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

by Neil Sheehan

  Proving one’s prowess at arms was not a necessity in the world he was entering. He could have fulfilled his military service obligation in these years of the draft with six months of active duty in the Army and reserve status. Instead he joined the Marines for two years and drove himself to excel at every attribute of a Marine officer. To attain the singular distinction of Expert Marksman from both right and left hand with the .45 caliber pistol, he strengthened his pianist’s hands and forearms by holding the heavy pistol in the air with arm outstretched for hours on end as he read. He learned that the pistol’s hammer would knock a pencil several feet if one stuck the eraser end of the pencil down the barrel when the .45 was empty and pulled the trigger. Ellsberg pasted a bull’s-eye on a wall and shot a pencil at it night after night. He achieved a trigger pull so perfectly smooth that the pistol never wavered off target out on the firing range. Other lieutenants in the 2nd Marine Division at Camp Lejeune obtained acting company commands, but had to surrender their companies in a few weeks to captains who outranked them. Lieutenant Ellsberg kept the company command he got, because under his leadership the company won more awards than any other in the battalion and was foremost in inspections and on maneuvers.

  When Ellsberg’s enlistment was expiring in mid-1956 and he was about to return to Harvard for the dream of an apprentice intellectual, doctoral work as a junior member of the renowned Society of Fellows, Nasser seized the Suez Canal. Ellsberg’s battalion was ordered to the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. He wrote a distinguished professor at Harvard that the Society of Fellows would have to wait and extended his Marine enlistment for eight months. Eisenhower disappointed Ellsberg by not intervening.

  In 1959 he left Harvard for the Rand Corporation, the civilian research institute the Air Force had established in Santa Monica, California, drawn by what he believed to be the momentous task of his time—preventing nuclear war by deterring the Soviet Union from a surprise attack on the United States. He was given clearances beyond Top Secret—clearances designated by code words that were themselves secret—so that he could analyze intelligence from U-2 spy aircraft and other esoteric sources. He studied the U.S. “command and control” procedures through which the planes with the hydrogen bombs were to be sent on their way to Russia and the intercontinental ballistic missiles launched, and he wrote ultrasecret memoranda on how to improve them. At the Pentagon he read the most closely guarded secrets of all in the central nuclear war plan of the nation, the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan.

  Ellsberg was dismayed by what he learned. The Soviets were hardly in a position to make a surprise attack. The claim that the Russians had a big advantage in intercontinental missiles—the so-called missile gap Kennedy exploited in the 1960 election against Nixon, apparently thinking it was true—was a fable. The Soviets’ humiliation in the Cuban missile crisis, which was to goad them into a full-fledged nuclear buildup, had not yet occurred. American intelligence showed they had four ICBMs and fewer than 200 intercontinental bombers. The U.S. Air Force generals and Navy admirals had, on the other hand, prepared a thermonuclear blitzkrieg with scores of land-based and submarine-launched missiles and thousands of aircraft. The Joint Chiefs’ plan envisioned killing approximately 325 million people in the Soviet Union and China. When deaths from strikes in Eastern Europe and from radioactive fallout in countries on the periphery like Finland and Pakistan and Japan were counted in, along with the number of deaths the Russians would be able to inflict on the United States before they were obliterated, the total fatalities would exceed half a billion. The American military leaders would make Hitler’s Holocaust look like a misdemeanor, Ellsberg thought. He attributed the JCS plan to a “mad dog” mentality within the military leadership, especially the Air Force generals who subscribed to the Douhet Theory (named after its originator, the Italian general Giulio Douhet) of waging total war from the air. The solution, Ellsberg decided, was firmer and wiser civilian control.

  When the intellectuals came into their reward in 1960 with the election of John Kennedy (when, as Henry Kissinger put it wryly, “professors for the first time moved from advisory to operational responsibilities”), Ellsberg’s career flourished. Kennedy did want tighter control of the military. Ellsberg’s special knowledge and presumed expertise, the coin of influence for a government intellectual, put him in demand at the top. Rand sent him to Washington on permanent detail to the new administration. He wrote memoranda for McGeorge Bundy and McNamara recommending changes in the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan, and a number of his recommendations were adopted. When the Cuban missile crisis occurred in October 1962, he worked on the crisis-management teams that Paul Nitze formed at the Pentagon and Walt Rostow organized at State. By 1964, Ellsberg had acquired sufficient stature to be appointed special assistant to John McNaughton, the former Harvard law professor who had recently been named McNamara’s deputy for foreign affairs. He left Rand and formally entered government at the highest possible Civil Service level, the “supergrade” rank of a GS-18.

