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

by Neil Sheehan

  Bunker invited Thieu, Ky, and Cao Van Vien, the chief of the Joint General Staff, to lunch at his residence and warned them that he would tolerate no power plays, that they and the other generals would have to argue the issue out among themselves. He probably did not mean to throw the decision to Thieu, but his restricting of the dispute to scheming and to shouting contests in the council of generals had this effect. Thieu was better at that game than Ky was, and although a number of his colleagues thought he was as egocentric as Ky and cold-blooded to boot, he had the virtue Ky lacked of being predictable. A man interested in exercising power and amassing wealth with a minimum of fuss is less likely to disrupt the same pursuit by others who gain his favor. Ky had been coerced into agreeing to run for the vice-presidency, and Thieu had plans for him and his clique after the election.

  Had Bunker come to Vietnam much earlier in his life, he might have been able to think for himself. His father, a cofounder and later head of the National Sugar Refining Company, had initiated his heir apparent as a laborer on the dock unloading 100-pound bags of raw sugar and put Bunker through nearly every manual job in the refinery before he was given authority. The calloused-hands expertise helped Bunker to become a creative businessman. He transformed National Sugar from a refinery on the Hudson River at Yonkers, New York, where he was born in 1894, into the second-largest American refining concern, with extensive interests in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and elsewhere in Latin America, making himself a millionaire many times over in the process. He was equally thoughtful in his politics. His business associates were content to recite the Republican catechism that Franklin Roosevelt was a traitor to his class and the New Deal an offspring of Bolshevism. Bunker decided that Roosevelt was a wise man and that the country needed the New Deal. He changed his party affiliation and became an active Democrat.

  In 1951, Truman’s secretary of state and Bunker’s Yale classmate of 1916, Dean Acheson, started Bunker on a second career by convincing him that the job of ambassador to Argentina, caught in the era of the Yankee-baiting fascist dictator Juan Perón, would be more interesting than chairman of the board. The ambassadorship to Italy followed, and later that of India after another old associate who was Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, decided Bunker was too valuable to sit out a Republican administration as president of the American National Red Cross. Bunker proved a rare American statesman in India, gaining the trust of the haughty Indo-Anglo aristocrat prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Then in 1962 at President Kennedy’s behest he averted a small war in the South Pacific by persuading the Dutch to see reason and surrender Netherlands New Guinea (the western half of the island of New Guinea), a useless souvenir of their lost Asian empire, to Indonesia.

  Ellsworth Bunker was two weeks from his seventy-third birthday when he reached Saigon. He had become a bit quaint, a thrifty millionaire who, after the pants had worn out, saved the coat of a suit to wear it as a sport jacket. His shoes were Brooks Brothers’ best English make, but there were lots of cracks in the leather under the gleam of the polish, because Bunker had the shoes resoled until the tops wore out. He had maple syrup from his Vermont dairy farm flown over in the diplomatic pouch to serve as topping on the ice cream at official dinners. There was nothing unalert about him physically or mentally, however, no stoop in the shoulders of this six-foot-two-inch Yankee cornstalk. The white hair, the narrow face, the blue eyes behind the amber-rimmed glasses lent themselves to the aplomb of the patrician, an aplomb that was fortified by Bunker’s natural reserve and a discretion he cultivated. The Saigonese quickly nicknamed him Mr. Refrigerator, not knowing that the reserve hid forebearance and a man who was a raconteur and wit of the first order in private company.

  The rub was that after thirty-four years in the sugar business and all that implied in acquired attitudes toward Latin America, and after his second and more satisfying career in the service of the American state, the furniture of Ellsworth Bunker’s mind had settled into place. It was impossible for him not to see Vietnam in the perspective of the Caribbean and Central America. Nor was it possible, after so much time as a successful man in a successful system, for him to question the judgment of generals like Westmoreland. Lodge had become increasingly worried about the reliance on Westmoreland’s war of attrition. His fundamental doubt was so simple and personal that he did not put it in the cables. He recalled it afterward while in semiretirement as special envoy to the Vatican. Maj. George Patton and the other Army regulars he made friends with as a reservist in the 1930s had said that the mistake of the European generals had been to fight World War I as if it were a musket-and-muzzle-loading-cannon war of the nineteenth century. Every war was different, they said, and if they had a turn to lead they would remember the lesson. Westmoreland seemed to Lodge to be trying to refight World War II in Vietnam. Bunker had no reason for such doubt.

