As Keeler put it, Johnson called so that the press officer could ‘get the party line.’ The political agenda in America was obviously more important than the bloodshed on the hills around Khe Sanh. Called to testify in a civil suit after the war, McNamara said under oath that he had decided as early as December 1965 that ‘the war could not be won militarily.’ĭuring the war, President Johnson would talk by telephone to then Air Force Major John Keeler about what to say during the ‘Five O’Clock Follies,’ the daily press briefing held every afternoon in Saigon. Men like Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara and President Lyndon Baines Johnson, along with Department of Defense bureaucrats, civilian and military, called all the shots.Īmerica lost her first war ever because bureaucrats 10,000 miles away from the fighting played a kind of ‘war monopoly’ game, in which the stakes were not play money but the lives of men sent out to die in the rice paddies and skies of Vietnam. But the men who ran that war were politicians and bureaucrats, not military professionals. It was a conflict that should not have been lost. The war in Vietnam was a strange war, indeed.
'Jack' Lavelle: Testing the Rules of Engagement During the Vietnam War Close Air Force Colonel Jacksel 'Jack' Broughton & Air Force General John D.