  As his professional fortunes were rising, Ellsberg’s private life was disintegrating. His wife told him that she didn’t love him and insisted on a divorce. The Ellsbergs had two children. The dissolution of his marriage pushed Ellsberg into despondency. He had become involved with the war in Vietnam through his work for John McNaughton. He probably would have gone off to the conflict sooner or later anyway, whatever the state of his private life, out of the same romanticism and desire to prove himself that had led him to extend his service in the Marines. His dejection made his longing for confrontation and a new cause that much more acute. After the buildup began in mid-1965 he inquired about assignment to Vietnam as a Marine company commander. He was warned that because of his civilian credentials the Marine Corps might assign him to a staff job, which did not interest Ellsberg. He asked Lansdale to take him on as a member of his team, and Lansdale, ever open to verve and intelligence, welcomed him. McNaughton did not attempt to dissuade him from going. He was becoming skittish about Ellsberg. A need to boast about what he knew made Ellsberg somewhat indiscreet under normal circumstances. His emotional distress was making his indiscretion worse. Although appropriate reticence is a matter of survival in any bureaucracy, the lack of it could bring unusually swift ruin in McNamara’s Pentagon.

  Vann’s name was on a “must” list of people to see that Ellsberg carried with him to Vietnam. He followed up his initial visit to Hau Nghia with Lansdale at the beginning of September 1965 by coming out again in mid-October to spend the better part of three days talking to Vann and roaming the province with him. The trip converted Ellsberg to fervid enthusiasm for Vann’s social-revolution strategy.

  The egocentricity that often grated on Ellsberg’s colleagues in the high-stakes-competition world of the government intellectual was muted in his relationship with Vann. These years in Vietnam brought out the zest for adventure and the compassion and sensitivity that were also mixed into Ellsberg’s complex personality. He was an appealing figure at thirty-four, with his lithe build, the occasional ironic smile in the slim face, the blue-gray eyes electric with curiosity, the teasing sense of humor. There was no feeling of competition between the two men. To Ellsberg, Vann was supreme in the realm of action. To Vann, Ellsberg was the brightest man he had ever met. Vann was to say to Halberstam that Ellsberg had “the most brilliant mind ever exposed to the realities of Vietnam.” He showed his poor-Southern-boy inferiority in the way he expressed his esteem for Ellsberg’s academic accomplishment. To third parties who were not mutual friends he would invariably refer to Ellsberg as “Dr. Dan Ellsberg.” Converting a man like Ellsberg to his ideas flattered Vann. He hoped that Ellsberg might succeed someday in promoting them and him. After all, Ellsberg actually was on a first-name basis with those who sat next to power in Washington. But Vann’s liking for Dan Ellsberg went beyond calculations of self-interest. He enjoyed Ellsberg’s company, and Ellsberg was prepared to go wherever John Vann would take him.

  Ellsberg di
scovered what a true companion spirit he had found one weekend in December 1965, during a drive with Vann to two of the more remote province capitals in the III Corps region. It was not the first weekend expedition for Ellsberg. Vann had decided to explore the entire eleven-province area methodically at the end of October when Charles Mann had promoted him out of Hau Nghia to be civilian affairs advisor to Jonathan Seaman, the commanding general of U.S. forces in III Corps. He announced his plan to Ellsberg, saying it was the only way to find out who owned what. Ellsberg immediately asked to join him.

  Previous trips had been to provinces relatively close to Saigon. For this one they were going to leave early on Saturday morning, because their first destination, Xuan Loc, deep in the rubber-plantation country, was about sixty road miles northeast of Saigon. They would then have another seventy-five to eighty road miles farther to go before they reached their final goal, the capital of Binh Tuy Province, a forlorn little place near the coast called Ham Tan. Vann intended to arrive in Xuan Loc by noon, have a quick lunch and chat with the advisors there, and proceed right on to Ham Tan in order to get there before dark. They would spend the night in Ham Tan and drive back to Saigon by the same route on Sunday.

  That Friday evening he and Ellsberg happened to mention the forthcoming expedition to one of the young Foreign Service officers at the embassy. The man was a field political reporter whose job was to go to the countryside and report on political attitudes and security conditions. Like almost all American officials, he now did his traveling by plane and helicopter. It had been ages since he had gotten out of Saigon, he said, and still longer since he had had an opportunity to assess security conditions realistically by looking at them from the ground. He would love to go along. Vann said fine.

  After the turn at Bien Hoa just north of Saigon, the road became lonely. The embassy field political reporter noticed the rows of fence stakes with the bits of chopped barbed wire dangling from them. He looked at the burned militia outposts. He saw the ragged strips of dirt bisecting the asphalt. The strips marked the spots where the Saigon side had hastily filled in ditches the Viet Cong had cut across the road by blasting a culvert to stop all movement during an attack or ambush. “John, I’m really not supposed to be doing this,” he said. “Political reporters are not supposed to be out on the roads. We have orders not to get captured. I think I’d better try to catch a helicopter.” Vann stopped at an ARVN camp and left him in the care of the advisors to the unit. The embassy man was waiting for Vann and Ellsberg as they drove into the province advisory compound at Xuan Loc. The advisors at the camp had managed to summon a helicopter for him. He looked a bit sheepish. During lunch at Xuan Loc the advisors there treated Vann and Ellsberg with the respect military men accord the daring. They were full of questions about what these two civilians had observed along the road. The reception accorded Vann and Ellsberg rekindled the enthusiasm of the embassy political reporter. “To hell with it,” he said when it was time to press on. “I’m going with you.”

