LBJ Library Oral History Home Page

The following Oral Histories have been placed on the LBJ Web Server and are available for downloading. The are available at the LBJ Library website: http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom
DEAN RUSK ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW II PREFERRED CITATION
Transcript, Dean Rusk Oral History Interview II, 9/26/69, by Paige E. Mulhollan, Internet Copy, LBJ Library.
INTERVIEW II
INTERVIEWEE: DEAN RUSK
INTERVIEWER: PAIGE E. MULHOLLAN
DATE: September 26, 1969

M: It is now. I was just indicating that--perhaps as useful background, even though it's in the Kennedy Administration--you were of course involved in Viet Nam from a very early time, and I'd like to get some indication as to how much Mr. Johnson as Vice President was involved during that period.
R: Well, in the first place, he was kept fully informed about everything that was happening in Viet Nam. He attended the National Security Council meetings and Cabinet meetings, and he had a State Department officer on his staff who kept him briefed on the daily reports from Viet Nam. So I would say that he had full information. He did make a trip to Viet Nam, as you will recall, and the historian will have a chance to read his full report on that trip.
M: Did you talk to him about that trip?
R: I talked to him about it after he came back. He was briefed on it before he left. I was present when he reported on his trip to President Kennedy, but I think it would not be correct to say that Vice President Johnson participated in the detailed decisions that were made by President Kennedy on Viet Nam unless President Kennedy talked to him privately about them because the key decisions were made not at formal meetings but informally by President Kennedy in consultation with his key advisers.
M: And Mr. Johnson was usually not present at that.
R: He was not regularly present at those special meetings that were called. Now the most important decision that President Kennedy made was to go beyond the levels of troops that were in effect permitted by the 1954 agreements, and greatly to augment our advisory position in South Viet Nam. Under the Geneva Agreements the French had been permitted to leave about six hundred and fifty people in South Viet Nam as a military assistance group. By agreement with the French, we later substituted Americans for those French, and so we had about six hundred and fifty people there who were ordnance people, and quartermaster people, and signal people, who were there to advise on the use and employment of American equipment that was being supplied under the military assistance program. It became apparent to President Kennedy that that such effort was not going to be nearly enough to do the job, and so he greatly increased the advisory role out there and moved the complement to about seventeen or eighteen thousand before his death. Any historian will want to look carefully at what President Kennedy said on the public record about Southeast Asia. You will find a great deal of material in the three volumes of the public papers of President Kennedy. There is no question that he felt very strongly that it was vital to the security of the United States that Southeast Asia be maintained as a free area, that it not be allowed to be overrun by the Communists. That was his policy, and some of the so-called Kennedy people who have tried to portray President Kennedy in a different role just missed the point. I'm not a ghoul, [and] I'm not going to dig President Kennedy out of the grave as a witness to later policy, but I think the historian will want to look carefully at what President Kennedy said publicly while he was President in order to make judgments about what President Kennedy's policy towards Southeast Asia was.
M: You are saying that the commitment was as firm as it ever had been or could be at the time the Administration changed in late 1963?
R: Yes, President Kennedy made the determination that I think any President would have made, that it was necessary for the United States to make good on its commitment to South Viet Nam. Every President since President Truman had come to the conclusion that the security of Southeast Asia was vital to the security of the United States; that if Southeast Asia with its peoples and its vast resources were to be organized by elements hostile to the United States that would create
an adverse and major change in the world balance of power; and that it was in the interest of the United States to maintain the independence of these Southeast Asian countries, particularly those covered by the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization. So when President Johnson became President, he found seventeen or eighteen thousand Americans in Viet Nam under a policy which was clearly aimed at maintaining the independence of South Viet Nam and Laos and Cambodia and
Thailand. Now, the question arises as to whether President Johnson could have changed that policy. As Vice President he was certainly loyal to the policy of President Kennedy. There was no question about that. In a purely constitutional sense President Johnson might have been able to reverse course--
M: But he would have had to do it against--I take it--the more or less unanimous advice of his advisers.
R: There was no advice to President Johnson from any of his advisers that we cut and run in Southeast Asia. President Johnson took office determined to carry out the main policies of President Kennedy. He did that both in domestic and foreign affairs. In another sense the President would find it difficult, if not impossible, to change a commitment of that sort. When you look at the consequences of cutting and running, the consequence is such that no President is likely to be able to accept. Not only would Southeast Asia be overrun, but the fidelity of the United States under its security treaties all over the world would be brought into question.
