Office of the Historian

34. Memorandum From the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy) to the President1

Washington, February 4, 1964.

SUBJECT

  • Your luncheon with Secretaries Rusk and McNamara

You said yesterday that you wanted to talk about South Vietnam and about Africa at this lunch.

1. On South Vietnam

There are two kinds of questions here:

a.

What stronger courses of action can we take?

The gut question here is whether and how we can bring pressure on North Vietnam. The working levels of the government are now inclined to argue that we can, but we do not yet have a plan.

Such a plan would need a closely interlocked military and diplomatic program so as to lay the widest possible basis of support for an action which will make almost all our allies nervous except perhaps Nationalist China, the Philippines, South Vietnam, and Thailand.

b.
To get any plan and to give it a better chance of success we need improvement in our organization here and in the field.

[Page 61]

In the field

If Lodge must stay then the transfer from Harkins to Westmoreland should be speeded up, and we need to have an intense back-and-forth communication from Washington to Lodge himself.

At home

We must end the deep-seated lack of confidence which exists between senior people at Defense and the Hilsman office.

My own judgment is that government needs a senior officer, accepted as first-rate by all concerned, who will make South Vietnam and related problems his only business. My nominee would be Mike Forrestal, but I would be glad to have him wear a Defense hat or State hat if that would help. I emphasize the role of Defense because that is where the resources are, and McNamara is the man with the heaviest personal commitment.

[Here follow recommendations on item 2, Africa.]

McG. B.2
  1. Source: Johnson Library, National Security File, Aides Files, McGeorge Bundy, Luncheons with the President, Vol. 1 [Part 2]. Secret. Bundy wrote the following note on the source text: “P[resident] used all this in lunch with results not yet clear. McGB”↩
  2. Printed from a copy that bears these typed initials.↩