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

by Neil Sheehan

  That fall of 1969, Alsop spent the better part of a week touring the Delta and wrote several columns celebrating the experience of being in “John Vann’s country.” If Vann, “in the long past… Vietnam’s super-pessimist,” said the United States and the Saigon side were currently winning, then it had to be true. “‘Not too far down the road,’ John Vann told me, ‘I’m confident that 90 percent of the Delta population will be under solid government control.’” John Vann was “an infinitely patriotic, intelligent, and courageous and magnificent leader.” The sincerity in the friendship that developed came from Alsop, a man who, when he gave his affection, gave it generously. Vann outwardly returned the friendship, accepted the advertising and the increased respectability Alsop provided him, and explained that he was nice to Joe because Joe was “the president’s journalist.”

  Respectability opened the door of the Oval Office. Colby received a cable from Washington during the second week of December 1969. The president wished to see Vann on December 22 at 11:00 A.M. Vann was due to be in the United States then for Christmas leave and had hoped to meet Kissinger. He had written for an appointment. Another of his newly acquired friends, Sir Robert Thompson, transformed a prospective meeting with the president’s special assistant into the ultimate compliment. He suggested to Kissinger that the president talk to Vann.

  Sir Robert’s opinion of whether the United States would prevail in Vietnam had fluctuated over the years, depending on whose ideas were being pursued. He was perceptive in analyzing Westmoreland’s. As with so many men of affairs, his critical faculties were daunted by his own. Richard Nixon was a student of Thompson’s writings and had invited him to the White House that October. Thompson had told the president that the Vietnamization strategy could put the essentials of victory in place within two years. (He was more cautious in a book he published in 1969, giving a three-to-five-year estimate.) Nixon then hired Thompson as a consultant and sent him to South Vietnam to validate his judgment. Thompson, another man in need of a touchstone, chose Vann as his validator.

  Vann escorted him around the Delta for three days at the beginning of November. They were together to hear Nixon’s watershed speech on Vietnam on November 3, 1969, listening to it over the radio in a district headquarters in Ba Xuyen Province, a former guerrilla bastion below the Bassac. Nixon had already ordered the withdrawal of 60,000 American troops to appease public opinion, and there was general expectation that he would use the occasion to announce a program for quick withdrawal of most of the rest and perhaps a cease-fire too. He instead appealed to “the great silent majority of my fellow Americans” for their patience and support while he prosecuted the war until he could obtain “peace with honor.” The withdrawals would continue, but at a measured pace to permit the strengthening of the Saigon forces. Vann was elated by the speech, because it meant, he wrote a friend, that Nixon had decided “to tell the demonstrators to go to hell.” Fortified by his days with Vann, Thompson reported back to Nixon that the Saigon side held a “winning position.”

  The president was standing beside his desk, looking out the French door toward the Rose Garden, when Vann entered his office. The hour of the appointment had been changed. The time was five minutes past noon. Nixon turned and stepped forward in greeting. Kissinger introduced Vann with unstinting praise. The president had cleared his desk to listen, his habitual courtesy to visitors, but he seemed genuinely to want to listen to what Vann had come to tell him. “I will not be the first president of the United States to lose a war,” Nixon said to the Republican congressional leaders that fall. He talked with Vann for nearly an hour. After Vann briefed him on pacification in the Delta, Nixon questioned Vann on how he had seen the war change over the years, seeking to learn why Vann had arrived at his current opinions. “He appeared to accept with some confidence the judgments I gave him as to the now favorable situation,” Vann said in his memorandum of the conversation. Vann assured the president that with the advantage of heavy weapons and U.S. airpower the ARVN would be able to handle the NVA when they someday faced off. The worst that could occur, he said, was that the Saigon regime “would have to give up some territory and some population if an all-out conventional invasion took place,” but the “invasion would be contained as the enemy extended his supply lines and became vulnerable to bombardment by air and artillery.” The president thanked Vann for his service and instructed him to return to Vietnam and keep up the good work. He gave Vann a fountain pen and an autographed golf ball as souvenirs of their meeting.

