“Ike has made a promise,” Lyndon Johnson would say of Vietnam during his years in the White House. “I have to keep it.” But he didn’t. This wasn’t a pact. The Senate had nothing to do with it. It lacked even the legitimacy of an executive order. Yet both Johnson and Kennedy felt bound by it. To have withdrawn U.S. support, Theodore C. Sorensen wrote, would have caused “the world to wonder about the reliability of this nation’s pledges.” Arthur Schlesinger went further:
Whether we had vital interests in South Vietnam before 1954, the Eisenhower letter created those interests. Whether we should have drawn the line where we did, once it was drawn we became every succeeding year more imprisoned by it. Whether the domino theory was valid in 1954, it had acquired validity seven years later, after neighboring governments had staked their own security on the ability of the United States to live up to its pledges to Saigon. Kennedy… had no choice but to work within the situation he had inherited.
“The cause in Vietnam,” Theodore H. White wrote in The Making of the President 1968, was “the cause of America for half a century, a cause made clear to the world…. If there is any fragile form of world order today, 400,000 American battle deaths in four wars in this century have created that world order.” President Johnson argued that to “cut and run,” would have been to “say to the world in this case that we don’t live up to our treaties and don’t stand by our friends.” Time explained to those who felt otherwise that:
…South Vietnam must be defended at all costs…. If the U.S. cannot or will not save South Viet Nam from the Communist assault, no Asian nation can ever again feel safe in putting its faith in the U.S.—and the fall of all of Southeast Asia would only be a matter of time.
The consequences of such a withdrawal were considered unthinkable. In support of sending American draftees to Vietnam, Robert McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff flatly declared that the alternative was serious deterioration throughout that part of the world. General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, speaking for the Chiefs, predicted that in the event of a Viet Cong victory, “We would lose Asia all the way to Singapore,” and General Maxwell Taylor, confident of success against the guerrilla enemy—North Vietnam was “extremely vulnerable to conventional bombing,” he said—told President Kennedy that a “U.S. military task force” was “essential.”
There was no sense in any of this. If the Kennedy administration hadn’t felt bound to evacuate the Cuban brigade from its doomed beachhead, then it owed Diem nothing. Furthermore, the Eisenhower letter had no validity now because Diem had openly flouted the obligation of introducing “needed reforms.” He had also refused to hold all-Vietnam elections in 1956. For him to have invoked the sanctity of treaties would have been absurd, even if the United States had been bound to him by a treaty, which of course it wasn’t.
The real pressures binding Washington to Saigon were political. McCarthy was dead, but both Democrats and Republicans were haunted by the nightmarish possibility that Diem might become a second Chiang Kai-shek. It is all the more ironical, then, that they repeated the very mistake Americans counseling Chiang had made; though the problem was political there, too, the aid they gave was military. One reason for their error was the attitude of powerful figures on Capitol Hill who had great faith in the Joint Chiefs and little trust in the political officers on the State Department’s Asian desk. Another explanation lay in the character of the two cabinet members advising the White House on Vietnam in the early 1960s. McNamara was decisive and forceful, Rusk was timid and vague; inevitably the more persuasive voice came from the Pentagon.
Vietnam had been comparatively placid in the latter Eisenhower years. Eight hundred U.S. military advisers and three hundred million dollars in military aid a year had sufficed to preserve the status quo. Then, in December 1960, the month before Kennedy’s inaugural, Diem’s adversaries announced the formation of a National Liberation Front. In Freedom Palace their rivals christened the NLF the Viet Cong (literally, “Vietnamese Communists”). Diem wasn’t worried by it at first. The previous autumn he had easily turned back an attempted coup, and when Vice President Johnson asked him if he wanted some American soldiers, he said he didn’t. But though ground troops weren’t necessary then, he admitted needing some help. President Kennedy approved the dispatch of a 400-man Special Forces group (the Green Berets) for training missions. For the first time the American commitment included troops.
