Honorable Exit

by Thurston Clarke

  Martin was a man who could tell a congressional committee, “For more than 40 years I have [had] a record of totally and unquestioned integrity so secure it needs no defense,” claim that “nothing happened in Vietnam, or any other place that I served, that I didn’t know about it,” and write to Senator William Fulbright (D-Ark.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, “The one asset I have prized most highly is a reputation for complete and total integrity….This fact is too widely known to be open to serious question and will be completely evident to historians when the archives containing all my reports are finally open.” He also informed Fulbright that his experience as a journalist (as a young man, he had briefly reported from Washington for several North Carolina newspapers) governed his policy in dealing with the press, adding, “I was regarded as a good reporter. I often wondered what would have happened had I accepted the invitation to do a column for the Washington Post. Perhaps today it might be my byline rather than Scotty Reston’s [the noted New York Times columnist] to which you would turn over your morning coffee.”

  Martin’s silver hair, elegant suits, patrician bearing, and penetrating pale gray eyes—eyes that an aide said could “open an oyster”—encouraged the assumption that he was a member of the southern gentleman division of the same eastern establishment that had molded Averell Harriman and Douglas Dillon, although, had that been true, he might not have praised his own rectitude and intelligence quite so lavishly. NBC correspondent Garrick Utley noted in a diary that he fit “the familiar profile of a particular generation of American diplomats, those in their fifties or sixties, who rise to positions of influence in the Cold War. Their dress, voice, and demeanor are cut from the same cloth and in the style of privileged backgrounds in the Old South or Boston…[and] their eyes are steady and hard.”

  But instead of a silver spoon, Martin had been born with a tobacco leaf in his mouth. He had grown up as the son of an itinerant Baptist minister in rural North Carolina, walking to school barefoot and stopping to pick tobacco leaves and roll his own cigarettes. His father sold some land during the Depression that was the family’s only valuable possession to send him to Wake Forest, where he majored in Latin and Greek. He graduated at twenty, moved to Washington, and married a nurse whose childhood had also been impecunious. They used milk crates as tables and chairs, practicing a frugality that became so ingrained that while serving as ambassador to Rome, he had refused to use government cars for family errands, leaving his wife, Dottie, to drive around in a clapped-out station wagon.

  His first break had come when Averell Harriman hired him as his assistant in the National Recovery Administration, one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies. He impressed Harriman, as he would his other mentors, with his intelligence, loyalty, and diligence. With Harriman’s backing, he rose quickly through the ranks of the New Deal’s bright young men. He opened the first regional office of the Social Security Administration in New York City, where he became a drinking companion of author and fellow North Carolinian Thomas Wolfe, and a close enough friend to serve as a pallbearer at Wolfe’s funeral in 1938. He joined the U.S. Army Reserve in 1936 and served during World War II as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps transport command, sometimes briefing army chief of staff General George Marshall. Marshall thought so highly of Martin that when he became secretary of state, he arranged for him to enter the Foreign Service without taking the examinations. Martin served in Paris for eight years, becoming deputy chief of mission under Ambassador Douglas Dillon, the heir to an investment banking fortune. After President Eisenhower appointed Dillon deputy secretary of state, Dillon brought Martin with him to Washington as his special assistant. After President Kennedy appointed Dillon secretary of the Treasury, Martin filled several important New Frontier positions before Kennedy named him ambassador to Thailand.

  During his four years in Bangkok, Martin resisted attempts by Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to send U.S. ground troops to Thailand to help its army fight a Communist insurgency. He argued that young American soldiers were finding it difficult to distinguish between friendly and enemy Vietnamese and would find it no easier in Thailand. He pointed out that he “did not see any white faces” on the Communist side in Vietnam and that introducing American soldiers into the Thai conflict risked adding a dangerous racial element. He forbade American advisers in Thailand to carry sidearms, mocked the “narrow military mind” of his opponents in the Pentagon, and expelled an American general who crossed him.

