The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  The reporters seemed to make an inviting target: they were young and without established reputations. Because the reporters were young, their views of the world and of war were not set in a World War II philosophy. Because only one of them was married, there was no wifely pull to become part of the Saigon social whirl, to get along with the Noltings or the Harkinses, the kind of insidious pressure which works against journalistic excellence in Washington. Unlike so many colleagues in Washington, they were not dependent on the good wishes of the people who ran the institution they covered; their friends and contemporaries were out in the field, where the war was. Their reporting of the political stagnation in Saigon, of the false promises of Diem, was consistently on target; and their reporting from the field was far more honest and accurate than that of the military (eight years later the Pentagon Papers would confirm this through analysis by the Pentagon’s own experts. It was a belated tribute of no small irony).

  But the questions they brought up were the smaller ones. They too did not challenge the given, and by accepting it, they too failed (had they challenged the very premise of the war, they would undoubtedly have been shipped out the next day). Only in the latter part of 1963 and in early 1964 did they begin to perceive that the problem was not just Diem, that Diem was simply a symptom of a larger failure and that the real problem had its roots in the French Indochina war. By then it was very late. Fifteen years earlier in China, restless young State Department officials had played the same role as the reporters did, had conveyed what they saw without jeopardy to their jobs. Now that kind of reporting could not be done through State and had to be done through independent newspapers. But the State Department people had been area experts and thus recognized immediately the root causes of what they saw on the surface, which the young American journalists in Vietnam lacked the sophistication to do (unlike the official personnel, they knew that our program did not work, but unlike their State Department predecessors in China they were not able to trace the reason back far enough why it failed. Whereas the State Department officials in China saw their pessimism come to its logical conclusion—that the United States did not belong in China—the reporters in 1962 and early 1963 did not yet see the parallel in Vietnam). Like everything else in Saigon, the American press did not work quite well enough. It did, however, represent the beginning of an end of an era of American omnipotence by challenging the information which supported the policy; the country and the Administration had overreached itself, and this was the DEW-line warning signal.

  The Administration countered quickly enough. If the reporters would not write upbeat stories, the Kennedy Administration, facile, particularly good at public relations, would generate its own positive accounts. Thus optimism and optimistic statements became a major and deliberate part of the policy; warfare by public relations, one more reflection of the Kennedy era. High-level Americans were sent over not to learn about Vietnam, not to see Vietnam or to improve what was privately known as a frail policy, but to pump up this weak policy. Their speeches and statements had been written for them before they left, full of praise for Diem, full of talk of a national revolution, of the end of the long war, of victory in sight. One day at the Saigon airport, with television cameras focusing on one of them as he descended the plane and began reading his statement, Neil Sheehan, then a twenty-five-year-old reporter for UPI, remarked, “Ah, another foolish Westerner come to lose his reputation to Ho Chi Minh.”

  But it became increasingly a policy based on appearances; Vietnamese realities did not matter, but the appearances of Vietnamese realities mattered because they could affect American realities. More and more effort went into public relations because it was easier to manipulate appearances and statements than it was to affect reality on the ground. In part the controversy with the American reporters became so bitter because for the first time there was a threat to the American mission on appearances (significantly, whenever reporters came up with a story showing that something was grievously wrong, the instinct of the American mission was to assault the reporters and their credibility, not to find out whether or not in fact the story was right). The Buddhist crisis would be troubling because it shattered appearances of tranquillity, not because it showed that the regime was stupid and cruel. And Vietnamese elections from the very start, once the original Geneva elections were avoided, were always aimed not at expressing Vietnamese aspirations, but at implanting American values on the Vietnamese and reassuring Americans. (This was true right through to 1967 when General Lansdale was back, this time in a civilian capacity, and trying to run elections which, though blocking out the Vietcong, would nonetheless, he hoped, be honest. He was, however, receiving little support from the rest of the embassy on his idea, so when Richard Nixon, an old friend of his, visited Saigon in mid-1967, Lansdale seized on the idea of using Nixon to build support for the elections, really honest elections this time. “Oh sure, honest, yes, honest, that’s right,” Nixon said, “so long as you win!” With that he winked, drove his elbow into Lansdale’s arm and slapped his own knee. Such were to be elections; like everything else they were to ratify American decisions and present American policies in a favorable light.)

