44. Editorial Note
At 11 a.m. on July 2, 1965, President Johnson met in the Cabinet Room of the White House with Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, George Ball, and McGeorge Bundy to discuss the four papers submitted to the President the day before dealing with Vietnam policy (Documents 38–41). The meeting lasted 1 hour and 45 minutes. (Johnson Library, President’s Daily Diary) No other contemporary record of the meeting has been found, but William Bundy recalled the decisions made by the President during the meeting:
“Like a Judge, the President expected to mull over the pleadings, and gave no direct indication what his final decision would be. Instead, he plucked ideas from each of the papers, and set them in motion. Averell Harriman should travel at once to Europe and set up the faint ‘cover’ of visiting Moscow on a sightseeing trip. McNamara should go to Saigon in mid-July with General Wheeler and with Cabot Lodge, now picked as Taylor’s successor, to look over the situation and evaluate the military plans which Westmoreland was already working to project into 1966. Ball should work intensively to refine the negotiating possibilities, with a [Page 119] particular eye to his latest proposal of direct contact with the North Vietnamese representative in Paris, and a secondary look at how contact with NLF representatives, through private Americans, might be arranged and to what end.” (Ibid., Papers of William P. Bundy, Chapter 27, page 13)