Memorial Bridge (48 page)

His father, when he spoke, had purged his voice of feeling, which effectively, ironically, underscored his unhappiness. "You can imagine, I suppose, what I think of that."

Richard went inside himself, deeply and quickly, not replying.

"If you have problems with the war," he said, his voice soft as carpet, "you bring them to me."

But I just did, Richard thought.

"All right?"

"Yes." In Richard's sinking imagination, but only there, he heard his father say, Yes what? "Yes, sir."

The Pentagon had a climate of its own. The temperature was kept at an even seventy degrees year-round, the only variable being the level of moisture in the air, which in winter was raised and in summer lowered.

July 28, 1965, was one of a string of sweltering days in Washington and the weather had made its citizens cranky and nervous. Inside the Pentagon, though, the men were unwrinkled and they moved through their concourses, corridors and ramps with the crisp feeling of expectancy. They were about to come into their own again, for this was the day on which the war they'd already begun fighting was going to be declared. Or so they assumed.

The President was addressing the nation at noon. Only the minuscule circle of his closest advisors had seen his text, but military men—the brass, but also JCS staffers and intelligence analysts, experts who had just accompanied the secretary of defense on his reassessment tour of Vietnam, compilers who had processed the daily dispatches from MACV, evaluators who had worked over the reams of indications data, sum-marizers who had drafted the mountain of follow-up white papers on force-level ratios, endurance estimates, morale assessments, North-South infiltration reviews, air interdiction effectiveness studies—all of these men knew already what the President was going to say, had to say, would go down in history for saying. "Stop swatting flies" was how a famous bomber general put it, "and go after the manure pile."

Shortly before noon Sean Dillon left his office on the third floor of E-Ring, the OSD area, Mahogany Row, and headed down to the windowless depths of the building. At a junction of two broad corridors a gate manned by a pair of armed Military Police officers marked the entrance to the JCS operations area. "Restricted," a bold sign read. "Warning. Unauthorized Entry Strictly Prohibited. JCS Credentials—Display Required."

Dillon had crossed into the area thousands of times in the previous four years, yet that, like the show of stars on his shoulders, counted for nothing with the stolid guards. He paused at their desk to sign the entry log and to produce his laminated security badge which he clipped onto the flap of his tunic pocket.

A long narrow hallway stretched ahead of him, its stout metal doors marked only with color-coded seals which alone indicated the activities going on behind them. One room was the secure conference chamber in which the chiefs of the services met, "the tank." It was there that Dillon presented the JCS each morning with his "All-Source Daily," the overnight intelligence summary.

Behind another door was the National Indications Center, referred to only as the War Room, with its panoply of communications equipment, projection screens and computer consoles. Behind that door now, as always, a dozen men sat at monitors, tracking input from the unified commands and the warning systems.

As Dillon moved along the corridor officers passed him, colonels mostly. They were somber and tense, but they usually were here. They always moved, and did now, with the air of worried fans hustling to their seats as the game was beginning. None of these officers acknowledged Dillon, nor he them, but suddenly a four-star general cut across his path, Davidson, the air force vice chief.

"Dillon," Davidson said abruptly, coldly.

Dillon stopped. "Good morning, General." They were neighbors at Boiling, but Davidson had been on the job only a few months and they'd rarely spoken outside briefings. Davidson was a tall, thin man, remarkably like Dillon himself in physique, and as they stood facing each other the effect was mirror-like. Their blue uniforms were identical except for three crucial details. Where Dillon, even after all these years, had a single row of ribbons on his left breast, Davidson had half a dozen. It was in combat that men won military ribbons; Dillon's combat had all been in Washington. The space above the ribbons on Dillon's uniform
was naked, but on Davidson's it displayed the bold silver wings and wreath of a senior command pilot. To the fliers Dillon was a "kiwi," a flightless bird. And, of course, to Dillon's three stars, Davidson had four.

"Your Interdiction Review was on the Air Staff table yesterday. We disapproved it, to put it mildly."