  There were of course some official Americans who were not enthusiastic about being manipulated by the executive branch. In late 1962 Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield came through Saigon at Kennedy’s request. Mansfield had visited Vietnam many times in the past and had been one of the original liberal-Catholic sponsors of Diem (the hope of liberal-Catholic Americans of sponsoring a liberal-Catholic regime in Saigon). Since he knew a good deal of the background, he was appalled by the deterioration of Diem, the growing isolation of the man, the sense of unreality around the palace, and the dominance of Mr. and Mrs. Nhu. Mansfield had skipped some of the official briefings provided for him by Nolting and had instead spent a four-hour lunch with the American reporters, a lunch which confirmed his own doubts. The next day at the airport, as he prepared to leave, he was handed a statement drafted for him by the embassy (a small courtesy on the part of the ambassador in case the Senate Majority Leader did not know what to say). Mansfield, however, rejected it; and his own farewell speech, by its absence of enthusiasm, reflected his disenchantment. When he returned to Washington he gave Kennedy a report of mild caution for public consumption, but in addition he gave him a private account that was blunt and pessimistic about the future of it all. Kennedy had summoned Mansfield to his yacht, the Honey Fitz, where there was a party going on, and when the President read the report his face grew redder and redder as his anger mounted. Finally he turned to Mansfield, just about the closest friend he had in the Senate, and snapped, “Do you expect me to take this at face value?” Mansfield answered, “You asked me to go out there.” Kennedy looked at him again, icily now, and said, “Well, I’ll read it again.” It was an important conversation, coming as it did about a year after the Taylor-Rostow mission and after a year of the policy of deliberate optimism. It showed that if this policy had not fooled anyone else, it had deceived the deceivers.

  But the articles in the daily newspapers, combined with the reports from men like Mansfield, had slowly been having an effect on the President. Increasingly bothered by discrepancies in the reporting, he dispatched two of Harriman’s people in late December to make their own check, Roger Hilsman of State and Michael Forrestal of the White House. He told Forrestal that in order to get at the truth he wanted a fresh look, but warned him not to become too involved with the journalists there and not to see events through their prism. Forrestal, he said, should find out what was really happening there and how the people of South Vietnam felt about the war.

  Listening to the President, Forrestal, who had been devoting himself to Laotian problems and had not worked on Vietnam, sensed his own doubts beginning. Those doubts were confirmed when he arrived in Saigon and found that the only people who believed in the regime were Americans. He also discovered that their belief was in direct proportion to the importance of their posi
tion, and that the more independent their position, the less faith they had in the regime or the viability of the war effort. He reported to Kennedy in early February that “no one really knows how many of the 20,000 'Vietcong’ killed last year were only innocent or at least persuadable villagers, whether the Strategic Hamlet program is providing enough governmental services to counteract the sacrifices it requires, or how the mute mass of villagers react to charges against Diem of dictatorship and nepotism.” Forrestal foresaw a long and costly war and also reported that Vietcong recruitment within the South was so successful and effective that the war could be continued without infiltration from the North, a point which jarred Saigon and Pentagon and some civilian sensibilities, since much of the Washington thinking was postulated on the basis of invasion from the North.

  By early 1963 the President had become unhappy with his team in Saigon; in particular he was dissatisfied with the reporting that was coming in, it was all too simplistic, too confident, and there was too little nuance, too little concern about the population reflected. But it was not so much a distaste for the Harkins and Nolting simplistic reporting as a distaste for the war itself and the problems of Vietnam, a belief that, as Forrestal had reported, it was not going to be easy, an intuition that it was somehow going to pull us in deeper and deeper. In private he began to voice concern over where we were going. He had a feeling that Harkins and Nolting did not share his misgivings, and that Nolting in particular, who was supposed to be the President’s man there, had not been a particularly good choice. Maybe for some other President, but not for him. So increasingly it was his own White House staff which had to fight to limit the military instead of the President’s ambassador to Vietnam. The more the reality of the commitment and what it was doing to the peasantry was unveiled, the more uneasy Kennedy became, but Nolting was not disturbed; he was committed to supporting the regime at all costs. What the President was learning, and learning to his displeasure (once again, the Bay of Pigs had been lesson one), was something that his successor Lyndon Johnson would also find out the hard way: that the capacity to control a policy involving the military is greatest before the policy is initiated, but once started, no matter how small the initial step, a policy has a life and a thrust of its own, it is an organic thing. More, its thrust and its drive may not be in any way akin to the desires of the President who initiated it. There is always the drive for more, more force, more tactics, wider latitudes for force.

  Starting in mid-1962, this had begun to be true on Vietnam, and there was soon a split between the American military (and Saigon) and the Administration over four main issues: napalm, defoliants, free fire zones and the introduction of jet planes instead of outmoded prop fighter-bombers. The military quickly lost on jets, but both Diem and Nhu supported and in fact pushed the American military on all these points, an important insight into the way they regarded their own peasantry, the lack of rapport and root and sympathy for them. The position of Diem, and particularly Nhu, was that these weapons were vital; they helped support the government, even though they inflicted great pain and death on the peasants. In fact, Diem and Nhu both specifically liked the use of excessive power. They still held to the mandarin psychology of the population’s responsibility to obey the government. An example of this mandarin thinking was the theory that the population would so hate the killing and the awesome force of its government that it would automatically respect the government even more, and would turn on the Vietcong. It was an attitude well out of date, for Indochina had been swept by twenty years of revolutionary excitement and fervor unleashed by the Vietminh and Vietcong, who had taught not Communism as the West knew it, but that a host of new possibilities, among them dignity and justice, were open to the peasants.

  That attitude of Diem and Nhu was an important reflection of the difference between the way they regarded Communism and the way the society did. The population was simply not that anti-Communist; it resented the force unleashed on it more than it feared the enemy it was allegedly being saved from. By the same token, a few years later the My Lai massacre would become a major political embarrassment to the Thieu government because it reflected the same attitude: in defense of the Saigon government’s own existence and in defense of the American anti-Communism, far too much fire power was inflicted on the reluctant Vietnamese people.

