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Tiger Research 65

Vice President Hubert Humphrey, after assuming office, described the film depicting the child swallowed up in a mushroom cloud as "unfortunate." I asked him why he ever ran with Lyndon. A lot of us knew that he had been called to the White House by Johnson and had almost had to get on his knees to take a loyalty oath. I don't recall Humphrey's precise words, but he said something like this: You and I have been around a long time, Barry. We've seen it all. Sure, he's an SOB, but in politics, like everything else, you take the chance when it comes along. So I took it. James "Scotty" Reston, columnist for the New York _Times,_ says, "I wish the media had kicked the stuffing out of LBJ and the White House on the TV ads issue. I think the senator is absolutely right in saying the press was remiss in letting that garbage get out without nailing them. It was outrageous—no doubt about it. He's got a legitimate gripe." The Washington _Post_ 's Ben Bradlee now describes the two Moyers bomb ads as "a fucking outrage. I was outraged then."

David Broder, the veteran political reporter and columnist for the Washington _Post,_ today describes the campaign this way: "The Johnson White House involvement with some penetration of the Goldwater campaign and its attacks on Goldwater were highly irrational because they were so heavily favored to win. Also, the media's original perception of Goldwater was fundamentally false. He was not the crazy madman that some depicted. However, some substantial criticism was justified. He made some mistakes and misstatements that we reported as facts. "The media have a tendency to characterize men and events and oversimplify them. We presented a scary picture of Goldwater. It was not the whole cloth of the man and politician. Our characterization of him as an extremist was a terrible distortion." We tried to find out who was supplying information to the White House but failed. Paul Wagner, Lee Edwards, and others did their best to plug the leaks, but they continued. The penetration did some harm because Johnson was able to take various steps to neutralize what we were about to charge in a speech or make public in an announcement.

We were witnessing some of the reasons why I never wanted to run against LBJ from the beginning. They went to the very core of the man, his basic character. When we first met in the Senate, Johnson enjoyed mentioning the fact that he had come to Congress as a $6,000-a-year, dirt-poor Texas schoolteacher. Later, he was to boast that he had become a multimillionaire. Johnson explained this new wealth with a knowing smile: His wife had inherited money. It was common knowledge on Capitol Hill and around Washington that Johnson was involved in who got which radio and television licenses in the country and other deals. He and his family had received the only TV franchise in Austin, Texas. Johnson and his longtime administrative assistant, Bobby Baker, were widely regarded in Washington as two of the biggest wheeler-dealers of their time. Baker later went to prison for his activities. The case against Johnson has been documented at length over the years. It serves no purpose to dredge up that background here except to indicate my misgivings about being in the same ring with him.

Johnson wanted a national party—a party of power, a machine that won, an apparatus that controlled. His opening sentence on almost any issue was, "Who's got the cards?" Johnson's politics was intervention—by government, by power brokers in either party, by those who would form the strongest alliance on any issue. His ideology was three words: Let's do something. A good example of this was his use of every federal department and agency to help guarantee a landslide victory. Government was his political action committee, his slush fund, his firepower, his troops. Above all else in the campaign, LBJ wanted his own massive mandate to govern. He was too big to live in anyone else's shadow. He would show Bobby Kennedy and the rest of that crowd, who joked about him behind his back, how the game was really played. To Johnson, the Democratic Party was a place with a fence and four walls where you retreated to rest, heal your wounds, and to gather strength—and then rush out into the street for more combat. It wasn't a home of strong beliefs and principles. LBJ would build another house, another power base, another shifting alliance. This was done by trading principle and power through an exchange of promises. His politics was the promissory note.

Johnson ducked the issues throughout the campaign. The White House strategy was to put Goldwater on the defensive, to use the Rockefeller and other Republican charges against him. To keep him off balance so he wouldn't be able to attack the President's policies and the Johnson image of himself. Above all, to run a campaign of fear—to make the American people fear Barry Goldwater. On Saturday evening, October 7, the President's closest aide, Walter Jenkins, was arrested in the men's room of a YMCA a few blocks from the White House. Police had staked it out as a hangout for homosexuals. Jenkins was booked along with an Army veteran on charges of disorderly conduct. We knew about the arrest within two days. LBJ also was told of the arrest but remained silent. I said nothing. The Chicago _Tribune_ and Cincinnati Enquirer learned of the story on Monday but decided not to publish it. The Washington _Star_ called the White House about the incident on Tuesday, and Jenkins immediately left his office. Abe Fortas and Clark Clifford, two intimates of Johnson, immediately called at the _Star_ and asked the editors to kill the story. Reports of the affair were now all over Washington as Fortas and Clifford made the rounds of news offices to suppress the damaging disclosure. Finally, seven full days after the incident occurred, the story broke.

Baroody and a few others on the staff saw the incident as a political windfall. Jenkins had been arrested previously on a similar charge, yet he had continued to work as Johnson's top White House confidant. We had been hammering away at ethics in government—Bobby Baker, Billie Sol Estes, and other cronies who had profited from running LBJ's errands. Reporters pestered me for a reaction to the Jenkins story. I said nothing, nor was I going to make an issue of the incident. We would separate Barry Goldwater from Lyndon Johnson on this matter. I told no one what I was thinking except Kitchel. He was to pass the word to everyone on our staff to say nothing—no comment whatsoever. Meantime, reacting to mounting questions from the media, Johnson asked the FBI to investigate the case on national security grounds. Jenkins had sat in on meetings of the National Security Council. There was a question as to whether he had ever been blackmailed. Jenkins had not. Later, we discovered that the President's second move was to summon his pollster, Oliver Quayle, to a midnight meeting. Johnson, who kept every current political poll in the breast pocket of his suit coat, wanted a quick poll to determine the damage to his campaign. He said nothing publicly about the case, distancing himself from Jenkins as he had from Baker, Estes, and other sidekicks who found themselves in trouble.

Mrs. Johnson, on her own, publicly asked for compassion for Jenkins and his family. It was her finest hour—doing what her husband should have done immediately instead of stalling and having his pals try to suppress the story. Lady Bird Johnson was one of the finest women I've ever met. She was a gracious individual with a particularly wide knowledge of nature and the nation's natural treasures. Lady Bird came to Phoenix to dedicate Camelback Mountain as a national preserve on one of her many trips across the country to protect the nation's natural beauty. Meantime, the White House anxiously awaited what we were going to say about the matter. It drove them crazy when I refused comment. Here was the cowboy who shot from the hip, the Scrooge who would put the penniless on the street with no Social Security, the maniac who would blow us and our little children into the next kingdom in a nuclear Armageddon. If he would kill a million men and women, why wouldn't he destroy one individual? Why was the extremist pursuing moderation?

When the media clamor over the case had climbed to fever pitch, I said the only matter which concerned the campaign was the national security aspect. We never spoke of it again except to repeat the security factor in response to questions and pressure from the media. Our reply was always the same: The FBI was the competent agency to answer any such questions. It was a sad time for Jenkins' wife and children, and I was not about to add to their private sorrow. In political terms, it would have made no difference if we had summoned a thousand angels in witness to our cause. This reality never got through to Johnson and Moyers—that winning, even by a landslide, isn't everything. Some things, like loyalty to friends or lasting principle, are more important. Any cause will go on if it's a good one. We're only players. It reminded me of the great Western writer Willa Cather, who spoke so profoundly of our relationship to the land around us: "We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it—for a little while."

Being a man from the open range, Johnson should have understood that. He never did, and that was pitiful. He forgot his roots in reaching for more and more power. We conservatives wanted to return that power to the open range, to the ranchers, to the Big Sky country, and to the cities and streets of all America. Some advisers wanted us to run a so-called morality film on TV to strike back at Johnson and Moyers and their garbage. The half-hour documentary was sponsored by an independent women's group. It attacked American moral decay by showing topless bathers, nudists, and pornographic books and portrayed LBJ as a reckless driver throwing beer cans out of a limousine. There were numerous claims he had done that. I killed it—because it was tasteless, and especially because it portrayed the presidency in a poor light. It was simply a cheap shot. Two other attacks on me indicate how low the campaign had degenerated. C. L. Sulzberger wrote in the New York _Times:_ "The possibility exists that, should he [Goldwater] enter the White House, there might not be a day after tomorrow."

Those words may well be one of the most unfair statements ever printed in the history of the New York _Times._ Sulzberger, as far as I can recall, had never spoken to me or interviewed me. What did he really know of Barry Goldwater? Of the men and women who would be his cabinet members and other advisers if Goldwater became President? What qualifications and what direct knowledge did Sulzberger have to suggest his apocalyptic vision? When the next history of the _Times_ is written, those responsible may well reflect on Sulzberger's sources of prophetic revelation—and whether the Sulzberger statement that I might destroy mankind and the earth was fit to print. A magazine called _Fact_ published a sixty-four-page "psychological study" of the GOP presidential candidate which began with this question: "Do you think that Barry Goldwater is psychologically fit to serve as President of the United States?" The editors claimed to have polled 12,356 psychiatrists across the country, saying they had received 1,846 replies. The respondents were not required to sign their names. The president and medical director of the American Psychiatric Association wrote in a joint letter: "By attaching the stigma of extreme political partisanship to the psychiatric profession as a whole in the heated climate of the current political campaign, _Fact_ has in effect administered a low blow to all who would advance the treatment and care of the mentally ill of America."

Other medical and professional groups criticized the survey as unscientific and said any doctors who might have taken part in it were guilty of unethical behavior. It was obvious that Fact was involved in a hatchet job. Yet the New York _Times_ published a full-page advertisement for the survey, and many newspapers published its results—all critical of the Republican presidential candidate. I later sued the magazine for libel and won a financial judgment. Running for the presidency is really two different journeys. Sometimes it's like flying with no wings or engine. Your heart and mind soar like a glider. You ride the currents of public opinion—the cheers, the handshakes, the deafening roar in a big stadium. Then, after three months or so, you land quickly, quietly. The horizons disappear in the sunset. As suddenly as the opening words of your first campaign speech, it's all over. You hear your heart beating again. You're alone. At other times, it's one helluva bumpy ride with all four engines pumping, clouds behind and a storm ahead. Your ear always catches that jeer among the cheers. For all the good handshakes, someone is shaking his fist at you. Your heart is beating so damn fast during some of those hectic twenty-hour days that you can hear it an hour after you've fallen asleep. And you're never alone. Somebody's just gotta talk to you. And you can't sleep.

Denny Kitchel used to sit down with me at 2 A.M., and we'd begin battling over the same old subject—the daily schedule. I was going from a 7 A.M. television interview to an 8 A.M. breakfast and speech to a 9 A.M. outdoor rally and speech in the center of downtown Billings, Montana, to a 10 A.M. flight to Cheyenne, Wyoming, with a noon rally and speech on the state Capitol grounds followed by a twelve-thirty lunch with leading townsfolk, with a news conference to follow. We were to take off for Denver at one-thirty with an airport rally and news conference before heading to Albuquerque for a 4 P.M. news conference, a 6 P.M. dinner speech, and an outdoor speech at the University of New Mexico at 8 P.M. A strategy session would begin at 9 P.M., followed by finance, advertising, and speechwriting conferences. As I told Kitchel a few dozen times, "You guys are killing me." Sometimes, however, I skipped out on the staff's advice and Kitchel's fatherly requests. One such incident involved Herblock, the longtime cartoonist at the Washington _Post._ He depicted me as an upstart who had inherited his father's department store.

I could feel the arrow in my rear end. Without telling anyone, I phoned Phil Graham, who was then the publisher, and said, "I haven't seen any cartoons in the _Post_ about the publisher marrying the boss's daughter." (Graham had married Katharine Meyer, whose father had owned the paper. She later became its publisher.) I'm not ashamed to admit that I popped off in the campaign. I was not about to let conservatism die of sleep and boredom. Sure, I talked at times with my heart and guts. But if you look at the record, Barry Goldwater didn't take cheap, dirty shots at his opponents that were masked in the skilled surgical language of columnists like Walter Lippmann and Joseph Alsop. A politician learns to take a lot of shots. As the years have passed, I've learned to live and often laugh with them. Sure, I sometimes still get mad. But that's when an issue is really serious or a person is not telling the truth. It has often been said, "You don't lie to Barry Goldwater." I don't like liars—never have.

