11/9/97

VIETNAM: OUR DEAD ASK WHY
Looking for 'Missed Opportunities'. Best and brightest gather in Hanoi

• A psychologist/scholar probes decision makers
• There's even an Edsel in Hanoi's Ho Chi Minh Museum

By RANDALL RICHARD
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

HANOI -- The question haunting the room from more than 58,000 graves was why and it soon became clear that not even "the best and the brightest" - not even the people who were most responsible for one of the greatest bloodbaths of the 20th Century - had the slightest clue.

They could give you a plausible explanation for why 3.6 million Vietnamese died, explanations that had to do, in part, with a centuries-old struggle against foreign domination - first against the Chinese, and then the Japanese, the French, and finally (in the minds of the Vietnamese, at least) against the Americans.

But they couldn't tell you why the Americans had died.

They could tell you - after an astounding series of admissions - what all those young men didn't die for; that they didn't die, as they once believed, to protect America's vital interests or to protect a tiny nation from monolithic Communism.

It wasn't that they ever really lied to you, they suggested, it's just that, when it really mattered, they got it wrong.

And now, 30 years later, they were in Hanoi - in an air-conditioned conference room, surrounded by $200-a-night hotel rooms and a Margarita-rimmed swimming pool - trying to figure if they might have missed a chance to end the war without filling so many of those graves.

Was it all, ask the mothers and fathers, children and wives, just a terrible mistake?

Was it simply that all these otherwise bright, well-intentioned and generally compassionate men just weren't up to the job?

Could anyone, given the emotions and paranoia of the time, have done any better?

And what of all those long-haired, draft-dodging kids on the street? Did they just happen to get it right, but for maybe the wrong reasons?

Or was there something more to it? Perhaps something more sinister? Or maybe something fatalistic, something having to do with hubris or with tragic flaws?

But that's not why these men gathered in Hanoi last June.

This was a conference, blessed by the President of the United States and by the Politburo of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

It was a conference instigated by former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and organized by Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies.

It was a conference to explore the "Missed Opportunities" of the Vietnam War - a rare chance, while many of the key decision makers are still alive, to learn from past mistakes - to ensure, in McNamara's words, that the mistakes of the 20th Century would not be repeated in the 21st.

Too many bodies too many of them black

Still, that wasn't why Gus White was here.

The towering Dr. Augustus J. White III, a former trustee of Brown University, didn't come half-way around the world to hear a lot of mea culpas.

Gus White had cut open too many bodies - too many of them black - too many of them hispanic and poor and uneducated - and had pulled from them too many bullets and far too much shrapnel to settle for a lot of what-might-have- beens.

White wanted something else. He wanted to know whether, after more than a generation, the men who ran the Vietnam War had begun to ask themselves some of the really tough questions about that war - questions that had to do with justice and compassion, with ethnicity and race; questions that addressed how the decision makers in Hanoi and Washington measured the value of a human life.

These are questions that have haunted him since he made his first bedside rounds with General William Westmoreland more than a generation ago and no one at the conference seemed to be raising them, at least not directly.

Gus White could share the enthusiasm of the scholars. He could appreciate that it was a miracle the conference had taken place at all.

Still, he wasn't getting what he was looking for, at least not in this first round of discussions in Hanoi.

For one thing, the person who could best answer his questions wasn't there. And there was good chance that President Lyndon Baines Johnson, the central figure in all this - the man who had sent so many young men to their graves - may have taken some of the answers with him to his own.

Johnson hovered over the conference like a ghost.

Lyndon Johnson 'hated being understood'

It wasn't until the last day of the conference that Gus White heard anyone speak directly to some of the questions that concerned him most.

For three days, Francis Bator had remained silent, tweaking the adjustments on his hearing aid as he fought a losing battle to drown out the feedback from the 21 sets of microphones and headsets at the conference table.

"Knowing what was going on in President Johnson's head," Bator observed on the final day in Hanoi, "was no easy task." The President, he declared to a table of nodding heads and knowing smiles, "hated being understood."

For most of the conference, Bator looked drawn and jet-lagged and frustrated by the whistling and popping sounds from his hearing aid.

Like the other Americans at the table, he had come a long way to be here. In his case, it was a journey that began in Budapest in 1939: a 14-year-old child who fled the Nazis and went on from Harvard University to the White House to become the President's advisor for European Affairs while still in his 30s.

But once he began to speak, it was with all the understated authority and reasoned eloquence of a Harvard professor.

The Voting Rights Act - the Great Society, declared Bator, those were the things that President Johnson really cared about. Vietnam, he insisted, was merely a distraction.

It seemed, at first, an odd thing to say at a conference organized to sort through one of the great tragedies of American foreign policy. And his comments about the President, dead 25 years, never went anywhere last June.

