234 e lusive v ictories
South. Westmoreland asked for additional troops to match the North
Vietnamese eff ort and sustain the logic of attrition. But as McNamara
warned in 1966, mutual reinforcement pointed to a new stalemate at a
higher and more costly level, with victory denied to either side. He
spoke of limiting the American commitment to a level that could
command durable domestic political support while denying North
Vietnam success. Eventually, seeing it could not prevail through trial by
arms, Hanoi would negotiate a political solution that would assure
some semblance of South Vietnamese independence.
By November 1967, the increasingly disillusioned McNamara went
further, recommending a complete halt to the bombing of the North
and a study of how best to shift the burden of fi ghting from American
troops to the South Vietnamese. The military pressed for a more
robust American commitment that would allow troop increases the
communists eventually could not match. Th en attritional math would
work its ruthless logic against Hanoi. Th e argument brought the debate
back to the sticking point for the president: to achieve the troop levels
the JCS sought would require broad national mobilization, a price he
believed the American people would not pay.
Although Johnson voiced displeasure that the military leadership
seemed unable to think of anything beyond more men and more
bombing, much of the fault for the failure to rethink policy rested
with him. Th e president overlooked opportunities to reclaim fl exibility
and steer military strategy in a new direction. Having bought into the
need to halt communist expansionism while keeping the Chinese and
Soviets out of the Vietnam War, he never revisited the bases behind
these working assumptions. Yet the world did not stand still, and the
likelihood that either communist superpower would either capitalize on
a drawdown in the American commitment or intervene was not a
constant. In 1966, the Cultural Revolution in China sowed disorder,
distracted its political leadership, and drew its military deeply into
domestic political turmoil. Th e communist tide in Asia, moreover, no
longer seemed to be advancing, as evidenced by the brutal suppression
of leftists in Indonesia. One year later, Johnson met Soviet Premier
Alexei Kosygin at Glassboro, New Jersey, in a precursor to detente. Th e
altered positions of China and the Soviet Union might have opened
either of two paths—toward a negotiated withdrawal (because the