The generals now had a green light from Lodge. On August 29 he cabled Rusk, “We are launched on a course from which there is no respectable turning back: the overthrow of the Diem government.” Everything seemed set for it. Days passed, and then weeks, with no coup. The plotters appeared to have lost their nerve. The crackdown on the pagodas had cramped their style, sidelining several of their leaders, and Diem had tightened his control of the troops around Saigon. The State Department asked Lodge what was the matter with the generals. He said, “Perhaps they are like the rest of us, and afraid to die.”
Encouraged by Diem’s survival, the hawks in the administration took on new life. The need now, McNamara said at a council of war on August 31, was to reopen conversations with Diem. Rusk agreed, saying that this much was clear: the American presence must remain in Vietnam until the Viet Cong war was won, and the United States could not approve of a coup. General Taylor said they were both right. George Ball and Averell Harriman thought that this was absurd. Autumn was approaching, and each day the division between the two camps in Washington was wider. It became an abyss in September, when the National Security Council sent another fact-finding mission to Saigon. The investigators were Major General Victor H. “Brute” Krulak of the Marine Corps and, from the State Department, Joseph A. Mendenhall, a senior foreign service officer of comparable rank with experience in Vietnam. On their return President Kennedy reconvened the National Security Council, and each presented his report. General Krulak said that the war was being won and Diem’s performance could hardly be improved upon. Mendenhall said that the Diem regime was at the point of collapse. There was a silence. Then the President said, “Were you two gentlemen in the same country?”
During all this the relationship between Lodge and General Harkins in Vietnam was deteriorating. Both were from Boston, and their families were old friends, but now they scarcely spoke to one another. Late in September McNamara and General Taylor arrived in Saigon on one more attempt to find out what was going on. At the airport Lodge, determined to reach McNamara first, detailed two of his men to obstruct Harkins’s way. (“Please, gentlemen! Please let me through to the secretary!”) Apart from that, Harkins was as cheerful as ever. His optimism was reflected in the opening paragraph of the subsequent McNamara-Taylor report, which declared that Diem’s army “has made great progress and continues to progress.” Because Diem’s troops were victorious on all fronts, the appraisal continued, the first thousand American soldiers could be withdrawn before Christmas, and all of them would be home by the end of 1965. At the same time the report dealt a glancing blow to the heretical suggestion of Robert Kennedy that the Americans pull out now. McNamara and Taylor took what would be the Pentagon line to the bitter end:
The security of South Vietnam remains vital to United States security. For this reason, we adhere to the overriding objective of denying this country to Communism and of suppressing the Vietcong insurgency as promptly as possible.
But this view was now definitely losing support in the administration. The President himself was moving away from it. Interviewed on CBS-TV by Walter Cronkite on September 2, he had said pointedly that if the Republic of Vietnam was to be successful in its struggle against the Viet Cong it needed “changes in policy, and perhaps in personnel.” He had then said: “I don’t think the war can be won unless the people support the effort, and in my opinion, in the last two months the government has gotten out of touch with the people…. In the first analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men there as advisers, but they have to win it, the people of Vietnam.”
Early in October a ten-million-dollar-a-month program for Diem was quietly suspended. He and the Nhus angrily denounced Kennedy, and Madame Nhu arrived in California to open a lecture tour of the United States, condemning Kennedy with the support of right-wing groups. From the outset the trip was a fiasco. Official Washington boycotted her. When she attempted to call on her estranged father, Tran Van Chuong, she found the door locked and bolted; the ex-ambassador was in Manhattan speaking on what he called “the trail of stench” left by his daughter. She tried to follow him. At La Guardia Field she was met by a city official who curtly denied that he was greeting her; “I’m just here to see that the lady has sufficient police protection,” he said. Madame Nhu snapped that she didn’t need protection. “God is in my corner,” she said. She never did find Tran. Speaking at Harvard, she was picketed by about five hundred students carrying such signs as NHU DEAL IS NHU DIEM GOOD. They pounded on the door of the lecture hall, spattered the side of the building with eggs, and rattled the windows as she spoke. After Cambridge, her crowds dwindled. Apart from ultraconservative claques, virtually the only people who turned out to see her were reporters.