I like stand-up guys who'll say, "Yes, I said it. I'm sorry. I'll try not to let it happen again." Political campaigning is often a nutty world. Bill Miller and I had some wonderful, wacky experiences. We had a Mata Hari aboard our whistle stop train. It was Dick Tuck's idea. Dick was a practical jokester at the Democratic National Committee whose idea of fun was to pull the elephant's tail. The gal's name was Moira O'Connor. A cute pixie, she worked as a volunteer for the DNC. Moira got on the train at Washington's Union Station posing as a reporter. At night, when everyone was asleep, she distributed the morning editions of _The Whistle Stop,_ which, among other things, said I remained on Washington time—George Washington, that is. Vic Gold discovered O'Connor and put her off the train at Parkersburg, West Virginia. I didn't mind her at all. I hope she had bus fare. Gold was a wonderful guy on the campaign. He really ran us ragged from 6 A.M. to midnight, urging bus drivers to go faster, pulling reporters out of bars to catch the plane, having our laundry catch up with all of us. Some wit in the press corps wrote a song about Vic to the tune of the old Wobbly song "Joe Hill." A few of its last lines tells the story:

When we have run our worldly course, And done our mortal chores, Vic Gold will be our escort on The trip to unknown shores. His face a mask of outrage In the tones we know so well, Vic Gold will shout the devil down, And lead us all to hell. One evening in Wichita Falls, Texas, I was winding up a serious speech on the meaning of freedom and was dead tired. The sun was slipping behind the Texas plains, making me even drowsier. I was almost asleep on my feet, ad-libbing the close of the address. If you can make sense out of what I said, be my guest: "There are no heights to which our people can't go. There is no limit to the heights, no limit to their expanse if we go as a free people. I say, as a great man once said, 'Let my people go.' Thank you." I saw Kitchel and said, "You heard the speech. Let me go—to bed." Bill Miller had a wild bunch of reporters with him. No campaign crew in history drank more booze, lost more laundry, or bet more money on card games. Bill won hundreds of dollars from them playing bridge. Miller had the quickest wit in Congress, as good as Senator Alan Simpson, the Wyoming Republican, is today. One of the newsmen, down on his luck, said to Bill, "I'll bet you a hundred bucks you guys lose the election—and give you five to one odds."

Bill shot back, "I may be a gambler, but I'm not crazy enough to bet on this election." After almost every game, as the plane began descending to the next stop on the campaign, the newsmen sang Miller these words to the tune of "The Wiffenpoof Song": We are poor journalists Who have lost our shirts Bah... bah... bah. Little lost scribes Who lost till it hurts, Bah... bah... bah. Gentlemen, newsmen, off on a spree Doomed from here to November three; Bill, have mercy on such as we. Bah... bah... bah. They formed a morals committee which used the cabin microphone to announce various escapades of the night before. It usually ended with a master list of reporters who'd had a merry eve. Before flying back to Washington from Miller's home in Lockport on November 4, the day after the election, the reporters breakfasted on beer, champagne, toast, and eggs. Miller concluded the campaign on the cabin microphone with these words: "What we have said apparently was little noted by the electorate, and certainly will not be long remembered. But it is for us the living, not the dead drunk, to here resolve: that this government, of the birds, by the birds, and for the birds shall not continue on this earth."

On that solemn note, his vice presidential bid ended. When their plane landed in Washington, Miller, his staff, and the reporters drove to Bill's house, where the party continued. One of our craziest episodes came in Bristol, Tennessee. We were flying in an American Airlines 727. We called it "Yai-Bi-Kin," which is Navajo for "House in the Sky." Ralph Long, the pilot, took off, turned, and roared back down toward the tower. I crawled on my hands and knees up to the cockpit to find out what was going on. Ralph told me he had just buzzed the tower to salute an old pal. I crawled back to my seat, giving everybody the thumbs-up. The incident eventually got up to C. R. Smith, the president of American Airlines. Smith wasn't going to do anything to the pilot, but he was getting heat from somewhere. I told him that if he changed pilots we were changing airlines. That quieted things down, and we crisscrossed the country, covering forty-five states. I've never admitted this, but perhaps it's time to do so. I piloted our Boeing 727 at times because it relaxed me. The aircraft was new at the time, and I wanted to get a feel of it. After the election, when we returned to Washington, I landed it at Dulles Airport. We didn't come down like a paintbrush. One of the reporters caught sight of me in the cockpit, came up, and whispered, "Your third bounce was pretty good, but that first one was real exciting."

We had no U.S. Secret Service protection in 1964. Frankly, I didn't want it. The candidates began to be covered in 1968 after former Alabama Governor George Wallace was shot. A fellow by the name of Charlie Justice, an auto salesman we met in New Hampshire, just stayed by my side through the campaign. He was a big, burly fellow but never carried a gun. I'm about six feet tall and weigh 185 pounds, but Charlie looked like the Fort Knox Mint by comparison. We picked up a few more Charlies after I got splattered with an egg in New Jersey. One time, a fellow flashed a sign at us with the chemical formula for Gold and Water. On the other side, it read, "In your guts, you know he's nuts." Charlie looked just once, and that guy disappeared like a puff of smoke. The best speech of the campaign was delivered by Ronald Reagan on October 27, a half-hour television address. It was called "A Time for Choosing." Reagan had already delivered it in California. When our staff suggested I make a national fund-raising address like it, I didn't want to do it. The words just weren't me. I watched a film of Reagan delivering it and immediately phoned him and said, "That was an eloquent speech. You're more eloquent than I am. You do it."

He did. The speech got us a bundle in nationwide campaign contributions but, more important, launched Reagan as California's GOP gubernatorial candidate in 1966 and as a national political figure. Ron was a class act. After he won the governor's race, Reagan couldn't phone me because of a California phone strike. He and Nancy flew to Phoenix to see her parents. Reagan called me on landing and said, "I never would have made it if you fellows didn't help me." There was no better place in the nation to study 1964 from the GOP grass roots level than the state of Texas, the home base of President Johnson. The Texas Republican Party was a virtual zero as the campaign began. Although Republican John Tower had been elected senator in a special 1961 election after Lyndon Johnson became Vice President, the victory had been seen as a political aberration for many reasons. One was the fact that Johnson had shown such disdain for the voters by running for two offices at the same time in 1960. His decision had left a bad taste in the mouths of most Texans. Johnson had had a special law enacted by the Texas legislature so he could do this. The decision was half ego and half cynical self-protection. It was also LBJ's way of saying the GOP had no one who could take his place in the Senate. The Republicans had also been beaten badly by John Connolly and the Democrats in the 1962 governor's race. I campaigned long and hard for Tower in 1961, and he never forgot it. Neither did Texas conservatives.

Texas GOP morale was very low in 1964. Yet a new, youthful strength, the vigor of thousands of young volunteers, was sweeping the country. The Young Americans for Freedom (YAFs) had begun only a few years earlier with a hundred members. In 1964 they numbered over 100,000 members, and many more were joining them. After I won the California primary, Lance Tarrance got a phone call at home from a Texas party leader. He thought he had been forgotten. Some young Texans in the state had already done volunteer work for me. The party now wanted to set up a Goldwater for President headquarters—with young enthusiasts. All were in their early twenties. Tarrance became the research director at our headquarters in Austin. Tad Smith of El Paso was our campaign director and graybeard. He was in his thirties. As director of research, Tarrance soon saw we were getting many $50, $100, and sometimes $500 contributions from small businessmen in Dallas and Houston. Virtually all had less than fifty employees. The Democrats were receiving most of their contributions from the fat cats. We were getting almost no big money from the richest precinct in the state, River Oaks in Houston. The corporate types were going for the big government contracts of LBJ.

These developments reflected the great conviction of conservatives in 1964—that the party had to be reconstituted from top to bottom. The process was reinforcing the belief that we had to examine not only the party but its relationship to government, corporations, and anything that would threaten our bid to broaden the base of the GOP. We needed true believers, not just accommodaters like the elite who wanted to wheel and deal and narrow the party's agenda to their special interests. This conviction arose before single-issue groups became so prevalent in the political picture. We learned another lesson. Considerable Republican debt had been piled up by the Shivercrats—Alan Shivers, a popular governor, had bolted the Democrats to join the GOP in the 1950s over the Texas tidelands issue. It was not until my campaign of a decade later that the GOP climbed out of debt. These people could help us, but they weren't conservatives. How did we free ourselves from such red ink? Most of our contributions came from little guys who believed in our principles. We had no big base among large corporations or the rich, nor did we aim for it. We had surplus contributions elsewhere. This helped the party stay on its feet in other states.

I lost Texas two to one. But new people had come into the party, new contributors, new ideas, new hopes. The same was true in other states. As Texas research director, Tarrance was very much aware of these new contributors. So was Richard Viguerie of Houston. He went to Austin and copied down by hand the names of contributors listed in the secretary of state's office. Viguerie also obtained the lists made up by Tower and others. Then he went to Washington and obtained our national mailing lists. He developed additional names from what is now the Federal Election Commission (by law, the names and addresses of all contributors must be filed). He then obtained more names on his own and has gone on to become the major originator and master of direct political mailings. Direct computer mail, soliciting thousands of small contributions, began in Texas on the state level. With our Washington master lists, it later exploded across the country. Many of the things those Texas neophytes did in 1964 became the politics of the future.

It's essential to realize that this new GOP financial power came from the South, West, and Midwest. This money helped John Tower win a big upset victory over Waggoner Carr in the 1966 Senate race in Texas. The same is true in other races across parts of the West and South in later years. I take no credit for the GOP's new financial base, although we wanted our campaign to wind up in the black. The real work was done by others, who saw the campaign as a way of demonstrating conservative financial integrity as well as individual initiative. We also received an avalanche of contributions in the final days of the campaign. None of this money was spent. It was a base on which the party could start to build. Since 1964 there have been thousands of GOP meetings, conferences, and seminars in various parts of the country. And I have met thousands of people whose political lives began with the 1964 presidential race. At times it seems surprising to meet yet another person in public life who was part of that campaign. It's all the more interesting that so many have remained in politics.

Of all the GOP meetings and conferences that have occurred over the past twenty-five years, one stands out. It was held in Kansas City in 1965 at the request of Ohio's Ray Bliss, who had been named the new chairman of the Republican National Committee. The meeting was a national conference for those Republicans interested in targeting political groups and issues with computers. Bliss, a very successful state chairman, was viewed by many as a conciliator. He would bridge the gap between the Rockefeller and Goldwater wings of the party. Ray believed the GOP was not targeting the vote right. Republicans had virtually given up the big cities; they were not concentrating on ethnic shifts as they should. Those attending were young and green. Republican veterans were oriented toward the Washington debate on national issues. They were not computer-, not survey-, not staff-oriented. These people had already been old when they had worked under national committee chairman Leonard Hall in the fifties. They saw themselves as quality people—and many were—but they didn't have a broad-based view of the party. Meeting in Kansas City were such people as Tarrance, John Deardorf, now a political media and advertising leader, Pat Buchanan, Walt DeVries, who later wrote a number of incisive books on politics and became a political consultant and professor of political science, Billy Wilkins, executive director of the GOP in Mississippi, Jim Rock of Oregon, who later went on to the American Farm Bureau, Fred Currier of Market Opinion Research, and many others who later became leaders in the GOP.

