by Max Boot
In recent works, however, two revisionist historians, Edward Miller and Mark Moyar, have argued that the reality of Ap Bac did not conform to the neat morality tale told by Vann. Miller has concluded that “Vann’s understanding of the Ngos’ thinking about military strategy was incorrect on almost every point.”8 While the Ngos were careful to select officers for their loyalty, they still expected the army to aggressively fight the Vietcong, which they viewed as a mortal threat to their regime. Moyar, meanwhile, has argued that Ap Bac was a much tougher objective to capture than initial press reports had conveyed. The Vietcong had three hundred to four hundred crack troops dug in behind zigzagging dikes, protected from aerial attack by thick forest and dense undergrowth. Vann was furious that the ARVN troops would not expose themselves and take more risks, but later in the war U.S. units would behave in similar fashion when facing entrenched positions: they, too, would prefer to reduce casualties by calling in air and artillery strikes. As Halberstam was to concede months later, after having covered more battles, “A rice paddy deals an awesome advantage to a well-armed defender.”9
The South Vietnamese attack at Ap Bac had suffered from numerous defects and it was hardly an ARVN victory, but, as Miller notes, neither was it evidence of “ARVN incompetence and cowardice.” That, however, was the story that reached the American public and policymakers.10
THE DAMAGE that Ap Bac did to Diem’s reputation would be compounded by press coverage of the showdown between the regime and a group of militant Buddhists. Before long, Buddhist monks were setting fire to themselves in the streets of Saigon. Watching this confrontation from afar, many Americans concluded that Diem, as a devout Catholic, was irrevocably at odds with the Buddhist majority. It was certainly true that Diem was an autocrat whose popularity was waning. But most Vietnamese were Confucianists, not Buddhists, and even among Buddhists, only a small, politicized minority actively sympathized with the demonstrations. And although Catholics were overrepresented in the lower rungs of the government bureaucracy, Diem had numerous Buddhists in his cabinet and the top ranks of the army.11 But such details tended to be forgotten in the sensationalistic media coverage of the demonstrations.
Tensions between Washington and Saigon came to a head on August 20, 1963, when Diem ordered the army to raid twelve pagodas in Saigon and to arrest more than seven hundred Buddhist activists. He was repeating the tactics that had worked for him in 1955 during his confrontation with the sects.12 But this time he did not have Edward Lansdale at his side to curb his brother Nhu’s dictatorial instincts—or to save him from the backlash of an increasingly hostile American administration and press corps.
The anti-Diem faction in the administration was led by a trio of influential officials: W. Averell Harriman, a wealthy Democratic Party elder, former ambassador to Moscow, and governor of New York who was now under secretary of state for political affairs; Roger Hilsman, a veteran of Merrill’s Marauders and the OSS who was assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs; and Michael Forrestal, son of the first secretary of defense, a corporate lawyer from New York who was serving on the staff of the National Security Council. These three men strategized over the summer weekend of August 24–25, 1963, while more-senior officials were holidaying, to win approval for a cable authorizing the newly arrived American ambassador in Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, to offer support to the generals who were plotting to overthrow Ngo Dinh Diem.
When President Kennedy reconvened with his National Security Council on Monday, August 26, 1963, he discovered that many of his most-senior advisers—including General Maxwell Taylor, now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and CIA Director John McCone—did not agree with a policy of overthrowing Diem. They felt that the cable had been approved in an underhanded fashion that made an end run around the normal policy-review process.13 But in spite of the misgivings of many of its members, and even of the president himself, the administration did not, in the end, countermand the infamous missive authorizing Diem’s ouster. The power of inertia proved too strong: having once endorsed an anti-Diem coup, Kennedy was loath to reverse himself when the man on the spot—the former senator and vice presidential candidate Henry Cabot Lodge—was so adamantly set on regime change. Overruling him would risk a political crisis at home that would endanger Republican support for the president’s foreign policy, and could even lead Lodge to seek the presidency himself in the 1964 election, as he eventually would do. Thus Lodge was allowed to proceed.
The ambassador delegated the task of engineering the coup to Lansdale’s old teammate, the hard-drinking, hell-raising Lou Conein, who had known most of the South Vietnamese generals for years. After a stint at the CIA station in Tehran, Luigi had returned to Saigon in 1961. Before long, he was deep into plotting with the generals.
