Chapter I -- A Fork in the Road

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Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5,

Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Epilogue, Acknowledgements

The atmosphere on the Boeing 707 carrying Assistant Secretary of Defense John T. McNaughton, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and their delegation from Saigon to Washington was somber, recalled Chester Cooper some 38 years later.  “There were no jokes, no smiles.  Everyone was apprehensive.  The mood music was bass saxophones rather than flutes. We knew that we had closed one chapter and were opening another.  You could feel the anger.”  [i]

At 2 a.m. on that morning of February 6, 1965 a platoon-size Viet Cong force struck II Corps Headquarters in Pleiku, 240 miles north of Saigon.  While one group of Viet Cong troops outside the perimeter readied their mortars, their comrades cut through barbed wire surrounding the encampment.  With hand fashioned grenades made from bamboo-wrapped beer cans filled with explosives and connected to delay fuses, the intruders walked toward the compound’s center placing charges next to barracks where Americans slept and near unguarded aircraft.  In the span of about ten minutes 34 mortar rounds[ii] hit their mark while the timed charges added to the death and mayhem.  When it was over, eight Americans had died and 60 had been wounded.

Informed of the attack, General William C. Westmoreland walked to the guest quarters of his Saigon residence to wake McNaughton.  Before sunrise, McNaughton joined Westmoreland and Bundy at the military operations center in Saigon and phoned the Pentagon recommending retaliations. [iii]   Soon after, while the American delegation visited the wounded in Pleiku, 49 U.S. Navy jets struck targeted barracks in North Vietnam following an attack plan that had been in the works in Washington for months. And 11 miles northeast of Pleiku, a force of GVN soldiers was making contact with the escaping Viet Cong force, killing 28 of the attackers and capturing documents that included a mapped out plan of attack on the II Corps Compound and Camp Hollaway four miles away -- but nothing linking the actions directly to Hanoi. [iv]   

Later, as their flight returned to the U.S., Bundy and McNaughton and others feverishly worked on a response to the day’s events while the plane made its way through Japan, to Alaska for refueling and on to Washington.  Cooper, who was with the delegation in his capacity as White House Assistant for Asian Affairs recalled that it was difficult for the delegation to hear each other over the dull roar of the engines, so participants wrote out respective sections of a memo in longhand, walking up and down the plane’s aisle passing sections back and forth as their paper took shape.[v] 

McGeorge Bundy, Chester Cooper, John McNaughton (and unidentified) on flight returning from Saigon on or about February 7, 1965.

Their February 7 document, signed by Bundy and addressed to the President, began: “The situation in Vietnam is deteriorating, and without new U.S. action defeat appears inevitable - - probably not in a matter of weeks or perhaps even months, but within the next year or so.  There is still time to turn it around, but not much.”  The assessment was transmitted to the White House hours before the plane touched down at Andrews Air Force Base at 10:15 pm on February 7, 1965.  President Johnson read the eight-page memo and its five-page annex before he went to bed. [vi]  

Ten days earlier, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and Bundy had presented a memo to the President hoping to precipitate a decision on Vietnam.  It, said McNamara, raised the questions: “should we get further into Vietnam or get out?  Could we prevent the fall of the dominoes by external military action?”   Known as the Fork in the Road Memo, the January 27 communication told the President that “both of us are now pretty well convinced that our current policy can lead only to disastrous defeat.”   McNamara and Bundy proposed two alternatives to the President: 1) to use our military power in the Far East and to force a change in Communist policy, or 2) to deploy all our resources along a track of negotiation, aimed at salvaging what little can be preserved.  

With the question raised, McNaughton and Bundy were dispatched to Vietnam to reach conclusions on which of the Fork in the Road’s paths should be chosen.  Chester Cooper recalled that there was still a hope for the path of disengagement when they left for Vietnam.  “This was washed away by the Pleiku attack.  It came as a shock, because it was during the time of the Tet cease-fire.  Since Bundy was in Saigon and (Soviet Premier) Alexei Kosygin was in Hanoi at the time, we thought that the action was approved by Hanoi.  Thus, it appeared to us at the time that the message of the attack was more serious than it actually was.”  [vii]

By February 26, 1965, Washington Post columnist Drew Pearson had learned enough to complete a column headlined “Pleiku Attack Not a Hanoi Plot.”   In 1997 Viet Cong commanders meeting with McNamara and Cooper confirmed that the attack on Pleiku was not ordered by Hanoi and that prior to the attack they were not even aware that Americans were present in the compound.   But, in the emotions of the day of the attack, little thought was given to the possibility that the timing of the raid was not related to the presence of Bundy’s delegation or Kosygin's trip to Hanoi.   Cooper recalls that “ if we would have had enough smarts we would have realized that a Hanoi decision to attack Americans would have taken more time, since the order could not have reached the local commanders in time for the attack to be carried out while Bundy was in Saigon. There was very little analysis.”  [viii]

Among the thousands of papers written during the Vietnam War period, few were as influential as the February 7, 1965, memo drafted by Bundy and McNaughton, and signed by Bundy on the plane back from Vietnam.  It, wrote David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest, stood alongside the 1961 Taylor-Rostow report calling for U.S. troop involvement in “such combat operations as are necessary for self-defense and for the security of the area in which they are stationed”, and March 1964’s NSAM 288 which was the only statement of U.S. objectives for the conflict. “It had effect,” opined Halberstam, “it moved people, it changed people at the time.” [ix]

Go to: Intro, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5,
Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Epilogue, Acknowledgements

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[i]               Chester Cooper, September 14, 2003

[ii]               DOD briefing, Warnke Filesl, LBJ Library 149c

[iii]              Janes, Thomas W., Rational Man, Irrational Policy (A Political Biography of John McNaughton’s Involvement in the Vietnam War), March 1977

[iv]              DOD Briefing, Warnke Files, LBJ library

[v]               Chester Cooper, September 14, 2003

[vi]              A. J. Langguth, “Our Vietnam” page 339

[vii]             Chester Cooper, September 14, 2003

[viii]            Chester Cooper, September 14, 2003

[ix]             David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, page 595-596