  Vann tried to talk to Bunker about the war and was somewhat intimidated. Where an extroverted patrician like Lodge tended to bring out the boldness in Vann, a reserved one like Bunker aroused his sense of social inferiority. By the late summer of 1967, Vann also knew that he could not hope for anything from the new ambassador. His friend and former housemate George Jacobson had become mission coordinator, the embassy official responsible for handling the agenda of the Mission Council, the U.S. executive committee that consisted of Bunker, Westmoreland, and the heads of the different American agencies in Vietnam. Jacobson was “very alarmed,” Vann wrote Ellsberg in his August 19 letter, over the extent to which Bunker was an intellectual prisoner of Westmoreland. The rapidity with which Westmoreland responded to any inquiry from Bunker with a concise memorandum composed by the MACV staff, the confidence the general communicated in briefings and private conversations, and the deference he showed the older man all had a reinforcing effect. “Westy is the best damned subordinate that Bunker has ever had,” Vann quoted Jacobson as saying. Westmoreland had so thoroughly convinced Bunker he was grinding up the Viet Cong and the NVA and that there had been “substantial improvement” in the Saigon forces that Jacobson indicated he could “no longer afford to push the opposite viewpoint” in reports and staff papers he gave the ambassador. He had warned Vann to “tone down” his criticism of the ARVN when Vann was around Bunker.

  John Vann had difficulties of his own making too. Annie got pregnant again at the beginning of April 1967, and refused to have a second abortion. She told Vann she could not face the trauma she had endured after the first one. She said that people in love should accept the consequences of their love: the consequence of theirs was a baby. Vann tried as hard as he could to persuade her to abort the child. He repeated the argument he had resorted to on the first occasion that fathering an illegitimate child would damage his career if the secret became known. When she responded that her pregnancy was an opportunity for him to do what he said he wanted to do—turn the legal separation he claimed to have from Mary Jane into a divorce so that he could remarry a woman he loved—she received the line he had composed for Lee on how he was financially chained to Mary Jane.

  Annie’s parents inadvertently became Vann’s allies. Her father had learned about and reluctantly approved of her first abortion, hoping that it would cure her of Vann or at least teach her to be more careful about getting pregnant. He and her mother were beside themselves when she announced that she was pregnant again and was going to keep the baby this time. They pleaded with her to get another abortion and then to renounce Vann. She was only eighteen and was about to ruin herself for life. No respectable Vietnamese man would ever marry her and give her the proper love and family that she ought to want. Her parents found out just how willful the daughter they had pampered could be. Annie said that she was in love with John and he with her. She said that even if John abandoned her now because of his career, she still would not surrender the child.

  Vann did try to abandon Annie, but her father wouldn’t let him. He telephoned Vann at his headquarters in Bien Hoa and asked Vann to meet him so that they cou
ld discuss the problem. Vann fobbed him off and did not call back. Annie’s father then drove out to Bien Hoa and confronted Vann right in his office. He coerced Vann into an arrangement that Annie wanted. It was the best her father could obtain for her under the circumstances. If Vann would promise to rent a house for Annie and to support her and the child in the circumstances to which she was accustomed, her father would not complain to Bunker. Vann would also have to go through a ceremony with her in front of the family to lend the union a semblance of respectability. Vann agreed. He did not blame himself; rather, he saw himself as having been blackmailed.