AND WHERE was Ngo Dinh Diem’s foremost champion while these machinations were going on? Edward Lansdale had received a promotion to major general in February 1963, but that was little consolation for his frustrating inability to significantly influence top-level decision-making. The position that Lansdale had briefly occupied as the Pentagon’s point man on Vietnam policy had been usurped by Marine Major General Victor “Brute” Krulak, adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on counterinsurgency and special activities. A far more skillful bureaucrat than Lansdale, he spread a fictitious tale that he had been a wartime buddy of Jack Kennedy’s to enhance his aura of power.14 Official records show that in 1963 Krulak was at the White House at least a dozen times, Lansdale not at all.15 (As we shall see, Lansdale may have had one off-the-books meeting with President Kennedy.) Cut out of Vietnam decision-making, Lansdale was left to take brief trips to Venezuela (March 8–16) and Bolivia (May 25–June 1) to study the state of Marxist insurgencies in those countries.
Even though he was cut out of the paper flow, Lansdale recalled,
I sensed something was going very wrong in Vietnam with Diem. I didn’t know they were threatening to overthrow him. But I could tell that there was some sort of movement afoot, and I talked to McNamara, to Harriman, on the thing, as though they were going to overthrow Diem, and I explained: “There’s a constitution in there. Please don’t destroy that when you’re trying to change the government. Remember there’s a vice president [Nguyen Ngoc Tho] who’s been elected and is holding office now, and if anything happens to the president he should succeed. Try to keep something sustained there.”16
McNamara reacted by pretending that he didn’t know what Lansdale was talking about. Rebuffed, Lansdale tried to get more information from Roger Hilsman, but he “refused to talk about Vietnam and kept switching the conversation to Australia, which he said he was planning to visit.”17
Given the way he was frozen out in Washington, the fullest case that Lansdale made for continuing to support Diem was heard not by decision-makers in the councils of power but by Life magazine editors at a lunch in New York on Friday, February 23, 1962. The setting was the Time-Life Building, a forty-eight-story modernist masterpiece, all glass and steel and clean lines, which had opened just three years earlier, at 1271 Avenue of the Americas.
The editors asked Lansdale, “Can we win with Diem? Should a coup replace him?”
Lansdale replied that Americans “were trying to play God, by trying to pick a leader for Vietnam. If they were serious, as they seemed to be, then they needed a yardstick to measure up Diem and other Vietnamese, to compare them for the job.” Lansdale went on to suggest some useful measurements, including “dedication to defeat the enemy,” “executive ability,” “moral courage,” “constitutionality,” “integrity,” and “popularity.” Diem was decidedly flawed, he argued, but by these metrics he was the best available alternative.18
While Lansdale thought it was important to leave Diem in power, he shared the widespread distaste for the president’s Machiavellian brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, and his wife, “the dragon lady,” Madame Nhu. “I’ve always thought it was brother Nhu who got Diem roused up about the Buddhists
and urged the reaction to them,” Lansdale later wrote.19 But Lansdale knew it would not be easy to get rid of Nhu, because Diem had pledged to their father on his deathbed that he would take care of his younger sibling.
