A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

by Neil Sheehan

  Halberstam was a physical contrast to Vann. He stood six feet two inches and weighed about 180 pounds, none of it fat. His fellow reporters were in awe of his appetite and stamina. He would put away a lunch of soup, two filet mignons, french fries, salad, and pie à la mode, and then burn off every calorie in un-Kiplingesque activity through the heat of the tropical afternoon. His long arms, big hands, and broad shoulders, which he tended to hunch forward a bit as he walked, and a coiled-spring quality to his gait gave one the impression of a boxer or a football player. The impression was strengthened by his features. He had a square jaw and a ridge of a nose. Both were accentuated by a five-o’clock shadow and black hair close-cropped in imitation of the military crewcut. He wore glasses with thick lenses. The frames were heavy and unfashionable plastic ones of contrasting black and neutral tint. The glasses tended to hide his dark brown eyes, which were the softest element in his features and which laughed first when he was amused.

  He used this aggressive-looking body to communicate his mental combatí veness. His hands and arms and shoulders were always in motion when he talked. To emphasize his points he would stab out with a finger. If he suddenly discovered something he had missed or if he felt satisfaction at the phrasing of his words, he would ball his right fist and slap it into the palm of his left hand with a quick laugh. When he was explaining a complicated matter he had a way of arching his hands with his fingers together in the shape of bent wings and flashing them back and forth through the air, like a plane weaving and diving in a dogfight. All the while his hunched shoulders would roll with his arms and hands. One had the feeling that he was mentally boxing with a situation as he talked, convincing himself of what he thought was true at the same time that he battled off ideas he saw as false.

  This mental combativeness was the manifestation of other qualities that were to make Halberstam an ideal reporter for Vann’s endeavor. They were also qualities that were to make Halberstam one of those rare journalists who put a personal imprint on the opinions of their time, instead of simply reporting information of interest that disappears into the newspaper archives of libraries. He was a man who saw the world in light and dark colors with little shading in between. A capacity for outrage at injustice and wrongdoing was one of his guiding motivations. The capacity had been enlarged by five years spent on Southern newspapers, witnessing and writing about the early civil rights movement, after his graduation from Harvard in 1955. Articles on the struggle that he had written in his spare time for the Reporter, a magazine that preached the synthesis of domestic liberalism and foreign intervention and anti-Communism that was fashionable to the era, had gained him an invitation to join the Times from James “Scotty” Reston, the columnist who was then also chief of the newspaper’s Washington bureau.

  A certain ruthlessness in Halberstam’s character also shaped his reporting. At Harvard he had been inadvertently pitted in competition against a friend for the managing editorship of the Crimson, the college’s daily newspaper. The competition had become so savage that Halberstam had sickened of it emotionally by the time he won the job. He was asked why he had continued the competition if having to humiliate his friend to win the editorship had upset him so. “I guess I’m a killer,” he answered quietly after a moment’s thought. His answer was unjust to himself in that it left unmentioned his support and kindness to friends and colleagues in any other circumstances, but there was truth in it nonetheless. The ruthlessness showed in a fondness for metaphors drawn from war and the gladiator’s arena. A good reporter, he would say, had to have “a jugular instinct” to go for what was vital in a situation he was covering; a reporter had to hold his fire until he had built up credibility with his readers and then, when events gave him an opportunity, to overwhelm them with the truth in a series of dispatches delivered with the force of a rolling barrage of artillery shells.

  Halberstam was capable of changing his conclusions with time and differing circumstances. If his outrage at injustice and wrongdoing and the certainty that he had at last learned the truth of a situation came together, his zeal to communicate that truth infused his reporting with firm moral judgments about everybody and everything involved. He left his readers with no doubt as to which was the good and which was the evil side, and his “instinct for the jugular” brought thrusts at anyone impeding his just cause.

