Why do you use the word "crazy" to describe our policies in Indochina?

The most widely accepted explanation given for increasing our involvement in a hopelessly stalemated war, which got larger and larger from year to year, with no perceptible progress, was that the president had been drawn into a quagmire by overoptimistic advisors, particularly the military. The idea is that the president, thinking of other matters and not focusing on Indochina very much, simply followed military advice in what he did.

But the documents prove that no aspect of this was true. No president had ever been told that involvement in Vietnam would lead to success, quickly or easily or on a small scale.

The Joint Chiefs did recommend that we get in, but only on a very large scale. They wanted him to greatly expand the war beyond the borders of South Vietnam into Laos and Cambodia and North Vietnam itself, on the ground. They also wanted a much greater expansion of the air war, right up to the borders of China and if necessary beyond those borders. Had we followed that policy Chinese ground troops would almost surely have come in, which would have led to pressure by the Joint Chiefs and others for the use of nuclear weapons. The Joint Chiefs I have to say in that instance look almost incomprehensibly crazy in their willingness to risk nuclear war. That looks crazy.

And the actual policy that successive presidents actually did follow -- which was of large-scale ground and air involvement in South Vietnam, with large but limited bombing in North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia -- was almost as irrational.

The United States was never prepared to allow self-determination in South Vietnam, because a democratic election would have led to communist participation in power and probably a communist-led government, since the communists had the prestige and the organization that grew out of having successfully defeated a colonial power.

Just to postpone that result, president after president was willing to send many people to die and to kill. Now, understood in those terms, one then stands back from the policy and says, but humanly how is this to be understood? It looks crazy. That's what I mean by crazy, a crazy disproportion between the human costs and the risks of the effort, and the legitimate benefits if any that can reasonably be expected.

What I'm saying is that very smart men -- and nobody is smarter than McNamara, and the Joint Chiefs were not dumb people by any means -- were espousing a terribly unwise policy that could lead to a catastrophic result.

What are some of the major lies that were told in support of this policy?

My first night in the Pentagon, on August 4, 1964, I heard my president, Lyndon Johnson, saying that he was retaliating against North Vietnam because of unequivocal evidence of an unprovoked attack on U.S. destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf that were on routine patrol in international waters. And that this retaliation was limited and that "we seek no wider war." Now that's five or six separate assertions, and I already knew within hours or days that every one was false.

Did they tell Congress things that they didn't want to tell the public, on the grounds that it might help the other side?

Yes, they did tell Congress things that were not made public at the time, or for years thereafter. And nearly all of the things they told Congress in joint committee hearings, in top-secret closed sessions, were top-secret lies. In other words, Congress was lied to just as egregiously, and to the same effect, as the public.

You also say in your book that they lied about the progress we were making in Vietnam once we began to send U.S. troops, a process that began in February 1965 that saw a high of 500,000 men at any one time, 58,000 dead, and more than 3 million troops sent between 1965 and 1973.

Yes, and that's the decision that looks so crazy given what the president knew the prospects were. The president knew from the fall of 1965 that he was getting into a very large war, which would probably go to a scale of 500 to 700,000 troops or more. But the public was never told that.

Instead he constantly implied that the last 20,000, 40,000, 50,000 troops that were sent were all that was required "at this time." The scale of the war to be expected was never explained to the public, lest it cease to support the war, lest it call on Congress to force negotiations, force coming to terms in some way and ending the war. So that was always lied about.

The prospective costs of the war were also concealed from the public. For example, Clark Clifford (U.S. secretary of defense in 1967-68), in arguing to the president on July 23, 1965, at Camp David, said to the president, "I see nothing but catastrophe for my country." He then gave an amazingly prescient prediction that the war would involve 500,000 U.S. troops and 50,000 U.S. dead. "That is not for us, Mr. President," he said. But it was. We sent 550,000 troops and lost 58,000 killed in action.

We know from Johnson's tapes that he rarely did believe that we were headed for any kind of success from beginning to end. He was saying to his mentor and close friend, Sen. Richard Russell, the head of the Armed Service committee, things like, "I don't think they'll ever quit, and if I was in their position I wouldn't. They're going to keep going and we are not going to beat them." This is while he was sending boys to die.

Why do you believe Johnson behaved so unwisely?

Well, I don't speculate on motives in my book, but since you ask I'll give you my own personal opinion. For a long time I believed his motive was essentially domestic politics, that he believed he would lose office if he was accused of losing Vietnam to communism. I would say that is the consensus explanation right now. And also that he believed it would hurt us internationally, if our credibility was destroyed and so forth.

But I have decided that this explanation does not square with what was then knowable about domestic politics. The president's decision to escalate went against that of his political advisors such as Hubert Humphrey, Clark Clifford and Richard Russell. I would say that he had no domestic risk at all in getting out of Vietnam in '65 after the defeat of Goldwater. Had he done so, even with a Communist South Vietnam, he would not have had inflation, he would have had money to spend on his war against poverty and his Great Society programs, he would not have provoked the domestic political crisis that forced him to not seek reelection in March 1968, and so forth. And I do not believe that was unforeseeable in 1965.

I would say that he consciously chose a policy that was riskier for him politically than the alternative. So how do we explain that? My best guess is that Lyndon Johnson psychologically did not want to be called weak on communism. As he put it to Doris Kearns, he said he would be called if he got out of Vietnam, an "unmanly man," a weakling, an appeaser.

He preferred to risk office, and to lose office, as a tough guy, than to gain and retain office while facing some strident charges from politicians who were beaten that he was a weakling. And I believe that he was not alone in that. Many Americans have died in the last 50 years, and maybe 10 times as many Asians, because American politicians feared to be called unmanly.

You're saying this is a psychological fear.

I think there is a heavy psychological element in it, and that from 1965 to 1968, there was not a realistic political aspect to it.

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