  Success did not tame John Vann easily. He almost got himself fired again for attempting to save his best Vietnamese friend, Tran Ngoc Chau, from jail. After the dispute with the CIA over the pacification teams, and simultaneous trouble he had had with Ky’s minister for pacification, Chau decided he had spoiled his chance for further promotion in the ARVN. He took a leave of absence from the army and transferred his ambition to politics, winning the seat from Kien Hoa in the lower house of the National Assembly during the October 1967 elections. He did well in the Assembly, managing to get himself elected secretary-general of the Lower House. The Tet Offensive then propelled him into a high-stakes maneuver. He sought to make himself the go-between in the peace talks, utilizing one of his brothers who had stayed loyal to Ho Chi Minh as a secret channel to the other side. This brother, Tran Ngoc Hien, was a senior agent in Hanoi’s intelligence service and had been back in the South since 1965, posing as a traveling salesman of pharmaceuticals. To further his plan, Chau had turned on an old ARVN friend and a former political ally, Nguyen Van Thieu, and attacked him by denouncing his bag man in the Assembly, a wealthy pharmacist named Nguyen Cao Thang whose task was to bribe delegates to vote as Thieu desired. Chau was not motivated entirely by ambition. Tet had convinced him that it was wrong to inflict on the Vietnamese people a war “without any end in sight,” and he thought that the Saigon side had a chance of surviving if it negotiated a peace in time.

  Chau’s brother was arrested in the spring of 1969. A policeman at a checkpoint had the wit to notice that Tran Ngoc Hien’s Central Vietnamese accent did not accord with the place of origin on the identity card he was currently using. Hien behaved with the shrewdness of a good intelligence officer. To avoid being tortured into revealing his important espionage networks, he deflected his interrogators. Chau was his means of deflection. He threw Chau to Thieu by telling the police about their meetings. Secret contacts between family members were common in South Vietnam. They were also illegal.

  Vann did not approve of Chau’s negotiating maneuver, and Bunker had warned him to stay clear of the affair the previous summer after Vann intervened to try to defuse the quarrel between Thieu and Chau. Bunker prized Thieu for the stability of his rule. He suspected that Chau was a Communist or a Communist agent, in any case a dangerous troublemaker who seemed to be attempting to gain a place for himself in a coalition government with the other side. The ambassador had called Vann to the embassy and administered “a polite but very steely ass-chewing,” as Vann later described the session. “John, you’re getting involved in politics. That’s my business,” Bunker said. “You tend to the pacification of the Delta and I’ll tend to the politics of South Vietnam. Don’t let it happen again.”

  By the time Vann returned in early January 1970 from his holiday leave and the exhilaration of his talk with President Nixon, Thieu, who had been moving slowly but surely toward vengeance, was about to arrest and imprison Chau for the secret meetings with his brother. He was bribing other deputies to sign a petition to strip Chau of immunity as a member of the National Assembly. Vann submitted a request through Colby asking that Chau be flown out of the country on a U.S. plane and granted asylum in the United States in consideration for past services. Chau could not leave South Vietnam legally, because Thieu had revoked his passport. Ev Bumgardner, who was back in Saigon working as an assistant to Colby, joined in the request. Bunker refused.

  John Vann couldn’t bear to give up Chau. It was not simply a matte
r of friendship. Chau still represented to Vann “the good Vietnamese” of his earlier vision, a symbol of the decent, progressive society that he and Bumgardner, Doug Ramsey, Frank Scotton, and Dan Ellsberg had wanted to create in South Vietnam. He knew that Chau was not a Communist or a Communist agent, no matter how much Chau might try to use Hien, as Hien might try to use Chau in this war in which brother exploited brother. Bumgardner felt the same way. Vann proceeded to concoct a plan to smuggle Chau to Cambodia. Chau could make his way from there to France or the United States. Vann had learned to fly a helicopter by having his pilots give him lessons. He was going to fly Chau to the nearest Cambodian fishing village up the Gulf of Siam coast and hover just offshore while Chau climbed into a rubber raft and paddled to the village.