  David Halberstam’s generation, the generation of the 1950s and the momentous confrontation known as the Cold War, was the last generation of Americans to go so naively into the world. It was destined to lose its innocence in the war and be forced to grapple with the consequences of disillusionment. Halberstam was to end the decade in 1972 denouncing in his popular book The Best and the Brightest the very men—Robert McNamara, Maxwell Taylor, Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, and Walt Rostow—whose worldview he subscribed to so emotionally in these opening years of the Vietnam era when he met Vann. In 1963, Halberstam was still one with Vann—another janissary for the American system. He and Vann and so many like them were examples of the genius of the Anglo-Saxon society of the Northeast for co-opting the talents and loyalty of outsiders with its social democracy. A society that would give an uncouth redneck a place of respect in the officer corps of its army and the grandson of immigrant Jewish peddlers a Harvard education and a job on the New York Times was innately good, incapable of perpetrating evil in other lands. They were full of gratitude to that society and wanted to spread its good.

  As the two men saw more and more of each other in the weeks and months after Ap Bac, Halberstam was struck by Vann’s remarkable career promise and by how recklessly Vann was disregarding that promise. At thirty-eight, Vann was relatively young for his rank and position as one of the nine division senior advisors, and with his flair for leading men in war he stood out as the obvious star among his peers. His attributes indicated that this was a man who would go far in the Army. As Halberstam was to write in his Esquire profile in the fall of 1964, “Vann was … clearly on his way to a colonelcy, and with a very good chance for promotion to a generalas] star … clearly a man about to take off in his career, one of those men who reaches his mid-thirties and then begins to pull away from many of his contemporaries.” That Vann would recklessly disregard this career promise made him stand out still more sharply from his peers. It is precisely at this takeoff point in his career that an officer has the most at stake and, having also been molded by his profession, finds it impossible to be genuinely indiscreet with reporters. The majority of the lieutenant colonels heading the advisory detachments at the other eight divisions shared Vann’s views to varying degrees, but they spoke with discretion. For example, Fred Ladd at the 21st Division, the colleague closest to Vann in his thinking, was frank yet exercised some reserve in communicating his worries to us. Vann, who seemed to have more to lose than any of his peers, was alone among them in being heedless of the professional consequences.

  Not long after Ap Bac it became common knowledge that Vann was the principal source behind the harsher press criticism of official strategy. In order to bluff Harkins out of taking formal action against him, Vann resorted to the same loud denials he had made in claiming that he had not talked to the reporters about the battle. Otherwise Vann did not attempt to hide his game. Instead of restricting contact with Halberstam and the other resident correspondents as the level of irritation rose at Harkins’s headquarters, he made himself and his subordinates available to us with more freedom than ever. He did nothing to protect himself against the informal and effective means of revenge that powerful men like Harkins can exact against lesser beings who cross them in an institution like the Army. Despite the value of what Vann was doing, Halberstam began to feel guilty over the probable career consequences for him. He urged Vann to be more circumspect. Vann told him not to worry and to keep coming down. He seemed to want a confrontation with Harkins. Halberstam could think of no explanation for Vann’s recklessness other than moral heroism. The rest of us reached the same conclusion. Vann would give us an identical
answer when we cautioned him. We decided he was deliberately sacrificing his career in order to alert the nation to the danger of defeat in this war.

