IN THE MIDDLE of these intense operations, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, the man considered the architect of the Vietnam War, admitted to President Johnson that the American war wasn’t going according to plan.
The war hawk was becoming a dove.
On May 19, 1967, the day Leroy was injured, McNamara sent a long memorandum to President Johnson suggesting a radical new course. He argued against the military’s request to increase troop levels to 671,616 soldiers and against expanding the ground war to Cambodia and North Vietnam. Instead, he favored a reduction in bombing of North Vietnam, holding troop levels around 400,000 and narrowing American goals to negotiating a settlement. In so many words, he said he saw no evidence that the US military was winning the war or could ever win the war.
This was heresy.
McNamara began by describing how unpopular the war had become in the United States, citing the growing casualties, the widening war, and the suffering of Vietnamese civilians. “Most Americans are convinced that somehow we should not have gotten this deeply in. All want the war ended and expect their president to end it. Successfully. Or else.”
Then McNamara demolished the military’s argument that the US was winning, using data from the intelligence services and the military. America’s technological advantage, he argued, was proving brutally ineffective. The prime example was the nearly 800,000 tons of bombs already dropped on North Vietnam—far more than were dropped during the Korean War.
“There continues to be no sign that the bombing has reduced Hanoi’s will to resist or her ability to ship the necessary supplies south.”
International opinion was confounded by the escalating war, too. “The picture of the world’s greatest super-power killing or seriously injuring 1,000 non-combatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one,” he wrote.24
McNamara’s verdict could have been lifted from the strongest antiwar pamphlets. The defense secretary then offered a solution. First, he reassured his president the United States had already won. The original intent of the war had been to prevent communist China from expanding in Asia and that had been achieved. The dominos had not fallen. McNamara was correct.
“The time has come,” he concluded, to reaffirm America’s minimum objectives: “to see that the people of South Vietnam are permitted to determine their own future” with the caveat that “this commitment ceases if the country ceases to help itself.”
The administration should take steps to negotiate a peace settlement.
Johnson was furious with McNamara, considering the new position something of a betrayal. The official US position was adamantly opposed to negotiations. The president sided with the military chiefs. Without any qualms, Johnson let McNamara understand it was time for him to go. The change in policy would not become official until November 1967.
All the wrangling over strategy was done behind closed doors. The troops and the journalists in the field would continue to hear the positive spin of progress on the battlefield. Nothing in the press at the time hinted at the deepening pessimism of Washington’s leaders, especially in the intelligence community.
The US offensives in the South and bombing of the North intensified. The South Vietnamese army was reduced to the secondary role of pacifying the countryside, and even that wasn’t going well, as McNamara had observed.
North Vietnamese propaganda spotlighted how the “colossal army” of the “imperialist” United States had reduced the “puppet troops” of the South Vietnamese to a subservient role.25
The mockery from the North for South Vietnam’s weakness was more than propaganda. It was a fact. South Vietnam could not fight its own war; it needed the US. Without the American military leading the way, their troops would go down in defeat. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong also needed help: China provided essential military equipment—tanks, artillery pieces, radar, planes, and weapons—as well as safe havens and basic necessities from shoes and toothpaste to uniforms, and the Soviet Union provided big weapons and military aid, each country trying to counter the influence of the other—but the Vietnamese communists were fighting their own war. No Chinese or Soviet air force bombed South Vietnam; no Chinese or Soviet troops marched south to fight against ARVN.
FRANKIE FITZGERALD SPENT July and August of 1967 in Glin Castle, in County Limerick, on the Shannon River, where she began her project on the origins and meaning of the war in Vietnam.
Frankie had had only the haziest idea of her father’s side of the family until college, when she met Desmond John Villiers FitzGerald, the 29th Knight of Glin, who invited her to stay. Frankie happily accepted the invitation and decamped to an Irish Georgian castle.26
Since her move back to the US, Frankie and Ward Just had kept alive their long-distance romance with letters about love and Vietnam. At Christmas 1966, Just wrote from Saigon: “Your letters come as great lifts to the spirit. I’m off to Quang Duc tomorrow to write my year-ender. I’m using you and Sheehan as the standard to be bettered.… You are much missed here. Much much love and joyeau noel.”27
Frankie was now his professional equal, praising her in the same sentence with Neil Sheehan.
Two months later he wrote to tell her about the death of Bernard Fall, the great French historian and journalist, and to offer solace. Fall had been a hero of Frankie’s whom she met on one of his last reporting visits to South Vietnam. He had covered the French Indochina War and now the American war, and while he initially supported the Americans, he had concluded the US had lost the political war. For FitzGerald, he was larger than life, an intellectual like Mus and a down-to-earth courageous foreign correspondent. Fall had been killed when he trod on a landmine as he was recording a taped dispatch. He was only forty years old. To cheer Frankie up, Just wrote her a ditty from Singapore:
I think that I shall never see
(which sight my heart imperiled)
A poem as lovely as this tree,
(her real name’s FitzGerald)
A tree who looks like God all day,
Exquisite fruit of the CIA
Who fashions dreams of wildest scandals
With one thong of her Hong Kong sandals.