  If the military lost on jets, it pushed very hard on the other issues. At the beginning it was the only aspect of Vietnam that Kennedy really interested himself in. Vietnam had been a low-priority item in early 1962, but these issues of killing were different, and the President specifically commissioned both Hilsman and Forrestal to watch the military on them, to make sure that nothing slipped by. He was convinced, and rightly so, that the military were always trying to push things by him. And Hilsman and Forrestal found that for the first time McGeorge Bundy was a genuine help on Vietnam, a sign of the President’s very real interest. Bundy made sure the door to the President was always open, though often the points seemed small or even technical by the standards of the period; they were not global. Napalm was the first one. Harkins liked napalm, Diem and Nhu liked napalm; Harkins said it put the fear of God in the Vietcong. It was just one more weapon in the arsenal, the general said, and perhaps he was right; other weapons killed people just as dead. Harkins pushed hard for the virtually unrestricted use of it, but there was an element in it as an antipersonnel weapon that appalled Kennedy. It was a weapon which somehow seemed to be particularly antihuman, and he hated photographs of what it had done to people. He would talk with a certain fatalism to his staff about the pressure on him to use it. Now they want to use it on villages, he would say. They tell me that it won’t hurt anyone, but if no one will be hurt by it, what do they want it for?

  Then the military wanted defoliation, and once again the battle started. They wanted to start using it widely, for crop defoliation, but Kennedy held the line there; he did not want crops destroyed, no matter whose crops. Then they pushed for limited defoliation, just on lines of communication. They wanted to use it on the roads to make it harder for the enemy to ambush the troops. Our boys will be protected. Try it out, MACV said. Just a little bit, it will work and it will help win the war. Reluctantly, Kennedy considered giving partial permission, but he was advised by the State Department’s legal section that any such use was a violation of the Geneva Convention’s rules of war. So he said, well yes, but couldn’t they try it out in some deserted country . . . Panama . . . or Thailand . . . or somewhere else; did they really have to experiment right there in Vietnam with all those people around? Finally he approved a limited use of it, just as he approved a limited use of napalm in battles where the population was not nearby.

  Then Harkins argued for free fire zones, a place to drop unused bombs, because to carry those bombs back made it dangerous for the planes on landing. Kennedy asked his staff why they couldn’t drop the extra bombs in the sea, since the United States had lots of bombs and the loss of a few into the South China Sea would not be a problem for this country and probably wouldn’t hurt the ocean too much. But Harkins wanted the Iron Triangle, no people there; well, no friendly people, certainly, and eventually the military gained very limited free fire zones.

  Gradually Kennedy began to hate it, and some of the men around him began to sense that they were losing control, they were having to fight too hard for moderate positions, they were running hard just to stand still. The military could just announce a policy on areas where there was a vacuum, and it was the civilians who would then have to fight back. Even worse, the military could gain the upper hand by asking for too much, and then, like a shrewd bargainer, settle for a little less. Ask for broad defoliation, and get access rights. Ask for unrestricted napalm, and get limited napalm, which would not be too much of a problem because those boys from the White House wouldn’t be on every plane on every mission.

  The White House was beginning to see that the people who were in charge of the mission in Saigon had begun to take on the col
oration of the commitment, they were more militant than Washington, more committed to Diem than Washington. As for Harkins, he took the position that it was, after all, not his viewpoint which was reflected, but that of the host government. We were just out here to help these little people, and since they wanted these weapons and they knew more about their country than we did, we should find out what they needed and then deliver it. Nolting was not inclined to challenge the military; indeed, he invariably went along with Diem in his demands. Thus when Kennedy repeatedly urged Forrestal to push Nolting to lean on the military, Forrestal would find a certain resistance, a reluctance to take on Harkins because that would mean taking on Diem. It became obvious that Nolting was not really acting as the President’s man in Saigon, but the problem was greater than that.

  Kennedy had made the commitment without much enthusiasm and with a good deal of misgivings. He had made it not so much because he wanted to, but because he felt he could not do less, given the time and the circumstances. But he was never in any deep sense a believer, whereas in Saigon, Harkins and Nolting had become true believers. They believed their own statements about victory, and they were not cynical. But the struggle over the issues of force was important on another level as well: as the Vietnam problem grew in importance within the bureaucracy and separated those who felt it was primarily a military problem and a question of force, from those who felt it was essentially a political problem, these questions of napalm, defoliation, free fire zones and jet planes would serve as an early litmus test as to which side the various members of the government would choose.

  The commitment was already operative, burning with a special fuel of its own—bureaucratic momentum and individual ambition—men let loose in Saigon and Washington who never questioned whether that something was right or wrong, or whether it worked or not. In government it is always easier to go forward with a program that does not work than to stop it altogether and admit failure. John Kennedy was fast learning that his personal and political interests were not necessarily the same as those of the thousands of men who worked in the government.