They were smart and stimulating and were to become skilled in computer politics, surveys, and direct mail. Bliss expected twenty people to show up. Some 115 came, and they paid their own way. They hadn't forgotten or abandoned the experience of 1964. They had built on it. The effort to move the party from the dominance of less than a dozen families and others in the East to hundreds of thousands of small businessmen and others in the South, West, and elsewhere was now really under way. Bliss put a lot of money into computers, even established a computer division at the national committee. He saw the party's future in the Goldwater donors, an independent new financial base for the party. Bliss went on to the widespread use of computer solicitation letters rather than one-thousand-dollar-a-plate dinners and similar functions to raise money from wealthy families and large corporations. These rich families and big firms owned the national committee and the party. They were the Rockefellers and others. We could dispense with the few and the powerful if we could find hundreds of thousands of small contributors through computers. And we did locate such support.

The national committee adopted an important research manual that Tarrance wrote for the party in Texas. It had been prepared for Tower's 1966 Senate race and was a computerized schedule for the candidate listing how many hours he should be in certain parts of Texas, what he should talk about at each stop, where the ticket-splitter counties were, and what we would do to divide the ticket our way. In 1967 Bliss brought Tarrance to Washington to become the number two research person in the party. The Texan was still in his mid-twenties. Tarrance and I had never met, although he had heard me speak. One evening, my wife and I were having dinner at a seafood restaurant on Washington's Potomac River. Tarrance and his wife arrived. They had been in Washington only a few months. Suddenly this young man was standing at our table and he said, "Senator, you don't know me. My name is Lance Tarrance. I worked as one of your volunteers in the sixty-four campaign. "You brought in a lot of young people like myself to work for the party. We got the hell beat out of us. But I want you to know that some day, people are going to look back at sixty-four and say that we changed the Republican Party. I just had to tell you this."

I got a lump in my throat and didn't know what to say. Many of us felt we would come back. There were simply too many of us, too many hopes, and too much faith to have us die in some political wilderness. We were lonely before Ronald Reagan came along. The GOP was thus able to use modern technology to leapfrog a full decade beyond the Democrats, not only in fund-raising techniques but in just about every aspect of campaigning. We gave and allowed youngsters more responsibility than any presidential campaign in history had. The reason was hardly profound. Many old-timers, who belonged to the liberal wing of the party, had simply deserted us. It may seem like a platitude, but I believe every campaign, without exception, should have a good number of young people in it. The young have an immediacy about them, a "now" quality that helps to interpret and explain many issues, and they are geared to the latest technology much better than, say, someone ten or twenty years older. We older folks often do not grasp the immediate importance of the latest technological changes.

I can see it in my grandchildren. They can make a computer talk and, for all I know, sing. I just putter along. That compliment to the young comes from a fellow who has spent his entire life trying to keep up with the latest electronic and other technical advances. In 1964 Ed Feulner was a rare bird. He supported our ticket on an Eastern campus and offers a much different view of our bid. It was considered downright treasonous to be for Goldwater at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Feulner was a graduate student in its Wharton School and became politically energized for the first time in his life. He worked as a part-time volunteer for the Goldwater-Miller committee. He soon learned it was unpopular even to be a Republican. Nevertheless, _The Conscience of a Conservative_ and Kirk's _The Conservative Mind_ moved him to action. In Pennsylvania, our situation was very bad. Senator Hugh Scott, the GOP Senate minority leader, didn't want to have anything to do with the Goldwater-Miller ticket. The Republican Party structure had frozen us out. So we left it to young eager beavers like Feulner to mobilize some kind of effort for the ticket.

Two things stand out about the Pennsylvania campaign: First, that Professor Robert Strausz-Hupe, director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the foremost political scientists at the time—he later became a top U.S. ambassador—was booed and shunned by his colleagues at the university because he supported me. Some academic freedom in the Ivy League. Second, on election day in November 1964 Feulner was assigned to watch some of the polls in Philadelphia. He and other volunteers used imitation radio antennae on the roofs of cars because they didn't have the money for two-way radios. The idea was to let those working for the Philadelphia Democratic machine think they were being reported for voting irregularities. But these leaders of brotherly love laughed and clobbered me. We never had a chance. The machine, second only to Chicago's, carried the city for Johnson by half a million votes. Feulner had never seen a political machine in action before. He became a lifelong conservative.

No candidate for national office could be nominated or elected in many states without the support of corrupt city political machines. Indeed, the Kennedy victory over Nixon in 1960 is still questionable, not only because of its closeness but, much more significantly, because of the role of Chicago's Daley machine in the waning hours of ballot counting in Cook County. In 1964 we challenged the entire Republican establishment, not just the East. No one had ever really taken on the total apparatus, down to the county and district levels. These young conservatives broke their backs because they believed in an idea. They stayed up later, mailed more letters, made more phone calls, pounded more pavements, and got their candidate nominated. Chuck Lichenstein, who has done considerable research on 1964, has made an interesting observation about our campaign. He says it paved the way not only for a new Republican Party, but ironically for Democratic candidates like George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, and Gary Hart. None was from a big state. None had a major power base. Neither did Arizona's Barry Goldwater.

Vic Gold once paid a tribute to me which I will always treasure: "I believe it was his role not to be President, although I still believe he would have made a good one. But Barry Goldwater's work was to be the conscience of the United States Senate and, in his time, for the country as well." In many ways, I've been both a dissenter and, I hope, somewhat of a leader. My mission in politics has been to take the hard knocks, get up off the floor, and keep the conservative cause alive while others—much more gifted by God than I—had the talent, time, and opportunity to build the movement to where it is today. If I've been a political conscience for Vic Gold or anyone else, I just want to say: "Hell, I hope I wasn't too much of a burden!" Frankly, for years I expected to hear some distant wails of regret among those who took part in our campaign. We had been beaten badly. Yet, in traveling around the country since 1964 and hearing every conceivable reason for why we had lost by such a landslide, I haven't heard a single tale of grief or abiding anger.

It has been argued that the media played a major role in 1964, that they themselves became a series of campaign events. Indeed, some of my conservative colleagues maintain the media had rarely taken such a decisive role in American politics. Further, they insist, the full impact of media participation in public events was not adequately understood until they began to assume a questionable role in the Vietnam War. It should serve a useful historical purpose to let some of those who covered the 1964 campaign look back and compare those times with the political atmosphere of today. Arthur Krock, the New York _Times_ columnist, said that I'd been attacked by the media "with a bitterness unexampled in recent history." Publisher John S. Knight, who had not backed me, said that I had received "shabby treatment from most of the news media." Even _Newsweek_ finally admitted that some reporters were "less than neutral." James J. Kilpatrick, the conservative columnist, believes many in the media were biased against us in 1964. He suggests some newspeople speak more moderately of us today because the conservative movement has risen to respectability and power in the country. Kilpatrick explains that the media are responding to public opinion to a large degree.

Ben Bradlee and I have refought 1964 a few times. We agree that both the media and I have changed. We don't agree on which has changed most. We strongly agree that, if Jack Kennedy and I had faced one another in 1964, the campaign would have been much better. As Bradlee puts it, "The issues would have really hung out there to see. They never did with Johnson." Bradlee says that five sources created bias against candidate Goldwater: myself, my staff, fellow Republicans, the Johnson White House, and the media. He argues that I shot from the hip, that our campaign leaders, particularly Denny Kitchel, were "hardasses" and inadequate to their jobs, and that some reporters portrayed me as "an un-thoughtful guy giving simplistic solutions" instead of reporting the facts. He says that none or very little of this bias was personal—that none or few in the media disliked Goldwater personally. Bradlee was tough on my campaign staff in the Clif White case, saying, "They broke his heart," when White didn't receive the RNC chairmanship. "He was the best guy around, a total pro, and understood the fabric of government better than any of them."

The Washington _Post_ executive editor says, in retrospect, that the media and others misread me on the so-called extremism issue: "Barry Goldwater is not a zealot and never was a zealot. He's a traditional person, a traditional Jeffersonian, not a single-issue politician, not a neoconservative. As a matter of fact, I never saw anything wrong with the extremism quote in his acceptance speech." He believes our campaign would have been more successful if I had spoken more and our speechwriters less: "He was more in control of himself later, and particularly now. Barry has also changed. He's much less conscious of political necessity. He doesn't give a shit, for example, about giving some credit to Sam Nunn, Ted Kennedy, or Mo Udall." Bradlee argues that conservatives become more liberal when they enter the White House—as witness Nixon's opening to China and ending the Vietnam War and Ronald Reagan's deficit spending. And liberals become more conservative—as witness various policies of the Carter administration as well as a movement toward the center by many liberals, including Senator Ted Kennedy. The _Post_ executive editor adds, "Let's face it, to a large extent, the liberal ethic and liberal programs of the Great Society have failed."

Bradlee explains that journalists have also changed, that they are more responsible today. He says that Goldwater, the candidate, was ahead of his time, adding, "The thing I remember about Barry Goldwater then and today was his absolute, essential decency. It overwhelms you. He never returned the unkindness he received. A bunch of us have sat around at times and wondered why we didn't do justice to Goldwater's run for the presidency. Today, we love him." Howard K. Smith says that one of the reasons the media now treat me better is that I'm no longer a threat to the liberal establishment. He also cites the biggest change: Barry Goldwater was known as a military man, yet he led the way in changing the Pentagon—in reorganizing the command structure and defense contracting. Goldwater has given tremendous weight to changing the powerful political action committees. He did the impossible in 1964 in getting a genuine conservative nominated, and an individual who happened to be half Jewish. Smith concluded, "Goldwater said to me during the presidential campaign, 'You're going to be surprised one day when you find out how much you agree with me.' He was right. He's voicing the views of many of us today."

Charles Mohr of the New York _Times,_ Mary McGrory, and Bob Pierpoint strongly argue that the media were fair to me in 1964. They maintain that I shot from the hip at times and should have been much more careful about the preciseness of my language. They maintain I have mellowed over the past twenty-five years. All concede the obvious rise and new power of the conservative movement. Mary wrote a sentence in the campaign which perhaps shows how much times have changed. It was published in the Washington _Star,_ under a New Orleans dateline on September 19: "Often [Goldwater] sounds like the village anarchist as he calls for 'less and less government.' " David Broder now looks back on our 1964 effort with long distance perspective. He says, "There's now no question but that Barry Goldwater contributed to enormous political change in the country. He changed the way we look at the American political world—the shift in the nation's political direction to the West—away from the East. Goldwater changed the country's political axis not only geographically but in terms of values and beliefs. He introduced modern conservative political thought to the national debate."

He adds, "Goldwater has never wavered, and many of his beliefs have been vindicated. His race also is of the greatest importance because, despite Goldwater's loss, his campaign saw the greatest recruiting in the past generation." Broder, assessing the role of the media in 1964, now explains, "We failed to see, we missed the enormous significance—yes, unequivocally—of what he was saying and his political effects on the country and the Republican Party. There's a direct relationship between Goldwater of 1964 and Ronald Reagan of 1980 and today. We missed where American politics was headed. Have we learned from the Goldwater campaign? I think we go on making the same mistakes." From a personal viewpoint, Broder concludes, "Barry Goldwater has made himself a monumental figure in American politics—beyond philosophy and ideology. He is an authentic American." We flew to San Francisco for the last big campaign stop. There was a tremendous crowd. None of us could believe it. Somebody said it was a larger throng than had greeted General Douglas MacArthur when he came home from the Pacific. We were thrilled but exhausted. I just wanted to go home.

We flew to one final stop, a sentimental journey to the little town of Fredonia, about three hundred population, on the Arizona-Utah border. I'd always ended my campaigns there. It was sunset. About 1,800 folks from nearby farms and ranches stood in front of a one-room office building in the middle of town. The American flag cracked in the wind. These were my people, in their frayed cowboy hats and worn boots, with plain, open faces and children in their arms, and they stood straight and tall with looks of wonder at all the media lights and equipment. Some Navajo and Paiute Indians stood at the edge of the crowd wearing black hats and solemn expressions. I talked about their mothers, fathers, and ancestors who had come to these hard plains and mountain country, the hard winters and the chilling snowdrifts and winds, to farm and raise cattle. They had asked nothing of the government. They made it on their own—with hard work and God's help. Some Navajos shook my hand when the speech was over. We exchanged best wishes in Navajo. Some mothers smiled, and their kids tugged at my suit coat for autographs.