  Vann obtained the raft, one of the instantly inflatable types the Air Force issued to pilots, and rehearsed the flight by taking his helicopter out alone. At a prearranged time, Bumgardner drove Chau to the helicopter pad at the trash dump at Newport, the military port Westmoreland had built on the Saigon River. Vann met them and flew Chau to Can Tho. Another close friend from HI Corps, Dr. Merrill “Bud” Shutt, who was currently serving as Vann’s public health officer for IV Corps, agreed to shelter Chau in his apartment in one of the CORDS compounds in Can Tho.

  Had Chau let Vann go through with the plan, Vann’s career in Vietnam certainly would have been terminated. Thieu would have been so angry at being cheated of vengeance that he would have demanded Vann’s expulsion. The police tailed Bumgardner and Chau as far as the entrance to the Newport dump and saw Bumgardner drive out alone. Knowing the friendships, it was not difficult to surmise what was going on. After days of hesitation and reflection, Chau decided that if he fled, he would be implicitly admitting Thieu’s accusation that he was a Communist. If he stayed and denied the charge and went to jail, he would become a martyr and retain a political future in South Vietnam. He and Vann got into a tumultuous argument in the apartment in Can Tho. Vann told Chau he was being a fool, that Thieu would endure a long time, because the United States was behind him, and he would keep Chau locked up for years. Chau followed his star. He had Vann fly him back to Saigon to hide for a while. Then he went to his office in the building where the Lower House met, the same place where Diem’s National Assembly had met, the Saigon Opera House of the French time, to wait for the police to arrest him.

  Bunker called Vann to the embassy again after he learned that Vann had been hiding Chau. The old man was cold on this occasion, as glacially cold as Ellsworth Bunker could be when he was enraged. “If it were anyone but you, John, you’d already be out of the country,” he said. “I warned you once, and now it has happened again. There cannot be a third time. If there is, you’ll have to leave, no matter how outstanding a job you have done, and you have done an outstanding job here.”

  George Jacobson had never seen anyone intimidate John Vann before. Vann was ashen when he came out of Bunker’s office. “It is not part of my game plan to be fired at this point,” he said to Jake.

  The thought that he might be caught in the syndrome of self-fulfilling prophecy for which he had mocked Harkins and Westmoreland seems never to have occurred to Vann. Dan Ellsberg teased him about his meeting with Nixon. “You finally had some good news to give the president, John,” he said. Vann did not appreciate the ironic humor.

  He and Ellsberg remained best personal friends. They were able to argue about the war for hours during Vann’s visits to the United States without alienating each other, but they were at opposite poles. Ellsberg’s personal life was on the mend. In 1970 he was to marry Patricia Marx, the woman with whom he had quarreled over the war in Saigon.

  As far as the war was concerned, Ellsberg’s metamorphosis was complete. The experience of reading the still-top-secret Pentagon Papers, the forty-three-volume inquiry into the origins and history of the conflict that McNamara had commissioned and that was completed in January 1969 (Ellsberg, being Ellsberg, read all forty-three), convinced him that the American cause in Indochina was now and had always been wrong-headed and futile. The Vietnamization policy was thus a “bloody, hopeless, uncompelled, hence surely immoral prolongation of U.S. involvement in this war,” Ellsberg wrote an official of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that September. Opinions may change; zealotry is a constant in the character of a man. Ellsberg, once Vann’s most impassioned convert in the pursuit of the war, became a force to be reckoned with in the struggle to stop it. Ellsberg discussed the Pentagon Papers with his friend. He told Vann that Vann too might alter his opinion if he ever had time to read some of them. He did not tell his friend that during the fall of 1969 he began slipping the Rand Corporation copy of the Pentagon Papers, several volumes at a time, past the security guards at the front door and photocopying them.