  Annie decided to have the ceremony on her nineteenth birthday, July 15, 1967, at the family’s home in the European quarter of Saigon. The ceremony was a melange of traditional Vietnamese engagement and wedding ceremonies, Westernized by the touch of a ring. Vann dressed decorously in a suit and tie. Annie told him what to bring and how to play his part. He gave her a pair of gold earrings, which a Vietnamese girl receives at her engagement and again on her wedding day. He gave her a small box filled with other pieces of jewelry too to show that she was allying herself to a prosperous man. He did not bring the most important gift that the groom must carry to the bride’s home on the wedding day, because Annie thought that as a foreigner he might not understand. She had already bought it herself and had placed it on the family altar. It was a brightly painted box of betel leaves and areca nuts. The rust-colored nuts of the graceful areca palm, wrapped in leaves from the betel vine that is planted to curl up around the trunk of the tree, are chewed by elderly peasant women in Vietnam for the mildly stimulating effect the combination gives. The two are also the Vietnamese symbols of unity and faithfulness, and no wedding takes place without betel leaves and areca nuts on the altar to the ancestors. The ornate brass urn on the altar in Annie’s home had been burnished for this occasion, and the altar had been decorated with freshly lit candles, offerings of fruit, rice alcohol and tea, and burning joss sticks that were giving off incense. Vann put the ring on Annie’s finger. He took a smoldering joss stick in his hands, knelt beside her before the altar, and bent low to her ancestors. Her father then formally introduced him to the other members of the family and they all sat down to a celebratory meal. There were no guests.

  Vann did not have to pay the rent for the house. An obliging AID administrator passed the bill along to the American taxpayers. Vann was legally entitled to a house. He and Wilbur (“Coal Bin Willie”) Wilson, the salty former paratroop colonel who had been his superior at the Ranger Training Command at Fort Benning in 1951 and a corps senior advisor during the Harkins years, had been saving money for the taxpayers by sharing the house at Bien Hoa. Under AID regulations they could have declined to share a house and demanded separate quarters. (Wilson had retired from the Army after his outspokenness had denied him stars. Vann had persuaded him to go to work for AID and then to become Vann’s deputy in the spring of 1967.) Shortly after the ceremony at Annie’s home, Vann approached one of the senior AID executives in Saigon and, requesting confidence, confessed his need for additional housing.

  The executive took a tolerant view. While Vann’s position would have been hurt had the secret got out, the fathering of illegitimate Amerasian children was becoming another common by-product of war. Many thousands were to be born, and mother and child were almost always casually abandoned when the man went home. AID had also acquired an interest in protecting Vann. Every agency was under pressure to demonstrate its contribution to the war effort. Vann had become AID’s house expert on pacification and its star performer in the field. The Washington headquarters had taken an exceptional administrative action in June to finally grant his request for conversion from temporary employee to permanent career officer. He need no longer worry about having to return to Martin Marietta in Colorado should it ever be necessary for him to leave Vietnam. The Saigon AID executive simply placed the Bien Hoa house in Wilbur Wilson’s name and leased a separate house for Vann in Gia Dinh town on the north side of Saigon.

  Gia Dinh town was both the capital of the province surrounding the city and a contiguous suburb of Saigon. AID and other civilian agencies and the construction firms had taken to renting houses there, because of the shortage in Saigon itself. Vann’s rank brought Annie a comfortable home—a two-story place with three bedrooms upstairs, living room, dining room, and kitchen on the ground floor, and an adjacent garage, the whole surrounded by the inevitable stuccoed brick wall topped by barbed wire. AID also refurbished the house and provided the basic furniture. Annie moved into it in August. Vann gave her money for living expenses and to hire a maid who would cook and keep house. He protected himself with the bureaucracy by having her sign a contract stating that she was his cook and housekeeper.

  Annie became none the wiser about Lee and Lee none the wiser about Annie. Nothing changed that Lee would have noticed. Vann and Wilbur Wilson continued to share the Bien Hoa house, where Lee often slept in Vann’s bedroom. Wilson was an ascetic bachelor who restricted his relationships with women to gruffly polite dealings at the office. Otherwise he shunned their company and would carefully ignore Lee as she traipsed about the house in a dressing gown. It amused her that a man as eager to cavort as Vann would choose to share a house with another man who, as she put it, “lived like a monk” amid the sexual cornucopia of an American’s Vietnam.

