During the hearings, Stennis used his allotted time to applaud the military repeatedly, adding that he, too, supported a significant expansion of the war. And he added a political edge to the debate, charging the Johnson administration with holding back in Vietnam when it should be charging ahead. He was particularly critical of McNamara’s handling of the air war. Stennis leaked to the press that Admiral Sharp, during his testimony, had shown the subcommittee additional military targets that he said should have been placed on the eligible target list. Why hadn’t McNamara approved these targets? Why hadn’t Johnson allowed the mining of Haiphong harbor? Stennis publicly doubted that the civilians in the Johnson administration could bring the war to a successful conclusion, a direct challenge to the president’s authority as commander in chief and the charge that Johnson feared most.

McNamara’s turn came on Aug. 25, and he didn’t disappoint. He delivered a point-by-point rebuttal of the Pentagon brass’s claims. Nothing, he said, would move the North Vietnamese: “There is little reason to believe that any level of conventional air or naval action, short of sustained and systematic bombing of the population centers” — something the Johnson administration was not willing to do — “will deprive the North Vietnamese of their willingness to continue to support their government’s efforts to upset and take over the government of South Vietnam.”

Addressing the concerns about military targets Stennis had raised in the press, McNamara declared that 85 percent of the targets recommended by the Joint Chiefs had been approved for strikes and that there had been no prohibitions on bombing any targets of military significance. He couldn’t approve the chiefs’ proposals because, however tempting it might be to try to save South Vietnam by bombing North Vietnam, the possibility of achieving victory, or even forcing a negotiated settlement, in that way was “completely illusory.” To pursue this strategy, he declared, “would not only be futile but would involve risks to our personnel and to our nation that I am unable to recommend.”

Not surprisingly, Stennis and the other members of his hawkish subcommittee sided with the military. Its final report chastised McNamara’s policy of gradualism and determined that “logic and prudence require that the decision be with the unanimous weight of professional military judgment.” The subcommittee said it was not advocating “the indiscriminate bombing” of civilian population centers, but it argued that the policy of “a carefully controlled, restricted and graduated buildup of bombing pressure which discounted the professional judgment of our best military experts” had not “done the job.” The report concluded that McNamara had “shackled” the American military in Vietnam and that it was “high time” to allow the “military voice to be heard in connection with the tactical details of military operations.”

Johnson was on the horns of a dilemma. Highly attuned to public opinion, he was already skeptical of either option his military advisers had presented: He believed that those who opposed the war would not be placated by any restriction on the bombing, even the total halt McNamara favored; they wanted a complete withdrawal of American troops. He also thought that expanding the war, as the Joint Chiefs proposed, would cost him public support for his Vietnam policies. At the same time, Johnson feared that there would be a revolt in his military command if he imposed further restrictions on the military. There were already unsubstantiated rumors that the chiefs were going to resign en masse if Johnson further limited the bombing.

Stennis’s hearings, coming at what might have been a strategic turning point in the war, made a deeper presidential reckoning with the war almost impossible. Instead, Johnson tried to bridge the gap between McNamara and the Joint Chiefs without addressing the fundamental issues at the root of their rupture. Wanting neither to challenge the hawks nor to intensify the public debate over bombing, he tried to chart a middle course when there probably was none that could be successful. He rejected McNamara’s proposed limitations on the bombing, but he expanded the bombing targets around Hanoi and Haiphong. He also rejected the military’s request for 200,000 additional troops — not all of whom would have gone to Vietnam — but he did give Gen. William Westmoreland, the officer in charge of America’s military effort in Vietnam, 55,000 new troops. The one measure Johnson rejected outright was mining Haiphong harbor: He worried that a Soviet or Chinese supply ship might be hit, leading to bigger problems than Vietnam.

Johnson thought that he could balance the various American viewpoints on bombing and the war without resolving the administration’s fundamental dilemma: whether to get out of Vietnam altogether or to escalate the war. This was a major mistake. Without a sound strategy based on a full and frank debate within the administration, Johnson could only tinker with tactics, and this pleased no one. By not providing clear direction from the White House, Johnson lost the consensus he so desperately needed to lead effectively.