  Vann came to regard his trips to the United States as triumphs. Lee taught him to dress better for them. She persuaded him to buy dark, custom-tailored suits in Hong Kong and to wear soberly striped ties. His lectures at the Army War College and other service schools were treated as major occasions. He did not get to see the president again, but he regularly briefed Melvin Laird, Nixon’s secretary of defense. Laird was the most enthusiastic advocate of Vietnamization within the Administration and was lavishing equipment on the Saigon forces—artillery of all kinds, armored personnel carriers, hundreds of tanks, squadrons of jet fighter-bombers, more than 500 Huey and Chinook helicopters. Vann would also call at the chief of staff’s office to talk to Westmoreland, who was eager for an outcome that would vindicate what he had spent. Bruce Palmer, currently the vice-chief of staff, was always on Vann’s list to visit. Palmer had been discouraged by Tet. He had then taken heart again because Vann assured him that he could.

  While many of the reporters Vann knew no longer agreed with his conclusions about the war, he retained a special credibility with the press because of all he had put in the bank in the past and because he could still be frank about the flaws on the Saigon side. He kept his credibility within the lower levels of the bureaucracy for the same reasons. His friendship with Halberstam survived in a strained way. Halberstam was in the midst of writing The Best and the Brightest, his indictment of the generation of American leaders who had led the country into Vietnam. He argued to Vann that American society was being torn to serve a foreign war of no importance to it; Vann ought to look at the social divisions and other costs the war was exacting at home. “I’m not interested in that,” Vann said.

  John Vann didn’t see some of his old Vietnam friends anymore, because his life had passed them by. Bob York was one. Although York had been awarded his third star and command of Fort Bragg and the XVIIIth Airborne Corps, he had retired from the Army in mid-1968 a disillusioned man.

  Vann’s visits with his aunt Mollie Tosolini were happy occasions. He would telephone her when he happened to be passing through the New York area and go out to her big house on Long Island. She loved to see him come, carrying a briefcase and looking like a diplomat. They would reminisce about Norfolk and he would tell her how he wished she had been his mother. He would tell her about the men in Washington who were listening to Myrtle’s child. “You and me, Aunt Mollie, we’re going places,” he would say.

  The move to Can Tho caused no trouble in his captain’s paradise. Rather, it enhanced his amusement at keeping two women ignorant of each other. He adopted a variation of the III Corps gambit. He had CORDS lease, renovate, and furnish a house in Can Tho, where he installed Annie and the child and where he slept himself on nights when he was not out in one of the provinces or districts or in Saigon. The place was not listed as his official residence. He officially slept in the second bedroom of a bungalow assigned to Wilbur Wilson in the main CORDS housing compound in Can Tho, nicknamed Palm Springs because the bungalows were built around a swimming pool. He kept a set of clothes in the closet there and toilet articles beside the bed and photographs on the walls to give the room a lived-in look. When Lee came to Can Tho for an occasional visit, t
hat was where they slept.

  Annie was not a danger to the game, because she remained naive about him and did not ask questions. Lee was the inquisitive sort to begin with, and by this time she understood that Vann was constantly unfaithful to her. He instructed his driver, his interpreter, and his helicopter pilot to parry her questions. His secretary, Frenchy Zois; Wilbur Wilson’s secretary, Tess Johnston; and the rest of the American and Vietnamese office staff at CORDS headquarters protected him too. Lee frequently telephoned him from Saigon. They made sure she did not accidentally obtain the number at the house if she called while he happened to be there. Lee never suspected that his unfaithfulness consisted of anything but transitory romping. (The bungalow bedroom was handy for this too.)

  Vann also stood beside Lee before her ancestors in 1970. She had been bringing him home with her at night when he was in Saigon, and she would lose all face with her family if he made no gesture toward her. She pressed him into an engagement ceremony on her twenty-sixth birthday at the home of her grandfather, who had served in cabinets of Bao Dai and Diem and had later run the national bank. She lied to her grandfather, telling the old man that Vann was divorced. Because it was just an engagement, the ceremony was less elaborate than the one Vann had undergone with Annie. He presented Lee with the symbolic engagement earrings and several other pieces of jewelry. Her grandfather formally introduced him to her uncle and aunt and the rest of the family members who assembled and to the spirit of Lee’s grandmother, whose portrait was on the ancestral altar. Vann clasped his hands and bowed his head while Lee prayed. Everyone sat down to a meal and champagne. Again there were no American guests.