Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3 NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET - Sensitive
tones, the second FLAMING DART operation constituted a sharp break with past US policy and set the stage for the continuing bombing program that was now to be launched in earnest.
Differences in Advocacy. "While all but one or two of the President's principal Vietnam advisors favored the initiation of a sustained bombing program, there were significant differences among them. McGeorge Bundy and Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, for example, both advocated a measured, controlled sequence of raids, carried out jointly with the GVN and directed solely against DRV military targets and infiltration routes. In their view, the intensity of the attacks was to be varied with the level of VC outrages in SVN or might be progressively raised. But whereas McGeorge Bundy's objective was to influence the course of the struggle in the South (boosting GVN morale, improving US bargaining power with the GVN, exerting a depressing effect on VC cadre), Ambassador Taylor's principal aim was "to bring increasing pressure on the DRV to cease its intervention." It was coercion of the North, rather than a rededication of the GVN to the struggle in the South that Taylor regarded as the real benefit of a reprisal policy. CINCPAC, on the other hand, insisted that the program would have to be a very forceful one -- a "graduated pressures" rather than a "graduated reprisal" philosophy -- if the DRV were to be persuaded to acceed to a cessation on U.S. terms. The Joint Chiefs, in turn, (and especially Air Force Chief of Staff General McConnell) believed that the much heavier air strike recommendations repeatedly made by the JCS during the preceding six months were more appropriate than the mild actions proposed by Taylor and Bundy.
Initiating ROLLING THUNDER. A firm decision to adopt "a program of measured and limited air action jointly with the GVN against selected military targets in the DRV" was made by the President on February 13, and communicated to Ambassador Taylor in Saigon. Details of the program were deliberately left vague, as the President wished to preserve maximum flexibility. The first strike was set for February 20 and Taylor was directed to obtain GVN concurrence. A semi-coup in Saigon, however, compelled postponement and cancellation of this and several subsequent strikes. Political clearance was not given until the turbulence was calmed with the departure of General Nguyen Khanh from Vietnam on Feb 25. U.S. reluctance to launch air attacks during this time was further reinforced by a UK-USSR diplomatic initiative to reactivate the Cochairmanship of the 1954 Geneva Conference with a view to involving the members of that conference in a consideration of the Vietnam crisis. Air strikes executed at that moment, it was feared, might sabotage that diplomatic gambit, which Washington looked upon not as a potential negotiating opportunity, but as a convenient vehicle for public expression of a tough U.S.
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