In Asia we have treaties with Korea, Japan, the Republic of China, the Philippines, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand. If those who would become our enemies made the judgment that our participation in those treaties was merely a bluff, then those treaties would have no deterrent effect.
M: Which is one of their chief purposes.
R: That's quite correct, and the effect would be that there would be those who would be tempted to move into areas which were covered by our treaty commitments elsewhere. To give one or two examples, in June 1961 Chairman Khrushchev produced a crisis on Berlin in his meeting with President Kennedy in Vienna in June. Chairman Khrushchev in effect said to President Kennedy, "We're going to turn East Berlin over to the East Germans, and you've got to work out problems of access and the presence of U.S. troops in Berlin with the East Germans." The implication was that the East Germans would not permit us to maintain our forces there, and Chairman Khrushchev said that any attempt by the United States to use force against the East Germans would mean war, President Kennedy had to look him straight in the eye and say, "Well, then there will be war, Mr. Chairman. This is going to be a very cold winter." Now, it was of the utmost importance that Chairman Khrushchev believe President Kennedy on that point; otherwise, there might well have been a war. Coming later to the Cuban missile crisis, President
Kennedy had to say to Chairman Khrushchev, "Now, Mr. Chairman, those missiles must leave Cuba. We'd prefer that they leave by peaceful means, but they must leave." Now, suppose Chairman Khrushchev had said to President Kennedy, or had thought in his own mind, "Don't kid me, Mr. President. I know that your principal newspapers and your key Senators will collapse when I put on the pressure." That's a very good way to have war. The credibility of the President of the United States at a moment of crisis and the fidelity of the United States to its security treaties are both of the utmost importance in maintaining peace in the world. The idea in the minds of leaders in Moscow and in Peking that they had better be careful because those fool Americans just might do something about it is one of the principal pillars of peace in the world. So the issue in Southeast Asia is not just Viet Nam, it's not even just Southeast Asia. It has to do with the maintenance of peace in a system in which the United States has security treaties with more than forty nations.
M: The world system--
R: So that any decision by President Johnson in 1963 or 1964 to abandon Southeast Asia would have been a decision to abandon the fidelity of the United States under its commitments, and this would have been a very grave thing--not only in Southeast Asia, but in the general world situation.
M: Was there any advice at that time that you could have maybe the best of both worlds and honor your commitments and not cut and run, but still not invest any more resources in the position we were trying to hold there? Was there a middle-ground that was an option, even at that time?
R: The historian is going to want to make some judgments about the problem of timing in using our forces in Southeast Asia, this question of gradualism. Basically we were on the strategic defensive in Southeast Asia. All we were trying to do was to deny to North Viet Nam its effort to seize South Viet Nam by force. Tactically in given local situations we took the offensive, but strategically all we were trying to do was to prevent something. We therefore responded to what North Viet Nam was doing. President Kennedy put in an increased number of advisers, hoping that those would be able to overcome the effect of the North Vietnamese personnel that were being infiltrated into the South. Then after our election of 1964, North Viet Nam began to send major units of its regular army into South Viet Nam so that--
M: There's no question about that unit infiltration?
R: No, no question about it at all. Not only were they eventually picked up on the ground and identified, but we had intercept material indicating that they were on the way.
M: This was as early as, you said, right after our election so--
R: We began to get information about the movement of these units in December and January after our election. Coming back to the point of gradualism--looking back on it the question arises as to whether we might have prevented further North Vietnamese efforts against South Viet Nam had we put in more troops sooner. For example, if President Kennedy had put in one hundred thousand men in 1962 as soon as it was discovered that the Laos Agreement of 1962 was not going to work, or had done it in 1963, it's just possible that that demonstration of substantial force at a very early stage would have caused North Viet Nam to pause and decide that the Americans really were serious. But the gradual response left it open to North Viet Nam to speculate that if they just did a little bit more, they'd be able to overcome what the Americans were willing to do. We followed the policy of gradualism in terms of responding to what North Viet Nam was doing partly because we didn't want a larger war ourselves, partly because we were on the strategic defensive and were therefore responding to what the North was doing, partly because we did not wish to stimulate China and the Soviet Union into decisions which might have led to some active intervention on their part. We were trying to
maintain this as a war that would not go beyond Viet Nam, you see. But this is a judgment that the historian will have to make.