In late August 1963, Lansdale had breakfast at Averell Harriman’s spacious redbrick house in Georgetown, just down the street from the Kennedys’ old place. Joining them was John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist and Kennedy friend who was serving as ambassador to India. Lansdale suggested that Harriman and Galbraith organize a sinecure for Nhu at Harvard. He told them, “Kick him upstairs. Tell him he’s an intellectual. Listen to him and give him a job there. He’d come, and Diem would let him go. And once he’s away, then Diem will be a very different person and be on his own and you won’t have to worry so much about him.” Harriman liked the idea, Lansdale recounted, but Galbraith took a “dim view” of it. “We don’t do that at Harvard,” he said dismissively.20
YET IF Lansdale was ignored, he was not entirely forgotten. Diem, for one, continued to pine for his erstwhile adviser and champion as the summer wore on and the Buddhist crisis intensified, with more monks immolating themselves. On July 19, 1963, for example, he asked Rufus Phillips, who was in charge of USAID’s Rural Affairs office in Saigon, if there would be “any objections to General Lansdale’s coming out to Vietnam again, if this could be arranged.”21 There were, as usual, many objections within the U.S. government. But the idea of sending Lansdale to the rescue would not go away. It was raised directly to the president by Phillips at a White House meeting convened on September 10, 1963, to consider the findings of two high-level emissaries who had just returned from a four-day visit to South Vietnam—Major General Victor Krulak and the veteran diplomat Joseph Mendenhall. They gave conflicting accounts: Krulak was sure that the “shooting war” was being won, while Mendenhall was convinced that the war “could not be won” as long as Ngo Dinh Nhu and possibly even Ngo Dinh Diem remained in power. JFK quipped, “The two of you did visit the same country, didn’t you?” Nervous laughter. Followed by an uncomfortable silence.22
For another perspective, the president turned to Rufe Phillips. Having just left Vietnam to see his dying father in Virginia, he was less optimistic than Krulak and less pessimistic than Mendenhall. Phillips said that on the whole the Strategic Hamlets program was succeeding, except in the Mekong Delta, where the hamlets were “being overrun wholesale,” and that “most Vietnamese would like to see President Diem remain, but they are unalterably opposed to the Nhus.” “We need a man,” he counseled, “to guide and operate a campaign to isolate the Nhus,” and there was only one man for that mission: Edward Lansdale.23 When Phillips raised Lansdale’s name, he saw McNamara shaking his head vigorously in opposition. The president, however, continued listening intently and taking notes. When he had finished, Kennedy said, in his inimitable Boston Brahmin accent, “Mr. Phillips, I want to thank you for your remarks, particularly for your recommendation concerning General Lansdale.”24 The meeting then moved on to an inconclusive debate about Vietnam, with no agreement among the “best and brightest” about whether the war was being won or lost or whether Diem should stay or go.
That evening, Phillips telephoned Lansdale at his home on MacArthur Boulevard to tell him what had transpired: “There was still an opportunity to get Nhu out of the country, I urged, but only he could do it. He said he would go if asked.”25 But would Lansdale be asked?
The next day, September 11, 1963, Roger Hilsman unexpectedly gave his endorsement to the dispatch of the “Ugly American” but in a way that neither Diem nor Lansdale was likely to accept. As part of a prospective deal to exile Ngo Dinh Nhu and Madame Nhu, he suggested, “We should be ready to inform Diem that we would place General Lansdale at his disposal, if requested, to assist in providing him political advice during the difficult period after the departure of his brother.”26 This was turning Phillips’s recommendation on its head: instead of sending Lansdale to persuade Diem to part with his brother, he would be sent only after Diem had already done so. Neither Diem nor Lansdale would ever agree to such an ultimatum.
Two days later, on September 13, 1963, a top-secret, “eyes only” missive arrived in Washington from, of all people, Henry Cabot Lodge requesting Lansdale’s presence in Saigon. The ambassador was upset with CIA station chief John “Jocko” Richardson for opposing a military coup. Bizarrely, Lodge thought that Lansdale would be the ideal candidate to take over the station and manage a coup d’état: “What I ask is that General Lansdale be sent over here at once to take charge, under my supervision, of all U.S. relationships with a change of government here.” Lodge was right that “General Lansdale has outstanding qualifications” for this assignment, but he was wrong in thinking that Lansdale would accept it.27
It is possible, though far from certain, that President Kennedy personally asked Lansdale to go to Vietnam on his behalf. The sole and not entirely reliable source for this encounter is Daniel Ellsberg, the future Pentagon Papers leaker who, as we shall see, went to work for Lansdale in 1965. According to Ellsberg, during a late-night drinking session in Saigon, Lansdale shared with him the story of what happened when he was summoned to the Oval Office in September 1963 along with Secretary of Defense McNamara.
Supposedly Kennedy asked Lansdale whether he would return to Vietnam and try to persuade Diem to send Nhu and Madame Nhu out of the country.
Yes, Lansdale said.
“But if that didn’t work out,” Kennedy continued, “or if I changed my mind and decided we had to get rid of Diem, would you be able to go along with that?”
“No, Mr. President,” Lansdale replied, sadly. “I couldn’t do that. Diem is my friend.”