  Vann’s behavior had special meaning to Halberstam, because he drew a parallel with his late father’s conduct during World War II. Charles Halberstam’s practice of internal medicine and surgery in the Bronx had only recently started to prosper with the end of the Depression when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The draft began conscripting doctors, but Charles Halberstam did not have to go. He was beyond the draft age limit, forty-five years old. He had also done his turn in World War I, prior to medical school, enlisting in the Army and serving as a corpsman at a field evacuation hospital in France, where he had risen to sergeant and had been encouraged by the doctors to go into medicine. To the disappointment of Halberstam’s mother, Blanche, who had been looking forward to a substantial income after the hardship of the Depression years, Charles Halberstam quickly volunteered for service as an Army field surgeon. He was shipped overseas in 1943 and did not emerge from the Army until the fall of 1946 as a lieutenant colonel. He then died of a heart attack less than four years after resuming his practice in New York. Halberstam’s family had suffered for his father’s patriotism. They had also drawn pride from it. To Halberstam, being the son of a doctor did not make you legitimate in American society, if you were a Jew, but being the son of a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army did help to legitimize you. Even though Halberstam could not shake his feeling of apartness as a Jew, he had grown up with the sense that his father had earned the Halber-stams a right to a place in America. He saw what Vann was doing in the light of what his father had done. Vann’s actions were patriotism and self-sacrifice of the highest kind.

  Halberstam became convinced that Vann, for all of his analytical powers, was at bottom a simple man whose professional integrity was so diamond-hard and whose moral courage was so unyielding that he could not compromise on a matter of fundamental right and wrong. Vann confirmed his conclusion by once remarking to Halberstam that the trouble with compromise was that you put a right and a wrong together and you ended up with neither. War, Vann said, was much too serious a business for that. Vann appeared almost puritanical to Halberstam in his dedication to his mission of winning this war. He had a habit of staying overnight with one of the province chiefs at the end of a swing he made every week by jeep and light plane through the seven provinces of the zone. Dinner and an evening of talk were an opportunity for him to get to know and to size up each province chief. Halberstam found out what day he was going one week and arranged to accompany him. As they landed in the province capital where Vann had chosen to spend the night, Vann spoke to him in that intense way he did when he was giving a lesson: “You know, Halberstam, every time I spend a night with one of these province chiefs, they put women in front of me. I always refuse. It lowers our prestige in their eyes. They’re trying to get something they can hold over you. Too damn many Americans in this country are sleeping with Vietnamese women. It’s bad for our image. The Vietnamese don’t like it. It arouses their resentment.” Halberstam felt a rush of guilt. He had a Vietnamese girlfriend in Saigon. “Jesus,” he thought. “Am I undermining the war effort?”

  Although Vann had decided to turn to the press, he did not give up working within his own system. Nearly twenty years in the Army told him to persist. Each month Drummond sent a report to Harkins’s headquarters on the competing degrees of control exercised within the division zone by the Viet Cong and the Saigon regime. The report consisted of two parts: a colored tracing-paper overlay for the map accompanied by a written description that went into such details as which roads were safe or unsafe at what hours. The overlay was colored in blue for Saigon-controlled areas and in red for those controlled by the guerrillas. Drummond sent up the January report at the beginning of February. A couple of days later a major on Harkins’s intelligence staff called and said that Drummond had too much red on his map overlay. Other information available to the headquarters, the major said, claimed that a number of the areas Drummond had colored in red were still controlled by the Saigon authorities. The major told Drummond to review his information and submit a new report.

  Drummond knew right away what the rub was. He had been having trouble with these reports since Cao began to fake operations in October and the guerrillas started to recover. Harkins did not want to admit to Washington that his intelligence information showed a deterioration in the regime’s position in the northern half of the Delta. The complaint was always the same, that Drummond had too much red on his map overlay. On the previous occasion he had asked the major to identify some of the areas that were supposed to be under Saigon’s control. Drummond had checked and found out that Dam and the province chiefs would not go into them with less than a battalion. To be able to say he had looked himself, Drummond reconnoitered in a spotter plane. He returned with bullet holes in the plane. He informed Harkins’s headquarters that they were listing these areas as secure for the wrong people, but he doubted that his information had changed any listing. A couple of his acquaintances on Harkins’s staff let slip that because he had refused to dilute this previous report, it had been suppressed. The overlay forwarded to Washington had reflected a far greater degree of Saigon control. Drummond was determined not to back down on the report for January, because it recorded the most serious deterioration yet.