  He also became a strident opponent of President Johnson’s escalation in Vietnam, later telling a congressional committee, “I felt then, and I still feel now, that it would have been far better if we had chosen, as a matter of national policy, to have confined ourselves to the provision of military and economic assistance, and perhaps some training, but not direct military involvement.” His cables to Rusk became more forceful after November 1965, when his beloved adopted son, Glenn Mann, a Marine Corps helicopter pilot, was killed while turning back a Vietcong attack on a South Vietnamese outpost. Mann was Dorothy Martin’s nephew, and the Martins had adopted him at an early age after his father had been murdered while witnessing a service station robbery in Georgia. The government of South Vietnam awarded Mann its Gallantry Cross with Palm, and Martin flew to the battlefield where he had fallen to attend a memorial service and receive his decoration from Colonel Pham Van Phu, the officer whose troops would be decimated during the Convoy of Tears. It was believed in Vietnam that French commander General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny had become even more determined to defeat the Vietminh after they killed his son in battle, chopped off his head, and tied his corpse to a water buffalo that they sent back to French lines. It was similarly believed that, like de Tassigny, Graham Martin could not accept that Glenn Mann might have died in vain. Mann’s death had been even more devastating because it followed that of Martin’s oldest son, who had been killed in an automobile accident during his senior year at the University of Virginia. The boy had missed a curve in the English sports car that Martin and his wife had given him as an early graduation present, driving it down an embankment and into a tree. Martin’s hair had turned white overnight.

  Rusk finally lost patience with Martin’s opposition to transforming the Thai insurgency into the kind of war that had killed his son and recalled him to Washington. Martin would acknowledge that his temperament might have been partly to blame, admitting that he might have erred by “expressing those opinions within the privacy of private channels, but with some pungency of expression that was perhaps too tart.” He told friends that he was proud of having taken a stand, remarking wryly that while others had been losing their heads over the Vietnam War, he had already been carrying his own head under his arm. He would also remind friends that the Thai army had defeated its nation’s Communist insurgency without help from U.S. combat troops and that Thailand never had a My Lai massacre.

  Rusk made him a special assistant for refugee affairs, a demotion probably meant to show him the door. But the same integrity and irascible temperament that had poisoned Martin’s relationships with Rusk and McNamara had impressed Richard Nixon when he visited Bangkok as a private attorney on a trade mission that included Vice President Hubert Humphrey. As Humphrey was preparing to offer a toast to the Thai king, Martin had restrained him and said that as President Johnson’s personal representative in Thailand he outranked Humphrey and that protocol demanded that he deliver the toast. Nixon overheard him telling Humphrey afterward, “If you become President yourself someday, Mr. Vice-President, you can be sure that I will guard your interests as closely as I did President Johnson’s tonight.” Instead, it was Nixon who became president. After his election a member of his transition team called Martin to say that the president-elect wanted to offer him an embassy and would like to know where he wanted to serve. Without hesitation Martin said, “Rome,” a post usually reserved for a major dono
r or close friend. The aide urged him to be more realistic and name some other capitals. Martin said “Rome!” again, and got it.

  While serving there, he funneled millions from a covert embassy fund to anti-Communist parties, including a payment of almost $1 million that he sent over the objection of the CIA to an Italian general who would be accused of plotting to overthrow the government. Martin was such a private man that it is difficult to know whether he had become an increasingly hard-line cold warrior because Communists had killed his son or because it put him more in tune with the Nixon administration, but his politics had always been idiosyncratic. During World War II the army had threatened him with a court-martial for making scathing attacks on the policy of incarcerating Japanese Americans in concentration camps. His liberal convictions were also evident in the two men he lionized as his heroes: David Bruce, the moderate southern Democrat who had preceded Dillon as ambassador to Paris, and Adlai Stevenson, a favorite of left-wing Democrats despite his two failed presidential candidacies. In a letter to the secretary-general of Amnesty International, Martin would describe himself as “a hopelessly old-fashioned liberal humanitarian.”