Back in Saigon the government seemed to be losing its grip on reality. Nhu was threatening to form an alliance with Hanoi to drive the Americans out of the country. Diem’s secret police, having purged the Buddhists, were attacking the country’s schools. In a series of incomprehensible raids they jailed college students, then high school pupils, and finally children in the elementary schools. Even Catholics weren’t safe from persecution. Vietnamese of all faiths and persuasions were appealing to General Duong Van Minh, “Big” Minh, the most prestigious officer in the army, begging him to oust Diem and Nhu. Minh approached John Richardson, the CIA station chief, and asked him for his advice. Bypassing General Harkins, Richardson arranged a meeting between Minh and Lodge. The ambassador told Minh that the Americans would do nothing to impede a coup, and that if it was successful U.S. aid would go to another anti-Communist government. This position was relayed to the White House, which approved it. Everyone in Washington and Saigon seemed to be aware of the coming revolt except Diem, Nhu, and General Harkins, who assured the President that there would be no coup, that it was all talk, that he had checked the rumors and found them to be groundless. Nothing could happen, Harkins said, without his knowing of it. It could, though. David Halberstam of the New York Times and another reporter had already received slips of paper with the message, “Please buy me one bottle of whisky at the PX”—the signal that the uprising was imminent.
Diem’s hour struck at 1 P.M. Vietnamese time (1 A.M. in Washington) on Friday, November 1, All Saints’ Day. In Saigon it was siesta time on a day of stupefying heat. The president and his brother had retired to their bedrooms in Gia Long palace, where they were presumably protected by the palace guard and seven-foot fences topped by barbed wire. But as they slept, truckloads of rebel marines wearing red kerchiefs had already launched an attack on their defenses while other soldiers threw up roadblocks at key intersections. The insurgents quickly seized the airport, the police station, navy headquarters on the banks of the Saigon River, and the government radio station, which broadcast a declaration in the name of fourteen generals and seven colonels: “Soldiers in the army, security service, civil defense force, and people’s force! The Ngo Dinh Diem government, abusing power, has thought only of personal ambition and slighted the fatherland’s interests….”
That evening the siege of the palace began with a mortar and artillery barrage. In the early hours of the next morning a force of eighteen tanks began blowing holes in the fences. At 6:15 A.M. a rebel general ordered a five-minute cease-fire and called on Diem and Nhu to surrender. A white flag appeared in a first floor window, but Diem and Nhu were not there. They had fled through a secret tunnel to the Chinese suburb of Cholon, from which they sent word to the victorious junta that they were ready to open negotiations. Exactly what happened after that is unknown. Reportedly they accepted offers of safe conduct out of the country, but it was a ruse; they who had deceived so many were now betrayed themselves. Picked up by rebel soldiers, they were killed, on orders from the generals, in the back of an armored personnel carrier. Their bodies were found there, riddled with bullets and dressed in Roman Catholic priests’ robes in which they had hoped to escape if nothing
else worked. Diem had also been stabbed repeatedly.
Awakened with the news in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, Madame Nhu sobbed that President Kennedy was to blame. The President was in fact shaken, depressed for the first time since the Bay of Pigs; whatever Diem’s faults, he said, he had not deserved to be slain. Elsewhere in the administration the news was accepted with resignation, even relief. There was one significant exception. Vice President Johnson was bitter. The Vice President had given Diem his hand, had been his friend, and in Johnson’s view the friendship had symbolized the American commitment to Diem. The same officials who had been Diem’s critics in the administration were also critical of the Vice President. He knew it, and knew who they were, and he had long since come to despise them and everything about them, right down to their Cardin shirts and PT-109 tie clasps. On other issues Johnson admired Kennedy, but not here.
The people of Saigon did not share Johnson’s view. They had turned the day into a holiday, dancing in the streets; statues of Diem, his brother, and his sister-in-law were smashed and posters of them were torn down, until the only likeness of the late President in the capital was on one-piaster coins. The triumphant generals were showered with confetti everywhere they went, and Lodge became the first American within recent memory to be cheered in public. Hope was running high in the U.S. embassy; the factions which had been united against the ruling family seemed popular enough to give the country a stable government.