M: Did the fact that we had an election in 1964 and that Mr. Johnson was terribly concerned and distracted by that perhaps make it difficult for him to give the attention to Viet Nam that first year that might have produced a different result had he had the time and the concentration to do it?
R: No, he gave full attention to Viet Nam during the campaign and in the period just after the campaign. There was never any inattention on his part. What he was doing during that period was, in effect, coasting along on the decisions that had been made by President Kennedy. The level of forces did not begin to increase significantly until the spring of 1965. There is one very interesting point about our elections of '64. Again, the historian will want to look into this, particularly if he can get any information available out of North Viet Nam. President Johnson, although reaffirming our commitments throughout his campaign in 1964, made it clear that we were not interested in a larger war. Barry Goldwater, his opposition candidate, talked as though he wanted to make it into a larger war in order to get it over with. Johnson won. It's entirely possible that the fellows in Hanoi said, "Aha, Johnson has won the election. He says he doesn't want a larger war. This means that we can have a larger war without an increase in risk." It was after our election and before the starting of the bombing of North Viet Nam that North Viet Nam began to send the regular units of its own army into South Viet Nam. The 304th Division, for example, was started out for the South very soon after our election, so we've sometimes speculated as to whether Hanoi misinterpreted the election of 1964 and thought that they could therefore increase their forces without running the risk of increasing the United States forces.
M: Although that had come after the Tonkin attack when we'd demonstrated our policy of retaliation before the election.
R: Yes, but they might have decided that that was an isolated episode and that this was not a matter of general policy, because there were some other attacks that had not led to retaliation.
M: Right. And that was one of the questions I wanted to ask you. Was there a reason why we followed a policy of retaliation at Tonkin, and then at Bien Hoa and other instances we didn't do so?
R: Well, I think that the main difference was that in the Tonkin Gulf incident there were attacks on American ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin and the issue there was whether or not--
M: There wasn't any question of the facts? I don't mean to interrupt you, but the facts were quite clear with the people who were considering the policy that this had in fact happened?
R: I never had any doubts about the facts. Certainly, no one has seriously challenged the first attack. There has been some doubt cast on the second attack. But the commander of the ship and all the intervening commanders had no doubt about it, and I was impressed with the intercept material which we picked up from North Viet Nam because my impression at the time was that North Viet Nam had no doubt about the fact that they were attacking these ships, you see. And they were the ones who would have the best means of knowing.
M: The critics have made a point of what our ships were doing there, supporting apparently covert operations by the South Vietnamese. Had the policy--or allowing or ordering that support--been discussed at the Cabinet-level?
R: These vessels were not there in support of any coastal operations by the South Vietnamese. They were not there in that role. They were there on missions that were more like the Pueblo mission. They were on an independent intelligence-gathering mission in the Gulf of Tonkin. Of course, since it was high seas we expected to maintain our capability of being present in the Gulf of Tonkin, and we weren't going to be driven off the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin just because of a scrap going on in South Viet Nam. But it is not true--and Secretary McNamara testified to this--that these vessels of ours were there covering or, in a sense, associated with some South Vietnamese coastal operation. You see there had been a little guerilla war going along on the coast back and forth across the DMZ between the
North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese. The North Vietnamese were using coastal waters for infiltrating men and arms into the South, and the South Vietnamese were retaliating. But the destroyers that were attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin were not there to give cover to operations of that sort.
M: Was this policy of retaliation already decided upon prior to its event, or was it one that you met and decided upon after the attacks occurred?
R: It was decided upon after the attacks occurred.
M: Was that a meeting in which the President personally got involved?
R: Oh, yes, he was very much involved in this one.
M: What about the degree of advice at that time? Was it still pretty much unanimous that this was something we couldn't allow, or were there important objections?
R: I don't recall any significant objections from any of the senior advisers. I think the advisers to the President were unanimous on this point.
M: That we should retaliate?
R: That's right. There was some discussion about how many points and what kind of targets and things of that sort, and it was decided to limit the retaliation to the bases from which these torpedo boats had come out and basically retaliate against the nature of the attack rather than to attack Hanoi and Haiphong and more general targets.
M: What about the Resolution that grew out of it? Was that something that also arose at that time, or was that a matter that had been discussed previously and decided upon?