In the limousine ride back to the Pentagon, McNamara scolded Lansdale: “You don’t talk to the president of the United States that way. When he asks you to do something, you don’t tell him you won’t be able to do it.”28
McNamara subsequently denied having any memory of this episode, but then McNamara had a penchant for forgetting inconvenient conversations, as, for example, when he had suggested killing Castro or bombing Cuba. On its face, the story is plausible and consistent with Lansdale’s previous refusals to apply too much pressure to Diem when he thought that doing so would be counterproductive. The fact that there is no official White House record of this meeting, however, and that Ellsberg became known for telling tall tales calls into question whether it ever actually occurred.29
We do not need to posit an off-the-books meeting with the president to understand why Lansdale was not sent to Saigon. The official record notes a conversation that occurred at 12:01 p.m. on September 17, 1963, between Secretary of State Dean Rusk and CIA Director John McCone. McCone made clear that in the CIA “there would be insurmountable problems raised re this man [Lansdale]—no confidence at all in him and M [McCone] could assume no responsibility for the operation.” As far as McCone was concerned, “they could replace Richardson if Lodge wants but not [with] someone from the outside.”30 McNamara, too, “flatly refused” to send Lansdale to Saigon.31 The proposal to dispatch Lansdale died a few hours later at an NSC meeting that also enhanced Lodge’s authority to deal with Diem as he saw fit.32 In hindsight, this can be seen as the death knell for Diem and Nhu and for the government they led.
As the weeks of October, filled with intrigue in both Saigon and Washington, ticked off, Lansdale wrote to his old commander Hanging Sam Williams, now retired from the army, to tell him, “My volunteering to go out and give a hand, along with Diem’s asking for me, got an emotionally negative response.” Lansdale was in “agony,” because he was “semi-close to the stumbling around on Vietnam without a chance to lend a hand in any way that was then heeded. At critical moments, I was cut out of the communications, so I couldn’t even read about what was happening. . . . It was Washington at its nuttiest.” He told Williams that, from what he could gather, “we essentially are pointing a gun at Diem’s head and are asking him to commit suicide.”33
Just a fe
w days after Lansdale wrote those dire words, Diem called Rufus Phillips over to the presidential palace. The date was October 30, 1963. Phillips, who was back in Saigon after having buried his father in Virginia, recalled, “He inquired about General Lansdale: had I seen him, how was he? I said I had been busy with my father’s funeral but had talked to Lansdale on the phone, and he was well. I regretted to tell him that despite all my efforts to get General Lansdale out to Vietnam to help him, particularly during my previous visit home, I had not been successful.” The embattled Vietnamese leader let out a sigh. He did not exhibit the agitation he had shown during the height of the sect crisis in 1955 or during the Buddhist crisis over the past year. He seemed calm, philosophical, resigned to his fate, whatever that might be.
The two men sat in silence for a moment while Diem puffed on his “ever-present cigarette.” Finally he looked directly at Phillips and asked softly, “Do you think there will be a coup?”
“I’m afraid so, Mr. President,” Phillips replied. He felt like crying.
Diem tried to comfort him by putting a hand on his arm. As the burly American walked out, he felt (or so he later recalled, with the benefit of hindsight) that this might be the last time he would ever see the president of South Vietnam.34
DIEM’S DAYS in power, which had begun nine years earlier, in the summer of 1954, were rapidly ticking down, and so were Lansdale’s. In early September 1963, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric told Lansdale that McNamara was thinking of phasing out his Special Operations office. A few days later, Lansdale wrote an anguished and only recently declassified reply: “I assume that the underlying reason for my being appointed as Assistant to the Secretary of Defense was to help the U.S. to achieve some solid victories in the cold war. If this assumption is correct, then, unhappily, I have not succeeded.” Lansdale was upset not only that he was cut out of the loop on Vietnam but also that, the Green Berets aside, his attempts to get the armed forces to focus seriously on counterinsurgency had failed. The army had created “airmobile” divisions equipped with helicopters to fight guerrillas rather than figuring out how to win “hearts and minds” as Lansdale favored. Some were calling him the “father” of counterinsurgency, but, he wrote, “I must disclaim any real kinship with much of the currently giant institution of counterinsurgency . . . and its massive conventional weaponry and operations. The program has borrowed many of my words, but has left out too much of the spirit and true meaning of what I have said.” His seven-page cri de coeur ended with these words: “Sincerely, if there is no way for me to be truly effective in helping get some cold war wins, then I shouldn’t stay on.”35