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Early in May 1961 a new U.S. ambassador, Frederick E. Nolting Jr., arrived in Saigon. His predecessor had tried to reason with Diem, and as a result had become, in effect, persona non grata. Nolting was resolved not to repeat that mistake. By now Viet Cong depredations were so obvious that even the mandarin president had to acknowledge them. The situation in the countryside was deteriorating. Guerrilla bands roamed at will, assassinating village chieftains. A U.S. intelligence estimate reported that an “extremely critical period” lay “immediately ahead” and warned that the Saigon regime’s “reliance on virtually one-man rule” and “toleration of corruption” led many to “question Diem’s ability to lead in this period.”
In Washington the White House was being urged to step into the Vietnamese breach of its various bureaucratic constituencies. Deputy Undersecretary of State U. Alexis Johnson asked Kennedy to accept “defeat of the Vietcong” as a “real and ultimate” objective. The Joint Chiefs assured the President that 40,000 U.S. troops would “clean up the Vietcong threat,” and that another 128,000 would be enough to turn back possible North Vietnam or Chinese Communist intervention. Roswell W. Gilpatric, McNamara’s deputy at Defense, proposed talks with Diem on the “possibility of a defensive security alliance,” and William P. Bundy, also in the Pentagon at that stage, urged “early and hard-hitting” American intervention in the war. Bundy gave it a 70 percent chance of success.
Kennedy authorized further studies, agreed to expand the 685-man U.S. military advisory group in Saigon, and approved plans to equip and pay 20,000 more Vietnamese troops for Diem (for a total of 150,000). Like Ike, he wanted aid contingent upon domestic reforms and mobilization of South Vietnamese resources against the Viet Cong, but he wasn’t emphatic about it. He was preoccupied with Berlin and nuclear testing at the time. Schlesinger doubts that he ever gave Vietnam “his full attention.” Observers attuned to the cold war continued to be baffled by Vietnam. “The situation gets worse almost week by week,” Theodore H. White wrote in August 1961. White found that “guerrillas now control almost all the Southern delta—so much so that I could find no American who would drive me outside Saigon in his car even by day without military convoy.” He reported a “political breakdown of formidable proportions.” Then he wrote: “…what perplexes hell out of me is that the Commies, on their side, seem to be able to find people willing to die for their cause.” The revolutionary spirit has often perplexed those not imbued with it.
The following month guerrillas captured a provincial capital and executed the governor. Diem’s troops were in retreat everywhere. Reluctantly he summoned Nolting and asked for a bilateral defense treaty. Washington was in a responsive mood. All summer support had been coalescing around the Lyndon Johnson approach to Southeast Asia. The Vice President was voicing the classic liberal position: the real enemies in Vietnam, he had written on his return from there, were “hunger, ignorance, poverty, and disease.” He believed that Americans “must—whatever strategies we evolve—keep those enemies the point of our attack, and make imaginative use of our scientific and technological capacity.”
The President responded by sending to Saigon a high-level mission comprising two of his most trusted advisers, General Maxwell Taylor and Walt W. Rostow. Thus a general and a militant civilian—for Rostow, first to last, was the most uncompromising of the hawks—were to be the President’s eyes and ears in Vietnam at this critical juncture. The absence of any American diplomat of stature was significant. It reflected, as Sorensen later wrote, “the State Department’s inability to compete with the Pentagon.” The
result was further emphasis on military objectives at the expense of political considerations.
The Taylor-Rostow report marked one of the great turning points in the Vietnam War. To arrest the decline in Diem’s fortunes, Kennedy was urged to send him a large contingent of American advisers, and—more important—American infantry: 8,000 at once and more as needed. Taylor, the dominant member of the team, wanted Vietnam to be the subject of a major presidential telecast. Some of his arguments for intervention were curious. In coming down hard on the side of an expeditionary force, for example, he compared Vietnam with Korea, “where U.S. troops learned to live and work without too much effort.” Actually Korea and Vietnam were very different. The first was a conventional struggle, with enemy formations crossing a border and engaging Americans in fixed battles on terrain relatively familiar to U.S. soldiers. The second was irregular warfare in dense tropical jungle. Most important of all, the native population in South Korea wanted the Americans there. In Vietnam they didn’t; Vietnamese villagers tended to regard U.S. Caucasian troops as successors to the French, and the Viet Cong as heroes.