  The three men had a lively conversation underway in the armored Scout as they set off for Ham Tan. Vann had selected the Scout for this trip because of its four-wheel-drive capability; they might have to leave the road to negotiate an obstacle. He was at the steering wheel. Ellsberg was in the passenger seat beside him. The embassy man was in the middle of the little bench seat just behind them where he had been riding in the morning.

  A short way out of Xuan Loc the road began to pass through some of the densest rain forest Ellsberg was ever to see in Vietnam. He knew precisely what to do. Vann had trained him during their previous expeditions. He glanced down at his side to be sure a grenade was handy and lifted the carbine he had been cradling in his lap so that he could immediately open fire out the window. Vann started driving with one hand. With the other he raised the M-16 automatic he now customarily carried to be ready to shoot out his side. Ellsberg wondered how they were going to shoot if they did encounter guerrillas. The years of neglect from the war had allowed the rain forest to encroach until the road was only wide enough for one vehicle to pass. The forest was so dense Ellsberg had the feeling that if he stuck his arm out the window, he wouldn’t be able to get it back; the undergrowth would snatch it. Then the road began to twist through blind curves. Ellsberg decided that if his seven-year-old daughter had an automatic weapon she could ambush a whole regiment on this one-way track through the jungle.

  As the road worsened and they made these preparations for action, Vann and Ellsberg kept up the conversation. Keeping up the conversation was important to them. They were enjoying the self-control and sharpening of the senses they felt in the presence of danger.

  The embassy political reporter did not say a word for quite a while. About twenty minutes out of Xuan Loc, he suddenly found his voice again. “John, how’s the security on this road?” he asked.

  “Bad,” Vann replied.

  “Well, I think I’d better go back, John,” the embassy man said.

  Vann found a place to turn around. He did not recover his temper sufficiently to do more than curse until he had returned to Xuan Loc and had the Scout back out on the one-way track through the rain forest, now with both hands on the wheel, wrenching the vehicle through the turns to try to make up for the lost time. “You know,” he said to Ellsberg, “I didn’t think he’d have guts enough to get out a second time.”

  Ellsberg smiled. “Well, dammit, John, why did you say that about the security?” he asked.

  “What could I say?” Vann said. He laughed and let go of the steering wheel for a second and swept his hands up toward the jungle that menaced from every side. “Look at it!”

  At Ham Tan there was a final moment to savor. They pulled up in front of the building where the province military advisors lived and went in and introduced themselves. One of the young officers noticed the Scout parked outside. He did a double take. He looked at Vann and Ellsberg, at the vehicle, and then back at Vann and Ellsberg again.

  “Did you people drive here?” he asked. They said yes as casually as they could.

  “Is that road open?” another advisor asked, astounded.

  “Well, it is now,” Vann said.

  They were the first Americans to drive to Ham Tan in nearly a year.

  Sex, like danger, was another shared interest that helped make the friendship between Vann and Ellsberg intimate. Ramsey had never displayed much interest in this subject that was of such immense concern to Vann, so Vann had pretended, as he did with men like Ramsey, that his girl hunting in Saigon was just the temporary larking of an overseas bachelor and that he was a serious family man who cared for Mary Jane and was concerned about the upbringing of their children. Ellsberg lacked Vann’s insatiable need for women, but his sexual life mattered to him and he was relatively open about it. When Vann found a friend who regarded sex with some of the importance he did, he interpreted the attitude as an invitation to confide the details of his exploits, which he liked to do. He was also inclined to be more candid about other personal relationships and about his past. “I’m only married in name,” he explained to Ellsberg. He said that while he respected Mary Jane, he had no special feeling for her, that they had nothing in common anymore. He also told Ellsberg about the statutory-rape episode and how, despite his victory over the lie detector, the accusation would have barred him forever from promotion to general.

  The coincidence of having houses in Saigon next door to each other further reinforced the friendship. Although Vann slept most nights during the fall of 1965 in a tent at General Seaman’s headquarters or at some other spot in the countryside, he was entitled to quarters in Saigon under his AID contract. He had begun sharing a house on Tran Quy Cap Street not far from Westmoreland’s villa with another close friend acquired through the war, Col. George Jacobson. Jake, as he was known to his friends, was once called “the consummate staff officer” by Vann. No derision was intended, as Jacobson had seen a lot of action in an armored cavalry reconnaissance unit in France and Germany
. He was a tall and well-proportioned man of innate dignity, fifty years old in 1965, with a mustache, a baritone voice, and a warm and genuinely considerate manner. He had earned his living as a professional magician and master of ceremonies prior to volunteering for the Army early in World War II. George Jacobson had disciplined himself during his twenty-four years in the Army to study the character and mindset of a superior in order to avoid futile clashes with idiosyncrasies and preconceptions. Troubles that the boss should not be bothered with, or would not listen to, Jake settled himself or deflected as temporarily insoluble. He then used the credit built up by his tactful efficiency to try to get the boss to confront other important problems he might be capable of resolving.