224. Memorandum From the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy) to President Johnson1
Washington,
March 31,
1965.
SUBJECT
- Your meeting with Max Taylor at 5:15 this afternoon2
- 1.
- Max Taylor’s visit this afternoon is the first of two. Today he comes privately. Tomorrow all the recommendations growing out of his [Page 500] visit will be available for formal presentation to you in the presence of the heads of the departments concerned. This will be quite a substantial meeting in numbers, but it is being kept off the record—and if it leaks it will be billed simply as one more effort to make sure that we are doing everything we can to make our program more efficient and effective.
- 2.
-
The three problems on Max’s mind are these:
- (1)
- The timing and direction of attack on the North;
- (2)
- The timing, size, and mission of any U.S. combat deployments to Vietnam; and
- (3)
- The terms and conditions of a political resolution of the problem.
He has done more thinking on (1) and (2) than on (3)—and so have we.
- 3.
- I think that on (1) he is in reasonable agreement with our outline plans for the next 2 or 3 weeks. But he is prepared to go toward Hanoi faster than McNamara. You may wish to probe him on this because I sense that you are leaning a little ahead of Bob on this one.
- 4.
- On U.S. deployments, I think Taylor and McNamara are very close together in the notion of a coastal deployment of the remaining battalions of the Marine Expeditionary Brigade and the effort to get a Korean Battle Group (Ambassador Brown warns from Seoul that he is very wary of this proposal and that the ground would have to be very carefully laid).
- 5.
- Max’s work is still continuing on the proposed actions to beef up our work inside South Vietnam. Max is somewhat resistant to our pressures on this since he feels that his own time and energy should go into the absolutely top priority problems. What he puts at the head of the list is overall troop strength in SouthVietnam—and I think he is probably right, at that. But the other matters also count, and that is one more reason for my conviction that in the long pull we need a McNaughton-type in Saigon. John does see this point.
- 6.
- Finally, you and Taylor will certainly wish to talk over the guidelines for his meetings with Congressional Committees tomorrow and any backgrounding he may do with the press.
McG. B.