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

by Neil Sheehan

  Perry shouted the message down to me as I was climbing out of the taxi a moment later. I jumped back inside and yelled at the driver to race for Halberstam’s house. He had no phone at home. There was a police precinct headquarters a couple of blocks before his house. When the taxi passed it I could see that the floodlit compound was filled with the U.S. Army model two-and-a-half-ton trucks the military aid program provided and that soldiers in battle gear and police were climbing into them. We met the raiding convoy a few minutes later as the trucks were pulling out of the compound and starting for Xa Loi and the taxi, with Halberstam now inside, came hurtling back in the same direction. By gesturing to the driver and shouting at him in a mixture of French and pidgin Vietnamese, Halberstam and I browbeat him into slipping the tiny Renault between the second and third trucks in the convoy. He was understandably terrified. We assumed that the police at the tail end of the convoy would block the street as soon as the trucks reached the pagoda.

  The raid on Xa Loi, like those on the pagodas elsewhere in South Vietnam, was flawlessly executed. It reminded me of a scene from a movie of the French Resistance—the scene when the Gestapo arrive at the Resistance hideout in Paris. As the drivers of the trucks in our convoy slammed to a stop beside the pagoda compound, two more convoys converged on the place from opposite directions. The police and troops in the trucks vaulted to the pavement, and the officers shouted orders and formed up their units. The gong at the top of the pagoda started to clang an alarm into the night. The monks added to this din of helplessness by beating on pots and pans. The police battered open the pagoda gate and then squads of ARVN Special Forces troops, in trim camouflage fatigues and berets, with submachine guns held high, pranced up before the gate to lead the assault.

  The ARVN Special Forces were another creation of the CIA that the Ngo Dinhs had turned to their private purpose. The CIA had trained and armed this elite unit for commando operations against the guerrillas and for forays into Laos and the North. The Ngo Dinhs had always had another goal in mind, which explained why the ARVN Special Forces had been held back and never employed effectively against the Viet Cong. The family had hoodwinked the CIA into forming a Praetorian Guard for them. They had made certain that the Special Forces troops were recruited mainly from Central and North Vietnamese Catholic families and had put them under command of a man they trusted absolutely, Lt. Col. Le QuangTung, another Central Vietnamese Catholic.

  There was enough illumination from the streetlamps and the headlights of the trucks for Halberstam and me to see the shoulder patches of the troops from the convoys as they assembled. None of them were regular ARVN soldiers or paratroopers. They were all Tung’s men. Diem and Nhu did not trust the regular army for this internal cleansing. For this work they were using their household troops. Colonel Tung was literally a man of their household. He had been a family servant of the Ngo Dinhs before becoming a noncom in the French Expeditionary Corps. Diem had given him his officer’s commission. The rest of the raiders were the Combat Police the CIA had also created, in their own distinctive camouflage uniforms, and the French holdovers—the ordinary, white-uniformed National Police.

  An officer shouted a command, and the first of the prancing squads charged through the pagoda gate, followed by more Special Forces troops and police. The crash of breaking glass began, and the splintering of doors giving way to boot heels and the butts of submachine guns. Shots interspersed with the screams of the monks being dragged from their rooms, and there were bursts of automatic-weapons fire from other Special Forces troops stationed behind the pagoda who were shooting BARs to stop any of the monks from escaping over the rear wall. Trucks with canopies of dark green canvas erected over the beds to conceal the cargo backed up to the gate. The police hurled figures in orange robes inside. When one truck was filled and pulled away for Saigon’s Chi Hoa Prison, another backed up in its place.

