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FOREIGN RELATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES 1964-1968 Volume II, Vietnam January-June 1965 DEPARTMENT OF STATE Washington, D.C.

199. Memorandum for the Record/1/

Washington, March 15, 1965.

/1/Source: Department of State, Bundy Files: Lot 85 D 240, WPB Chron. Top Secret; Eyes Only. Prepared by William Bundy. A note on the source text indicates that copies were sent to Rusk, McNamara, Ball, McGeorge Bundy, Gaud, McNaughton, and Unger.

SUBJECT
Highlights of Conversation with Ambassador Johnson at Baguio/2/

/2/The Far East Chiefs of Mission Conference held at Baguio, the Philippines, March 9-11.

I had 3-1/2 hours of solid conversation with Ambassador Johnson on the last evening of Baguio. The following were highlights:

1. Saigon had some difficulty getting a clear picture of exactly what our policy was going to be after the first strike. For example, they thought that our second and more general message to all posts/3/ somewhat expanded the policy as originally stated to Saigon alone, notably in respect to what they interpreted as total freedom of action/4/ in South Viet-Nam. I told Alex the history of policy development in this period, and that no contradiction or inconsistency had been intended. I also went over in detail the origins of the British approach to the Soviets, which they had also had some difficulty in understanding. The moral seems to be that we should perhaps be a little fuller in our explanation of policy to them. Another point is that the McGeorge Bundy report/5/ never went to Saigon. Query whether it should now do so for background purposes, even though it has been effectively superseded by later policy decisions.

/3/Presumably the circular telegram of February 18 quoted in part in Pentagon Papers: Gravel Edition, vol. III, pp. 324-325.

/4/Presumably a reference to Document 115.

/5/Document 84.

2. In the course of my review of the various policy discussions in Washington, I stressed that the President was particularly anxious to let our policy speak for itself and not to speculate on its implications to the press. I told Alex frankly that we have been somewhat concerned at the extent of backgrounding being done in Saigon in this direction. We also discussed the Kleiman article;/6/ Alex and others had seen Kleiman, largely to attempt to affect the Times line, but Alex made clear that his conversation bore no resemblance to the article. Apparently Kleiman himself kept talking about "a political track" and I must say that it remains possible that Kleiman was reflecting his own thinking in large part and merely claiming to have got it from Administration sources. This of course still leaves the mish-mash of specifics about "McNamara-Bundy" and "McNaughton" texts, and Alex quite rightly pointed out that no such labels were even known in Saigon. The mystery is not solved, but my own surmise is that Kleiman put together the burrowings of the last three months and gave it an authoritative label to make a story out of it. Nonetheless, someone certainly did talk to him a little too much.

/6/A front-page article in The New York Times on March 1 by Robert Kleiman describing in detail the development of U.S. policy toward Vietnam during the previous several months and indicating that according to the "highest American and South Vietnamese officials" in Saigon, President Johnson had decided to begin a limited air war against North Vietnam as leverage to reach a negotiated settlement. The Department of State's concern over the Kleiman article and the "apparently increasing problem" of leaks to the press was expressed in telegram 1849 to Saigon, March 1. (Johnson Library, National Security File, Country File, Vietnam, Vol. XXX)

3. Alex complained mildly about the hasty way in which General Johnson's trip had been arranged and also queried its vast bulk and rank.

4. Commenting on Seaborn's report of his impressions in Hanoi,/7/ Alex particularly noted Seaborn's impression that Hanoi thought we were in effect putting our allies up to negotiating initiatives, and that our military actions were simply desperation measures and a screen for seeking a way out. I asked whether Seaborn based this impression of Hanoi's attitude on any specific evidence, but Alex seemed to think it was largely deduction and atmospherics. (I have not read the full report of Seaborn's impressions.)

/7/The Canadian representative on the International Control Commission for Vietnam, Blair Seaborn, visited Hanoi during the first week of March and, on behalf of the U.S. Government, repeated to a DRV official on March 4 a statement made by Ambassador Cabot in Warsaw on February 24 to PRC Ambassador Wang outlining U.S. objectives in Vietnam. The text of Cabot's statement to Wang is in telegram 942 to Ottawa, February 27. (Department of State, Central Files, POL 27 VIET S) Seaborn reported on his trip in a conversation with U. Alexis Johnson on March 6, which was described in telegram 2880 from Saigon, March 7 (see footnote 3, Document 187).