Then two weeks ago, as the nation began hearing the first tantalizing snippets of President Johnson's secretly recorded White House tapes, Bator agreed, to expand on his brief remarks at the conference. But others, he suggested, would have far more to offer.

"I'm not the story," Bator protested, as he was pressed on what it was that had brought him to Hanoi during the summer.

His expertise, he pointed out, was with European security, not Vietnam.

But it was perhaps for that very reason, his caller persisted, because of both his closeness to the President and his distance from the issue that his perspective might be revealing.

In the comfort of his apartment in Cambridge, Bator seemed relaxed and well-rested. But there was clearly something troubling him.

On the carpet in his sitting room was a new copy of Taking Charge, Michael Beschloss' edited version of the first volune of President Johnson's secretly recorded White House tapes.

Bator picked the book up with obvious disdain.

A treasure, he fumed. A national treasure!

But Beschloss, he said, had ruined it with his gratuitous commentary.

Bator shook his head. This was a man who was not shy to say he deeply cared about the President he had served for so many years and that he could not tolerate what he saw as Beschloss' demeaning characterizations.

How could he presume to know what was going on in President Johnson's mind?

It wasn't long, however, before Bator bagan to do precisely the same thing. Only Bator, unlike Beschloss, was there, in the Oval Offie, day after day as the tragedy unfolded.

"Look," declares Bator, "Ike really puts a gun in LBJ's back. He inherits an independent South (Vietnam) - from Kennedy, from Eisenhower."

"And he also inherits the presidency - with the instrument of succession an assassin's bullet - from, by then, an enormously popular president, a young president, an enormously popular figure.

"The country is in enormous unease. And using the theme, 'Let us continue,' performs what is a masterful feat of politics, in the best sense of the word, in holding the country together and moving it off the horror of assassination."

But then there is Vietnam, and the President's tortured voice on those secretly recorded tapes:

Wednesday, May 27, 1964: 11:24 a.m. President Johnson is speaking to Bator's boss, national security adviser MacGeorge Bundy:

"I'll tell you, the more I stayed awake last night just thinking about this thing - the more I think about it - I don't know what in hell. It looks like to me that we're getting into another Korea - it just worries the hell out of me. I don't see what we can ever hope to get out of there once we're committed.

"I believe the Chinese communists are coming in to it. I don't think that we can fight 'em 10,000 miles away from home and ever get anywhere in that area."

Bundy sympathizes with the President's agony. He tries to tell him he understands his dilemma, his sense that not only is it a mistake to get more deeply involved in Vietnam, but that there may be no way out even now. But the President barely lets him get a word in edgewise.

Johnson's words roll into the receiver in an agonized drawl, his voice rising to drown out Bundy's as Johnson speaks about his valet:

"I look at this sergeant of mine this morning - got six little old kids over there - and he's getting out my things and bringing me in my night reading and all that kind of stuff and I just thought about ordering his kids in there.

"And what in the hell am I ordering them out there for?

"What in the hell is Vietnam worth to me?

"What is it worth to this country?"

Those were the same questions Gus White had come halfway around the world to find the answers to - the same questions that still haunt so many of the mothers and fathers and wives and children of the 58,000 Americans who died there.

Jack was wrong most of the public was wrong

On day four, when Professor Bator raised the issue of the Civil Rights Act and Johnson's Great Society, it was one of the first times, even obliquely, that the issue of race and poverty and the underclass came into play during the conference, and Gus White was listening intently.

Gus White is a soft-spoken man. He chooses his words, much as he chooses his scalpels, for their precision.

He is the kind of man others turn to in a crisis - when they're in pain, or when something is gnawing at their insides - and so it was not surprising that some of the people at the conference began to seek him out.

During the lunch breaks many of the scholars, and even some of the conference participants, Vietnamese as well as American, wanted to know what he thought.

Despite his soft-spoken demeanor, the word had gotten out: this was a man who had been there - not merely in the Oval Office - but in the field. And there was something else special about him. During those all-too-few waking hours when he wasn't sewing Americans back together he was working with Vietnamese lepers.

Gus White had come to Hanoi on his own, interrupting a busy medical practice to do so. Thirty five years may have been too soon for some to risk reopening old wounds, but it wasn't long enough for Gus White to forget the questions he had begun to ask himself so many years earlier.

And while White and Bator had never met before Hanoi, they shared a preoccupation with Lyndon Johnson and a deep need to understand why he waged a war he didn't believe in.

Back in Cambridge a few weeks ago, Bator was saying that to understand Johnson's mind on Vietnam, you have to distinguish between '63-'64 and the critical decisions in the winter, spring and summer of '65, which is when he converted what had been a serious American commitment into an American War - "into Lyndon Johnson's war - not McNamara's war."

"And you have to ask, during each of these periods, what was the plausible picture of what went on in Lyndon Johnson's head. . . .