A week passed, and then two weeks; the autumn days grew shorter, and President Kennedy’s spirits rose. The McNamara-Taylor report, dated October 2, was still on his desk, but he felt no sense of urgency about the need to deal with it. As David Halberstam later wrote:
He knew Vietnam was bad and getting worse, that he was on his way to a first-class foreign policy problem, but he had a sense of being able to handle it, of having time, that time was somehow on his side. He could afford to move his people slowly; too forceful a shove would bring a counter-shove. It was late 1963, and since 1964 was an election year, any delay on major decisions was healthy; if the Vietnamese could hold out a little longer, so could he.
On November 13 he summoned a conference of his chief strategists for the coming campaign. Meeting in the Cabinet Room late that Wednesday afternoon, they agreed that prospects for a landslide victory against Goldwater were encouraging. The economy was flourishing. The annual Gross National Product had grown 100 billion dollars since his inaugural; its rate of growth was greater than that of either Russia or Europe. The huge new Saturn rocket, which would be launched next month, would at last put the United States ahead of the Soviet Union in the planned spacecraft race. Except for Vietnam the world was calm, and to get more perspective on that the President cabled Ambassador Lodge suggesting that he come home for a long talk. Lodge replied that he was making arrangements to leave Saigon as soon as possible. That would be on Thursday, November 21.
***
Richard M. Nixon, then an attorney representing Pepsi-Cola, left Dallas, Texas, aboard American Airlines Flight 82, bound for New York, at 9:05 A.M. on November 22, 1963, thus missing President Kennedy’s arrival there aboard Air Force One by about two and a half hours. Mr. Nixon had spent the past two days at a Pepsi-Cola Bottlers Association meeting. He was just beginning to learn the ropes as a corporation lawyer. He had filed a petition for admission to the New York State bar only last Friday, and his name was not yet on his office door, because he would not become a full partner in the law firm of Mudge, Stern, Baldwin & Todd until January 1, 1964.
It was expected to remain there a long time. Earlier in the week during a televised interview Dwight Eisenhower had spoken of Nixon’s chances in the next presidential election, but his remark is chiefly memorable as vintage Eisenhowerese: “Now, if there should be one of those deadlocks, I would think he would be one of the likely persons to be examined and approached, because he is, after all, a very knowledgeable and a very courageous type of fellow.” Hardly anyone agreed with Ike. Certainly the American Broadcasting Company didn’t. Not only had the network called a broadcast about him The Political Obituary of Richard M. Nixon; the program, filmed the year before, had featured an interview with, of all people, Alger Hiss. Two companies tried to cancel their advertising contracts with ABC because of it, but FCC Chairman Newton N. “Wasteland” Minow turned them down with the cold observation that broadcasting must be free from censorship by “those few, fearful advertisers who seek to influence the professional judgment of broadcast newsmen.” President Kennedy said he agreed. Those were golden days for effete snobs.
Aboard Flight 82 a stewardess offered her distinguished passenger a selection of current periodicals, and if one could return in time from the mid-1970s to that fateful Friday, one of the differences to be noted in the American scene would be the wider choice of magazines, Look, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post then being alive, well, and on the stands. (The long retreat from mass circulation was already well advanced among newspapers, however, and four weeks earlier, on October 16, the New York Mirror had folded. Before the end of the decade 163 magazines and 160 daily newspapers, including the Indianapolis Times, the San Francisco News-Call-Bulletin, the Boston Traveler, the Portland Reporter, and the Houston Press would end publication.)
Nixon may well have picked Time, for he knew he would be in it. The first news page carried an informal picture of him—he was fifty and looked a young forty then—and in an accompanying interview he was quoted on the political consequences of the Saigon coup: “If this Viet war goes sour, Viet Nam could be a hot issue next year. If all goes well, it won’t be. It’s strange to me, when we are fawning over Tito, catering to Kadar, accommodating Khrushchev, we don’t even have the decency to express our sympathy to a family which was a real foe of Communism.”