  The drama went on for two hours, because some of the monks barricaded themselves in their rooms with stacks of furniture. Two monks managed to escape over the rear wall despite the bullets from the BARs and took shelter in a U.S.-owned building right next to the pagoda. It was the four-story Saigon headquarters of AID. The most militant of the Buddhist leaders, Thich Tri Quang (Thich is the Vietnamese honorific for a monk), who had organized the first protest meeting in Hue and who knew that he was marked for death, stole out of the pagoda just before the raid with two fellow monks and went into hiding. Approximately 1, 400 monks and nuns at Xa Loi and other pagodas in South Vietnam were arrested that night, including some lay followers who had gone to the pagodas as an act of faith. Thirty of the monks at Xa Loi were wounded, and seven were never heard from again. They were apparently killed and their bodies disposed of secretly. The raids were bloodiest in Hue. About thirty monks and student followers were shot or clubbed to death there, and the great statue of Buddha in Hue’s main Tu Dam Pagoda was smashed.

  Diem declared martial law. He put Saigon under Brig. Gen. Ton That Dinh, a boisterous ex-French paratrooper, given to Scotch and loyal to the Ngo Dinhs. A 9:00 P.M. curfew was imposed. The troops and police had orders to shoot to kill anyone on the streets after curfew who did not have a pass and tried to flee arrest. Under the cover of night and curfew the police ransacked houses and apartments and rounded up more suspected opponents of the regime. Fear was as tangible in Saigon as touching one’s skin. The dissident intelligence officer who had passed on the warning from his gangster acquaintances—and who was involved in an abortive coup plot and had arranged for Halberstam to witness the coup from its command post if the plot went forward—fled for his life. A lycée classmate who owned several freighters shipped him to Yokohama with a load of fertilizer.

  Halberstam and I no longer dared to sleep at home. We slept every night for the next three weeks at the house of John Mecklin, the USIS chief, who was kind enough to give us shelter. I took Nguyen Ngoc Rao to Mecklin’s house with me. He had courageously refused to quit and hide, despite pleas from his family. While Mecklin’s house did not have diplomatic immunity, it was U.S. property, and we assumed that at night we were safer there from arrest or worse. Tran Van Chuong, Madame Nhu’s father and the regime’s ambassador in Washington, resigned, announcing that now there was “not one chance in a hundred for victory” over the Communists with his daughter and her husband and brother-in-law in power. Her mother, Saigon’s official observer at the UN, resigned with him, as did most of the embassy staff.

  The press spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, who never had anything to announce, telephoned in hysteria. The foreign minister, a meek man named Vu Van Mau, had also resigned, shaved his head like a monk, and asked Diem for permission to go on a pilgrimage to India. Diem gave consent. The press and the diplomatic corps assembled at Tan Son Nhut to see him off. He never arrived. Nhu had General Dinh arrest Mau on his way to the airport. Another general persuaded Dinh to put the former foreign minister under house arrest, not in a cell, and to let him keep his passport. “Tomorrow you may be given the order to have me arrested,” the other general said to Dinh. “Be good to me, eh? Get me a nice cell and put a pretty girl in it.”

  The Saigon University students rioted. Hundreds were beaten and arrested. Diem closed the university. (He had already closed the South’s other university at Hue because of demonstrations there.) The high school students then rioted. The schools that rioted first were the best Vietnamese high schools, many of the students the sons and daughters of civil servants and military officers.

  At Trung Vuong, a famous girls’ school, the police were met in the yard by long lines of young ladies, dressed in the pale blue ao dai that was their school uniform, holding hands and chanting in high-pitched voices: “Da Dao Ngo Dinh Diem!” (Down with Ngo Dinh Diem!), “Da Dao Ngo Dinh Nhu!” “Da Dao Tran Le Xuan!” (Madame Nhu in the insulting form of her maiden name). The boys were violent. They smashed the windows with their desks and chairs and hung banners on the outside walls that were more explicit in their insults to Madame Nhu.


  The Ngo Dinhs proceeded to arrest the children of the people who ran the country for them. One morning the trucks hauled more than 1,000 high school students off to jail. As the police burst into the schoolyards, jeeps and staff cars would pull up and officers would dash in and try to rescue their children. This prolonged suicide of the dynasty that Lansdale had founded became a theater of the bizarre. At a high school one morning a plainclothesman was pushing a boy toward a van and kicking him hard. A senior police officer in uniform went manic at the sight. He grabbed the plainclothesman and beat him wildly with a truncheon. Diem closed the high schools too.