5. Alex was totally negative on MACV taking over the police advisory role, much less USOM as a whole. He reported that Westy felt the same way.

6. Commenting further on General Johnson's mission, Alex expressed the general view that what was needed was less a host of new tactics than giving Westmoreland what he had asked for. He commented that there were a great many requests in the mill which had not been met.

7. Alex said that both he and Ambassador Taylor had been really dubious about the marines going into the north, but had finally been persuaded that the security situation at Da Nang was critical.

8. Alex totally supported Jim Killen and said that Killen now was in full accord with others on the need for continued and indeed increased decentralization. He was also making a marked effort to improve relations between USOM and MACV, and Alex had a number of reports that USOM morale is now better. He thought that Killen was generally doing a fine job, while noting that he tends to take things into his own hands and is still not very good at delegation.

9. Continuing on the theme of whether there should be more decentralization, Alex said he was thoroughly familiar with Peer de Silva's thesis in this direction. He said everyone agreed that the province chief was the key and should be up-graded and subjected to less harassment from Saigon. Organizationally, he thought that the position of the Corps vis-à-vis the province chief was very hard to resolve on any general basis. Westy at one time had favored the abolition of the division level, but did not now think it was practical politics. One major step--which Killen had pushed through--was the arrangement now in force to have funds go directly from the GVN Bureau of the Budget to the province chief, not through the individual ministries.

10. Alex noted that both he and Ambassador Taylor were now trying to give a number of small dinners for Vietnamese leaders. He said that the going was fairly sticky at these, but that they should pay dividends in the long run. Alex made the interesting comment that, as compared with his experience with Chinese, Japanese, and Thai, the Vietnamese were the most difficult group he had ever encountered. They had very little openness and tended to clam up in each other's presence, and the long strains of war had made them very cagey. He noted that the people as a whole simply do not have the sense of humor and capacity to laugh, even in adversity, that the other peoples have.

11. Alex noted that there was some continuing difficulty between MACV and CAS, with the former suspicious that CAS wanted to resume control of the CIDG problem. He said that de Silva was doing all he could to allay this suspicion.

12. Alex said that he himself had come to the central conclusion that, whatever the importance of economic benefits, security was the crucial and necessarily dominant key to the present situation. He felt this was particularly true in the central provinces, where the deteriorating situation now verged on open conventional warfare.

13. Alex thought that the up-grading of the Popular Forces was extremely important, and noted that MACV was now moving some of our Special Forces assets into this field. He said that it was very difficult for the Vietnamese JGS and MACV to get away from their basic feeling that the Popular Forces were simply a third-rate armed force, rather than having an essentially different mission.

14. Alex said that both he and Ambassador Taylor were skeptical that US jets would really have great impact on the situation. He noted that one early operation in Phuoc Tuy had been a complete bust, and said that the fundamental point still applied that air was most useful where GVN units were in definite contact with the VC and really good forward air control was available. He said that Army-Air Force service rivalry continued to plague the whole air problem, and that the dispute of fixed-wing aircraft versus armed helicopters just was not resolved. In the same character, he had a little the feeling [felt slightly] that the allocation of strikes against the north, as between Navy and Air Force, was affected by a feeling that everyone had to get into the act. He wondered if we could not work out a geographical division, with the Air Force taking on southern targets, perhaps up to the 19th Parallel, and the Navy acting above that point. He said that the involved command chain from CINCPAC caused real problems, particularly since the Second Air Division in any case had to handle liaison with the VNAF on the VNAF strikes.

Alex had the impression that experience with the strikes was raising serious doubts whether jets were more effective than A1H's, where the latter could reach the targets. The jets seemed to be more vulnerable to ground fire, and their speed seemed to increase this damaging effect of hits that hardly bothered an A1H.

15. Alex expressed the hope that authority for strikes against the north could be placed on a "when weather permits" basis. He admitted that Washington might occasionally have to take into account political factors, but hoped that this would henceforth enter in very rarely.

16. We concluded with a long discussion of possible negotiating sequences, which I will not try to summarize in this memorandum, but will discuss at the Working Group meeting this afternoon./8/

/8/No record of this meeting has been found.

