224 e lusive v ictories
fi t poorly with a war waged under such tight political constraints. In
addition, the JCS chafed under the decision not to mobilize for war
and repeatedly recommended that the president call up reserves, an
option Johnson had rejected at the outset and would continue to shun.
He dealt with his commanders through a version of what has been
called the “Johnson treatment”: a mixture of bullying and fl attery, his
well-honed technique for dominating interpersonal relations. When the
chiefs responded to the lack of progress by urging a turn to their kind
of warfare, the president lashed out at them, excoriating them for their
utter lack of imagination, their inability to come up with any better
idea than more or heavier bombing. At the same time, he suggested
that he saw merit in their arguments and never ruled out their requests
once and for all. He also knew when to throw them a bone. After their
frustrations with McNamara became public in summer 1967, the pres-
ident decided the secretary of defense should be eased out. Th e pres-
ident also started to include General Wheeler or another JCS member
in his small Tuesday meetings on the war. Th ese occasional sops suffi ced
to deter his military commanders from resigning as a group to protest
the restraints under which the military fought.
Both the president and the nation might have been better served had
they done so. Johnson should have found commanders more in tune
with his policies or revisited his assumptions. And the chiefs, who
believed the war unwinnable under the terms the administration had
established, should have accepted Wheeler’s suggestion amid the 1967
dust-up with McNamara that they resign. An open rupture over the
political limitations imposed on military operations might have pro-
moted better public understanding of and support for the adminis-
tration policy, or at least led to an earlier reassessment of its viability.
Instead, an unworkable situation was allowed to continue, with pres-
ident and military commanders at loggerheads, an institutional stale-
mate that mirrored the one that took shape on the battlefi eld.
In General Westmoreland, Johnson had a more complaisant com-
mander with whom to work in the battle zone itself. Based on West-
moreland’s military assessment, the administration decided that the
South Vietnamese military was on the brink of defeat in 1965. Th e general
also recommended that American troops be used in off ensive operations,
and he requested suffi cient manpower to permit U.S. forces to assume