To love her is like landing on an aircraft carrier
Think of the astronaut ecstasy of the one who will marry her?28
Finishing his Vietnam tour in May 1967, Just wrote that “I miss you more than I can say.” Immediately after he arrived in Washington, he was sent to Israel to cover the Six Day War. When that conflict ended on June 10, he cabled her from Rome: Rendezvous June Twenty Ninth Paris Love Ward.29
Ireland was their first chance to recover the romance of Vietnam. While Paris was delightful, their expectations hadn’t matched, exactly. Frankie pushed back from any discussion of marriage—she did not want to become a wife. Just dropped the subject and spoke instead about settling into his new job in Washington. In Ireland, they could relax for two months and suspend knotty discussions while discovering each other anew without pressing daily deadlines. And they were in a country at peace. They wrote their respective books in the deep silence of the castle during the day, with a staff to cater to their needs. They walked in the palatial gardens, and at night they drove to the town of Glin for drinks at the bars and conversations with locals who couldn’t care less about Vietnam.
Ward Just thrived in the idyllic setting. His book—a war correspondent’s memoir—was taking shape and included an entire chapter on his near fatal injury. His working title, and the book’s eventual title, was “To What End: Report from Vietnam.” He asked the simple question: What did the United States think it was doing in the war? Despite his best efforts, he couldn’t see anything to redeem it. He introduced FitzGerald in his first chapter, “Saigon and Other Syndromes,” describing her as a beautiful reporter recently arrived from New York whom he escorts through bars and the cynical hustles of the city.
She talked through the book wi
th Just, helping with his memory, discussing the context of certain events. She had witnessed many of the episodes he recounted; Frankie was part of his war.
Meanwhile, FitzGerald was writing an outline for a very different book, building off her fifteen-page magazine piece on the war to be published that August in the Atlantic. Her theme was the depth and danger of American misconceptions about the war and the Vietnamese, and it would be told from the Vietnamese point of view. The book would challenge the American justification of the war and underline the enormous damage it was doing in Vietnam and to the social fabric of the United States.
She was attempting to break into an almost entirely male world. Women rarely wrote serious books on war, especially not wars that were still raging. Books on war were almost exclusively the purview of men.
But FitzGerald was escaping the pigeonhole of a wealthy intellectual dabbling in war and, in some quarters, was being perceived as a serious if young journalist. She now wanted to become a fully respected chronicler of the war in Vietnam.
The romance seemed easy while they were writing. They ate well at the castle. They were regulars at a few pubs. They went to Ballybunion Greyhound Stadium and bet on the dog races.
Then on July 23, the castle’s telephone rang with a call for Frankie. It was an official from the CIA station in London. A soft voice said that her father had collapsed and died playing tennis at his country home in Virginia. Frankie wrote that she “felt like my stomach had been torn out.”30
Desmond FitzGerald was only fifty-seven years old. Frankie’s beloved father had often closed his letters: “I miss you very badly, Frankie and always will when we are away from each other, love Daddy.” Yet he hadn’t visited her in Vietnam. And now he would never read her book. The inspiration for her Asian obsession was dead. She could not stop crying: “I went into a paroxysm of tears.”
“Ward let me cry and fed me Scotch and curled up around me in bed. But it was no substitute.”
She caught the first plane to Washington. Just stayed behind in Ireland to continue writing. FitzGerald’s funeral was impressive. Vice President Hubert Humphrey attended, along with Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, and enough CIA officials to fill the pews. Frankie wept throughout. “His death felt like a desertion—so strong were my emotions.”31
Just wrote her a reassuring note from the castle: “I’m all right here except that it’s lonely and quiet and Joan calls me Mr. FitzGerald and gets flustered.… Please hurry back, Much love.”
Frankie did return quickly to Ireland, but for the rest of their time in Glin, she couldn’t concentrate on writing. As always, the women in her family looked after her from afar. Her mother sent a package with all of the obituaries about her father. FitzGerald read and reread a note from her maternal grandmother, Mary Peabody, an outsized figure who had been jailed at the age of seventy-two for taking part in a civil rights protest in Florida. Grandmother Peabody wrote: “All of us share your sorrow over your father’s death. We were so fond of him… he was working so hard for the U.S. that he will be terribly missed—and he was much too young.”32
Determined, Just finished writing most of his book and stayed through August before returning to the US. But the intimacy was fading. Frankie knew that “eventually he got annoyed with me. All I was thinking about was my father and not about him.”
She was still grieving when, two months later, Just sent her a birthday letter with what he described as an “unusual” announcement. He had married another woman a few days earlier.33
Just had ended what was considered the great romance of the Vietnam War with a betrayal carried out like a thief in the night. He had been seeing another woman in Washington and impulsively married her without bothering to break up his romance with Frankie.
FitzGerald was surprised, maybe even shocked, but she disguised whatever she felt with a simple response: “He said he knew her from before.”
