The March of Folly

by Barbara Tuchman

  To Kennedy in person he was more outspoken, saying that the infusion of American troops would come to dominate a civil war that was not our affair. Taking it over would “hurt American prestige in Asia and would not help the South Vietnamese to stand on their own feet either.” Growing more disturbed and red in the face as Mansfield talked, Kennedy snapped. “Do you expect me to take this at face value?” Like all rulers, he wanted to be confirmed in his policy and was angry at Mansfield, as he confessed to an aide later, for disagreeing so completely, “and angry at myself because I found myself agreeing with him.”

  Nothing changed. The President sent other investigators, Roger Hilsman, head of State Department Intelligence, and Michael Forrestal of Bundy’s staff, a team closer to the Mansfield than to the Taylor-Rostow view. They reported that the war would last longer, cost more in money and lives than anticipated, and that “The negative side of the ledger is still awesome,” but as office holders without Mansfield’s independent base, they did not dispute the prevailing policy.

  Buried in Hilsman’s intensively detailed report were many specific negatives, but no moves were made to adjust to the information the investigators brought back. Adjustment is painful. For the ruler it is easier, once he has entered a policy box, to stay inside. For the lesser official it is better, for the sake of his position, not to make waves, not to press evidence that the chief will find painful to accept. Psychologists call the process of screening out discordant information “cognitive dissonance,” an academic disguise for “Don’t confuse me with the facts.” Cognitive dissonance is the tendency “to suppress, gloss over, water down or ‘waffle’ issues which would produce conflict or ‘psychological pain’ within an organization.” It causes alternatives to be “deselected since even thinking about them entails conflicts.” In the relations of subordinate to superior within the government, its object is the development of policies that upset no one. It assists the ruler in wishful thinking, defined as “an unconscious alteration in the estimate of probabilities.”

  Kennedy was no wooden-head; he was aware of the negatives and bothered by them, but he made no adjustment, nor did any of his chief advisers suggest making one. No one in the Executive branch advocated withdrawal, partly in fear of encouragement to Communism and damage to American prestige, partly in fear of domestic reprisals. And for another reason, the most enduring in the history of folly: personal advantage, in this case a second term. Kennedy was smart enough to read signs of failure, to sense in Vietnam an ongoing disaster. He was annoyed by it, angered to be trapped in it, anxious that his second term not be spoiled by it. He would have liked to win, or to find a reasonable facsimile of winning, to cut losses and get out.

  The trend of his thinking emerged at a Congressional breakfast in the White House in March 1963 when Mansfield renewed his arguments. Drawing him aside, the President said, perhaps because he knew it was what the influential Senator wanted to hear, that he was beginning to agree about a complete military withdrawal. “But I can’t do it until 1965—until after I’m re-elected.” To do it before would cause “a wild conservative outcry” against him. To his aide Kenneth O’Donnell, Kennedy repeated, “If I tried to pull out completely now, we could have another Joe McCarthy scare on our hands”; only after re-election, and he added sharply, “So we’d better make damn sure I am re-elected.” To other friends he implied his doubts, but argued that he could not give up Vietnam to the Communists and ask American voters to re-elect him.

  His position was realistic, if not a profile in courage. Re-election was more than a year and a half away. To continue for that time to invest American resources and inevitably lives in a cause in which he no longer had much faith, rather than risk his own second term, was a decision in his own interest, not the country’s. Only an exceedingly rare ruler reverses that order.

  • • •

  In the interval, the supreme confrontation of the Cuban missile crisis had been skillfully mastered, and its setback for Khrushchev and successful outcome for the United States had invigorated the Administration’s confidence and prestige. One reason the Soviets had backed away offered the same lesson as Berlin—placing the missiles in Cuba was a daring gamble, not a vital interest for the USSR, whereas preventing missile sites so near our shores was a vital interest of the United States. On the basis of the law of vital interest, it was predictable that the United States would ultimately back down in Vietnam and the North prevail.

  With the blow to Communism in Cuba and enhanced American prestige, it would have been a moment to disengage from Vietnam with every hope of overriding a domestic uproar. But this was the time of official optimism, with no current running for withdrawal. Kennedy did, at about this time, instruct Michael Forrestal to think about preparing a plan for post-election withdrawal, saying it would take a year to prepare acceptance by Congress and by the allies in Asia and Europe. Nothing came of this, but when asked privately how he would manage withdrawal without damage to American prestige, he replied, “Easy; put a government in there that would ask us to leave.” Publicly he was saying that for the United States to withdraw “would mean a collapse not only of South Vietnam but Southeast Asia. So we are going to stay.” He was thinking both ways and was never to resolve the duality.

  A constant factor in the policy process was fear of what China might do. The Sino-Soviet split was by now apparent, and as the Russian threat seemed to shrink in a period of détente, the Chinese, behind the curtain of severed relations, loomed more menacing than before. The impression of Korea had not faded; the bellicose show over Quemoy-Matsu, the annexation of Tibet, the border war with India taken together made a picture of infinite mischief. When asked in a television interview if he had any reason to doubt the validity of the domino theory, Kennedy said, “No, I believe it, I believe it.… China looms so high just beyond the frontiers that if South Vietnam went, it would not only give them an improved position for guerrilla assault on Malaysia, but would also give the impression that the wave of the future in Southeast Asia was China and the Communists.”