It was real, unpretentious, simple. I was home. We took off for Phoenix. As our plane banked south, a sweeping rainbow of lights glowed in the dark sky to the west. Kitchel was awestruck by it and called the lights "a good omen." We stopped at the Camelback Inn on arrival in Phoenix for a drink with the hundred or so reporters who had covered us. I was tired and aching all over. I couldn't eat the delicious-looking Mexican chili, enchiladas, tortillas, and tacos. Several newsmen asked me for one last thought on the campaign. I was sipping a bourbon and finally began to relax a bit. There was one big disappointment, I told them, "We may not have spelled out the issues as well as we could. That was the point of it all—the point of the entire campaign. If only Jack Kennedy were here." I put down the drink and repeated, "If Jack were here, we would have had a good campaign." Those were my final words of the campaign. Peggy and I went home. As we drove north toward Camelback Mountain, she was very quiet. I looked at her and simply said, "Peg, we were ahead of our time."

We lost to the Johnson-Humphrey ticket, 43 million to 27 million votes, a Democratic landslide. The Goldwater-Miller ticket won six states—Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Some of us believe the conservative movement has had broader and deeper national implications than any other movement of our times. The reasons are that it now reaches beyond single segments of the population into all classes of society, and it is involved in virtually every major issue facing the nation. Conservatives now hail from all regions of the country, every social class, each and every creed and color, and all age groups. The new GOP was forged in the fires of the 1964 presidential campaign. 8 Vietnam: Past and Future It was peaceful coming home. The wars of the campaign and Washington seemed a world away. Peggy and I were always together—on a short vacation with friends in the Bahama Islands, off on camping trips to photograph more of the state, enjoying long hours with the family. Our two girls, Joanne and little Peggy, were married. Barry Jr. and Mike were working and still bachelors. Many old friends called at the house. My mother celebrated her ninetieth birthday. The sunny Arizona winter of 1965 seemed to make life serene, too soft for this old war-horse.

I opened a small office in Phoenix with a staff of one, Judy Rooney, who had worked with me in Washington. (She later married Earl Eisenhower, a nephew of the former President.) We were deluged with mail, especially requests for speeches. Slowly, I got back on the speaking circuit, but this time I was making money, more than ever in my life. The speeches covered the gamut of public issues, but audiences were primarily interested in two topics—where the Republican Party was going and how to win the War in Vietnam. For the next four years, the war became one of the driving forces of my life. I regularly spoke with American troops in Vietnam through the MARS network that had been patched into the ham radio shack next to our home. I also toured our military bases on five visits to Vietnam, getting the views of many old friends and acquaintances—military commanders, pilots, and GIs in the field. I was still flying in the Air Force reserve. All we talked about was the war. But nowhere was the conflict of greater interest than on the nation's college campuses. I spoke at dozens of them and listened to the conflicting views of young people.

In the spring of 1965, I visited President Johnson in the White House. We discussed the war and my travels to Vietnam and around the United States. I told the President that when you go to war, the first decision you must make is to win it. There were too many political restrictions on our commanders, including bombing limitations and a ban on "hot pursuit" into enemy sanctuaries in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam. We weren't trying to win the war. We were in a twilight zone, fighting a political conflict while using troops as pawns. Their mission was to defend themselves as best they could. It was a pleasant but pointed conversation. I concluded, "The way we're now fighting this war, there's no way we can win it." It was clear from our conversation that Johnson was playing the war by ear. Neither he nor Defense Secretary McNamara had any definitive strategy or policy for victory. I told Johnson and old colleagues on Capitol Hill that we had two clear choices: Either win the war in a relatively short time, say within a year, or pull out all our troops and come home.

If the choice had been to win it, I would first have addressed the Congress and the American people and spelled out our choices—a short or long war, projected casualties and financial costs, the long-term effects on the American economy, and the need for national unity. As commander in chief, I would have stated precisely what I proposed to do. At the same time, I would have warned the North Vietnamese by dropping thousands of leaflets on Hanoi and the rest of the country. My address and these messages would have said clearly that either they halt the conflict or we would wipe out all their installations—the city of Hanoi, Haiphong harbor, factories, dikes, everything. I would have given them a week to think about it. If they did not respond, we would literally make a swamp of North Vietnam. We would drop 500-pound bombs and obliterated their infrastructure. Also, I would have sent our troops north and used our sea power to mine and blockade North Vietnamese ports. I never discussed nor advocated the use of nuclear weapons with Johnson or anyone else in authority. I supported a total conventional air, ground, and sea war. That was not to be. Indeed, late in the conflict, it would not have been supported by most Americans. By then, millions saw little purpose to the war.

Some argue that in the course of the conflict we actually hit North Vietnam more heavily than all the bombs dropped in World War II. They add that our most sophisticated weaponry did not halt the march of men and supplies from the North to South Vietnam along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The trail was the wrong target. There was, in fact, no single supply route. The trail changed every few days. In our limited time frame, knocking it out was not the answer. There was too much territory to cover in Laos and Cambodia. I know, because I flew over the trail as well as North Vietnamese supply depots and troop sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia on visits to Vietnam between 1965 and the end of 1969. The official reason for my visits was to talk with MARS outfits to see if they had sufficient equipment to contact radio relay stations leading back to the United States. I later attempted to get them needed equipment through the Air Force so GIs could talk with their families through our stateside volunteer switching points. I was still a brigadier general in the Air Force reserve.

I've never wanted to talk about these missions because some people might say, there goes Goldwater again, still trying to get into combat. Now that the war is over and I'm pretty much out of public life, a few thoughts about those flights might be informative. In flying over the trail, we couldn't see a damn thing for the most part. Jet fighter pilots saw even less because of their high speeds and high altitudes over the thick jungle. On a few lucky occasions, they spotted supply convoys from the North. My first flight over the trail and Communist staging areas in Laos and Cambodia was in 1965. It was about six months after the presidential campaign. I was fifty-six years old. The last was in 1969, when I was sixty and had returned to the Senate. That first reconnaissance was in a slow-moving army twin-engine Beechcraft Bonanza which flew at about 2,500 feet. I wanted to have a close look at the thickness of the jungle and determine whether our pilots could see supplies moving. It was important to know if heavy bombing in the area was a realistic objective. No one should spout off on such a subject unless he knows what he's talking about.

I saw very little of the trail despite our low altitude and slow speed. The same was true for our small spotter planes. On some passes, the pilot and I saw indistinguishable movement beneath the jungle cover, but whatever it was had disappeared by the time we returned on a second pass. After a two-hour flight over the trail, during which we caught glimpses of narrow paths as well as some open stretches, I saw that hundreds of walkways crisscrossed one another over the long, wide terrain. It was a hidden and very dispersed target, not ideal for heavy bombing. On other missions, I flew in T-39s. We went farther north, where I spotted North Vietnamese surface-to-air missiles and smaller antiaircraft support. Presumably we were flying over North Vietnam, although I no longer have the flight plans. We again flew over Laos and Cambodia, where the North Vietnamese had placed SAM and other antiaircraft firepower. U.S. pilots were not allowed to bomb these sites unless fired upon. On several occasions, I flew Marine helicopters from Danang. We were never fired on, but these flights were tricky because we often flew lower than the hilltops on either side. It would have been easy for any sniper to open up on us. After one of these flights, the North Vietnamese fired a 120-millimeter rocket into our Danang billets. It exploded nearby and killed several Marines. I still have a piece of that shrapnel as a reminder of that day.

These flights convinced me that we should never have made the trail a prime target. Rather, we should have concentrated our firepower on the North's sources of waging war—harbors, cities, protective dikes, and similar areas. My plan to win the war had two crucial aspects. It would have been launched in 1965, when we were a credible adversary, and carried out quickly. That would have convinced Hanoi that we meant business. To this day, I believe the North Vietnamese would have stopped the war if we had carried it to them by land, sea, and air over a three- to six-month period. This triple action would have forced the Communists to mass their troops and supplies. We could then have used our overwhelming firepower to full advantage. Our all-out air-sea-land attack would have been intolerable. Some have claimed China would have entered the war. That was unlikely for three reasons: First, China is protected by massive mountains north of Vietnam. Also, while friendly with Ho, the Chinese never really trusted or respected the Vietnamese. This was clear from their contentious history and was later reflected in border fighting after we pulled out of Vietnam. Beijing also was beginning to move toward Washington as its confrontations with Moscow continued. None of this is hindsight. I spelled out the strategy at that time.

As our military tactics, strategy, and diplomacy shifted with the winds of politics and public opinion, Hanoi saw we were not a serious, total adversary. The Communists, however, were fully committed to their cause. There is only one way to deal with a fierce enemy in war, and that is to kill him. There is no middle ground. America chose to fight a halfway war. Johnson and McNamara lost the conflict in 1965, when they made two critical decisions. The first was to "squeeze" the enemy—also called a "measured response"—with more troops. This involved heavier bombing but restricted the targets. The second was to hide their escalation of the war from the American people. This is not to blame them alone. President Kennedy had made the original commitment of nearly 17,000 soldiers to Vietnam, in effect giving them orders not to shoot back. At the same time, he was telling James Reston of the New York _Times_ that this was his answer to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's challenge at the Vienna summit. He would make our might credible. If Kennedy wanted to be believed, he should have told North Vietnam that he would blow away its ability to fight unless Hanoi quit the war. But the President was only bluffing. In war, you threaten and mean it. You do not bluff.

General Maxwell Taylor, who later became ambassador to South Vietnam, was advising Kennedy. He argued that we should fight a war of counterinsurgency instead of carrying the battle to the North Vietnamese, who were the decisive threat. It's ironic that such a distinguished soldier helped politicize his longtime military colleagues in his diplomatic role. Taylor sided with McNamara, battling the Secretary's military critics. My plan—as tough as it might seem to some—would have been more merciful to both sides. The war continued for another decade with 58,000 American dead, 303,000 wounded, and perhaps 1 million Vietnamese killed. Many more were injured on both sides. And none of this describes the civilian suffering. As Johnson and McNamara upped the ante in Vietnam, an ironic twist from the presidential campaign came to haunt them. It was an anonymous quote on Johnson's claim that, if elected, Barry Goldwater would lead the nation into a massive war in Southeast Asia. The quote was: "I was told that, if I voted for Goldwater, we were going to war in Vietnam. I did, and damned if we didn't."

Vietnam divided the United States into political and moral camps. Much has been written and said about the two conflicts we were actually engaged in, the one at home and the other in Southeast Asia. Many misconceptions and errors still cloud our perspective about both. It's important to consider them because unless we change some of our thinking and attitudes, the United States may lose the next war. We lacked an understanding of Vietnamese culture and history, especially its people's fierce desire for independence after long rule by the Chinese and French. Rather than weakening the Vietnamese view of themselves as one people, these occupations had strengthened their wish for unity. After World War II the United States had agreed to France's reoccupation of Indochina in exchange for strong French support in resisting Soviet pressures in Europe. We were unable to know the importance of Indochina in the future of Asia. Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh had wide popular support in their eight-year guerrilla war against the French, which ended at the 1954 Geneva Conference. Indochina then won limited independence. France's civilian population had played a major role in ending the conflict when it became disenchanted after the fall of Dien Bien Phu. A decade passed before the United States entered the no-man's-land that had existed between the French and Vietnamese. And it would be another decade before we left.

In my military tour of Asia during World War II, nothing made a greater impression on me than the cultural differences between Asians and Americans. Most of their personal, religious, and social values are very different from ours. They were not about to change these basic views just because they liked American cigarettes, clothes, or happy-go-lucky friendliness. Twenty years later, in Vietnam, it was transistor radios playing American music and Hollywood movies on new TV sets. Yet we could no more make an American out of a Vietnamese in Vietnam than they could make a Vietnamese of an American in Arizona. The North Vietnamese, in their measurement of values, were prepared to lose what we viewed as an extraordinary mass of men and women. To them, these people were heroic martyrs. Johnson and McNamara knew little of Asia and much less of Vietnam and its people. The President understood domestic politics, and McNamara was the Ford Motor Company embodiment of the modern technocrat. With these historical and personal backgrounds, the two took over the war in all its major aspects, including making decisions on daily military actions.

