226 e lusive v ictories
In a summer 1967 trip to Vietnam, McNamara blurted out to reporters
that he thought Westmoreland had enough men and simply needed to
make better use of them. Rather than bite the bullet as Lincoln had,
however, Johnson stood by his ineff ective general. Th e president did so
not because he still had confidence in Westmoreland but because
removing him would amount to an admission that his initial selection
had been a mistake. Refusing to admit error is a luxury no wartime
president can aff ord. Lincoln seems to have been the rare president to
appreciate this.
Choosing the Least Bad Strategy
Johnson declined either to put his stamp on the conduct of the war or
shape military operations to meet his goals. Beyond translating the
underlying assumptions about how to keep China out of the war into a
set of restrictions on American military operations, he and his senior
civilian advisors provided little guidance for the military. This was
unfortunate, because in Vietnam the U.S. military confronted an unfa-
miliar kind of confl ict, waged on several levels by a sophisticated enemy.
Given the complexity of the challenges, field commanders needed
eff ective direction and oversight. Instead, the military chafed under the
limits that Washington imposed, while those in uniform and civilians
pointed fi ngers at each other for the lack of progress.
The Vietnamese communists conducted multiple, interlocking
political and military campaigns. Adapting the approach of Mao
Zedong—as tested in their earlier war against the French—they
pursued a strategy that evolved through three stages. Phase one took the
form of a low-level insurgency designed to erode government authority
and win allegiance of the people. This had commenced in South
Vietnam in the late 1950s and continued throughout the Diem period.
His ouster and murder had coincided with the beginning of the second
phase of the struggle, in which guerilla forces launched more ambitious
attacks on government troops, undermining their morale and further
eroding the regime’s authority. Vietcong (and possibly NVA) troops
engaged in successful assaults on ever-larger ARVN units, backed by the
increasing fl ow of men, equipment, and supplies down the Ho Chi
Minh Trail. By mid-1965 communist forces seemed on the verge of