  In fact, if Americans could have seen the value of accepting a strongly nationalist North Vietnam, Communist or not, a vigorous, independent, intensely anti-Chinese nation would have been a far better barrier against the feared Chinese expansion than a divided warring country offering every opportunity for interference from across the border. This did not occur to the best and the brightest. China, in any event, was then struggling in the economic ditch into which the Great Leap Forward had landed her, and in no shape for foreign adventure. “Know your enemy” is the most important precept in any adversary relationship, but it is the peculiar habit of Americans, when dealing with the Red menace, to sever relations and deal from ignorance.

  The military establishment, fulfilling McNamara’s order at Honolulu, was now busy in drawing up a comprehensive plan, absorbing miles of memoranda and months of paper work, for withdrawal of a not very imposing total of 1000 men by the end of 1963 and the build-up and financing of ARVN to the point where in training and numbers it could be expected to take over the war. While MACV and CINCPAC and Defense Department were up to their knees in figures and acronyms and exchange of documents, progress soured in South Vietnam and brought on the crisis that ended in Diem’s fall and death, dragging behind it the moral responsibility of the United States.

  Diem’s mandate to govern, never thoroughly accepted by the mixture of sects, religions and classes, was finally shattered by the Buddhist revolt in the summer of 1963. Long resentment of the favored treatment of Catholics practiced by the French and continued by Diem fired the Buddhist cause and gave it a native appeal. In May, when Saigon prohibited celebrations of Buddha’s birthday, riots followed and government troops fired on the demonstrators, killing several. Renewed riots and martial law were given a terrible notoriety by the desperate act of self-immolation by a Buddhist monk who set himself on fire in a public square of Saigon. The protest spread, gathering in all opponents of the regime: anti-Cath
olics, anti-Westerners, dissidents of the lower and middle classes. Repression and violence rose, known to be guided by Diem’s brother Nhu and culminating in a raid on the main Buddhist pagoda and the arrest of hundreds of monks. The Foreign Minister and the Ambassador to the United States resigned in protest; Diem’s government began to crack.

  American intelligence, which seems not to train its sights on popular feeling, had not foreseen the revolt. Two weeks before the outbreak, Secretary Rusk, deceived by the barrage of optimism from MACV, was led to speak of the “steady movement” in South Vietnam “toward a constitutional system resting on popular consent” and the evidence of rising morale indicating that the people were “on their way to success.”

  In the army too Diem had enemies. A generals’ coup was simmering. War effort had dwindled as the government struggled against plots and conspiracies. Nhu and the sinister Mme. Nhu began to appear in intelligence reports as communicating with the enemy, with the suspected object of reaching a “neutralist” settlement through French intermediaries for the advancement of their own fortunes. All America’s investment seemed in jeopardy. Was this the preferred protégé for nation-building, the reliable candidate to bar the way to the implacably motivated North?

  Discussions in Washington about what to do were heated, the more so as the government, in fact, did not know what course to take. Was there an alternative to Diem? If he remained, could the insurgency ever be defeated under his government? Argument concentrated on the pros and cons of Diem and how to get rid of the Nhus, not on any reconsideration of what America was doing in this galère. Less because of their oppression of the Buddhists than because of their neutralist overtures, the Nhus had to be eliminated. The hope was to force Diem to that point by judicious cut-off of aid, but Diem, confident of the American commitment against the Communists, was impervious to these threats. They were made rather nervously in anxiety at the State Department that Diem might see in them a sign that action against him and the Nhus was imminent and “take some quite fantastic action such as calling on North Vietnam for assistance in expelling the Americans.” This interesting notion suggests a certain frailty in Washington’s own sense of its role in Vietnam.

  Gradually policy-makers reached the conclusion, not that South Vietnam as a barrier to Communism was a losing proposition, but that Diem was and would have to go, with the help of the United States. In short, Washington should support the plotted military coup. It was an assumption of the right—or, if not the right, the pragmatic imperative—to protect investment in a client company under failing management.

  A classic covert CIA agent, Colonel Lou Conein, opened liaison with the plotting generals, and the new Ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, vigorously took charge, completely convinced of the need to end American partnership with “this repressive regime with its bayonets at every corner.” Responding to his advice, Washington instructed him that if Diem did not get rid of the Nhus, “We are prepared to accept the obvious implication that we can no longer support Diem,” and empowered him to tell “appropriate military commanders we will give them direct support in any interim period of breakdown central government mechanism.” In the yes-no style of government instructions, Lodge was told by the White House that “no initiative” should be taken for “active covert encouragement to a coup,” but on the other hand “urgent covert effort” should be made to “build contacts with possible alternative leadership”—which should of course be “totally secure and fully deniable.”