  General Dinh boasted in French to Lou Conein, his old CIA acquaintance from earlier years: “I, Dinh, am a great national hero. I have defeated the American, Cabot Lodge. He was on his way here to pull a coup d’état, but I, Dinh the hero, have foiled him.”

  He arrived at Tan Son Nhut in a drizzling rain two nights after the raids on the pagodas. He looked a bit old-fashioned when the door of the plane opened and he emerged into the glare of the television spotlights with a straw hat in his hand. As he walked down the steps of the gangway, one saw that he was too long of limb at nearly six feet three inches to be called lanky. He was, rather, the lean and angular man that popular legend said New England Yankees were supposed to be. His profile was cut precisely, the jaw pronounced, the nose large and slightly hooked. Sixty-one years had rounded his shoulders, brought his neck and head forward, and grayed his hair. Otherwise one could still recognize the man in the photographs of his prime—the freshman senator from Massachusetts in 1936, the one Republican star in Franklin Roosevelt’s landslide against Alfred Landon; the Army lieutenant colonel on the Western Front in World War II; a leading Republican senator of the postwar era, the national political strategist who had persuaded Eisenhower to run for president and had been Ike’s campaign manager in 1952; Eisenhower’s ambassador to the United Nations when the post had truly been second in rank and prestige to that of the secretary of state; the man Eisenhower had trusted to escort Nikita Khrushchev on his historic tour of the United States in 1959; and then what had seemed an unsatisfactory end to his public life, Nixon’s running mate in the 1960 election against Kennedy.

  The straw hat was a clue to the man. Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., was an anachronism in American public life by the 1960s—a man of character and lineage with independent political stature. He had modeled himself on the grandfather after whom he had been named, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Republican senator from Massachusetts for thirty-one years, closest friend and collaborator of Theodore Roosevelt, and one of the founders of the American empire. If any two men could claim principal responsibility for the seizure of the Philippines and the transformation of the United States into a power abroad, the elder Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt would be those two men. Lodge’s grandfather had been at his most brilliant as an orator when he had been calling the country to its new destiny on the eve of the war with Spain that had started the imperial venture. The Senate galleries would fill to hear him speak. He had been the author of the famous description of the commencement: “It has been a splendid little war.” It was yet another irony of this war in Vietnam that sixty-five years after that beginning the grandson of one of the founders should be sent to Saigon to resolve a major crisis of the overseas order, a crisis that was eventually to challenge the American role in the world that the grandfather had initiated and the grandson had helped bring to maturity.

  Halberstam and I and the other correspondents would have felt less beleaguered had we been privy to the secret debate in Washington. We did not realize that our dispatches had been arming Averell Harriman, who had moved up to become under secretary of state for political affairs, and Roger Hilsman, who had replaced Harriman in the Far Eastern affairs post at State, in their attempt to persuade Kennedy to authorize the overthrow of Diem and his family. We would have been still more encouraged had we known how much our reporting—and Vann’s view of the war as it was reflected in that reporting—had contributed to shaping the judgment of this man who was to take the power of the United States into his hands in Vietnam in the late summer and fall of 1963 and wield it as he saw fit.

  Shortly after his arrival, Halberstam, Browne, and I were invited to have lunch, individually, with the new ambassador and his wife, Emily, a lady from the Boston merchant family of Sears, whose sprightliness and wit leavened the marriage. We were told that the lunches were to be private, that Mr. Lodge wanted our “advice.” When my turn came he questioned me about the regime, the Buddhist crisis, and the war for about an hour at the table and over coffee afterward in the drawing room of the embassy residence. He put the questions matter-of-factly. I watched his face to see what he thought of the answers, but his expression stayed blandly uncommunicative. I told him, in sum, that the Ngo Dinhs were so mad and hated that they were incapable of governing, that the Viet Cong were gaining rapidly in the countryside, and that if Diem and his family stayed in power the war was certain to be lost. If they were replaced by a military regime there was no guarantee that a junta of generals would do better, but there was hope that they might. With the Ngo Dinhs one could look forward only to defeat.