Some members of the administration subcabinet—Chester Bowles, George Ball, and Averell Harriman among them—were appalled by this recommendation. The only senior man to question it, however, was Kennedy himself. He refused to go to the people on TV because that would confer upon Vietnam the status of Berlin. He also noted pointedly that Taylor and Rostow, unlike the Joint Chiefs, were optimistic about the effectiveness of U.S. intervention only if the North Vietnamese were prevented from infiltrating South Vietnam, and that they had no ideas for accomplishing that. What dismayed him most was the proposal to send soldiers. Sorensen wrote: “All his principal advisors on Vietnam favored it, calling it the ‘touchstone’ of our good faith, a symbol of our determination. But the President in effect voted ‘no’—and only his vote counted.” Kennedy told an aide: “They want a force of American troops. They say it’s necessary in order to restore confidence and maintain morale. But it will be just like Berlin. The troops will march in; the bands will play; the crowds will cheer; and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send more troops. It’s like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another.”
Nevertheless, he was being manipulated. He vetoed U.S. troops but yielded on other points, and a buildup of U.S. strength in Vietnam began in December 1961. Like Eisenhower seven years earlier, the President affirmed the arrangement in a public exchange of letters with Diem. It wasn’t all one-way; Diem conceded the need for reforms and acknowledged the need for more leadership and better morale in his army. But no limits were set for the amount of U.S. assistance or when it would end, other than when the Viet Cong had been pacified and the North Vietnamese driven out. Taylor saw no great peril in that. “The risks of backing into a major Asian war by way of South Vietnam,” he cabled the President from the Philippines, “are present but not impressive.” George Ball, on the other hand, was apprehensive. Diem wouldn’t stop pressing until he got the administration to send infantrymen, he said. That was what Diem really wanted; it would allow him to stabilize his regime while the Americans did his fighting for him. Ball predicted that if that commitment was made it would not stay small. Within five years, he told the President, there would be 300,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam. Kennedy laughed and said, “George, you’re crazier than hell.”
One factor in the coming acceleration—which would vindicate Ball and then some—was the character of the Americans making decisions in Saigon. From early 1962 until the end of Kennedy’s thousand days in power the two key figures were Ambassador Nolting and General Paul D. Harkins, the new head of the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG), who reached Vietnam in February. The choice of both was tragic. Nolting, a member of an old Virginia family, was a traditionalist who knew nothing about Asia. His appointment had been recommended by the anti-Communist hard-liners in the State Department. In any crisis he would back Diem, and when Kennedy really needed him he would be found to be off cruising on the Aegean Sea on an extended vacation. Harkins was worse. He was the maverick son of a cultivated Boston family, a high school dropout who had risen in the Army solely because he was a good cavalryman, a spirited polo player, and a horsy companion for George S. Patton when Patton wanted to relax. In World War II Harkins had been Patton’s deputy chief of staff; his nickname then had been “the ramrod” because of the way he drove Patton’s orders home. Like Patton, he sometimes had trouble taking orders himself. This was to be particularly true when his instructions required him to send the President candid reports on how the war was going. Kennedy had made it plain that he wanted to know everything, the good news and the bad. But Harkins didn’t like to relay bad news. He thought it might reflect on him. Instead he acted as though his mission were to make things look good on the surface. When he arrived in Saigon he told American correspondents that he was an optimist and liked to have optimists around him. Henceforth, he disclosed, the daily situation appraisal for Washington would be called “The Headway Report.” He intended to leave no doubt that under him the fight against the Viet Cong would be making headway.