R: Fairly early in his Administration, President Johnson came to the conclusion that at some stage he was going to ask Congress to associate themselves with the effort in Viet Nam. He had remembered very clearly that at the outbreak of the Korean War that Congressional leaders had advised President Truman not to ask for a Congressional resolution and suggested to President Truman that he use the powers of the President to conduct the Korean operation. Well, President Truman accepted that advice and did not ask for a resolution, and then some Senators, particularly Senator [Robert A.] Taft, later attacked the whole operation on the
grounds that he should have asked for a resolution. President Johnson, remembering that, felt that at some stage he wanted to associate the Congress with him in the
effort in Viet Nam. Since that was known, various efforts were made to see what a draft resolution would look like. I never participated in those directly because I never thought the time was ripe to ask the Congress for a resolution, so that I am not familiar with the details of some of that preliminary staff work that had been done. Then when the Gulf of Tonkin came along and the President consulted with the leadership of the Congress, he discussed with them whether this was not the time now to go for a resolution putting the Congress behind the United States policy on Viet Nam and making it clear to North Viet Nam that we were serious about it. The Congressional leadership encouraged him to do so. There was practical unanimity among Congressional leaders on the desirability of a Congressional resolution, and so we had our hearings, and promptly the Congress passed the so-called Gulf of Tonkin Resolution with only two dissenting votes in the Senate.
Paragraph II of that resolution, which the historian will be able to see, of course, was not about the Gulf of Tonkin, but was about Southeast Asia, and it simply affirmed that the United States is prepared as the President determines to use whatever means are necessary including the use of armed force to assist the states covered by the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization in the defense of their liberty. Now, there was no question at all at the time about the meaning of that resolution.
M: The critics--Mr. [J. William] Fulbright particularly, has later said that he didn't understand it to mean what it was later said to mean. Were there questions at the time? Was he given some kind of assurance at the time that has led him wrong?
R: I think the historian will want to look at the discussion on the floor of the Senate on that resolution in order to make a judgment on that kind of point, because as I recall one Senator asked Senator Fulbright whether this resolution would encompass the dispatch of large numbers of forces to South Viet Nam. Senator Fulbright said, "Yes, the resolution would cover that." He hoped that it would not be necessary to take such steps, but that the resolution would cover it. So that there was no question at all in my mind at the time that the Congress knew what kind of resolution they were passing. Some of them later changed their minds, and when they changed their minds they tried to throw some cloud upon the resolution itself. But there was no doubt about it at the time the resolution was passed.
M: And no one was fooled who didn't want to be fooled.
R: No, it's very simple language. These Senators are all educated men. It's only two or three short sentences. They knew exactly what they were voting for, and the floor discussion in the Senate brought out all of these aspects. Senator Morse, for example, who opposed the resolution, told the Senate very frankly what this resolution meant, and because it meant that he himself opposed it. It was a very far-reaching resolution. In the testimony, by the way, Senator Fulbright told me at the close of Secretary McNamara's and my testimony that this was the best resolution of this sort that he had ever seen presented to the Senate. I noticed that that
particular sentence was deleted from the published text of the testimony.
M: That takes on considerable irony in the light of later events.
R: I will never forget Senator Fulbright's remark in that regard. He was all for it at the time. He urged the Senate to give it immediate and unanimous approval. Perhaps we made a mistake in not calling it the Fulbright Resolution.
M: I keep asking you about whether or not anybody was opposed because I think it is important to get it into the record that there was, if it seems there was, unanimity through this period on these decisions that sometimes the critics later forget about. It's a little repetitious for me to keep asking you, but that's why I do it.
R: President Johnson briefed the Congress on Viet Nam more extensively than any President has briefed the Congress on anything. When he first became President he used to have briefing sessions at the White House for Senators and Congressmen. He brought them down in groups and he'd have the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State give them a full discussion and gave them a chance to ask questions [and] make comments and I think he went through the entire Congress at least twice in this course. There was not evident at that time in those briefings and the reactions of the Senators and Congressmen to those briefings--there was not evident any serious opposition to what we were trying to do in Viet Nam. It was not until the costs of the war increased, it was not until large numbers of Americans got out there and the casualties went up, that in 1966 and 1967 there began to be second thoughts in the Congress about our commitments in Viet Nam.