  As the recent Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, Lodge had been appointed to the Embassy not only for his political ability and fluency in French, but as a means of involving his party in the Vietnamese entanglement. No pushover, he took care to put the Kennedy government on record so that it could not later repudiate him. “We are launched,” he wired, “on a course from which there is no respectable turning back: the overthrow of the Diem government.” He informed State that Colonel Conein had made the desired contact with the coup leader, General “Big” Minh, who had outlined three possible plans of action of which the first was the “assassination” of the Nhus while keeping Diem in office; “this was the easiest plan to accomplish.”

  In the ongoing conferences in Washington, a larger issue than the fate of Diem and the Nhus occasionally raised its head, as when Robert Kennedy said the primary question was “whether the Communist takeover could be successfully resisted by any government. If it could not, now was the time to get out of Vietnam entirely, rather than waiting.” If it could be resisted under a different government, then we should go ahead with plans for a change, but he felt that basic question “had not been answered.”

  Some tried to answer. Field officers who had accompanied ARVN units into combat, and learned in bitterness that American training and weapons could not supply the will to fight, did their best to circumvent General Harkins’ suppression of negative reports and gave their accounts of sorry performance at debriefings in the Pentagon. One in particular, the battle at Ap Bac in January 1963 involving an ARVN battalion of 2000 equipped with artillery and armored personnel carriers, had been expected to demonstrate triumphantly the newly acquired fire power and aggressiveness. Caught under the sudden fire of 200 Viet-Cong guerrillas, the ARVN troops cowered behind grounded helicopters, refused to stand up to shoot, refused orders to counter-attack. The Province Chief commanding a Civil Guard unit refused to permit his troops to engage. In the slaughter three American advisory officers were killed. Ap Bac bared the failings of ARVN, the inutility of the American program and the hollowness of Headquarters optimism, although no one was allowed to say so. Colonel John Vann, the senior American at Ap Bac, was back at the Pentagon in the summer of 1963 trying to inform the General Staff. As Maxwell Taylor was the particular patron of General Harkins and upheld his view, Vann’s message could make no headway. A Defense Department spokesman announced that “The corner has definitely been turned toward victory,” and CINCPAC foresaw the “inevitable” defeat of the Viet-Cong.

  Foreign aid officers, too, voiced discouragement. Rufus Phillips, director of rural programs, reported the strategic hamlet program in “shambles,” and made the point that the war was not primarily military but a political conflict for the allegiance of the people, and that the Diem regime was losing it. John Macklin, director of the United States Information Service, who had taken leave of absence in 1962 as Time correspondent to try to help turn the Vietnamese people against the Viet-Cong, resigned after 21 months with his assignment ending “in despair.” The chief of the interdepartmental Working Group on Vietnam, Paul Kattenburg of State, startled a conference with Rusk, McNamara, Taylor, Bundy, Vice-President Johnson and others present by his recommendation that, given the certainty that Diem would not separate from his brother and would get less and less support from the people and go “steadily down hill,” it would be better for the United States to decide to get out now. No one present agreed, and the suggestion was firmly quelled by Rusk, who said that policy should proceed on the assumption that “We will not pull out until the war is won.” Subsequently, Kattenburg was eased out of the Working Group and transferred to another post, predicting as he left that the war could draw in 500,000 Americans and extend into a five- to ten-year conflict.

  A Delphic voice spoke out at this moment: Charles de Gaulle proposed a neutralist solution. In one of his shrouded statements, delivered at a French Cabinet meeting but given an unusual authorization for publication verbatim, clearly intended for overseas ears, de Gaulle expressed the hope that the Vietnamese people would make a “national effort” to attain unity and “independence from exterior influences.” In spectral phrases about French concern for Vietnam, he said every effort made toward this end would find France ready to cooperate. His demarche was taken by diplomats, poring over his language, to mean a “neutralized” solution on the pattern of Laos, independent of both Communist China and the United States. “Authoritative sources” indicated that the North Vietnamese had been showing themselv
es receptive and that French officials had been passing on feelers from Hanoi in other capitals.

  This could have been the opening to “jump at the chance” of a possible negotiated settlement, as Galbraith had once advised. De Gaulle was offering an out if Washington had been wise enough to want one. “Wide annoyance,” however, was reported in the American government, a frequent reaction to de Gaulle’s pomposities. Yet, given political disintegration and military inadequacy and lack of any real progress in South Vietnam, and the hints from Hanoi, the American government could have used the opportunity of Diem’s coming collapse and de Gaulle’s implied good offices to say it had done all it could by way of support; it could not do more; the rest was up to the Vietnamese people to settle for themselves. This would have meant sooner or later a Communist take-over. With the future not foreseen, and with the confidence of 1963 in American power, that outcome was still unacceptable.

  Matters proceeded on the chosen course toward coup d’état. That it violated a basic principle of foreign relations did not bother the realists of the Kennedy school. That it made nonsense of the reiterated American insistence that Vietnam’s conflict was “their” war does not seem to have been considered. “Their” war was a ceaseless refrain; Dulles said it, Eisenhower said it, Rusk said it, Maxwell Taylor said it, all the Ambassadors said it, Kennedy himself said it many times: “In the final analysis it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it.” If it was their war, it was also their government and their politics. For the defenders of democracy to conspire with plotters of a coup d’état, no matter how cogent the reasons, could not be hailed in the history books as the American way. It was a step in the folly of self-betrayal.