, DCI/McCone, Box 2, Folder 2: "DCI (McCone) Memos for the Record, 23 July - 26 November 1963."

(21) McCone, Memorandum for the Record, 5 September l963 (S). CIA/DCI files as above.

(22) In McCone, letter to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., l9 September l963 (S). CIA/DCI files, Job No. 80B1285A, Box 8.

(23) Nolting, From Trust to Tragedy, p. 132.

(24) Remarks made to Professor Francis X. Winters of Georgetown University. Winters, to author, 6 May 1993.

(25) Colby, to author, 22 December 1993. Mike Forrestal was very close to John and Robert Kennedy, but it is possible that his statement to Professor Winters was prompted by the fact that Forrestal, who had been one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the coup idea, sought after the fact to distance himself from what had turned out to be a disaster.

(26) This author's findings accord with those of two colleagues who have plumbed Mr. McCone's record in detail: Walt Elder, previously McCone's Special Assistant; and Dr. Mary McAuliffe, formerly of CIA's History Staff.

(27) McAuliffe, John A. McCone as Director of Central Intelligence, 1962-1965 (S), June 1992, pp. 209-211. In CIA History Staff files.

(28) DIR 63855, reproduced in CIA/IG report, p. 5.

(29) CIA/IG files, Job No 74B779, Inspector General, Box 1, "Special Studies, 1964-1972," Folder: "Chronology on Vietnam, November 1964." These files include notes indicating that in l971 President Nixon requested that DCI Helms send the White House its files on the overthrow of President Diem, and that Presidential assistant John Ehrlichman "was fascinated by the account of CIA's noninvolvement in the assassination of Diem, which runs contrary to the impression he has held." From Kenneth E. Greer, Memorandum for the Record of 17 November 1971 (S). CIA/IG files as above.

(30) Carver, O/NE Staff Memorandum No. 60-63, "Present Prospects for South Vietnam." (S) CIA/DDI files, Job No. 80R1720R, O/D/NFAC, Box 3, "GAC Files," Folder 1, "Vietnam Historical File." O/NE's Sherman Kent allowed Carver's policy-laden memo to go forward only as Carver's personal views, not those of O/NE.

(31) Carver, Memorandum for the Acting Director of Central Intelligence, "Alternatives to the Ngo Family Regime in South Vietnam," 28 August l963. (S) CIA/DDI files, Job No. 79R00904A, O/D/NFAC, Box 10, Folder 1: "Memos for Directors - 1963." Gen. Bruce Palmer contrasts this initiative of Carver's with the manner in which Carver's parent office, O/NE had "scrupulously stayed out of the policy realm." Palmer, "US Intelligence and Vietnam," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 28, No. 5 (Special Issue l984), p. l6.

(32) Abbot Smith, handwritten note on Carver's 28 August study.

(33) R. Jack Smith, the Acting DDI at the time, took exception to the views in this O/NE memorandum, arguing that one could "not rule out the possibility of winning the war under a Ngo administration." Smith told the Director that "it should be remembered that it took the British nine years of intensive effort to beat down the Communist rebellion in Malaya, where the problems were less than those of Vietnam." Smith, Memorandum for the Director of Central Intelligence, "ONE Memorandum on South Vietnam's Leaders," 4 September 1963 (S/NF). CIA/DDI files, Job No. 79R00904A, O/D/NFAC, Box 10, Folder 1, "Memos for Directors - 1963."

(34) Recorded by McCone, Memorandum for the Record, "Discussion with Secretary Rusk at Lunch at DCI Residence This Date," 3 September l963. (S/Eyes Only) CIA/DCI files, Job No. 80B01285A, DCI/McCone, Box 2, Folder 8, "DCI (McCone) Memos for the Record, 23 July - 26 November 63." In this memorandum, Mr. McCone recorded that Rusk was "most complimentary of the reporting and judgment of Carter, Helms, and Colby in the meetings of last week." He noted also that Rusk had asked him to explore "the possibilities of an independent, unified Vietnam which would be neutral but free of Chi Com influence . . . this apparently is a French idea and if it could be accomplished would be a very stabilizing influence on all of Southeast Asia."

(35) As recorded by Bill Colby, a participant in this Presidential conference. IG Report, p. l7. Mr. McCone here misspoke himself on two accounts: the NIE in question had been produced in April-- there was no NIE on Vietnam in May; and the April NIE (53-63) did not say that "we would win." That was Mr. McCone's interpretation of what his remanded NIE had said, from which judgments he was now (September l963) retreating. CIA/IG files.

(36) As recorded by Bromley Smith, White House assistant, in his Memorandum of a Conference with the President, White House, Washington, September ll, l963, 7 p.m., "Vietnam." FRUS, Vietnam, 1961-1963, Vol. IV, p. l9l. Word of this DCI caution found its way to the press; journalist David Halberstam wrote--inaccurately--that "almost all" the members of McCone's staff differed with him on this score. The New York Times, l5 September l963.