The pair became our generals and admirals by imposing official rules of engagement on the military. Details of these rules were classified "top secret" by the Johnson administration until I was able to get them declassified in 1985 with the help of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. These restrictions were divided into three categories. The first involved the border areas of countries neighboring Vietnam, the demilitarized zone, and air operations over North Vietnam. Under these rules, for example, if the North Vietnamese sent large concentrations of men and war materials down inside the Laotian border, U.S. embassy diplomats in Vientiane had to approve any American air strikes or other operations against them. The second set of rules restricted our ground war, tactical air operations, and naval gunfire. The third included prohibitions against striking enemy locks, dams, dikes, hydroelectric plants, and fishing boats. To ensure that these Johnson-McNamara restrictions were followed by our pilots, the U.S. Seventh Air Force was required to have all its strike air crews and forward air controllers (light-plane spotters) complete a written examination on the rules.

These are some examples of the restrictions: American pilots were not permitted to attack a North Vietnamese MIG sitting on a runway. It could be shot at only when it was flying and showed "hostile intentions." For most of the war, our pilots were not allowed, even when pursuing enemy aircraft that had shot at them, to attack North Vietnamese military air bases. In some areas, enemy supply trucks could escape attack merely by driving a few hundred yards off the road. SAM missile sites and supporting radar systems could not be struck while they were under construction, only after they became operational and actually fired at U.S. aircraft. Until the end of 1971, air crews in South Vietnam had to refer to at least four different sources of operations orders to determine which rules they were fighting under. Seventh Air Force records show that the average time between identifying a target in Laos and receiving clearance to hit it was more than fifteen days. In 1967 the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a report that was sharply critical of the "Rules of Engagement." It said that the American air campaign had not achieved its objectives because of political limitations which prevented our air leaders from waging the war in a manner and on a timetable best calculated to achieve maximum results. The report cited McNamara specifically and the Administration in general. It said that they had discounted the "unanimous professional judgment of our military commanders and the Joint Chiefs, and substituted civilian judgment in the details of target selection and the timing of strikes."

The subcommittee enraged McNamara when it reported, "During the entire year of 1966, less than 1 percent of the total sorties flown against North Vietnam were against fixed targets on the JCS list." McNamara was angry because his secret controls and personal power had been publicly exposed. The subcommittee statement was the centerpiece of a detailed accounting which showed that targets chosen by our best military minds could not be hit without specific approval of the Secretary of Defense or other high civilian authority. Most of the U.S. air war was limited to targets south of the vital Hanoi-Haiphong regions, to which the enemy could import and concentrate war materials in the knowledge that they were untouchable. The North Vietnamese sent these materials south and, at the same time, were allowed to build up an extremely sophisticated air defense system provided by the Soviet Union. Our military leaders were furious with Johnson and McNamara about this because their restrictions directly increased our casualties in the war.

This is not to argue that the commander in chief should and the Defense Secretary should not have broad war powers. They clearly did. It is to question their military competence in making extensively detailed decisions about how to fight the war. Some Johnson administration officials now suggest that our military leaders never conveyed the depths of their concerns about the rules of engagement to either McNamara or the President. However, it's abundantly clear from the Pentagon Papers and various declassified documents that the Joint Chiefs of Staff repeatedly argued against the political limitations forced on them. Time after time, they requested changes. At one point in early 1968, the Joint Chiefs showed Clark Clifford, who had replaced McNamara as Defense Secretary, photographic intelligence reports which clearly demonstrated that civilians had been removed from much of Hanoi and Haiphong and war materials had been stockpiled throughout almost half these cities. Johnson rejected the JCS pleas on March 31, 1968. In the same speech, in which he said he would not seek reelection, the President restricted air strikes on North Vietnam to a line south of the nineteenth parallel. On December 1, he ordered the total halt of bombing and of B-52 flights over North Vietnam.

During the last week of March 1972, North Vietnam launched a major offensive against South Vietnam. President Nixon quickly resumed and broadened air operations against North Vietnam to just below the Chinese buffer zone. These assaults concluded with twelve consecutive days of B-52 strikes in December 1972. Hanoi then began moving toward a genuine peace settlement. How did we get into such a faraway fight in the first place? Vietnam is about halfway around the world from Washington. It's as large as the major Western European nations, with nearly 130,000 square miles of land. And its population has been almost on a level with the same nations. Its ancient recorded history goes back to 111 B.C. At the time President Eisenhower sent a few hundred military advisers there, it was difficult to determine whether the Viet Minh insurgents were operating under the global designs of world communism or were independent nationalists trying to liberate their country. However, the intention of Ho Chi Minh—to secure Communist domination of all Vietnam—was clear by mid-1965.

We entered Vietnam with considerable ignorance. Our goal—to halt the spread of communism—was clear, but most other considerations were confused. Our military leaders repeatedly warned us not to engage in a massive land war in Asia. These warnings were reinforced by indications from Hanoi that it would be willing to fight a long war. We were willing to accept the risks because of the danger that the Communists might overrun all of Asia. But in stepping into the faraway conflict, no one dreamed we would engage in such a struggle with our hands tied behind our backs. One man assumed the role of managing the war and would lead us out of the jungle. Robert McNamara took over explaining the conflict to the Congress and often to the American people. He was the whiz-bang technocrat who wanted to win the war almost by himself. Yet McNamara had alienated critical supporters in the Congress, the military, and, increasingly, among the public. In the face of this overwhelming division, it became questionable whether we could win the war over an extended period of time. That was the heart of my argument against a protracted war, a conflict that was even more in doubt because it was to be managed to an unprecedented degree by civilians.

My own belief in civilian control of the armed forces is unshakable. Also, not a single military officer expressed the slightest reservation about it during or after the war. But a critical question arose then and is still with us today: To what extent can a President and Secretary of Defense politicize a war? Put another way, to what degree may the limited competence of civilians be allowed to dominate professional military decisions? This is the precise path down which LBJ and McNamara led the nation—an ever widening, politicized conflict with no effective plan for military victory. President Johnson was ultimately responsible for the war. Some claim McNamara's calculator so dazzled LBJ that he was blinded to reality. That is false. McNamara was telling Johnson what he wanted to hear—that he could have his Great Society and conduct a war, too. The eventual realization that he could not was what brought the President to his knees. A few months before Jack Kennedy died, word leaked from the White House that McNamara had told Kennedy that if he received sufficient support, the Vietnam battle could be won by the end of 1965. Kennedy was skeptical. But Johnson fell for the idea of a drop-by-drop war of attrition that perfectly suited Hanoi's intention to wait out the Americans, as they had the French.

I said at the time that it wasn't going to work. Neither the Congress nor the American people would stand for a prolonged conflict. The military wished to avoid it. Johnson and McNamara recognized the dangers of an open-ended commitment, so they hid their escalation of the war in hopes of an early victory. I began to distrust McNamara when, on becoming Secretary of Defense, he lied about U.S. missile strength. It was not so much his support of Jack Kennedy's false campaign line that the Soviets had surpassed our missile power. I was taken aback by the extent of McNamara's charade before Congress and the media. The Central Intelligence Agency had proved beyond a reasonable doubt that there was no missile gap. Up stepped McNamara, the management expert. He proposed that the President could seem to end the politically manufactured disadvantage by having the United States more than double its missiles, to a total of 950, and still tell Moscow that we weren't launching an arms race. How? By limiting the throw weight, or destructive power, of the more numerous new missiles to that of the 450 already in place. The old missiles would presumably be destroyed. McNamara was willing to have this country spend billions of dollars on new missiles to cover up a Kennedy falsehood and fulfill a phony campaign promise. It was an incredibly deceitful performance.

McNamara was nothing if not nimble. He later argued that the United States should accept nuclear parity with the Soviet Union. The Secretary maintained that missile equality was good for America—that parity supported nuclear deterrence and the theory of mutually assured destruction. It was MAD all right. McNamara would deliberately abandon our policy of nuclear superiority, the greatest defense not only against a surprise Soviet nuclear strike but against the massive Russian army, which could launch a sneak assault with conventional weapons. We later learned that McNamara and others had miscalculated and that the Russians had been building nuclear missiles much faster than we had recognized. Ironically, the Soviets actually took a missile lead on McNamara's own watch. The CIA reported that to President Nixon after he took office in 1969. I considered McNamara one of the most unreliable and untrustworthy men in America and still do. He continues to posture as an expert on our military defense. Yet his record is one of repeated failure.

McNamara was a numbers cruncher, a systems analyst, logistics administrator, bean and body counter who knew little or nothing of the military or warfare. He also knew little about people, whether Vietnamese or American. He confounded Johnson with his glib certainty. The Secretary was the ultimate superachiever; he saw figures and functions but not the men fighting the war. He quantified Vietnam without ever understanding the meaning of its complex human equation. McNamara even ordered his staff to compile a statistical digest on Southeast Asia that eventually became nearly two inches thick. Some data were updated daily, others weekly, and all monthly. He regularly spent hour after hour analyzing these numbers, as if they would somehow lead him and the nation out of the wilderness of Vietnam. Ultimately, more than 380 separate numerical tables filled the defense leader's three-ring binder. Each page was crammed with digits in small print. He memorized the small print but never understood the shooting war.

McNamara never comprehended either the trained officers under him or the determination of those faraway little men in the black pajamas. Nor did he fathom Hanoi's leadership, which took every advantage of Washington's hesitation to undertake a massive military assault. In the final analysis, McNamara knew the cost of everything but the value of little. There are many reasons why we failed in Vietnam. But we did not lose on the battlefield. We lost at home. It's critical to understand what happened if we are not to lose a future war. We must have a clearer definition of the roles and responsibilities of our political leaders, the military, the public, and the media. The same is true for a limited nuclear war. The Vietnam War truly began for us on August 7, 1964, when the U.S. Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution after reported attacks on two U.S. destroyers, the U.S.S. _Maddox_ and _C. Turner Joy,_ by North Vietnamese patrol boats. The so-called attack on the _Maddox_ took place on August 2 and the one on the _Turner Joy_ two days later. A week after the incident—two days after the Congress voted the resolution—Johnson and McNamara were still so confused as to what had actually occurred that the Defense Department had to send a special Navy team to the Far East in an attempt to reconstruct the events. I took a lot of flak for saying what was basically accurate: "With the great communications system which McNamara is always bragging about, they're waiting for an airmail letter to find out just what did happen."

Those were the hazy circumstances under which the Congress approved American involvement in Vietnam. It became the equivalent of a declaration of war. An actual declaration eventually became impossible as support for our effort faded. Presidents Johnson and Nixon used their authority as commander in chief to continue our participation. In fact, the attack on the _Turner Joy_ never took place. Our ship sonar operators had made a mistake. And based on the numerous contradictions in McNamara's testimony before Congress and the accounts of others, I still question whether the _Maddox_ was shot at by the North Vietnamese. There was no doubt about one thing, though: McNamara misled Congress and the American people, particularly by not revealing the critical fact that the _Maddox_ was on a secret mission. I later learned that the operation involved U-2 spy flights over North Vietnam, kidnapping North Vietnamese for intelligence interrogation, commando raids from the sea, and parachuting psychological warfare teams into North Vietnam. This was an example of Johnson-McNamara duplicity—to act and then hide it. In this case, the facts were not revealed to the Congress. We voted on the Tonkin Gulf Resolution with critical aspects of the situation withheld from us.