William P. Bundy/9/

/9/Printed from a copy that bears this typed signature.

 

200. Memorandum by the President's Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy)/1/

Washington, March 16, 1965.

/1/Source: Johnson Library, National Security File, Country File, Vietnam, Vol. XXXI, Memos. Top Secret; Sensitive.

MEMORANDUM FOR DISCUSSION, TUESDAY,
MARCH 16, 1:00 P.M./2/

/2/The luncheon meeting included the President, McNamara, Rusk, and McGeorge Bundy, and lasted from 1:34 to 3 p.m., at which time everyone except McNamara went to the President's private quarters. Rusk left at 3:15 and Bundy at 3:37. (Ibid., President's Daily Diary) No other record of the luncheon meeting has been found.

Policy in Vietnam

a. Military actions

1. Rolling Thunder. DOD will present a proposed four-week program designed to increase the effectiveness and visibility of air strikes. Essential changes in this program are its increased flexibility to avoid weather delays and its delegation of operational control on a week-by-week basis to the field (CINCPAC and MACV).

2. Barrel Roll. State and DOD are coordinating closely on a program which again is intended to be more effective and more visible (at least to Hanoi). This program will imply daily route reconnaissance and 3 or 4 operations for attacking or reseeding choke points each week.

3. 21-step Johnson program/3/ is being reviewed and general approval is expected.

/3/See Document 197.

4. Major ground force development. Defense and State are both reviewing this question and recommendation should be available for discussion next week. Preliminary analysis suggests that such deployment may soon be necessary for both military and political reasons.

b. Political and civil action in South Vietnam

At the President's direction, State, AID, and USIA, with the White House Staff, are framing a program designed to match and even out-match the military efforts outlined above. This program will be designed to present additional actions in such categories as the following (the list is illustrative and not exhaustive): close control of the population; new programs to encourage Viet Cong defection; land reform operations; new information and propaganda programs; new incentives to university students; new programs of guerrilla action in Viet Cong-controlled areas; intensified housing and agricultural programs; progressive U.S. political announcements; increased contact at all levels with political and religious groups; greatly increased decentralization of all U.S. efforts in the light of weakness and instability of central government.

c. U.S. leadership in Saigon. General Taylor's return at the end of the month has been announced, and the question of the timing of his replacement and the name of that replacement is increasingly urgent. There should be preliminary discussion today, and a full slate of candidates should be available for discussion next week.

d. The political and diplomatic position. We have largely accomplished the immediate purpose of getting our new level of military action into operation without yielding to clamor for "negotiations." We now need to examine both our public and our private view of the conditions for a settlement.

1. Public position. There is a strong argument for a more detailed exposition of our conditions for peace, and our view of the future in Southeast Asia. It may be wise to have a draft prepared for consideration over the weekend and review on Tuesday,/4/ with no commitment as to the level at which such a statement might be put out.

/4/March 23. No draft public statement antedating March 23 has been found. Regarding the drafting of the address the President gave at Johns Hopkins University on April 7 and which dealt with Vietnam, see Document 245.

2. Our private assessment of the bargaining problem. The existing situation in South Vietnam is bad, and the basic condition of any political negotiation is that it should allow us to continue to take actions which will in fact improve the anti-Communist position in South Vietnam. This means that this can only be done by successful pacification, and therefore our object must be to trade off our own trumps in return for enemy actions which will give us advantage in the South. This will not be easy.

In essence, there appear to be three things that Hanoi can do: it can stop its infiltration; it can withdraw forces and supplies under its control from the South; it can order its people not to use force against the government in the South. None of these is likely at present, and it is questionable whether any of them will be ordered under the pressure of our air operations alone.

Nevertheless, we can and should consider at what point we would reduce our air operations against the North in return for actions of this sort by Hanoi.

Preliminary analysis suggests that we might well wish to indicate privately that the weight and locus of air attacks will be raised and lowered in direct relation to the amount of Viet Cong force and/or infiltration we observe.

Of course it is not essential from our standpoint that we stop hitting the North before serious bargaining begins. But it may be necessary that we have a public price for doing so, if only to make it clear that our position remains careful, reasonable, and measured.

e. The shape of an eventual settlement. Only the broadest outline of this question can be stated now, but there appear to be three general possibilities.

