Faith of My Fathers (32 page)

President Nixon had continued and even accelerated the drawdown of American forces in country begun by his predecessor, while seeking a negotiated end to the war. But he resolved to apply greater military pressure on the enemy while negotiations and “Vietnamization,” the name given to the strategy of preparing South Vietnam to ultimately fight the war on its own while simultaneously drawing down American forces, were under way. In the interim, Nixon intended to escalate hostilities, both to hasten his diplomacy's successful conclusion and to strengthen the South Vietnamese regime.

In May 1970, with my father and General Abrams strongly urging it, the administration had authorized an incursion into Cambodia by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces. The enemy had used the sanctuary of the neighboring country to establish formidable military positions, especially along the border, from which they threatened much of the South, including Saigon. The incursion was of brief duration, and it was based on sound military reasoning. Nevertheless, given the considerable growth in domestic opposition to the war at the time, the decision provoked a firestorm of criticism. Neither the President nor his advisers nor his senior commanders wavered in their support for the action.

When North Vietnam launched its offensive in late 1971, Washington was very receptive to the requests of my father and his fellow commanders to respond to the North's aggression decisively. The administration authorized the immediate use of B-52 bombers, for the first time, to strike North Vietnamese targets.

The following May, the administration ordered my father to commence mining operations in North Vietnamese harbors. The President announced to the nation his conclusion that “Hanoi must be denied the weapons and supplies it needs to continue the aggression.”

Most of the mining was conducted by carrier-based A-6 Intruders. The operation was a resounding success. Casualties were minimal. Twenty-seven foreign merchant ships remained trapped behind the blockade for the nine months the mining campaign was in effect. Almost all other ships were prevented from entering North Vietnamese ports. The flow of foreign arms and supplies to the North was abruptly and completely halted.

Neither did the war's escalation, so long anticipated as the unavoidable result of mining the harbors, occur. The administration's opening to China and its policy of détente with the Soviets were by this time well established and contributed significantly to the response of the Soviets and the Chinese to the mining of their client's harbors. Their reaction to what was once feared as a casus belli was remarkably muted.

The reaction in both the higher and lower reaches of the United States military was relief. The men charged with fighting the war believed that for the first time a rational policy to undercut the enemy's critical lifeline was in effect. Thus, they and their civilian bosses reasoned, the war's end would be hastened.

The reaction among the Americans held as prisoners in Hanoi, who learned of the actions from new arrivals to our ranks, was unanimous approval.

Despite their approval of the administration's more aggressive approach to the war, General Abrams and the other commanders in the field, including my father and most of the military establishment, doubted the efficacy of the administration's overall strategy to Vietnamize the war while seeking a negotiated conclusion in Paris. Abrams had profound misgivings that the South Vietnamese could develop the military capability the administration assumed possible. My father concurred, and strongly supported his subordinate's concerns.

Admiral Vasey, whom my father appointed as head of strategic plans and policies for the Pacific Command, told me that my father “fired some tough messages to Washington.” His most frequent backchannel correspondents were the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense. Henry Kissinger and Secretary of State William Rogers were also recipients of my father's appeals to rethink their strategy. However, his arguments, while fairly considered, were not successful in persuading them of the necessity of the reevaluation he and Abrams believed was necessary. The drawdown of American forces continued, while the progress of the peace talks in Paris waxed and waned, and South Vietnam reluctantly and without adequate resolve or preparation approached nearer the day when it would stand alone. The American public grew ever more impatient for the war to end. The administration, even after the President was reelected in a landslide, did not possess enough political strength to oppose the people's will. Washington did what it could to ensure “peace with honor,” but the country's priority was to get out of Vietnam, and get out we would.

By the time the end did come, with the signing in Paris of the peace accords, my father had retired from active duty. No longer restrained by his role as a subordinate to civilian superiors, he dismissed the agreement. “In our anxiety to get out of the war, we signed a very bad deal.” This he offered even though the “very bad deal” would bring his son home. He was an honest man, with an exacting sense of duty.

Long after the war, I once rashly remarked that the entire senior command of the armed forces had a duty, which they shirked, to resign in protest over Washington's management of the war, knowing it as they did to be grievously flawed. Obviously, my father was implicitly included in my indictment. It was a callous remark that I probably should have refrained from offering, but I felt strongly about the obligation of military leaders to place the country's welfare before their own careers. So did the men whom I criticized. They were honorable people, including, certainly, my father. Their opposition to the war's course, which in many of their cases they pressed in the strongest possible terms to the politicians who designed it, almost surely led many of them to consider resigning. But their country was at war. And I am sure that their sense of duty to help see the thing through to the end, a value first embraced in a great war thirty years before, far more than any career consideration, prevailed over a conscientious contemplation of a principled resignation.

Having once served as the Navy's liaison officer to Congress and enjoying several close friendships with members of Congress, my father was quite familiar with the character of politicians. But he was puzzled and troubled by widespread and mounting congressional opposition to the war. Likewise, he was astonished at the breadth of opposition among the American people. He was, of course, respectful of the subordinate relationship of the military to the people of a democracy and their elected representatives. But it is fair to say that he believed something had gone badly wrong in a country that did not, by his lights, stand behind the men it had sent into harm's way to fight for it.