Barry Goldwater, who rarely fawned over Communists, was the front runner for the 1964 Republican presidential nomination, Nelson Rockefeller having diminished his chances by marrying Happy Murphy the previous May. In that third week of November Goldwater had just scored a fresh triumph with one of his natural constituencies by telling a Better Business Bureau banquet in Chicago that the New Frontier had produced “1,026 days of wasted spending, wishful thinking, unwarranted intervention, wistful theories, and waning confidence.”
Each time the Arizona senator tore into Kennedy reporters asked the President to reply. “Not yet,” he would say, grinning; “not yet,” but plainly he relished the prospect of running against him.
Among his valuable campaigners this time would be the First Lady. The Secret Service hoped Mrs. Kennedy could persuade her husband to be more careful in crowds. Eschewing SS advice the week before the Texas trip, he had ordered his driver to leave his car’s motorcycle escort and detour through crowded downtown Manhattan. While the presidential limousine was halted at the traffic light an amateur photographer had darted up and fired a flash bulb at Kennedy’s side of the car. A New York police official had told reporters, “She might well have been an assassin.”
It was a year of technological innovations. Kodak introduced the Instamatic camera and Polaroid brought out color packs. Polyethylene appeared. Detroit’s fall models featured sleekly sloping rear windows—“fastbacks,” they were called; the one on the Sting Ray was particularly dramatic. On July 1, 1963, the Post Office Department, while announcing an increase in first-class postage from four cents to five, sprang the zip code system on a stunned and resentful public. The triumph of the digits moved one step closer with the conversion of the White House telephone number from NAtional 8–1414 to 456–1414. On the Bell systems’ master map the hatched areas indicating switchovers to direct distance dialing were spreading like a vast cancer; DDD reached 44.2 million Bell subscribers in 1963. Students at liberal arts colleges displayed decals reading, “I Am a Human Being—Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate.”
The sale of Barbie dolls reached its initial peak in 1963, and Barbie, who had acquired a boyfriend, Ken, two years earlier, was now joined
by her “best friend,” Midge. (Barbie’s “black is beautiful” friend, Christie, would not appear in the Mattel sales line until 1968. In 1963 black beauty, like black power, was waiting to be discovered.) The question of how lifelike female dolls should be was still sparking lively debates among toymakers. A considerable number of parents objected to Barbie’s firm little breasts. The public attitude in such matters remained comparatively conservative. In the matter of premarital intercourse it continued to hold that “Nice girls don’t,” although Gael Greene, researching Sex and the College Girl in 1963, was finding that more and more nice girls did. (A memorable passage in Miss Greene’s book, startling at the time, described a sorority girl pretending to climb a wall in mock agony while crying out in frustration, “You don’t know how long it’s been since I got screwed.”)
Few of collegiate America’s mothers had any idea how casually some of their daughters were accustomed to being bedded. Parents would later rise up in righteous indignation to protest coed dorms, only to reel back when confronted by the new facts of campus life. One stunning fact was in a report of the infirmary at the University of California in Berkeley to the effect that venereal disease had become a serious health hazard among female undergraduates. Integrated dormitories was one answer to a problem which had other solutions. But in 1963 that belonged to the future. Playboy was then averaging fifty applications a week from young women whose aspiration was to appear on its gatefold in the altogether and who, in the judgment of the editors, were qualified to do so, yet even Playboy had to trim its sails somewhat to public opinion; for example, it did not yet dare show its Playmates’ pubic hair. (It did, however, create an uproar in 1963 with a topless photo of a model who was an almost perfect double for the nation’s First Lady.) Hard-core pornography was neither chic nor legal; in November 1963 a three-judge Manhattan court ruled that Fanny Hill was obscene and therefore forbidden. “While it is true that the book is well-written, such fact does not condone its indecency,” the court found. “Filth, even if wrapped in the finest packaging, is still filth.” It is startling to reflect that Linda Lovelace, who would rocket to fame ten years later as the superstar of Deep Throat, was then a twelve-year-old girl sucking lollipops in Bryan, Texas.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 149