  Rome had capped a brilliant diplomatic career for a barefoot boy from North Carolina. In mid-twentieth-century America it was harder to be a self-made diplomat than a self-made businessman, and few ambassadors of Martin’s rank had come from such modest beginnings. He had proven himself smart and diligent and had hitched his wagon to some of the century’s brightest diplomatic stars. His detractors, however, would accuse him of being “a born conspirator” and “a skilled bureaucratic knife-fighter.” Los Angeles Times correspondent George McArthur believed that his courtly manner concealed “the most Machiavellian mind” he had ever encountered. Kissinger has described him as a paranoid who “tended to consider anything less than 100 percent support as betrayal.” An anonymous subordinate told a reporter that he was “a man with a mission different from the rest of us,” adding, “He was going to save Vietnam all by himself. He thought he was one of the Caesars.” Martin compared himself to a honey badger, a ferocious weasel-like beast known for sinking its sharp teeth into an opponent’s balls.

  Still, he was the only one at the March 25 Oval Office meeting to express any concern over what might happen to America’s South Vietnamese allies and to pledge to evacuate “as many of our Vietnamese friends” as possible. His concern might have been motivated more by his belief that abandoning them, like incarcerating the Japanese Americans, was morally wrong and could only tarnish America’s honor than by any great affection for the Vietnamese people.

  White House photographer David Kennerly was also concerned about America’s South Vietnamese allies. He had failed to raise the issue at the Oval Office meeting because he had made it a rule not to speak while he was shooting. Once Martin, Weyand, and Kissinger had left the Oval Office, he plopped into a chair and said, “Mr. President, I really want to go on that mission.” He argued that his friends in the Saigon press corps and among the younger diplomats at the embassy would speak more openly with him than with Weyand, telling Ford, “Vietnam is falling to pieces. I’ve spent two and a half years there…and I’ve just got to go back. I’ve got to see for myself.” He did not add that he wanted to help his Vietnamese friends escape and hoped that his photographs and eyewitness account might influence how Ford handled the fall of South Vietnam.

  He also wanted to witness the final days of a war that had been the defining experience of his life. He had joined the UPI as a staff photographer at twenty-one and lobbied to be sent to Vietnam because he knew that the war would be the biggest story of his generation. He had taken daring combat photographs, won a 1972 Pulitzer Prize, covered the release of American POWs from Hanoi, and returned to the United States to work for Time and shoot the photograph of Gerald Ford appearing on the magazine’s cover. Their photo session had led to an intergenerational friendship between Ford, the straight-arrow midwestern politician, and Kennerly, the bearded and blue-jean-wearing West Coast hipster. Ford found Kennerly’s iconoclastic humor and high spirits refreshing; Kennerly admired Ford’s lack of guile and vanity. After Nixon resigned, Ford appointed Kennerly White House photographer and gave him unrivaled access to him and his family.

  After considering his request to accompany Weyand, Ford said, “Sure, David, I understand. And I’ll be interested to hear your views of what’s going on when you get back.”

  Kennerly slapped a sign on his office door announcing, “Gone to Vietnam, back in a week or so,” and went upstairs to the family quarters to say good-bye. Ford asked if he could do anything for him before he left. Kennerly said the banks were closed and he was out of cash. Ford emptied his wallet and handed him $47. As he was leaving, Ford flipped him a quarter and said, “You might as well clean me out.” Then he threw an arm around his shoulder and said, “Take care of yourself over there.”

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  The Weyand mission flew to Saigon on a U.S. Air Force Lockheed C-141 transport outfitted with “comfort pallet” modules containing bedrooms and conference rooms. Kennerly’s black-and-white photographs of the flight have a film noir quality. Men with tight expressions stand in shadows or sit under weak cones of light. Weyand stares up at a large map of Vietnam pinned to a curtain. Martin leans against a wall, head down, his profile a dark silhouette. Martin and Weyand speak in the corridor, and although Martin is over six feet, Weyand, a raw-boned man with a receding hairline who bears a resemblance to John Wayne, stands hands on hips, towering over him.

  During much of the flight Martin sat alone, his head wreathed in smoke as he chain-smoked his way across the Pacific while reading the reports and cables that had piled up during his leave. He was a chronic insomniac, and sleepless nights and cigarettes had carved deep lines into his face, making him appear a decade older than sixty-two. His pallor and habit of working late into the night had led to his nickname, the Gray Ghost.