As CINCPAC, my father was expected to testify periodically before the committees of the House and Senate that authorized and appropriated the Defense Department's budget. The Pacific Command's vast expanse, including all of the Pacific and Indian oceans, from the West Coast of the United States to the Persian Gulf, encompassed a number of highly charged security situations in addition to the ongoing hostilities in Vietnam. Although our forces in Vietnam were progressively reduced during my father's watch, tensions on the Korean peninsula and in the Taiwan Strait were always a danger, and there was fear that the Soviets might generate a major crisis in the region while we were preoccupied with the war. It was the Pacific Command's responsibility to safeguard the shipping lanes and air traffic of half the world.

Accordingly, it was necessary for the United States, as the only military guarantor of regional stability, to maintain a large and expensive presence in Asia while executing the endgame of an unpopular war in Indochina. And my father was not one to subordinate his responsibilities to the prevailing political sentiments of the time, which assumed that our presence in the Pacific should be accorded lesser significance once the unfortunate war in Vietnam was finally ended. Even if the region's other tinderboxes were to become unexpectedly tranquil, my father's long-standing apprehension of the emerging Soviet naval threat was enough to persuade him that Pacific Command should retain its priority for American military planners. Thus, he could not countenance on his watch force reductions that he believed would jeopardize our supremacy in the area whether we were engaged in open hostilities or not.

In his opening statement to a Senate committee in 1971, my father gave his projection of the necessary force requirements for the Pacific, after first assessing the state of the war and the various security threats in the region confronting the United States. Many of the senators in attendance were familiar with my father and his views. Some of them he considered friends. They listened respectfully to my father's presentation, even if one or another of them had doubts about the size of the force level my father was advocating.

One senator, an outspoken opponent of the war, was not an intimate of my father's, nor, apparently, was he familiar with my father's ethics. When his turn came to question my father, he immediately took issue with his central argument, that we needed to increase our presence in the Pacific, and he did so in the one manner that anyone familiar with my father's reputation for probity knew better than to pursue. In effect, he accused him of lying.

He callously implied that my father had intentionally exaggerated his threat assessments to justify force levels that were excessively large and unnecessary. To this senator, my father was an archetype, the old military hawk used to getting his way from unquestioning legislators who had always left military decisions to the military. But times had changed. The World War II–vintage military brass were no longer accorded automatic respect by younger members of Congress, who, though they may have lacked much if any military experience themselves, prided themselves on their modern sensibility and ability to see through an old hawk's con. To this particular senator, men like my father had gotten us into an unwinnable, unpopular, and probably immoral war. They were not to be trusted.

This was not, of course, the first time my father had testified before a congressional committee. Nor was it the first time my father had encountered a quarrelsome legislator. He had forged personal relationships with a good many politicians and over the years had had any number of spirited debates with them on all manner of military subjects. It was, however, the first time any member of Congress had challenged his honesty, and that was an injury he would accept from no one.

Once the insult was offered, my father forgot all thought of the purpose of his testimony. Neither did he particularly give a damn about disputing the senator's view of our force requirements. All that mattered to him was that he respond to the attack on his good name, which he did instantly and forcefully.

According to Admiral Vasey, who had accompanied my father to the hearing room and was seated right behind the witness table, the moment the senator finished making the offensive remark, my father jumped to his feet. Red-faced, and jabbing his finger in the direction of his accuser, he proceeded to deliver a heated and sarcastic lecture on strategy and the responsibilities of the Commander in Chief, Pacific. “I don't remember his specific words,” Admiral Vasey recounted in a letter to me, “but he made it crystal-clear that he was an officer of the highest integrity, as was his father before him, and he strongly objected to any insinuation that reflected on the moral character of himself or his testimony, or of the United States military.”

When it appeared that my father was not about to let up on the offending senator, Admiral Vasey discreetly grasped the bottom of my father's coat and pulled him down into his seat, “but not before observing the sly smiles on the faces of other committee members.”

Such outbursts were rare in those days in the ostentatiously formal precincts of Capitol Hill. They are even rarer today. There were few things in his life my father valued more dearly than his career. But his good name was one of them. He would have sacrificed anything to defend it, as the errant senator found out that day.

Of course, my father was at the end of his career, and already wore four stars. He had achieved his life's ambition, and there was nothing an antagonistic member of Congress could do about it. My father did have hopes of extending his tour as CINCPAC, and that, of course, could have been put at risk by his publicly upbraiding a sitting member of Congress. I am confident, however, that my father did not give a damn about the risks involved in what some might have viewed as his astonishingly rash behavior. I doubt he believed any job was worth having if it required him to suffer such an insult in silence.

My father prided himself on being a strategic thinker. Obviously, the war consumed most of his time, but, as he had for most of his career, he focused much of his attention on the future threats to American naval supremacy in the Pacific. He had long been concerned about the growing strength of the Soviet Navy, and he believed one of his most important duties as CINCPAC was to ensure that the United States was prepared to contain the emerging Soviet naval threat. Toward that end, my father worked not just to maintain the Navy's military advantage in the Pacific, but to strengthen the United States' relationships with the countries in the region.

Needless to say, American diplomats in Asia were not always delighted to share their responsibilities with a naval officer, especially one as outspoken and often unpredictable as my father. But my father enjoyed warm, personal relationships with many Asian leaders and could speak to them more forthrightly and often to better effect than could a good many American ambassadors in Asia. Many Asian heads of state had come to power as military leaders. Many were not philosophically well disposed toward the virtues of democracy. They were often more comfortable in the company of a senior American military official who wished to talk with them only about questions of regional security and military power, and in a language familiar to them, than they were in the company of our diplomats.