Just’s friends in Washington were also shocked. When Just called Ann and Walter Pincus to ask them to witness his upcoming marriage, they had no idea who the bride was: “We thought it was Frankie, but we didn’t know. Ward said, no, it was Anne Harvey. We had no idea.”34
After the ceremony at a suburban courthouse, the four of them celebrated with a picnic lunch. Just’s book was published the next year. He removed Frances FitzGerald’s name from the book, leaving only a description of an anonymous reporter clearly based on her. In his introduction, he said he wrote the book in Ireland, “a country I felt would be in every respect the reverse of South Vietnam,” implying it was his idea with no acknowledgment that he had been with Frankie as a guest at her cousin’s Irish castle.
He had erased Frankie, his wartime love, from his Vietnam story.
BY 1967, THE war had taken over the American conversation so much that Vogue published three of FitzGerald’s articles from Vietnam, setting some record for a fashion magazine’s concern about the conflict.35 The most intriguing was “The Power Set: The Fragile but Dominating Women of Vietnam.” She begins with two women: “Like butterflies they have floated in and, folding the panels of their au dais [traditional tunics], have settled on the couch.”36
One of these butterflies owned two bars on the toughest street in Saigon. The other was applying for a loan to buy an ice plant in Da Nang. In war, FitzGerald wrote, Vietnamese women were taking advantage of the vacuum of manpower “to go to the limit of escaping their condition as women.” The two businesswomen had become the norm, she wrote, as women during the war “control virtually all of the business in Saigon that is not monopolized by the Chinese.”
That last claim may have been an exaggeration, but FitzGerald’s interest in the status of all Vietnamese women—beyond the prostitutes and refugees who appeared routinely in other stories—was unique. No other correspondent at the time explored the subject. The few women reporters working in Vietnam were allergic to any assignment that smacked of a women’s page feature.
FitzGerald’s epic fifteen-page article on the war, “The Struggle and the War: The Maze of Vietnamese Politics,” was published in the Atlantic in August 1967 while she was in Ireland. Nothing she had written before had such an impact. With this piece she marked out her territory. For the first time an American journalist looked at the war from the Vietnamese point of view. She wrote with a disciplined and deep appreciation of Vietnamese history, culture, and politics. In her telling, Vietnam came alive as a separate country, not just an American battleground, with more than a thousand years of rich history of independence interrupted by centuries under the thumb of China and its Confucian culture and later French colonial masters. She showed how these foreign nations enriched and distorted Vietnamese society and how the Vietnamese tried to recover their integrity.
She described how the Americans had little interest in understanding the Vietnamese as a separate culture outside the American experience and how this led to Americans adopting strategies and policies based on dangerous misconceptions of Vietnam and the war that undermined their own cause.
FitzGerald wrote: “In the context of Southern [Vietnamese] politics the American vision of a popular, non-Communist government looks today, as it did twelve years ago, as improbable as an air-conditioned motel in the middle of a trackless jungle.”
By the end of the piece, she convincingly wrote there was little evidence that the government of South Vietnam could survive without the Americans—their money, their military power, and their authority. She predicted with unusual foresight: “the intractable problem for the United States is not the war but the peace.”
In other words, with victory out of reach, how could the US leave Vietnam without discrediting the whole costly operation?
The article was noticed. While most war correspondents are lauded for their physical bravery, FitzGerald was exhibiting a quieter moral courage with her willingness to puncture some of the myths and consequences of the American war effort.
Henry Kissinger,
still an informal adviser on the war, was impressed. He wrote to her: “Dear Frankie: I have been promoting your article in the Atlantic all over Martha’s Vineyard.… Shall we try to get together either in Boston or New York? Warm regards. Sincerely yours.”37
One year later he would take charge of Vietnam policy under newly elected President Richard M. Nixon.
John T. McAlister Jr., a lecturer at Princeton University, telephoned her when she was back in New York to praise the piece. He also asked Frankie if she wanted to meet Paul Mus, the French sociologist whom she had cited in the article.38 McAlister had studied under Mus at Yale, fought in the Vietnam War, and then returned to become Mus’s collaborator on a book about the Vietnamese and their revolution.
Could FitzGerald come to Yale where Mus was a visiting professor? He wanted to meet her.
FitzGerald had no idea that Mus was in the United States.
The normally distant but gracious young woman was starstruck when she visited Mus at his campus office in October 1967. The French professor looked the part of an intellectual. He was European in dress, wearing a proper suit and tie, and in manner. He had a comforting and expansive style, gesturing broadly with his arms, smiling easily, raising his eyebrows, modulating his French accent when speaking English, pleased to switch to his native langue. Plus, he was funny.
FitzGerald listened intently to the legend who had grown up in Hanoi, trekked for days to ask Ho Chi Minh to consider a cease-fire with France, and then became an opponent of the French war. His office was tastefully accented with painted scrolls and silver mementos among the inevitably well-organized bookcases. He was one of the first professors in Yale’s Southeast Asian department and knew all too well the level of Americans’ general ignorance about Vietnam.
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