M: Some of them then forgot how they had reacted to your--
R: That's right, and they forgot that they passed the Southeast Asia Treaty with only one dissenting vote back in 1955, with only Senator [William] Langer [R-ND] opposing it. Senator Morse voted for the Southeast Asia Treaty; Senator Mansfield signed the Southeast Asia Treaty along with Mr. Dulles and Senator [H. Alexander] Smith [R-NJ] in Manila when the Southeast Asia Treaty was first brought into being.
…………………………
M: That pretty well ended the events of '64, with our election and, as you've indicated, the increased infiltration. Did the military situation change sharply at that general time period--late '64 and the beginning of '65? Did it deteriorate markedly?
R: In the spring of '65 it was apparent that unless we made some significant reinforcements of our own forces that the increased manpower of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong would likely cut the country in two and could cause very serious problems. We were faced with a serious step-up in infiltration, including North Vietnamese regular units, and I have no doubt that had President Johnson not increased our forces in the spring and summer of 1965 that the situation
could have collapsed from a military point of view.
M: That is in spite of the opening of bombing which came in February.
R: That's right.
M: Can you lead up to that and the circumstances which led to taking that action? That becomes one of the main points of attack by critics in later times.
R: I'm not a very good witness on the actual beginning of the bombing of North Viet Nam in February of 1965, because I had gone to the Churchill funeral and had come down with the flu. [I] came back and spent some time in the hospital and then went to Florida for a period of ten days or so. I was not present for the discussions which led to the beginning of the bombing of the North. I was not opposed to it. I felt that we should do whatever was necessary to affect the battlefield in the South, and the bombing of the infiltration routes in Laos and the bombing of the supply routes coming down from the North were entirely in accord with my judgment as to what the situation permitted or required. My general attitude toward bombing the North reflected somewhat my impressions from the Korean experience. We bombed everything in North Korea from the 38th Parallel right to the Yalu River and had complete air superiority, and yet with full bombing we were not able to prevent the North Koreans and the Chinese from maintaining an army of five hundred thousand men at the front. They would bring in their supplies piggy-back, and at night, and in bad weather, and build up their supplies and then lunge forward for ten days or so, and then wait and build up their supplies again
and lunge again. So I was skeptical about the direct effect of bombing on the battlefield itself. I had no doubt that the attrition of forces in the infiltration routes made that bombing valuable, and I had no doubt that the limitations on supply routes was valuable. I was always skeptical about bombing up in the far North, in the Hanoi-Haiphong area, because I did not believe that that bombing had much effect on the battlefield in the South--and it was bombing that was very expensive in terms of plans and men lost. Hanoi and Haiphong were two of the most heavily defended areas that you've ever seen in warfare. So I was always in a mood to
suspend that kind of bombing if there was any possibility of converting it into a serious peace move. There were times when we would stop the bombing around Hanoi and Haiphong for periods of several days in a radius of five or ten miles of the two cities in conjunction with some peace move that we or somebody else was making. Now, anyone who ever expected the bombing to end the war ought to have his head examined, because bombing just doesn't do that. It makes it more difficult, but it doesn't prove to be a decisive military factor,
M: Was there a disagreement, or a misunderstanding, about what we hoped to accomplish by the bombing in that first few months in the spring of 1965? Did some people have one idea that it would lead to the negotiating table, other people think that it would end the war on a military basis, and other people think that it might just punish them? That became an item that the critics fastened on at a later point, too.
R: Well, in retrospect, I think that it was a mistake to have the bombing of the North run by Commander-in-Chief Pacific from Hawaii rather than by the commander in South Viet Nam, because that tended to mean that there were two wars. There was [Gen. William] Westmoreland's war in the South and there was Admiral [U.S. Grant] Sharp's war in the North, CINCPAC in Hawaii was of the view that if they just continued to escalate their bombing that that alone would bring the war to a conclusion, whereas the effect on the war in the South was minimal. The bombing was also related to the question as to whether the war would expand and whether Red China would come in. If anyone had asked me in 1963 whether we could have a half a million men in South Viet Nam and bomb everything in the North right up to the Chinese border without bringing in Red China, I would have been hard put to it to say that you could. One of the effects of a policy of gradual response was that at no given moment did we ever present Peking or Moscow with enough of a change in the situation to require them to make a major decision based on overall world-wide considerations, in terms of intervening in that war. So just as the North Vietnamese infiltrated, so did we and helped thereby, I think, to limit the war to Viet Nam.
