For McCain, father's error holds lesson

Failure to fault policy on Vietnam shapes views

President Nixon met with Admiral John S .McCain during the time his son was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. (Bettmann/Corbis)

WASHINGTON - On May 19, 1972, while John McCain was spending his fourth year as a prisoner of war in Hanoi, President Richard Nixon lashed out about McCain's father, Admiral John McCain.

"He's going to start taking his orders from here, or else," Nixon said about Admiral McCain, the commander of Pacific forces during much of the war, according to transcripts of tapes reviewed by the Globe. "Now, I'm not going to have this crap anymore."

Admiral McCain was the subject of Nixon's ire because he had complained to the White House that Nixon was imposing too many restrictions on his ability to bomb North Vietnam. The admiral soon went into retirement, keeping private his disagreements with Nixon and publicly praising the president's "Vietnamization" strategy, in which the United States cut back its involvement as control of the war was gradually turned over to the South Vietnamese.

Now, as Senator John McCain seeks the presidency, he often says that the lessons from the Vietnam War helped shape his views on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But what is little-noted is that one of his key lessons came from what he perceived as a failure by his father. Senator McCain has excoriated the way his father failed to make public his misgivings about Nixon's Vietnamization strategy. If the older McCain and other commanders had spoken up, his son believes, it might have changed the course of the war.

"The entire senior command of the armed forces had a duty, which they shirked, to resign in protest over Washington's management of the war, knowing it to be grievously flawed," McCain wrote years later. "Obviously, my father was implicitly included in that indictment."

These two events - Admiral McCain's private disagreements with Nixon, and Senator McCain's disenchantment with his father for failing to speak up - provide a fresh understanding of how the Arizona senator views the lessons of the Vietnam War. He felt Nixon imposed too many restrictions on the military, and that commanders gave in too easily. McCain's anger at his father's silence also helps explain why the senator has styled himself as a "maverick" who will deliver "straight talk."

John McCain was a 31-year-old Naval aviator when he was shot down over Hanoi in 1967 and began his 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war. His father, who served in World War II as a submarine commander, was commander-in-chief of Pacific forces, including those in Vietnam, from 1968 to 1972.

The senior McCain was known for his overly optimistic briefings about the war, which he summarized in a Reader's Digest article in 1968, writing, "We have the enemy licked now. He is beaten. The enemy cannot achieve a military victory; he cannot even mount another major offensive." Then, in 1970, Admiral McCain delivered a Naval Academy commencement address filled with assurances that victory in Vietnam was around the corner. "The president's policy is sound and the current plan for withdrawal of 150,000 men is both safe and reasonable," the senior McCain said.

Admiral McCain believed that a key to victory was to bomb targets in North Vietnam. Senator McCain later wrote in his autobiography that the Nixon administration "was very receptive to the request of my father" to bomb in the North.

But the secretly recorded White House tapes show that Nixon was at odds with Admiral McCain over the extent of bombing. The tapes were transcribed earlier this year by the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs and have received little notice until now.

At first, Nixon viewed Admiral McCain as an ally. "He's a hard-line son of a bitch. . . . you know, he's got a son who's a POW," Nixon told an aide on May 5, 1972. Nixon announced the bombing of the North three days later. He told an aide that he had decided to extend Admiral McCain's tenure as Pacific commander in chief.

But Nixon learned a week later that Admiral McCain still felt there were too many restrictions on bombing, setting off Nixon's tirade about the admiral. Henry Kissinger, then Nixon's national security adviser, had told Admiral McCain that Nixon was livid about the admiral's assertion.

"I just gave hell to McCain," Kissinger told Nixon on May 19, 1972. "I said I'd never seen the president so angry."

Nixon decided not to extend Admiral McCain's tenure, but the dispute did not become public at the time. Admiral McCain retired a few months later and promptly wrote a New York Times op-ed that was designed to help Nixon win reelection. The admiral praised Nixon's strategy, writing that Vietnamization was working as "our friends and allies assume greater responsibility for their own defense."