(37) Joseph G. O'Neill, Jr., CIA Assistant Legislative Counsel, Memorandum for Assistant to the DCI, "DCI Congressional Briefings on Vietnam," 23 September l963. (S) CIA/DCI files, Job No. 80B01285A, Box 3, DCI/McCone, Folder 14, "DCI (McCone) Vietnam, 01 Sept - 30 Sept 64." (Hereafter cited as O'Neill memorandum.)

(38) CIA/IG Report, p. 21.

(39) McCone, Memorandum for the Record, "Luncheon Meeting with Mr. Reston of The New York Times-DCI Residence-26 September l963." (S/Eyes Only). CIA/DCI files, Job No. 80B01285A, DCI McCone, Box 2, Folder 8, "DCI (McCone) Memos for the Record, 23 July-26 November '63."

(40) As quoted in Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, an Interim Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, U.S. Senate, 94th Congress, lst Session, l975, p. 22l.

(41) CIA files, O'Neill memorandum.

(42) Neubert memorandum of l8 October l963. FRUS, l96l-l963, Vol. IV, pp. 406, 407. Neubert added: "As I see it, it is quite clear that the first serious problem confronting us here in Washington as we attempt to pursue a policy that really satisfies no one is going to arise with CIA."

(43) McCone, Memorandum for the Record, "Special Group 54l2 Meeting--l7 October l963," l8 October l963. (S) CIA/DCI files, Job No. 80B01258A, DCI/Executive Registry, Box 1, Folder 5. Mr. McCone told the Special Group that Ambassador Lodge's policies had "foreclosed intelligence sources" and consequently were undermining the American effort in Vietnam. At this meeting, the DCI also proposed that Bill Colby should be sent to Saigon as Acting COS, where he could reconstitute CIA's intelligence capabilities. White House adviser McGeorge Bundy responded that Mr. McCone was exceeding his authority as DCI and vetoed the proposal on the grounds that Colby's once-close relations with Diem and Nhu would send the wrong signals and confuse Lodge's negotiating tactics.

(44) McCone, Memorandum for the Record, "Discussion with the President--October 21" (S). CIA History Staff files.

(45) Paul Eckel, Memorandum for the Record, "Minutes of Meeting of the Special Group, 24 October l963," 24 October l963. CIA/IG files, Job No. 80B01285A, DCI/McCone, Box 2, Folder 8, "DCI (McCone) Memos for the Record, 23 July-26 November '63."

(46) CIA/IG Report, p. 32. See also McCone, Memorandum for the Record, "Meeting with the President," 25 October l963. (S) McCone papers, as above, Box 6, Folder 5. Present also at this meeting were Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Secretary of Defense McNamara, and McGeorge Bundy.

(47) William E. Colby, Memorandum for the Record, as reproduced in CIA/IG Report, p. 34. See also Bromley Smith, Memorandum of a Conference With the President, White House, Washington, October 29, l963, 4:20 p.m., Subject, "Vietnam." FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. IV, pp. 468-47l. At that meeting Robert Kennedy and Maxwell Taylor joined DCI McCone in criticizing the pro-coup course. And according to the meeting's recorder, Bromley Smith, President Kennedy held that if, as it appeared, the pro- and anti-Diem forces were about equal, then any attempt to engineer a coup would be "silly." FRUS, p. 47l.

(48) McCone, Memorandum for the Record, "Discussion with Governor Averell Harriman at Lunch, October 30th," 3l October l963. (S/Eyes Only) CIA/DCI files, Job No. 80B01285A, DCI/McCone, Box 2, Folder 8, "DCI (McCone) Memos for the Record, 23 July-26 November '63."

(49) Chester L. Cooper, Memorandum for the Director, "Viability of the GVN," 30 October l963 (S). CIA/DDI files, Job No. 80R01720R, O/D/NFAC, Box 5, "GAC Files (SAVA-NIO)," Folder 1, "GAC Chrono-June 63-May 65." This task force included O/NE officers Harold P. Ford and George A. Carver, as well as several DDI officers.

(50) DIR 79126 (to SAIG/S/FLASH). CIA/GAC files, as above.

(51) SAIG Cable (IN 51983).(TS/Immediate) CIA/GAC files, as above. General Harkins was not alone in his untimely prediction. According to journalist Peter Arnett, Keyes Beech of the Chicago Daily News filed a story on the eve of the coup in which he stated that "Americans aren't any good at overthrowing governments, and the latest government we haven't bounced is the family concern in South Vietnam." Arnett, Live From the Battlefield, pp. 120-121.

(52) Later characterized by a senior DO officer as "the banana republic tradition of military coups became part of the thinking of every ambitious troop commander. . . ." (S). CIA/DDO files, Job No. 88-00067R, Folder 137-603-007.