Nolting and Harkins agreed that Diem was the answer to all problems, that nothing could be done without him, and that since criticism of his regime would only anger him, there would be none of it. In the phrase of Homer Bigart of the New York Times, this became the policy of “Sink or Swim with Ngo Dinh Diem.” Diem quickly realized that there was no limit to the ways he could take advantage of these two Americans.
The first drive against the Viet Cong after Harkins’s arrival was called, appropriately, Operation Sunrise. Harkins told reporters that he was planning construction of a chain of fortified “strategic hamlets” which would be manned by home defense units; his co-planner was the Vietnamese president’s brother Nhu. The next thing Washington knew, strategic hamlets were a thundering success, with over one-third of the total rural population living in them. The war seemed to be turning around. All the reports from Saigon were good. Skeptics could check Harkins’s appreciations with those from Nolting, which also glowed.
In reality the experiments with the fortified hamlets were a failure. Nothing had changed except the men at the top. They were waging war through public relations releases. Reports from the field were being rewritten by Harkins, with pessimism and unwelcome information deleted and outright fiction substituted. Colonels and majors who objected—and some did, most memorably Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann—were transferred to unwelcome assignments with notations in their records that ended their military careers. When another general, junior to Harkins, toured the front and found a situation very different from that being depicted in the MAAG commander’s self-serving dispatches, he gave Harkins an appraisal telling the truth about the war. Harkins scribbled in the margin—“Lies,” “Lies,” “More lies”—and stuck it in the back of a file cabinet. The real lies were his own, but the only sources to contradict him were the stories in American newspapers cabled back from correspondents in Vietnam. Harkins explained them away by calling the reporters sensation-mongers or, worse, traitors. When occasional reverses were acknowledged it was because Harkins had an ulterior motive. He wanted more men, more guns, more choppers. Failure to supply them, he warned, would mean that civilians were letting down the army, and anybody who remembered China knew what that would mean.
Had there been a Tet offensive or any other eruption in Viet Cong activity, this press-agentry might have been exposed in the beginning. As it happened, there was a drop in guerrilla activity. That was all the manipulators of news needed. Operation Sunrise, they declared, had brought blue skies over the battlefield. They were elated, and in Washington their elation was infectious. Maxwell Taylor said he sensed “a great national movement” in Vietnam to crush the Viet Cong. McNamara said, “Every quantitative measurement we have shows we’re winning this war.” President Kennedy, surprised and pleased, authorized an expansion of the Saigon command fro
m 2,000 men to 16,000, and the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) was upgraded to the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV).
TWENTY-EIGHT
Now the Trumpet Summoned Us Again
In 1961 the troubled years of the decade lay in the future. The disorders at home would not begin until the summer of 1964, eight months after President Kennedy’s death. Later this would encourage the myth that if only he had lived none of it would have happened. In fact, his responsibility for the coming turmoil was substantial. The Vietnam buildup was one of two major steps he took toward it. The second step was his decision to mount a program aimed at putting a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s. Because Kennedy committed the country to the spending of vast sums on space exploration—over 56 billion dollars before Apollo 11 reached the moon, and even that wasn’t the end of it—successive administrations lacked the resources to provide imaginative, far-reaching responses to the ghetto upheavals which rocked the nation from Watts to Harlem. Those riots, combined with anguished demonstrations against the U.S. role in Vietnam, weakened the fabric of American society to an extent unknown since the Civil War a hundred years earlier.
Kennedy agonized over both the Vietnam and space issues. In the first of them he may even have been on the verge of withdrawing from Indochina. Kenneth O’Donnell, his chief of staff, has said that he planned to get out in his second term, and before flying to Texas on his last journey the President had issued an order to bring back the first 1,000 U.S. military advisers. (According to O’Donnell, Lyndon Johnson quietly rescinded the order after the return from Dallas.) There are other signs that Kennedy was moving toward disengagement. David Halberstam, who cannot be called a friendly critic on this issue, believes that Kennedy had made up his mind but “did not want to rush too quickly, to split his administration unnecessarily. There was always time.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 138