"So he inherits the presidency, with the instrument of succession an assassins bullet. . . . And using the theme, let us continue . . .

"Let us continue. Oh, but then there's Vietnam - Jack made a mistake - we've got to get out of this mess.

- "So, '63, '64 - there is very little room (and) notably, he is running against Goldwater. So what he has to do is protect himself from the right."

"Oh, it's a mistake - and we really have no interest in what happens in Vietnam. And Jack was wrong. And Ike is wrong. And most of the public is wrong. And most of the Senate is also wrong."'

"Oh, the president is fully aware that it's a terrible mess. But given the situation he found himself in - and the situation he inherited - it is inconceivable that anyone would have acted on that notion in '63, '64.

"Then, he wins the election, but by then, in late '64, '65 Saigon is going down the drain - very fast. So how does Lyndon Johnson respond? And why?

"The response has three components.

" . . . Not only does he escalate and make it an American War - though he reveals himself to be deeply dubious about whether it can be made to work - but he takes the biggest plan on the table - the most unqualified, most no- golden-bridge-of-escape - an absolute, flat, it's-my-war kind of commitment - a line in the sand - and he does it going in naked.

"Totally uncharacteristic of Lyndon Johnson - who was the most power- rationing, looking-out-for-the-consequences . . . the most incremental,most majority-leader-like commander in chief.

"And yet, he throws himself into a war - a land war in Asia - a war of attrition in the most unqualified, unguarded way. No line of escape about 'well, it's their war, they have to win it' - or, 'it may not work' - or, 'there's a limitation in what we can do.'

"And he does it without leading a national campaign to secure support.

"Typically, Lyndon Johnson, even in a high payoff enterprise, would build insurance. . . . bring in every national leader, every governor, every senator, every newspaperman - sit them down and say, 'Okay, this place is going down the drain. Shall we let it go down the drain? Is that what you think we ought to do? We may not be able to do the job. Should we just say the hell with it - walk away from it?'

"He would have nailed down everybody. . . . He's not going into this alone - he's going to have every goddamn division he could muster behind him. He doesn't do that. He goes in - sneaks in silently.

"There would have been an address to the nation on prime time TV - there would have been a big speech. But he doesn't do any of that.And he takes the biggest plan going, the full Westmoreland view.

Why?

Johnson didn't want a debate on Vietnam

". . . There's only one explanation. He wanted to avoid a great national debate on Vietnam."

"If he had cut back on Westy and on the joint chiefs, they would have gone to the Hill: The commander-in-chief is not backing his troops.

Vietnam would have been the subject for the spring and summer and fall of 1965.

"But he was determined to avoid a great debate. Why?

"Because what he really had in mind was the voting rights act - and Medicare - and The Great Society.

"These were very close votes and he thought he had one chance after the assassination - a two year period - and after the election, a one year period, when he could move the country forward on poverty and race.

"And he wasn't going to have that all go down the drain over a big national debate on Vietnam.

"Yet Lyndon Johnson couldn't say that. A president can't get up and say 'I'm sending Marines to be killed for the Voting Rights Act.'

Gus White let the hypothesis roll around in his brain a while.

It was last week, and he was at Beth Israel Hospital, awaiting a call to go into surgery, when he was asked what he thought about Bator's theory.

In fact, he said, it was a possibility he had already given a little thought to after reading McNamara's book a few years back.

There was something in the way McNamara had alluded to Johnson's deep commitment to the Civil Rights Act that had surprised him a bit, that had him wondering about whether there might be a possible link with Johnson's Vietnam policy.

But McNamara's book, a pirated version of which has become a best seller in Vietnam and is now on display at Hanoi's Ho Chi Minh Museum, certainly hadn't carried it as far as Bator seemed to be carrying it now.

"Interesting," he allowed, as he thought about it a bit more.

But did he find it at all comforting?

For a man who has had the intellectual discipline to keep asking himself some of the toughest questions about the Vietnam War for more than 35 years, it is not surprising, perhaps, that his answer should be a whole new series of questions.

Would the Civil Rights movement in the United States have succeeded to the degree that it has without Lyndon Johnson?

Would progress in civil rights have been stalled if Johnson had levelled with the American public and permitted a great national debate over Vietnam?

Was protecting the Civil Rights movement and his war on poverty merely a way for Johnson to rationalize to himself his blunders in Vietnam - blunders that took their heaviest tolls among the nation's poor and disadvantaged, the very people he wanted most desperately to help?

Gus White doesn't pretend to have the answers. But he does know there probably will be no answers until a lot more questions make it to the table, and not just the conference table in Hanoi.

Hanoi, he believes, was a good start.

But in the end, the answers he seeks may be in the questions themselves and in the nation's willingness to confront them - questions about compassion and justice and fairness - questions not of the intellect, but of the heart.

BACK