  The CIA had sent George Carver and Ted Shackley, men who, according to Kennerly, “worked in the deep shadows.” Shackley had an archetypal Cold War résumé: West Berlin in the 1950s, Miami during the Bay of Pigs and Cuban missile crisis, chief of station in Saigon from 1968 to 1972. His light blond hair, pale complexion, and reluctance to be photographed had led colleagues to call him the “Blond Ghost.” During the flight, the Blond and Gray Ghosts joined General Weyand around a table covered by a map of South Vietnam. Weyand and Shackley took turns briefing Martin on the retreats and defeats of South Vietnam’s armed forces. Martin pointed to a place on the map and asked incredulously, “You mean that division is no longer here?”

  “That division is nowhere, Graham,” Weyand said. “It no longer exists.”

  “But that doesn’t happen!”

  “It does; it has,” Shackley said.

  Weyand decided that Martin could not accept the dimensions of the catastrophe and signaled for Shackley to end the briefing.

  Since arriving in Saigon in 1973, Martin had insisted that Thieu was popular and competent and that his armed forces could defeat the Communists and his country would prosper if Congress increased U.S. aid to its government and if the press and the antiwar Left—opponents he called the “worldwide community of alienated intellectuals”—stopped criticizing and undermining him. Ban Me Thuot and the Convoy of Tears had not shaken Martin’s faith in Thieu nor his belief that he knew Vietnam better than anyone. Nor had they convinced him that the war that had killed his adopted son might be lost.

  The Vietnam War had channeled the careers of Shackley, Weyand, and others on the mission, and they had in turn contributed to the catastrophe they were flying to Saigon to assess. Weyand had arrived in South Vietnam in 1966 in command of the famed Twenty-Fifth “Tropic Lightning” Infantry Division. Two years later he was commanding U.S. forces in the southern third of South Vietnam and reporting directly to General William Westmoreland. He had next served as the chief military
adviser to the U.S. delegation at the Paris Peace Talks before becoming the last U.S. commander in South Vietnam. In that role, he had presided over the flag-lowering ceremony at the U.S. military headquarters at Tan Son Nhut on March 29, 1973, declaring in English and Vietnamese, “Our mission has been accomplished,” and saying that he was departing “with a strong feeling of pride in what we have achieved.” He concluded, “It is our sincere hope that the peace with honor that has been our goal will last forever.”

  Kissinger, Ford, and Martin probably assumed that because of this Weyand would make a strong case for additional aid. They might have been less confident had they known that in 1967 he had drawn aside CBS correspondent Murray Fromson at a Saigon cocktail party and said, “Westy [Westmoreland] just doesn’t get it. The war is unwinnable. We’ve reached a stalemate, and we should find a dignified way out.” Several days later he had repeated his pessimistic assessment to New York Times reporter R. W. Apple, adding, “Unless a more positive and more simple theme than simple anti-Communism can be found, the war appears likely to go on until someone gets tired and quits, which could take generations.” In a front-page New York Times article titled “Vietnam: The Signs of Stalemate,” Apple repeated Weyand’s scathing assessment of the war, identifying him as “a senior American general.” Neither President Johnson nor Westmoreland ever learned his identity, and at Weyand’s request it remained secret until Westmoreland died in 2005.

  While the Weyand mission was airborne, the shadings and arrows on its maps identifying the movements of North and South Vietnamese troops became obsolete. Deputy Chief of Mission Wolfgang Lehmann cabled Washington that the situation in the North had “deteriorated considerably in the past 24 hours,” and Ford and Kissinger received a March 28 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) reporting that government forces in Military Region I had abandoned “large quantities of ammunition and fuel” and did not “appear capable of standing up to the communists” and that South Vietnam’s leadership was reacting with “dismay and depression.” The NIE predicted that the government would soon control “little more than the delta and Saigon and surrounding populated areas,” and concluded, “The communists will keep up their military pressure to topple the GVN [government of South Vietnam] by outright defeat unless there have been political changes in Saigon that open the way to a new settlement on near-surrender terms.” Its only note of optimism was a forecast that there was “likely to be defeat by early 1976.” Three days before Ford and Kissinger received this assessment, North Vietnam’s Politburo had ordered General Dung to “liberate Saigon” before the dry season ended in May.