I couldn't believe that McNamara would stage a second big deception after his elaborate Bay of Pigs scenario. By 1964 many in Congress had deciphered his first series of lies. It seemed inconceivable that he would try again. So we supported the Tonkin Gulf Resolution with only two members opposing it—Oregon's Wayne Morse and Alaska's Ernest Gruening. At the time, uneasy about the circumstances of the incident, I recalled an observation by Mark Twain: A lie can travel around the world before the truth gets out of bed. That was their first and perhaps worst mistake—misleading the Congress and public. It was to take various forms on different occasions over the next several years, but the result was the same. Many members of Congress and more and more of the public became convinced that Johnson and McNamara were lying. This weakened their political and moral authority to conduct the war. I had suggested to LBJ as early as 1965 that he fire McNamara. One of the reasons was the Secretary's repeated untruthfulness. But equally important—contrary to what many thought—was his professional incompetence, which flowed from his erratic behavior. An early example of this occurred on Christmas Eve of 1964, when McNamara summoned the vice chief of staff of the Army, General Creighton Abrams, and told him in approximately these words:

"I've just canceled the army aviation program. I'm impounding funds and there will not be one dollar in the budget I'm about to take to the Congress in January for one new army helicopter, one new army airplane, to train one new army pilot, or buy any spare parts—unless and until you undertake a study that gives me the answers to the following questions: Why do we need army aviation? How much do we need it? Why do you need helicopters instead of fixed-wing aircraft?" Similar questions followed. This incredible conversation was reported to me by some of those in the Pentagon called upon to answer McNamara's inquiry. The questions, which came from McNamara's celebrated civilian systems analysis whiz kids, caused a major flap inside the Department of the Army. It quickly organized a special task force headed by Brigadier General Edward Mueller and Dr. Wilbur Payne, director of operations research, to answer the challenge. In mid-1965, while his staff was still distilling the army study, McNamara flew to Vietnam on a five-day fact-finding mission. En route home, he fired off a series of cables from Hawaii: How soon could the Army ready two more airmobile divisions for deployment to Southeast Asia? How soon could the Army send other aviation units there? _How rapidly could the Pentagon increase helicopter production rates and in what stages?_

The messages made little or no sense to McNamara's own staff or the Army. Six months before, the whiz kid of all whiz kids had canceled the army aviation program. Helicopter production had been wiped out by his own edict. McNamara was now demanding that his staff and the Army tell him, within three days of his return to Washington, how to resurrect the corpse. On the fourth day, McNamara planned to brief the President so LBJ could quickly ask Congress for a supplemental appropriation. Funds were needed because the Secretary of Defense planned to persuade Johnson to deploy new army airmobile forces in Vietnam. But how? He had halted production of the helicopters needed for their missions. A Pentagon review of army aviation was still under way. Never mind. McNamara would equip them with helicopters that would, under new orders, crackle off assembly lines like popcorn. The Secretary wanted to know how quickly UH-1 Huey helicopter production could increase to 300, 500, and even 1,000 a month from his previous zero production order. He also pushed the panic button on new troops: How soon could the Army deploy eighteen airmobile companies equipped with UH-34 helicopters?

However, the UH-34, a piston-engine helicopter, was out of production. The Navy and Marine Corps were already short some 3,000 replacement engines for UH-34s they were then operating. These engines had not been produced for years. It would take years to restart the production lines. Newer, turbine-powered helicopters, such as the UH-1, could be built much more quickly. But McNamara had ordered that these lines come to a virtual standstill, with only a few choppers produced. Production lead times for critical components, such as transmissions, averaged twenty-four to thirty months. Knowing that he had canceled army aviation, McNamara turned to the old UH-34s. However, his computer memory had blown a fuse. The Navy and Marines, the last customers of the UH-34, were already into the transition of new turbine machines like the CH-46. Ben Schemmer, a member of the Secretary's systems analysis staff and the army special study team, was disturbed by McNamara's contradictory demands. He asked Charles Hitch, an assistant defense secretary who was compiling responses to McNamara's frantic cables from Hawaii, "What are we trying to accomplish? Tell us the objective so we can sort out the conflicting priorities. Are we going to war?"

Hitch told Schemmer, in words repetitive of McNamara's response to such questions, that he was out of order. The Secretary of Defense asked the questions. The staff provided the answers. That was McNamara's problem. He rarely answered questions—of the military, Congress, the public, or his own staff. He was accountable to only two men, the President and himself. Schemmer said, "He was escalating the war but keeping his actions even from his most trusted aides. I went home the evening after talking with Hitch about McNamara's contradictions and told my wife that we were going to war. She almost fainted." McNamara's defenders argue that he had to shock the military with difficult questions to force them to justify their actions. Schemmer, who worked under the Defense Secretary for three years as director of land force weapons systems, denies that claim: "In this case, McNamara impounded funds authorized and appropriated by Congress. This effectively shut down engine, helicopter, and spare parts production. This went on at what contractors called a minimum sustaining rate. Some companies continued limited production on their own, believing their firms would be reimbursed later."

He also recalled, "Industry reps told Pentagon officials that nobody could be this goddamned nuts!" Schemmer estimates that after McNamara's Christmas Eve edict to General Abrams, the rate of production of UH-1 Huey helicopters fell from about forty a month to five. Then, after McNamara's July 1965 tour of Vietnam, production climbed to 300 a month. However, this rate was throttled back at various times for different reasons, either to keep the war's cost down or when combat losses in Vietnam were lower than forecast. McNamara ordered surges in production when American losses rose or when even more aviation units were needed for deployment. Schemmer called this the "hot rod, cold douche routine." McNamara overruled his deputy, Cyrus Vance, who had agreed with the Defense Secretary's own staff and the Army. They argued that a new attack helicopter—the AH-1 Cobra, developed by Bell Laboratories on company funds—should be rushed into production for Vietnam. McNamara sat on the recommendation for months. In another, later reversal, he was critical because the Cobras could not be produced fast enough. Production rates of other helicopters—CH-47s, OH-6s, and Marine Corps CH-46s and CH-53s—were whipsawed in similar ways.

Yet McNamara boasted to Johnson and Congress that he could manage the war "efficiently" while keeping the military at high readiness levels around the world. The Congress eventually—and rightly—challenged McNamara on this. LBJ also began to question the wisdom of his computer-brained secretary. Under McNamara the army aviator training pipeline was so constricted that at the height of the war, pilots were being involuntarily returned to Vietnam for second and third combat tours. The intervals between tours also became increasingly shorter. From about mid-1965 to the beginning of 1971, more than 6,400 army aviators had to be returned involuntarily to Vietnam for second and third combat periods. We were short of pilots because from 1961 through 1965 McNamara had slashed eight separate Army requests to increase its pilot training program. Did McNamara know of these shortages? That some of these men were flying 150 hours of combat each month, a total never previously reached or believed possible? Schemmer, now editor of _The Armed Forces Journal International,_ says he personally wrote more than a dozen memos to McNamara and Vance about it: "I had to fight to increase pilot production by fifty to a hundred people a year—every year—when we needed thousands of new pilots, not hundreds. This man suddenly wanted to build thousands of helicopters, like a popcorn machine, but wouldn't give us the money to train pilots. He told Congress the services were wasting money because they had more pilots than cockpit seats. The reality was, he had kids flying eighteen hours a day in Vietnam."

McNamara was saying to them, as he had to all the country's military: You're just a number. McNamara's contradictory policies had all the bang of a whimper in mid-1965 when Lieutenant General Harry W. O. Kinnard was told at Fort Benning, Georgia, that he would shortly lead the 1st Cavalry Division to fight in Vietnam. The division's effectiveness depended on about 450 helicopters. Where did Kinnard get them? "A large part was stripped from another unit," he said. Kinnard, widely considered a brilliant field commander, was told by his Pentagon superiors that President Johnson would declare a state of national emergency. Such an order would allow him to take all the men he had trained to Vietnam. Now retired and living in Virginia, Kinnard recalls the shock that hit him: "The President didn't declare a national emergency. So I had to eliminate thousands of men, including more than five hundred aviation specialists, because they were not eligible to be retained under a nonemergency. It made no sense to send us to Vietnam under those conditions. We took men with as little as a month's time to go in the Army because I was told we'd probably be fighting as soon as we got there. It was the stupidest thing you could imagine. I was being asked to train an entirely new division in a few months before going to war. That was an incomprehensible political decision."

The general and his available troops arrived at An Khe in north central Vietnam in September. Two months later, they were engaged in an all-out battle with three North Vietnamese regiments in the Ia Drang Valley. The fight was one of the fiercest and most significant battles of the war. It illustrates the kind of mess the contradictory Johnson policies caused for men in the field. North Vietnam's top military commander, General Vo Nguyen Giap, planned and directed the enemy operation. He had become famous for organizing Hanoi's victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu. The enemy attack across the central highlands, which came from Cambodian sanctuaries, was an attempt to cut Vietnam in half. The North Vietnamese were to succeed in doing just that against South Vietnamese troops late in the conflict. The battle also marked the first major engagement of the war between regular North Vietnamese and American troops. American B-52 bombers were used for the first time in close support of U.S. troops in Vietnam.

The North Vietnamese were routed by the Americans in one of the best-planned operations of the war. The Communist forces suffered nearly 1,800 casualties in three days of fierce around-the-clock fighting. The enemy finally fled, some into Cambodia, while others crossed into the North. Kinnard wanted to destroy all three North Vietnamese units completely to teach Hanoi a lesson. He asked permission to follow them into Cambodia and elsewhere. This was approved by General William Westmoreland, our commander in Vietnam, and, significantly, by Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. Kinnard says: "It was disapproved in Washington—a decision that could not have been made by the military. So these people escaped. They were refitted, rearmed, and fighting again by March 1966. "The objective should have been to totally eliminate the North Vietnamese as a threat. The way we elected to carry out the war was a disaster. The idea of permitting them a sanctuary, into which you can't go on the ground, was absurd. It's like telling a football team it can't cross the fifty-yard line."

Kinnard believes, as I do, that we should never have allowed the North Vietnamese to fight as guerrillas. But how could one get these hit-and-run troops to mass? As Kinnard puts it, "You go where he lives. The most stupid decision of the war was a political one, to restrict our fighting to South Vietnam. We could have whipped the North Vietnamese by going into their territory and heading for Hanoi. They'd have had to stand and fight. We could then have used our artillery, tanks, helicopters, planes, and other logistics en masse." Kinnard remembers asking for B-52 strikes on certain areas. He was told such approval had to come from Washington. LBJ and McNamara sat in the White House and not only blocked bombing runs but chose targets of their own. It would take a week or more to get a response. Kinnard and other generals rarely, if ever, knew what targets they would be hitting a week later. The political decisions and objectives of Johnson and McNamara were inconsistent and contrary to our military goals. We were engaged in counterinsurgency, a war of attrition through a long process of search-and-destroy missions, to defeat the Communist guerrillas. However, beginning in 1966, Vietcong and North Vietnamese regiments and divisions moved their bases into Cambodia, Laos, and the North Vietnamese panhandle north of the demilitarized zone. We did not began to attack these sanctuaries until 1970, when U.S. forces were being withdrawn. The U.S. embassy in Laos, claiming the war might be widened, opposed any serious American military operations against the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Our counterinsurgency alone could not push Hanoi out of the war. The Communists simply retreated to sanctuaries from which they would strike again and again. It was obvious we had to hit border areas in nearby Cambodia and Laos because they were major sources of support for the war. Indeed, the North Vietnamese were able to put as many men in the field as we did because of the protection allowed them by Washington. In 1965 Johnson and McNamara increased American troop strength in Vietnam from about 23,000 soldiers to more than 184,000. That total rose to 385,000 in 1966. The two were pouring troops into Vietnam beyond any projections. Their only plan was to send more men. The Secretary's own words demonstrate how he eventually led Johnson to approve a total of more than 500,000 troops in Vietnam. In January 1962 McNamara told the President and the American people that the situation in Vietnam was "encouraging." In September 1963 it was "getting better and better." In March 1964 it had "significantly improved." By November 1965 we had "stopped losing the war." And in July 1966 he was "cautiously optimistic."