But the Vietnamization strategy collapsed when US troops pulled out as part of the 1973 Paris peace accords and Congress did not support more funding for the South Vietnamese. The North Vietnamese captured Saigon in 1975 and united the country under communist rule. Senator McCain later wrote in his autobiography, "Faith of My Fathers", that his father, contrary to what was written in the New York Times op-ed, "doubted the efficacy of the administration's overall strategy to Vietnamize the war." It was this failure to speak out - to deliver straight talk - that caused Senator McCain to believe that his father shirked his duty.

In words that echo McCain's campaign theme of "country first," Senator McCain wrote in the autobiography: "I felt strongly about the obligation of military leaders to place the country's welfare before their own careers. So did the men whom I criticized. They were honorable people, including, certainly, my father. Their opposition to the war's course, which in many of their cases they pressed in the strongest possible terms to the politicians who designed it, almost surely led many of them to consider resigning." But, McCain wrote, his father's sense of duty "prevailed over a conscientious contemplation of a principled resignation."

McCain declined a request for an interview.

Robert Timberg, a Vietnam veteran and author of the biography "John McCain: An American Odyssey", said McCain believes a series of mistakes were made that caused the United States to lose the war. He said McCain faults the reluctance by the United States to bomb the North Vietnamese more heavily and regrets the lack of full American air power in the later stages of the war. The US pullout of most forces by 1973 was followed by 1974's Watergate-related resignation of President Nixon and Democratic victories in midterm elections. With little public support for continued US involvement, Congress cut off funding to the South Vietnamese. Timberg said that McCain believes that decision ultimately led to South Vietnam's defeat by North Vietnam.

"I think McCain feels that was a dreadful mistake and had that not happened, the South Vietnamese had at least a reasonable chance to beat back the North Vietnamese," Timberg said.

McCain has said he applied Vietnam's lessons in backing a "surge" of troops to Iraq and saying there must be no timetable for withdrawal. And, after initially expressing optimism about the Afghan war, McCain has called for more troops. While the conflicts are different from Vietnam, there is a similar question of whether progress will be undone if US troops are removed while combat continues and operations are shifted to local forces.

Some leading historians of the Vietnam War question whether McCain has learned the right strategic lessons from the conflict. They challenge McCain's oft-stated belief that the Vietnam War was "winnable," noting that the North Vietnamese lost more than a million soldiers and were prepared to fight far longer than American forces.

"I just think he is misinterpreting Vietnam," said Stanley Karnow, the Pulitzer-winning author of the book "Vietnam: A History". "I think Vietnam was an unwinnable situation from the beginning. We were up against an enemy who would take unlimited losses."

Critics of McCain's view of the Vietnam War point out that even former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who served two tours in Vietnam, wrote in his autobiography that the conflict seemed unwinnable.

"At the end of my first tour I'd guessed that finishing the job would take half a million men," Powell wrote. "Six years later, during my second tour, we reached the peak, 543,400, and it was still not enough. Given the terrain, the kind of war the [North Vietnamese and Viet Cong] were fighting, and the casualties they were willing to take, no defensible level of US involvement would have been enough."

One defender of McCain's view is Melvin Laird, who was Nixon's Secretary of Defense and worked closely with Admiral McCain on the Vietnamization strategy. Laird said in an interview that Senator McCain is right to say that the Vietnam War was winnable. Indeed, Laird, 86, sounded as sure of the strategy as he did in the early 1970s.

"It was won," Laird said of the war. But he said that "Congress broke the back" of the South Vietnamese by not providing them support after US forces pulled out. Laird, who has been close to the McCain family for decades, said Senator McCain will not forget that lesson.

Another lesson was delivered by McCain's father, who died in 1981. In a 1975 oral history given to the US Naval Institute, Admiral McCain said members of the US military must understand that "if it's necessary, die for your country. This sounds hard-boiled. . . . but we have got to have young men who will go forth and die for their country. And, of course, an outstanding example of this is my son, Johnny, who, thank God almighty, he came out of it alive."