M: Is that why publicly the President frequently referred to the policy even after the bombing began as really being no change or not inconsistent with what we'd been doing anyway? Was that pretty well for Hanoi's consumption?
R: That was partly for that, yes. You see, we were trying to limit the expansion of this war. We didn't want to see it develop into a bigger war, and we didn't want the Red Chinese to come in. We didn't want Moscow to come in with any of their own forces. One of the reasons, therefore, that we played down the importance of any particular steps that we took was to play it down from the point of view of the enemy as well.
M: What about the timing of the bombing? Isn't it Charles Roberts of Newsweek , or somebody, who is quoted as saying that Mr. Johnson once told him that the bombing had been decided on back in 1964 and had been waiting for a time--or that's the implication anyway. Was it a matter that was decided upon during that period when you indicate you were--
R: No, the bombing of the North was always, from 1961 onwards, one of the possibilities. It was one of the alternatives that was considered, but no decision was made until February of 1965.
M: It was retaliatory--
R: Yes, but all alternatives were constantly being looked at right across the entire spectrum. Some alternatives were dismissed rather quickly. For example, the alternative of just getting out--withdrawal. The alternative of using nuclear weapons was just brushed aside and put on the shelf because there was no basis on which anyone would reasonably want to use nuclear weapons in that situation. But all of these alternatives were constantly being looked at when any important decisions came up for review, and we established review groups from time to time without having in mind that there would be new decisions, but just to review the bidding--to see where we were, to see whether we could do things differently, and to see whether there were opportunities that we had overlooked either in the peace direction or on the military side. I would be surprised if the record would show that any decision were made to start the bombing before February 1965, although there was
discussion of it.
M: There was the consideration, I'm sure, by everybody that bombing might also mean the necessity for added troop deployment as supports units, if nothing else. Was the connection between bombing and troop increase recognized and fully considered?
R: Yes. You see, the armed forces of South Viet Nam were somewhat fragile during this period. And the political situation in South Viet Nam was somewhat fragile. There had been the overthrow of Diem; there had been a succession of coups-- M: Somewhat of an understatement right at that particular period.
R: That's correct. So if bombing would lead to a larger war, that is if the North Vietnamese were to shoot the works and put all of their regular forces against the South, then the question is whether the South Vietnamese and the forces that we had there were capable of standing up to it, you see. Some of us wanted to be careful about what we did militarily until there had gotten to be a stronger situation in the South, both politically and militarily. Otherwise you might start something you couldn't see through. So bombing the North itself required that the situation in the South be strengthened because it could be anticipated that the North would make a larger effort in response to the bombing of the North.
M: So really the beginning the bombing and the troop decision are part of the same thing?
R: Yes.
M: In this sense when you decide on one you know you're deciding on the other at the same time.
M: The bombing undoubtedly greatly increased the length of time it took to infiltrate men and material into the South. We picked up a lot of prisoners who reported on their xperiences on the route south, and it's quite clear that the bombing was a harassment that they didn't like at all, and that the attrition, morale and otherwise, on the infiltrators from air-bombing was very considerable.
M: Was there important opposition within the government at high level to the bombing at the time it was undertaken?
R: No. As a matter of fact, George Ball recommended it as Acting Secretary. You see, I was away at the time, and he would have been one who later might have been expected to oppose it, but he made the recommendation.
M: And the fact that Mr. Kosygin was in Hanoi and not considered important enough to delay it when the Pleiku attack occurred?
R: At that time the bombing had nothing to do with Hanoi. It was on the southern part of North Viet Nam. It was on the infiltration routes and just across the DMZ. Initially it started out as simply pinpoint attacks on a limited number of targets and did not start out as a systematic bombing of North Viet Nam. I think there were those who--there were some--who felt that it might be better to wait until Mr. Kosygin got out of town, but the Pleiku attack was delivered while Kosygin was
in town. So you've got to have some sort of sense of balance and reciprocity on these things. If the North Vietnamese laid on a particular attack in Mr. Kosygin's
presence, we didn't see any reason why we couldn't lay on a responsive attack while he was still there. But there was never any question about his personal safety because the bombing didn't go up there at all.
M: The responsive nature of it was incidental? It was understood by everybody that this was the beginning of what would be a continuing policy, not a one-shot response.
R: That is correct.
…………………..