These were the years of decision, the most crucial of the conflict, during which McNamara told LBJ that the war could be fought both efficiently and on the cheap. Johnson believed him. McNamara's concealing and disguising the cost of the war to the American people are well documented in government files, books, and other sources. They show he had various sets of figures for each annual budget, from high to low, while telling Congress and the public the outlay would be the lowest figure. Meantime, LBJ plunged ahead with his Great Society spending. In previous wars, we projected costs into the future. McNamara's costs covered only one year ahead, as if the war would then end. He was well aware that this was untrue. LBJ resisted his own party's demands for tax increases. That would have been an open admission of the war's rising cost. In November 1966 the Secretary of Defense finally admitted his charade and dropped his annual cutoff date on the end of the fighting. The media began to report what many economists had known all along: The cost of the war would immediately double.

We're still paying for Vietnam. In all this, McNamara tried to protect himself—and Johnson—by writing draft memos to the President when, in fact, they were final recommendations and understandings between the two. A draft memo, if and when it surfaced, would allow them room to deny that any or all of a document was actual policy. McNamara was shortly to turn against the war he himself had created because it was no longer cost-effective. Perhaps he also began to see that the numbers he had crunched and sent to Vietnam were really flesh and blood. Casualty rates had been rising steadily. At Georgetown cocktail parties, McNamara began to confess doubts about the outcome of the war. It was too late. The character of the conflict had changed. We were committed. No honorable man can walk away from a war to which he has sent hundreds of thousands of men. The situation was all the worse because the President and Secretary of Defense continued to place limited trust and responsibility in our military leaders. And the brass privately wondered whether Johnson, McNamara, and their staffs had any comprehension of their own lack of military competence.

That professional capability was challenged on April 24, 1966. The New York _Times_ carried a front page story by its veteran military affairs analyst, Hanson W. Baldwin. It said there was a bomb shortage in Vietnam and at various U.S. bases. The report explained that there were "current ordnance shortages" because available bomb components did not match. The number and intensity of U.S. aircraft missions had been sharply reduced because of various aviation ordnance shortages. The article noted, "The problem is believed to be largely one of distribution or shipment rather than overall shortages." McNamara, the efficiency genius, was being reduced to a plumber trying to unclog his own pipeline. As Schemmer recalls, "Robert McNamara went ballistic over that story. He went into random trajectory—into the ionosphere like a crowbar without fins. Some of us from systems analysis—he had a team juggling the numbers—spent three days and nights in the Pentagon working on a response. Everything precious to McNamara's integrity had been challenged. This could never have happened under his management reforms at the Defense Department. This was impossible."

Baldwin and Schemmer say to this day that the _Times'_ story was solid. It included the charge that the American stockpile of 750-pound bombs around the world was so low that supplies might be exhausted before production of new bombs later in the summer of 1966. Schemmer reported that Navy pilots were flying off our aircraft carriers with as few as one or two 500-pound bombs, when they could have carried loads of ten or twelve. McNamara called a Pentagon news conference after conferring with his entourage of whiz kids. Schemmer recalls that a McNamara staffer told him, "We don't have a bomb shortage. We have a surplus of targets!" The Secretary put on one of the most remarkable performances of his career before Pentagon reporters and later the Congress. He said that there was no bomb shortage ("That's baloney!") and, at the same time, that the military services had screwed up the distribution of bomb parts. Indeed, there was a surplus of targets! Of course, it was a maze of contradictions. But the perception of performance was what counted with McNamara—blow them away with statistics!

The Secretary quietly had the Air Force buy back more than 5,500 bombs sold earlier to a West German firm, as well as thousands of bombs shipped to our European allies. Under government agreements, Washington could recover surplus military bombs and weapons at cost. However, this was not the case with sales to private firms. So the German company resold the bombs to McNamara at a large profit. No wonder the Secretary of Defense was upset with Baldwin. The disclosure had tarnished his image as the ultimate manager and money saver. Baldwin, a highly respected military writer, now says: "McNamara was not telling the truth. He took umbrage with anyone who disagreed or took issue with him. McNamara placed me on his blacklist. Cy Vance suggested I speak with him. When I attempted to do so, he refused to see me. "Unfortunately, his loyalty was only up—not equally down to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other military commanders. He was very disloyal to the people under him. I didn't trust him. It's too bad we then didn't have stronger Joint Chiefs of Staff."

Baldwin confirmed what many of us already knew about the Defense Secretary. He cited a McNamara trip to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in the mid-1960s, during which the Secretary had viewed a parachute drop. After it was over, Baldwin recalls, McNamara told those present he had learned nothing. He'd known it all before he came. That was precisely what McNamara did on all his trips to Vietnam. He had reached his conclusions and decisions before ever leaving Washington. A draft of what he would report to Johnson had already been typed. There would be minor adjustments. It was what the Pentagon whiz kids called "managed decision making." The Secretary did not kindly view appeals or questions from the field—those fighting the war—about decisions in Washington. There was no more dramatic appeal from Vietnam than one which began in late 1965. It's an untold story—a horror. Schemmer and others were involved on the Washington end. A general officer from the Joint Chiefs of Staff asked Schemmer's help in expediting the transfer of sixteen UH-34 helicopters from the U.S. Navy or Marines to the Vietnamese Air Force. The request carried the highest wartime priority of the U.S. commander in Vietnam, General Westmoreland, and the commander in chief of the Pacific fleet, Admiral Ulysses S. G. Sharp. The helicopters were needed for sensitive cross-border operations, missions LBJ and McNamara wanted to be able to deny knowing about.

Some involved inserting Vietnamese CAS (Controlled American Sources) agents into North Vietnam or extracting them. Others concerned intelligence missions into Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. McNamara did not want to risk having to explain why an American helicopter might be shot down or a crew captured in these places. The helicopter shortage was so severe and McNamara's micromanagement of the war so pervasive that no one but the Secretary himself could approve the transfer of these sixteen obsolescent helicopters. McNamara sat on the request. Week after week, month after month, McNamara's staff sent him memos explaining why the helicopters were urgently needed. There were critical military and moral reasons for these requests: Cross-border operations had mounted, with increasing numbers of Vietnamese pilots shot down on these missions. The pilots as well as CAS agents were signaling frantically for extraction. Yet McNamara returned one memo after another from his staff. All were, in effect, pleading for the lives of Vietnamese pilots and CAS agents who were in immediate, critical danger. The Secretary nitpicked the memos to death, often raising irrelevant questions which he scrawled in the margins. At one point McNamara objected to taking some helicopters from the naval reserve because Congress might interpret that as an indication that he was scratching to find resources for fighting the war. In other memos, McNamara vaguely asked for "more analysis." That was a commonplace reminder of what the new Pentagon was all about.

A straightforward operational problem had become a nightmare. For ten long months, McNamara overrode plea after plea to release the UH-34s. By then, the Vietnamese Air Force was clamoring for seventy-five helicopters to launch the perilous rescue missions. In his most incomprehensible move of the entire debacle, McNamara scribbled in the margin of one memo: "Why do we need a VNAF (Vietnamese Air Force)? I don't believe it's very effective?" If American pilots were ruled out, who were to fly the rescue missions? Or were these courageous downed pilots and agents to die slowly twisting in the wind? McNamara's conduct raised serious questions. The Vietnamese were volunteering to do just what Johnson had asked of them—more of the fighting. Why not accept their offer? Why refuse to help allies risking their lives behind enemy lines to free their brothers facing certain death? What was McNamara's problem? The Secretary never answered these questions. He answered to himself. I have often asked myself if, in his tormented soul, McNamara ever faced the memory of the men he left behind to die. No man involved with the military—I don't care what nation he might be from—would leave troops in such a predicament.

Schemmer wrote a final brief, frantic memo urging transfer of the UH-34s to the South Vietnamese. McNamara returned it to Vance with this note in the margin: "Cy, get Schemmer off my back. RM." Vance's senior military aide called Schemmer to the front office. He handed him the reply, which McNamara had initialed, and said, "The boss thought you might want to keep this, Ben. But don't show it to anyone." Schemmer concluded at the time, "McNamara is very sick. It's time to leave the Pentagon. It's futile to play mental isometrics with an irrational man incapable of coming to grips with such a simple problem." One of McNamara's aides, whom Schemmer won't name, called Ben into his office and said, "Yes, Ben, McNamara is sick. But that's why you should stay. That's why I'm staying. McNamara needs help. By now, not many people are willing to argue with him." Schemmer left the Pentagon at the close of 1967. A few months later he learned that LBJ—as part of his halt to the bombing of North Vietnam—had forbidden any further missions to resupply CAS agents who were still operating up north. The Vietnamese Air Force, denied helicopters, was no longer in a position to offer help. Some agents had died or been captured and were believed shot. Others, who managed to survive for several more months, were told to "hang in there." They were advised there were "resupply problems which were being worked out." Eventually, forty-five CAS agents were quietly abandoned. Their radios fell silent. They were never heard from again.

A few months before Schemmer left the Pentagon, a young man about six feet six inches tall with curly orange hair and a large motor-cycle belt buckle appeared at Schemmer's office from out of nowhere. Dolf Droge looked like a rock singer. He had just completed his third tour in Southeast Asia with the Agency for International Development. He came to tell someone how badly we were losing the war and how we could either win it or leave Vietnam. After being shifted to various offices, Droge was directed to Schemmer. Ben offered him fifteen minutes. The two talked all night. Droge's offered nineteen ways to end the war. Schemmer put them in a ten-page paper to Vance. One stood out: We should bribe Ho Chi Minh to end the conflict, offer him aid to bring his country into the twentieth century. There were no political nuances, no moral imperatives, just an old-fashioned, outright bribe, whatever it would take to have Ho and his forces quit fighting while we pulled out of Vietnam. Droge's point was simple and direct: It would be a lot cheaper for the United States in blood and treasure to bribe Ho than continue a war with a no-win policy.

Vance told Schemmer to write a special paper on bribing Ho. He did. A few days later, Schemmer was told by his immediate superior to knock off the "peripheral stuff" and get back to work. Schemmer then resigned. Later, after Vance became our chief negotiator at the Paris peace talks, he invited Schemmer to visit him in New York. In the midst of their conversation, Vance suddenly asked Schemmer, "Do you remember when you brought me that memo about bribing Ho Chi Minh?" Schemmer did. "Well," Vance said, "it almost worked." Startled, Schemmer asked what he meant. Vance answered, in effect, "We tried. We almost had him ready to come over. Then Lyndon Johnson shared an indiscreet confidence with a foreign leader. The word leaked. It's dead." Vance now says he doesn't recall the conversation. Schemmer does—vividly. If McNamara was a poor leader and perhaps even unwell in the latter part of his seven years as Defense Secretary, why didn't the Pentagon's military leaders stand up to him and have a greater influence on events?

This has been the subject of an intense private debate among the nation's military. The answers are many and varied. Perhaps no one understands the issue better than Ambassador Edward Rowny, a retired Army lieutenant general who served under McNamara. Rowny headed the Army Concept Team, fifty officers and fifty scientists whom McNamara sent to Vietnam in 1961 with instructions to return in a year with a plan that would win the war. The group studied nearly twenty projects. Pacification and other programs were implemented. Rowny later became our representative at the Geneva disarmament talks with the Soviet Union. Rowny explains, first, that most of our top military never understood McNamara. He intellectualized and computerized all issues, even the simplest human problems, and never talked a language they could understand. Nor did McNamara comprehend them—or war. He saw the answer to almost every problem in some form of quantitative analysis, especially cost-effectiveness. The answer was not strategic military conception and execution or leadership, not troop training or GI morale—rather, logistical numbers. Rowny recalls that McNamara was constantly massaging and manipulating data. McNamara did not lead the Department of Defense; he analyzed it.

