232. Memorandum From the Presidentʼs Special Assistant (Rostow) to President Johnson1
Mr. President:
A reflection on bombing the North.
- 1.
- Clearly, bombing the North has not stopped infiltration to the South; although it may have set a limit on the scale of military operations in the South. For example, the Laos road net has been expanded, with great effort, to a capacity of 400 tons a day. A recent report2 indicates it is only being used at a rate of 80–100 tons a day.
- 2.
- Clearly, bombing the North as we have done it has not, by itself, brought Hanoi to the conference table; nor has anything else we have done by way of military, civil, or diplomatic action.
- 3.
-
What has it done?
It has imposed a severe but not decisive general burden on the North Vietnamese. Bombing in the North is our equivalent of Viet Cong guerrilla operations in the South:
- —It engages a large amount of civil manpower (2–300,000), and substantial military resources and foreign aid in countering damage and air defense.
- —It imposes economic stagnation or decline.
- —It imposes a political and psychological burden and morale problems which have, on firm evidence, increased with the passage of time.
- —It limits normal shipping to North Vietnam.
- —It assures that the bulk of external assistance is to shore up North Vietnam rather than increase its thrust against the South.
- 4.
- Again—bombing as we have conducted it—is not a decisive instrument any more than the guerrilla operations in the South are a decisive instrument. But if it werenʼt hurting we would not have either the vast effort at air defense in the North or the extraordinary diplomatic and psychological effort to force us to stop bombing without conditions.
- 5.
-
Put another way, without the bombing, Hanoi could keep the war going without any significant incentive to knock it off. I keep close by me all the time the November 1962 interview in the Saturday Evening Post3 with the Hanoi leaders, the punch line of which was this:
“Americans do not like long, inconclusive wars, and this is going to be a long, inconclusive war. Thus we are sure to win.”
A cessation of bombing in the North would make it much easier for them to make that judgment stick.
- 6.
- Therefore:
- —I am against taking the heat off the North: we should stay with oil and steady pressure on transport;
- —I believe we should be studying ways to increase the pressure on the North at the right time in the future;
- —We should not diminish our pressure on the North without a fully adequate quid pro quo in the South.
- 7.
- I add an amateur political judgment: a “pause” during the campaign, without solid evidence that a move towards peace will promptly follow, could be quite dangerous during the campaign, as well as providing evidence of over-anxiety and lack of perseverance to Hanoi.4
- Source: Johnson Library, National Security File, Rostow Files, Vietnam—W.W. Rostow. Top Secret. The source text is marked with an indication that the President saw the memorandum.↩
- Not further identified.↩
- Bernard B. Fall, “Master of the Red Jab,” Saturday Evening Post, 235 (November 24, 1962), pp. 18–21.↩
- McNamara handwrote the following note in the margin of the source text, next to this paragraph: “I am inclined to agree that a ‘pause’ prior to November would be unwise.”↩