Worst of all was the effect that the high casualty rates were having on our supporters in Congress, who were constantly hearing from constituents back home, many of whom were the parents of draftees or those who were in line to be called up and were frustrated and fearful of a war that had been going on for two years with no end in sight. When the President of the largest bank in the smallest county in Arkansas calls his Congressman and expresses his doubts about what was happening in South Vietnam- that has much more impact than any editorial in The New York Times. Not even the staunchest hawk in the House or Senate could afford to ignore sentiments such as those. Many of my colleagues in the Pentagon took great pride in dismissing such civilian opinions, but I knew otherwise. Had they forgotten that you cannot fight a war without public support?
We were losing the people we needed the most in spite of the optimistic face the Administration showed the public. Exasperation and frustration reached the highest levels as I was to learn for myself on a Saturday afternoon in late March. I received a call at my home in Arlington from the White House operator with a request from the President that I come down there immediately. I thought there must have been a major disaster in Vietnam if the President wanted me there on such short notice, but upon arriving I was ushered into the Oval Office where I found President Johnson sitting by himself. Although I had participated in many meetings with the President, this was the first time I had been alone with him. You could see the strain the ordeal of war had been for him, it was written on his face, mirrored in his eyes.
He had called me there, he explained, because he had come to value my opinion after observing my work with Secretary Nixon. “It’s always the man who sits at the right hand of the top guy that knows what’s really going on” he said, “ and you’re always at Nixon’s side, so I figure that when it comes to Vietnam, you know the difference between shit and shinola. I figure you can tell me if we’re get’n set up for another Din Bin Phoo.” With that he spent the next thirty minutes questioning me about what I had seen during my trips to Vietnam and what my impressions were of the people over there. During the course of our conversation, the President unburdened himself to me concerning his worries about the course of the war and his fear that continually widening the conflict would result in a confrontation with the Soviets, but the more he talked, the more it became clear that his greatest concern was the situation right here in America and what the war was doing to the country. “This bitch of a war has really poisoned the well, a lot of college professors and big Eastern liberals-all part of the Bobby Kennedy fan club- with their toadies in the press have all been busy turning the country against me. They can’t stand anybody who’s not one of their own ilk. I had so many plans for a great society in America, to really fight poverty…but they were jealous of what I had achieved and used Vietnam to try and kill my Administration.”
This was very revealing, I had no idea how deeply the President was wounded by the anti-war faction. Of course I had to be very careful with my answers, I never forgot that I was talking to my superior’s superior and every word I said would likely be repeated back to Secretary Nixon. After some length of time, I made a point of telling the President that it didn’t matter what his critics said or did, what we were doing in Vietnam was right and the only course of action possible was to finish the job. With that, the President made me a stunning offer: “Tell you what I’ll do Halton, I can kick Westmoreland upstairs to the Joint Chiefs and I’ll promote you up to his job, you know what needs to be done over there. You can be the man to do it, take over and straighten out that mess and bring our boys home with the coonskin nailed to the wall. You do that and I swear you’ll be sitting right here in my chair…you can be President of the United States.” I didn’t know what to say to this, it was not possible for him to be serious. “All it’ll take is for me to make a phone call to Nixon right now and put the whole thing in motion.” Finally I was able to stammer out a firm decline and asked to be excused. To this day I’m not sure just how serious the President was; anyway, at least the country was spared the Presidency of Earl Halton. The next day I repeated every word of this conversation to Secretary Nixon, who found it very revealing concerning the President’s mood.
Despite these doubts and fears, we were faced with making serious decisions to escalate the war in the spring of ‘67. In the second week of April, Gen. Westmoreland took the ball and ran with it by sending a report to the Pentagon stating that the “incursion” had met with only partial success in cutting off the flow of supplies into the South and that in order to isolate and destroy the Communist forces in South Vietnam, operations would have to be expanded further into Laos. This was followed up by a formal request for more troops-which would have brought our total commitment up to 800,000-and permission to occupy all of Laos and Cambodia from the South Vietnamese border to the Mekong River and if necessary, lower half of North Vietnam. This included a proposal to assemble a large force in Thailand to hit the Communists from the west. Almost immediately the Joint Chiefs got behind Westmoreland’s plan, which then landed like a lit stick of dynamite in the laps of Secretary Nixon and ultimately the President.
Both of these men were the two best politicians of their generation and the fully grasped the ramifications of this escalation. First of all, it would finally require the President to call up the reserves, a move he had resisted for over two years because it was so potentially damaging politically. On top of that, once they adopted Westmoreland’s plan, the war was sure to last another twelve months, well into a Presidential election year where the enemies of the Administration’s war policy would surely come out of the wood work. At that point in time, Washington was full of rumors that Bobby Kennedy, the President’s bête noire, was being urged on a daily basis to challenge the President for the Democratic nomination the following year. In that situation, it would be impossible to be Commander-In-Chief and candidate for re-election simultaneously. If the President understood this, the Secretary also understood it in spades. Thus we were under the gun to come up with an alternative to Westmoreland’s plan of escalation. At no time did we seriously discuss using thermonuclear weapons on North Vietnam, despite what some members of the Administration have claimed after the fact. Also I categorically deny that I was the author of the Neutron Bomb option. The first time I saw this idea laid out was in a memo written by Mr. H. R. Haldeman, Secretary Nixon’s chief civilian assistant, which had been drafted at the Secretary’s direction.
Originally the Neutron bomb was designed to be a tactical nuclear weapon, officially labeled an “enhanced radiation weapon” for use on small scale battlefields. A warhead is mounted on a missile or artillery shell, that when detonated, releases up to 8,000 rads of lethal radiation, enough to instantly kill anyone within a 1/2 mile radius of ground zero. Anyone within a mile radius will die anywhere from a day to a month later. Even though it releases deadly radiation, the Neutron bomb has only 10 % of the blast of a thermonuclear weapon. After 24 hours the radiation would dissipate and allow the area to be occupied. A prototype was built and tested in the desert north of Las Vegas in the summer of 1963 and when we began the buildup in Southeast Asia in the summer of ‘65, it was rushed into production for use in Europe in case the Warsaw Pact decided to take advantage of America’s mounting foreign commitments and send its tanks into West Germany. The existence of such a weapon was not acknowledged to the public, but we made sure that the Soviets knew we had it, just in case they got any ideas.