For example, Rowny explains, McNamara transformed the selection of military officers into a programmatic systems analysis which didn't fit individual men or the services. Instead of thinking about strategy and the nature of war, the services became cost analysts. Effectiveness became cost management. Efficiency—how to plan and execute a war—is completely different in the military. McNamara could never understand that morale was as important as materiel. He never comprehended why the chain of command was critical. He hadn't the slightest knowledge of military or service tradition. McNamara selected managers, not leaders. Some of his whiz kids couldn't lead a troop of Girl Scouts. Since McNamara's tenure at the Pentagon, a disproportionate number of administrative managers have been chosen for promotion over field leaders. The system badly needs balance. Rowny estimates that McNamara's leadership caused the military problems that still have not been solved. The services are top-heavy in administration.

Rowny and others point out that McNamara never visited U.S. troops on his tours of NATO bases in Western Europe or Vietnam. He expressed no interest in them whatsoever. He would fly into bases with his stacks of data, charts, and programs. The Secretary would meet with several leaders, then fly out. Nor did he have any personal rapport with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He recognized this and once obliquely asked a staff member how it might be arranged. The staffer replied, "Go and have a drink with them." McNamara never raised the subject again. Rowny recalls an elegant restaurant dinner in Paris with McNamara and Air Force General Lauris Norstad, then commander of NATO. They sat together sipping mineral water because McNamara frowned on them having a glass of wine. It was unreal to Rowny—the taut, stilted, almost tense conversation that was merely an antiseptic interlude between formal conferences. Yet in White House and other meetings, McNamara became the killer shark, embarrassing Secretary of State Dean Rusk, other members of the cabinet, and presidential advisers. He used statistics as the critical measurement in political and military decisions. Rowny, who became a special adviser to President Reagan and Secretary of State George Schulz on arms control policies, now explains:

"For all these reasons, McNamara and the military leadership never got along. In the end, there was no one of stature in the military who stood up to him. They could have done so—not in public, because that was against tradition—but internally. They could have said, 'Either you support us or we quit.' "Had they resigned and then protested his decisions, they would have been on better grounds. Instead, they were silent." If the Pentagon brass would not protest, I did. In speeches across the nation, I described McNamara as a dishonest man wielding military power with little or no professional competence. There is nothing more dangerous in the world. My relationship with the Secretary went from one public confrontation to another. Whether or not the Joint Chiefs and others fought McNamara was their business. If the top military brass didn't resign, neither did McNamara. This is despite the fact, Paul Hendrickson of the Washington _Post_ told us, that McNamara had admitted at a Georgetown dinner in January 1966—just after completing the most massive troop buildup of the war there—that the conflict could not be won militarily. McNamara was telling the American people one thing and the cocktail and dinner party crowd another.

Nor did anyone in the Johnson cabinet quit in protest over the way the war was being conducted. The President himself finally dismissed his Defense Secretary in a surprise announcement, saying McNamara was going to the World Bank. McNamara answered my protests about his conduct of the war with personal pettiness. Air Force General Gabriel P. Disosway, now retired in Shreveport, Louisiana, recalls one incident. In 1967 Disosway, then assigned to the Pentagon, tried to get me some kind of medal on my retirement as a major general from the Air Force Reserve. He went to General John McConnell, the Air Force chief of staff, and said there was a precedent for such an award because he had personally pinned a medal on General Jack Foster when he had retired in San Antonio. McConnell then went to McNamara and asked about an award. The Defense Secretary told him, "No, we're not going to do anything for Goldwater. And I don't want a bunch of generals going out to Arizona to his retirement." Disosway and other Air Force officers from around the country came anyway, and presented me with a plaque. I'll never forget the guts it took, because McNamara was notoriously vindictive.

McNamara blocked a retirement ceremony for me at Luke Air Force Base just outside Phoenix, so the Arizona Air National Guard held it at Sky Harbor International Airport. I said of McNamara over a loudspeaker in my farewell dinner speech: "If that bastard thinks he's through with me, he's mistaken." I was a dissenter. I wanted out of Vietnam as much as the antiwar protester did and said so. But I would leave in a different way. The antiwar crowd wanted to cut and run. I wanted to defeat the enemy, but, since we were unwilling to do that, I finally supported a negotiated settlement of the conflict. There was no choice left. The South Vietnamese could not fight on alone, although I backed aid to them after the peace treaty was signed. It was a last grasp at honor and an attempt to give some of them a chance to decide their future. The antiwar movement had a profound effect on military thinking in Vietnam and still does. It's now clear that our military leaders do not wish to go to war again without the overwhelming support of the American people. They cannot fight one war on the battlefield and another behind their backs. This is not to criticize all those who questioned our involvement in Vietnam. Many decent people saw it as a mistake.

The United States has had dissenters in every war, but never to the extent of Vietnam. We must yet come to terms with such dissent. It is reasonable to ask how much opposition is acceptable in wartime. One of the most logical places to begin answering such a question is amnesty for draft dodgers. This still disturbs me and millions of Americans. It goes to the heart of fairness: Who is obliged to defend this country? I happen to believe all Americans should defend their homeland in time of war or a major conflict, such as Korea or Vietnam. A citizen need not carry a gun if that is contrary to his religious beliefs or moral views. However, each has an obligation to serve as a noncombatant—medic, truck driver, cook. Some Americans still attempt to justify their unwillingness to serve in any capacity by saying all war is immoral and they wish no involvement whatever in any conflict. We still face the mundane but crucial question of whether others should die so they themselves may enjoy freedom.

Many draft dodgers have long said that since they didn't agree with the War in Vietnam, they bore no responsibility for it. Most still maintain that view. That's like saying they will obey only those laws that accommodate their personal views. Others, who don't pay taxes or who disobey speed laws, are fined and sometimes jailed. Yet we have a precedent of offering amnesty to those who fled to other countries rather than fighting for their own. I propose that the country resolve that issue now. It may startle the draft dodgers, but I'm not sure any war is moral. I am certain, however, that we are a nation of laws. Those who break them must pay a penalty. I believe it's incumbent on the President and the Congress to make clear that this country will never again grant blanket amnesty to draft dodgers. It's important to distinguish between amnesty and a pardon. Amnesty is generally viewed as a grant of immunity from legal prosecution and punishment to entire classes of unnamed individuals who have been guilty of a crime. Pardon is viewed as a release from prosecution and punishment of a crime only for a specified individual in an unusual case.

There is real doubt in my mind as to whether President Carter had the power to grant such an amnesty. The Constitution may grant the President the right to offer a pardon, but not amnesty. The expression "amnesty" is not in the Constitution and was not even used until the Civil War. There is a strong legal argument that the power to grant amnesty may reside only with the Congress. A national debate on amnesty is needed in a calm atmosphere, not during a time of crisis. It is relevant because all of us should be clear about our obligations to defend the United States and the consequences if we refuse. Those who hold that their religious and personal views come before their country and fellow citizens can have their say. But this is a democracy, and if they will not abide by the reasonable will of the majority, they can go to Canada, Sweden, and elsewhere now. They can leave today, and I will be at the pier to wish them bon voyage. The Congress has an obligation to hold hearings and vote on this issue because every time this country comes close to an international confrontation, some Americans immediately say that this is not their fight and they will not defend the President's actions. If these wartime obligations and the consequences of not serving are made clear now, amnesty will cease to be an issue. I believe those who refuse to fight or serve as noncombatants should be imprisoned for ten to twenty years.

All the pronouncements and promises of Johnson and McNamara about the war exploded in their faces in early 1968 and drove the two apart. A series of events forced some critical decisions. On January 30, the Vietcong and North Vietnamese launched the Tet offensive. They mounted major military drives in most of South Vietnam's forty-four provincial capitals. The U.S. embassy in Saigon was attacked. The imperial city of Hue was captured by the Communists. On February 1 Richard Nixon announced as a GOP candidate for the presidency. On February 20 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee began hearings on the events that had led up to congressional approval of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. On March 1 LBJ's longtime friend Clark Clifford replaced McNamara. And finally, on March 31, the President announced he was de-escalating the war and would not seek reelection. American television news coverage of the Tet Offensive during February and March convinced Johnson and millions of Americans that the war could not be won. Yet, as our military leaders said at the time and Hanoi has since admitted, Tet was a military disaster for the Communist forces. The best troops of the Vietcong were virtually wiped out. North Vietnamese support troops were forced into battle much earlier than expected. They were also beaten into bloody, massive retreats. The Communists suffered more than 10,000 casualties in two months of fighting.

If the United States lost the war, as so many commentators remind us, the American media were defeated at Tet. There is no doubt about their failure, especially that of television news. The media's insistence on U.S. defeat and disaster throughout February and March was thoroughly misleading. Peter Braestrup, who covered the war for the Washington _Post,_ and others have documented these inaccurate reports. Robert S. Elegant, one of the best and most experienced reporters covering Vietnam and the Far East, also wrote broad criticisms of his colleagues in the print media. As I and millions of other Americans watched this wretched posturing night after night on TV and in our newspapers and magazines, we became angrier. One of the worst examples of inaccurate TV coverage came on NBC's "Huntley-Brinkley Report" within four hours of the first shot at the U.S. embassy in Saigon. "NBC News" reported, "The Vietcong seized part of the U.S. embassy in Saigon early Wednesday, Vietnam time. Snipers are in the buildings and on the rooftops near the embassy and are firing on American personnel inside the compound. Twenty suicide commandos are reported to be holding the first floor of the embassy. The attack on the embassy and other key installations in Saigon, at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, and Bien Hoa north of Saigon, came as the climax of the enemy's biggest and most highly coordinated offensive of the war. There was no report on allied casualties in Saigon, but they're believed to be high."

The networks continued this guessing and bird's-eye interpretation of what had happened even after the battle. They reported that the six-and-a-half-hour Vietcong occupation of the embassy grounds appeared to be the most embarrassing defeat the United States had suffered in Vietnam. It was suggested that General Westmoreland had lied in offering rosy projections about the war. The truth is, the Vietcong never entered the chancery. They never even held the grounds. They had tried to but failed. The "snipers" firing on Americans on the embassy grounds actually were U.S. personnel firing into the compound at nineteen VC commandos. Our casualties in Saigon were not high, but the Communists' were. To suggest that a relatively small group of terrorists fighting on our embassy grounds for six and a half hours was the most embarrassing U.S. defeat in Vietnam is absurd. The Communist offensive throughout Vietnam was reported in the same doom-and-gloom scenario by the overwhelming majority of the broadcast media. The reasons are now clear:

• Most radio and TV reporters were unwilling to wait and evaluate their sketchy knowledge of widespread battles before pronouncing judgments about the overall conflict. Indeed, they were unable to do so because no network had the staff to cover what was actually occurring in many cities and towns throughout South Vietnam, especially the performance of the South Vietnamese army. The truth is, in their constant attempts to appear knowledgeable about events, many reporters pretended to know what was happening. As McNamara would have put it, they suffered from "an insufficient data base." These newsmen were a professional catastrophe, not only in Vietnam but in their faraway New York editing rooms. • In order to lend significance to their narrow focus and scant knowledge of Tet events, TV reporters offered interpretive reporting that was carried by networks as "straight" news. This was invariably inaccurate. I used to get screaming mad at this "instant analysis" of the war. It was so manifestly dishonest. Like millions of Americans, I was outraged at the arrogant effrontery of reporters who didn't know what the hell they were talking about.

• Newsmen were generally skeptical of the war and pointedly suspicious of Johnson and McNamara. This compromised their objectivity during normal coverage and destroyed it during Tet. • The three major television networks never fully set the record straight, even when they knew the facts had favored our side at Tet, which was then and is today professionally unforgivable. • These failures magnified the most glaring weakness of television news—its presentation of increasingly shorter stories with only a short-range view of events. This is not just Goldwater talking. It's Americans in every walk of life, reporters and editors themselves, and a wide array of government and military leaders. My purpose is not to attack the media. To dispel that notion, this long and tough critic of the New York _Times_ will say categorically that the best coverage of Tet was by one of its men, Charles Mohr. My real aim is rather to ask a question: Can we run the risk that the media may repeat Tet at some other place and time? I don't believe the American people can—or should—accept such a possibility. Nor do I consider it prudent to leave that important question to the media alone. All involved must have a voice.