Dillon flinched despite himself. "That review went to General Wheeler and Mr. McNamara. It was not for the Air Staff to approve or disapprove."

"You completely ignored the findings of the air force itself. Don't you think the people assigned the mission have some idea whether they're succeeding at it or not?"

"Excuse me, General, but I did not ignore the air force findings."

"You dismissed them."

"Certain numbers, yes."

"You mocked them."

"The air force tally of 'structures' destroyed, I believe the figure was 6,912 in June alone. And those damaged, 1,947."

"The precision of our count bothers you?"

Dillon shook his head. He had to rein his impatience. He hadn't come down here for this. "Lack of definition, General, was the point of my criticism. What is a 'structure'? The target area is the Ho Chi Minh Trail, jungles and mountains, hundreds of miles of paths and unpaved roads. In evaluating the success or failure of air interdiction, what is the possible relevance of enumerating the demolition of huts?"

"Warehouses, not huts. Storage facilities. Depots."

Dillon stared at Davidson, wanting the stare itself to be his statement. But it wasn't enough. "Vietnam is not Europe, General," he said at last. "Of much greater relevance in determining the effectiveness of the air strikes along the Trail is the question of whether Vietcong supply levels have risen or dropped in the past six months. By every measure they have risen dramatically."

"Your report goes on about refugees as if you're the Red Cross or the Catholic Relief Service."

"Refugees are relevant not because we feel bad for them, General, but because in great numbers they can represent a critical mass of social disintegration. How could the air force assessment not even mention the fact that the bombing in Binh Dinh Province alone has put to flight eighty-five thousand people, one tenth its population?"

"We look at military effects, General. Isn't that what you're supposed to do? Aren't you military? And, for that matter, aren't you air force?"

Here it was, the nub of Davidson's complaint, and it surprised Dillon not at all. The DIA Interdiction Effectiveness Review had concluded that six months of the deadliest bombing since World War II had done little to stem the flow of supplies and soldiers from North Vietnam into South Vietnam. The air force, with Operation Rolling Thunder, had dominated the war to this point, and what it wanted was not the massive introduction of foot soldiers but an expansion of bombing, a shift of the target area from the obscure North-South jungle trails to the city of Haiphong, the Russian port of entry into North Vietnam, and to the far northern border across which supplies came from China. But the air force case depended on a faith in strategic bombing which the army had always denied and which the recent DIA report undercut. Now, with the President's imminent announcement of full mobilization, army troops would replace air force planes as the center of the American combat effort in Southeast Asia. To the men who lived with him at Boiling, Sean Dillon had stabbed his own branch of the armed services in the back.

"I am air force, yes."

"Well, you're carrying the army's water. All Wheeler wants is a piece of the action, but a land war in Asia? Is that what you want?"

"What I want isn't the issue, General. My job is to provide intelligence to OSD and JCS, and that is what I do."

"OSD, that's right." Davidson grimaced as if he'd just remembered something, that the water this son of a bitch carried wasn't even the army's. His clenched expression conveyed contempt, which, if articulated, would have been, You fucking civilian!

"I assume you're on your way to hear the President," Dillon said. He made a show of looking at his watch. "Isn't what he wants the issue?"

Davidson grunted and pushed past Dillon. At the door to the tank he looked briefly back before going in.

Dillon continued down the corridor, and to his own surprise his legs wobbled under him. Once he would hardly have registered such a parochial and patently self-serving outburst. As recently as the years under Kennedy it had been, for Dillon, no source of discomfort to be associated, even as a general officer, with the vested gray suits' effort to tighten control of the blue and brown uniforms. McNamara, early in his tenure as secretary, had regarded centralization of the services as his top
priority, and the first large institutional step he'd taken in that direction — his main rule for managers at Harvard and Ford both had been to control the flow of information; in the Pentagon that meant intelligence — was the establishment of DIA under Dillon. Kennedy himself became DIA's main sponsor after the Bay of Pigs disaster destroyed his trust in CIA, and his commitment to Dillon's fledgling agency was solidified a year and a half later when it served reliably as his main source of information about missile sites in Cuba. No one faulted Dillon for disloyalty in those heady days of the long-sought showdown with Russia. And no one doubted, or for that matter complained, that civilians were absolutely in charge of the military, even if one of them was the attorney general.