(53) Cline, Memorandum for the Director, "Coping with the Chronic Crisis in South Vietnam," 8 September l964 (S/Eyes Only). CIA files, Job No. 80B01285A, Box 3, DCI/McCone, Folder 14, "DCI (McCone) Vietnam 01 Sept-30 Sept 1964."

(54) McCone, Memorandum for Secretary Rusk, Secretary McNamara, Saigon Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, and McGeorge Bundy. (TS). CIA/DDI files, Job No. 80T01629R, Box 3, O/D/NFAC, "SAVA Policy Files," Folder 2, "Vietnam Committee." Mr. McCone hand-carried a copy of this 2 April memorandum to President Johnson on 29 April l965.

(55) From an Eyes Only cable from Ambassador Lodge to President Johnson, 6 November: "There is no doubt that the coup was a Vietnamese and a popular affair, which we could neither manage nor stop after it got started and which we could only have influenced with great difficulty. But it is equally certain that the ground in which the coup seed grew into a robust plant was prepared by us and that the coup would not have happened with [when] it did without our preparation." FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. IV, p. 577.

(56) At a Honolulu conference on Vietnam questions, 20 November l963, MACV chief Harkins reported that immediately following the coup, Viet Cong incidents had "shot up 300-400% of what they were before." FRUS, as above, p. 6l2.

(57) Leslie H. Gelb and Richard K. Betts, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, l979), pp. l97-l98. In the Vietnam interagency working groups in which the author of this CIA History Staff study participated, l964-65, the focus of concern was solely on how best to escalate.

(58) At a small l966 dinner party in Taiwan for Mr. Goldwater, at which the author was present, the Senator repeatedly berated "that [expletive deleted] Lyndon Johnson" on this score.

(59) Cooper, letter of 5 December l986, to William C. Gibbons of the Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress. A copy of Cooper's letter is on file in CIA's History Staff. Cooper also describes LBJ's style as one marked by "a certain ad hocing; there was a certain stretching for the gimmick; there was a certain business of piling extravaganza upon extravaganza . . ." Interview of Cooper, 7 August l969, by Paige E. Mulhollan, for the University of Texas Oral History Project, Tape No. 2. A copy of that interview is on file in CIA's History Staff.

(60) Cooper testimonies, as above. For similar descriptions of Mr. Johnson's Vietnam policymaking style see Gelb and Betts, pp. 97-98; Marvin Kalb and Elie Abel, Roots of Involvement, pp. l67-l69; Robert L. Gallucci, Neither Peace Nor Honor: The Politics of American Military Policy in Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, l975), pp. 32-34; Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy (New York: Doubleday & Co., l964), p. 535; and David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, l969), p. l44.

(61) McCone, Memorandum for the Record, of 29 December l963, of conversation with President Johnson, 27 December l963 (S). CIA/DCI files, Job No. 80B1285A, Box 2, Folder 9, "DCI (McCone) Memos for the Record, 27 November-31 December 1963." In this folder, see also McCone memos for the record of similar meetings with President Johnson, 13 December and 21 December 1963 (S).

(62) As described by memorandum for the record of the Honolulu conference, prepared by Enno H. Knoche. CIA/IG Report, p. 38.

(63) McCone, Memorandum for the Record of a Meeting, Executive Office Building, Washington, November 24, l963, 3 p.m. FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol IV, pp. 635, 636. In his memoirs Lyndon Johnson gives a similar account of this, his first Vietnam policy conference: "Lodge was optimistic. . . . I turned to John McCone and asked what his reports from Saigon in recent days indicated. The CIA Director replied that his estimate was much less encouraging. . . . McCone concluded that he could see no basis for an optimistic forecast of the future." Johnson, The Vantage Point p. 43.

(64) CIA/IG Report, p. 39. As we will see, months later Mr. McCone reversed his position on this issue, holding in late l964 that US bombing of the North would have little effect on Hanoi's willingness to continue the war unless the United States also committed ground troops to combat in the South.

(65) CAP 636333 to Saigon. CIA/IG Report, p. 39.

(66) DIR 87711. CIA/IG Report, p. 40. Other members of the party were McGeorge Bundy and State's William Sullivan.

(67) McCone, Memorandum for the Record of conversation with Harkins, 2l December l963. CIA/IG Report, p. 42.

(68) McCone, Memorandum for the Record of conversation with Lodge, 2l December l963. McCone records that Lodge agreed with his criticisms of reporting. CIA/IG Report, p. 42.

(69) McCone, Memorandum, 2l December l963. CIA/IG Report, p. 43.

(70) McNamara, Memorandum for the President, 2l December l963. FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. IV, pp. 732, 733. Also recorded in CIA/IG Report, pp. 42-43. CIA/IG files indicate that despite the pessimistic judgments he had given the President privately, a week later Secretary McNamara told a House Armed Services subcommittee that the United States still hoped to carry out its earlier plans to withdraw most of its troops from Vietnam before the end of l965. CIA/IG Re