  The Viet Cong had become bolder and more active and were doing things in the daytime, such as harassing outposts, that they had usually dared only at night in the past. Two advisors driving back from Tan Hiep airstrip had almost been killed by a guerrilla standing alongside the road in front of a banana grove right near the Seminary. They had been fortunate enough to notice in time that this loitering farmer was armed with a carbine and had ducked as he raised it and blasted the windshield out of the jeep. The chief of the hamlet at the fork in the road above the Seminary had not been so lucky. An assassination squad walked into the hamlet on another day and gunned him down. The Viet Cong had criticized themselves in their after-action report on Ap Bac for having been too “passive in opposing the enemy” and had spoken of the need to better coordinate actions by all levels of fighters from local guerrillas to regulars in order to transform the countryside into a hell for their opponents. Drummond was seeing the first results of that self-criticism. The deterioration was especially marked between My Tho and Saigon along Route 4, the main road out of the Delta and the route by which the capital received most of its food.

  After the call from the major, Drummond contacted the captains serving as intelligence advisors in the province capitals throughout the division zone and asked if they or their counterparts wished to retreat from anything they had told him. No one wanted to soften anything, and some felt they had understated the increase in guerrilla control. With Vann’s permission, Drummond had all of the province intelligence advisors and their counterparts meet with him and Binh at My Tho. The new map overlay for Harkins’s headquarters that emerged from the meeting had more red on it than the original one, and the written section of the report was grimmer.

  Vann decided to time its arrival with a disconcerting message of his own. On February 8, 1963, he sent a secret three-page memorandum to Porter in Can Tho, as the chain of command required, but dispatched an “information copy” directly to Saigon so that Harkins would receive the memorandum immediately. Vann was hoping that his memorandum and the additional red on Drummond’s overlay might at last embarrass Harkins into accepting facts. He told Harkins that Drummond and Binh had reliable information locating Viet Cong regular or Regional companies at ten different sites and just as sound information on thirty-five locations where guerrillas were operating at platoon strength. He had tried to persuade Dam to attack them, but Dam, apparently on orders from Cao, refused to go near any of these forty-five Viet Cong units. Dam was instead imitating Cao’s farces of the previous fall and was staging one large operation after another of 1,000 to 3,000 troops in a
reas where the intelligence showed there were no Viet Cong or at most a smattering of local guerrillas. Vann proposed that Drummond draw up a list of priority targets in consultation with Porter’s intelligence officer and that Harkins then present the list to the Joint General Staff with a demand that JGS order Dam to attack these guerrillas.

  The memorandum sent Harkins into a renewed state of high dudgeon. He ordered his intelligence chief, Col. James Winterbottom of the Air Force, to go down to My Tho with a team of his subordinates. They were to interrogate Vann and Drummond, compare the intelligence files at the Seminary and the 7th Division headquarters with the February 8 memorandum and Drummond’s control report, and search carefully for discrepancies. If anything had been exaggerated, Harkins was going to fire Vann.

  Harkins had an Air Force officer as his intelligence chief because the bureaucratization of the American military hierarchy had led to a treaty arrangement decreeing that every service had to have a share of the action. Winterbottom’s specialty had been photo interpretation for the Strategic Air Command, odd credentials for counterguerrilla war. Nevertheless, Drummond had discovered in prior dealings that the worst impediment to Winterbottom’s performance was not his pre-Vietnam experience but the fact that he worked directly for Harkins. Winter-bottom had turned out to be a decent man who would often listen. He and his team spent eight hours in My Tho being briefed by Drummond, questioning him and Vann, and examining the files. (One of the staff officers let slip to Drummond how provoked the commanding general was by the red on his overlays.) When Winterbottom and his team returned to Saigon, Vann and Drummond had reason to hope that they might at last have forced some truth into the system. “There is no question in my mind,” Winterbottom assured Drummond, “that you have the necessary data to back up your report.” He told Vann that he thought the February 8 memorandum had also been accurate and fair.