Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam 1945-1995 by James S. Olson & Randy W. Roberts

Author:James S. Olson & Randy W. Roberts [Olson, James S.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: eBook
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-09-23T07:00:00+00:00

In May 1967 McNamara asked Johnson to stop the air war over North Vietnam, put a cap on troop levels, and seek a diplomatic settlement. The “picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed,” he told the president, “is not a pretty one.” McNamara was now skeptical of the attrition strategy and Westmoreland’s talk of the crossover. “The point,” he puzzled, “is that it didn’t add up. If you took the strength figures and the body count, the defections, the infiltration and what was happening to us, the whole thing . . . didn’t add up. . . . How the hell the war went on year after year when we stopped the infiltration or shrunk it and when we had a very high body count. . . . It didn’t add up.” In June McNamara commissioned a top-secret study. With the aid of Morton Halperin, deputy assistant secretary of defense, Leslie H. Gelb of Havard set out writing what within a few years would be known as the Pentagon Papers. But at the moment McNamara was asking Gelb to get the study under way, Johnson decided to rid his administration of McNa-mara. By the end of the summer the president managed to position McNamara for the presidency of the World Bank. In November 1967 McNamara resigned.

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