But the Kennedys were gone; so was the energy they'd brought to the impulse to reform the government. And in the year since Tonkin Gulf things had changed even more. Despite his quick start, McNamara's frustrations with recalcitrant Pentagon turf-defenders were as pointed as Forrestal's had been a decade and a half before, but the hard-driving pragmatist was not one to turn those frustrations against himself. He tempered his challenges to the generals; he needed them more, anyway, now that the organization he intended to bend to his will was no longer the Defense Department but a peasant-dominated, Asian form of communism. Frustrations with what his whiz-kid staffers called the mad-dog military? Frustrations with the wily but insecure successor President? McNamara would vent them on Vietnam.

Dillon had been left to fend for himself. DIA had its legs by now as a huge agency with thousands of billets, but every extension of its reach had been accompanied by savage bureaucratic infighting mounted from outside the Pentagon by the CIA and from within by the fiercely jealous service chiefs. As director, Dillon operated the Washington-based mechanisms of intelligence analysis and distribution, but the "collection assets" around the globe still belonged to the commanders in the field and therefore to the chiefs. Agents carrying DIA credentials, signal equipment on spy ships, eavesdropping aircraft, eye-in-the-sky satellites, all generated initial raw data on which DIA depended, but they remained in the direct control of the air force, the army and the navy. In the first phase of his mission—collection—Dillon was at the mercy of military men who opposed him.

And in the last phase too. As an early compromise, McNamara had
allowed, over Dillon's strong objection, ambiguous language to define the DIA chain of command. His victory on this issue at OSI had been the key to his first success, and his defeat on it here was ominous. The language in the charter undercut the secretary's own authority, making the DIA director responsible "to" the secretary of defense, but "through" the Joint Chiefs of Staff. With McNamara increasingly less inclined to oppose them, the service chiefs had succeeded in interpreting that definition to mean that they were a coequal master of the intelligence agency, the very raison d'être of which they, of course, rejected.

Dillon knew better than to blame the small-minded generals and admirals whose commitment to a unified, single-thrust national defense was ambivalent at best. Their inability to cooperate with him, as with each other, was ultimately the consequence of confusion and ambivalence not in the Pentagon but in the White House. What Dillon longed for—yes, as a bureaucrat defending his turf, but more as the American military officer he'd been for almost twenty years now—was the clear, forceful statement of national will that both the reform of the Pentagon and the conflict in Vietnam desperately required and that only the President could give. In Dillon's view the ambivalence of generals and admirals, as well as the easily exploited ambivalence of newspaper pundits and college students, all derived from the President's ambivalence. Kennedy had learned how destructive ambivalence can be at the Bay of Pigs, and that lesson had saved the nation and perhaps the world eighteen months later, at the Cuban missile sites.

As Dillon approached the red-coded door at the end of the operations corridor he stopped to steady himself, an uncharacteristic hesitation. His mind was suddenly taken over by a sequence of images that didn't belong there. Cass bent over her patch of zinnias in the yard at Boiling, a garden tool in hand; the family dog, Prince, leaping up at him by the door; Richard at the dining room table that night last spring, his eyes shimmering with the threat of tears; and, of all things, what Dillon saw then was the vast stretch of the old Chicago stockyards as seen from the air, a view he'd never had of it, the view an airmobile helicopter could offer, acre upon acre of muddy corrals, Unes of bleating animals, a throng of men in soiled overalls passing through the Stone Gate and, in the distance, the spewing smokestacks of slaughterhouses. He closed his eyes for a moment, standing with his hand on the doorknob, and he found himself hoping—praying almost—that after all these months of
so earnestly wanting it both ways in Asia and having it neither, President Johnson too had learned his leader's lesson about the dangers of ambivalence.