  We had been warned that Lodge was to do the questioning, that we were not to attempt to pry anything out of him. I did not want to leave, however, without obtaining something. “And what’s your impression, Mr. Ambassador?” I asked as it was time to go.

  He was sitting on the couch beside his wife, his legs crossed lazily and his arm extended behind her. He smiled. “About the same as yours,” he said.

  I was skeptical of his proffered frankness. I wondered if this was more flattery, as inviting reporters in their twenties to give “advice” to Henry Cabot Lodge had been, regardless of how sincerely he might be seeking information.

  In retrospect, I was wrong to be skeptical, and the other reporters and I soon ceased to be. Lodge’s public behavior and the secret cables in the Pentagon Papers disclose that he had virtually made up his mind before he arrived. “We are launched on a course from which there is no respectable turning back: the overthrow of the Diem government,” he told Kennedy in a top-secret cable just a week after he landed in the rain at Tan Son Nhut and prior to any luncheon interrogations. He gave the president the “fundamental” reason that the United States could not shrink from this intimidating business: “There is no possibility, in my view, that the war can be won under a Diem administration.”

  Our reporting and Vann’s investment in it might have been wasted on most of the other important figures in the U.S. government. The effort had not been wasted on Lodge. The explanation was not that he had spent most of his twenties as a reporter and editorial writer, first for the Boston Transcript and then for the New York Herald Tribune. The explanation was in the peculiar mix of the man—the self-containment of the aristocrat, the sensitivity of the politician to human factors, and a perspective on the military leaders of the 1960s that reached back into the pre-World War II era. Unlike Kennedy, McNamara, and Rusk, he did not think that these generals were necessarily more competent to judge wars than he was. Taylor and Harkins, an old military acquaintance of Lodge’s as another Bostonian, had been his contemporaries in the Army. He had followed the martial tradition of his family by joining the Cavalry Reserve in Boston in 1923, had gone on maneuvers every summer, and had progressed with the Army of the ’20s and ’30s from horses to the tanks of Patton’s new 2nd Armored Division in the maneuvers of 1941. He had been in the first tank fighting of the war to involve Americans in mid-1942 when Marshall and Eisenhower had arranged for him to lead an exploratory mission to the British Eighth Army in Libya and Rommel had unexpectedly attacked. Henry Stimson, the secretary of war, had managed to keep Lodge in the Senate as the Army’s unofficial representative there until the beginning of 1944. With the battle for Europe coming, Lodge had been unable to resist any longer. He had resigned his seat to serve as a lieutenant colonel, the first senator to do so since the Civil War. After World War
II he had maintained his interest in military affairs and in 1963 was a major general in the active reserve.

  Lodge had been assured in briefings at the Pentagon and at Admiral Felt’s headquarters in Honolulu that the reporters were contriving stories about flaws in the Saigon forces and Viet Cong gains. He had thought it unlikely that reporters as a group would consistently invent such information. He had also decided that a regime as grotesque as Diem’s in its political behavior could not be expected to win a war. He had known that his invitations to lunch would flatter. He went out of his way in his dealings with all of the reporters to gain as good a press as possible for himself. He had also been interrogating us to take our measure and to see if we had anything of further use to him in the enterprise he had begun.

  He was two months bringing his task to fruition. Publicly, he isolated Diem and his family and made them vulnerable to a coup by implying repeatedly in word and gesture that the United States, in the person of Henry Cabot Lodge, would like nothing better than to see them overthrown. On his first morning in Saigon he insulted the Ngo Dinhs by ostentatiously driving to the AID headquarters next to the Xa Loi Pagoda where the two monks were sheltering, telling them they were welcome, and ordering fresh vegetables bought daily for the vegetarian diet to which Buddhist monks adhere. When the chief Buddhist leader, Tri Quang, and the two other monks who had slipped out of Xa Loi and into hiding with him ahead of the raids ran into the embassy lobby a couple of days later and asked for asylum, Lodge granted it to them and gave them a new conference room as temporary living quarters.