  Lee was Vann’s public mistress, the one he took to diplomatic receptions in Saigon and to other social occasions as the official attitude toward bringing Vietnamese paramours to these events gradually relaxed. (While Vann had been sufficiently rash in the initial excitement of the affair to fetch Annie at her lycée in Dalat, he had been careful not to flaunt her in Saigon. He had held the restaurant and nightclub outings there to the minimum necessary to seduce her and then to keep her content. After her second pregnancy and the arrangement with her father, he never let himself be seen in public with her. Only his close friends like Ellsberg and George Jacobson, some of his senior subordinates like Wilson, and his American secretary, Frenchy Zois, knew about her.) Lee’s sophistication and her command of colloquial English rendered her the natural choice for the public role. Vann was reasonably generous to her. She had virtually full-time use of a Toyota sedan he bought in 1967 to replace the little Triumph he had shipped from Colorado. The Toyota turned out to be superfluous, as Vann preferred a livelier Ford Mustang that AID provided him.

  Although money was not Lee’s motive, she did profit from the affair. She obtained a concession for a souvenir boutique at the Saigon USO club. Vann did not intervene to get the concession for her or do anything else that was corrupt. Being his mistress brought her the necessary connections. She sold her English-language school and took up the more pleasant livelihood of running the boutique and managing a Saigon restaurant for its Corsican owner. Lee in turn tried to make herself useful to Vann. She constantly did personal errands for him, and on the occasions when he had to entertain a VIP at his Bien Hoa residence she would act as hostess and see that the drinks went around and that the lunch or dinner was properly cooked and served.

  Vann spoke to McNamara alone for the first time that July when the secretary flew out to bargain Westmoreland down on his most recent troop request. The day that he saw McNamara was, Vann wrote Ellsberg, “a red letter day” of VIP meetings. Nicholas Katzenbach, who had replaced George Ball as under secretary of state the previous fall, spent two and a half hours questioning him. That evening David McGiffert, the under secretary of the Army, came to Bien Hoa to have dinner at Vann’s house, passed the night talking late, and then traveled around III Corps with him all the next day. Vann spoke to McNamara for only half an hour, but the fact that the secretary would seek Vann’s opinion was an indication of what the war had been doing to McNamara. Robert McNamara had, to his credit, become frightened.

  The failure of the air war against the North first opened McNamara’s eyes. The bombs of Rolling Thunder did not stop or substantially reduce the flow of men and equipment from
the North into the South any more than they weakened the will of the Vietnamese. Rather, as the bombs hardened Vietnamese will, so they goaded the Vietnamese into building a transportation system that each year could carry more and that each year was less vulnerable to air attack. The Ho Chi Minh Trail that the CIA cartographers sketched at the beginning of 1965 was a faint skein of Montagnard trails and washed-out dirt roads from the colonial era, only parts of it drivable and then only in the dry season. Eight years later the Agency’s map of the Trail was to show thousands of miles of all-weather roads, surfaced with crushed rock and laterite or corduroyed with logs where the local soil could not be compacted enough to hold, bridged at the creeks and rivers. The roads swirled from the North down through the mountains of Laos and into the South in double loops and triple bypasses, a rain-forest highway grid that the Vietnamese called the Truong Son Strategic Supply Route after their name for the An-namite mountain range.

  For the better part of two years during World War II the American and British air forces vainly sought to stop supplies and reinforcements from reaching the German army in Italy through just a few mountain passes. Operation Strangle in Korea, a more ambitious effort to interdict a stream of troops and supplies moving along roads and railways, was a fiasco. Senior aviators are the most unfailingly forgetful of military men, for if they reminded themselves and others of the limits of their flying machines, civilian leaders might be less willing to let them lavish money and blood in the use of them.