The first would be effective pacification of a wholly non-Communist South Vietnam. This is desirable but hardly possible today. If this is our real target, it is doubtful that we want an early settlement.

The second is a somewhat Laotian solution, in which a government of national unity would have some members from the liberation front and in which de facto VC control in large parts of the countryside would be accepted. This is what the French and the Lippmanns have in mind, and our current estimate is that this solution would be acceptable only if some significant U.S. presence remained, to sustain de facto non-Communist control in substantial areas of the country, including especially Saigon and its surroundings.

The third is an explicit partition of SVN, leaving the clearly non-Communist government in control of as large a territory as possible. This solution might permit a reasonably quick reduction of U.S. forces if real pacification were achieved in the non-Communist territories and if the ground given to the VC were sufficiently limited. But it is also probable that continuing VC ambition would quickly lead to a situation in which we would have to return.

It does not appear necessary today to decide among these three alternatives. What does appear quite likely is that our eventual bargaining position with respect to all three possibilities will be improved and not weakened if the United States presence on the ground increases in coming weeks. This U.S. ground presence is likely to reinforce both pacification efforts and Southern morale, while discouraging the VC from their current expectation of early victory.

McG. B.

 

201. Telegram From the Department of State to the Embassy in Vietnam/1/

Washington, March 16, 1965, 8:02 p.m.

/1/Source: Department of State, Central Files, POL 27 VIET S. Top Secret; Immediate; Exdis. Drafted by Unger, cleared by Sieverts, William Bundy, Cooper, and McNaughton (in substance), and approved by Rusk. Repeated to CINCPAC and Bangkok.

2000. Saigon's 2888./2/ Having in mind considerations raised your reftel and recommendations of Gen Johnson following his return, longer range program of action against North Viet Nam has been given priority consideration here and program for first week, Rolling Thunder 7, has been decided, for execution this week. Details this program which includes one US and one VNAF strike together with one US and two VNAF route armed recce is subject of instructions being sent through military channels. You will note these instructions leave to military commands in field decisions as to specific timing within period covered. Execution of first action under Rolling Thunder 7 may take place anytime from daylight March 19 Saigon time. Although program contains full measure VNAF participation, requirement that US and VNAF operations proceed simultaneously is dropped.

/2/See footnote 6, Document 187.

You are requested to see PriMin ASAP in order to outline to him this further program we have in mind and to solicit GVN participation as specified therein. You should convey to PriMin that proposed program, on which you will be providing him with further information in successive weeks, is designed to maintain pressure on Hanoi and persuade North Vietnamese regime that costs of continuing their aggression becoming unacceptably high. At same time Quat should understand we continue to seek no enlargement of struggle and have carefully selected targets with view to avoiding undesirable provocation. Further objective is to continue reassure Government and people South Viet Nam we are and will continue fight by their side and we expect they will also be making maximum efforts in South Viet Nam where a real setback to Viet Cong would do more than perhaps anything else to persuade Hanoi stop its aggression.

With initiation Rolling Thunder 7 we believe publicity given US and VNAF strikes should be progressively reduced, although in its place there should be picture of GVN and US pursuing with regularity and determination program against the North to enable South restore its independence and integrity and defend itself from aggression from North. Larger strikes (Rolling Thunder 7A and 7B) should be announced as before but suggest in future that such announcements not contain references to Viet Cong atrocities, etc. Instead these matters, which should get full attention, might be subject of separate and perhaps regular press briefings by GVN with full US support.

As regards route recce, we question whether we should take initiative to announce these missions since this could contribute to impression of substantial increase in activity. At same time we presume reporters will get wind of these missions, Hanoi will report them and VNAF may not wish maintain silence. Therefore seems difficult avoid replying to inevitable press questions. Request PIO meeting opening tomorrow Honolulu/3/ to look into this one and give us and Saigon its recommendations; possibility it should consider is passing off all route recce missions in low key replies to queries as "routine recce".

/3/A conference on information policy in Vietnam was held in Honolulu March 18-19. A copy of the report on the conference was attached to a March 19 memorandum from Greenfield to Rusk. (Department of State, Central Files, POL 27 VIET S)

Rusk

[end document]

Continue:
Increase in U.S. ground forces in Vietnam and consideration by the U.S. Government of a bombing pause,
March 8-May 8
Documents 202 through 220