by Max Boot
The biggest obstacle Lansdale encountered, however, was on the American side, in the “Pentagon East,” the swollen and cumbersome U.S. bureaucracy in Saigon. When he had first arrived in South Vietnam in 1954, there were only 348 American servicemen in the entire country; by the end of his second tour, in 1968, the figure had grown to more than half a million.102 Lansdale, for his part, had only eleven team members.103 He had no independent authority of his own, and his ability to exert any influence was limited by his own ineptitude at office politics, by his lack of high-level support in Washington, and by the bureaucracy’s chronic suspicion of him. One official summed up their attitude: “We don’t want Lawrences of Asia.”104
The cause of such antipathy was not hard to discern. The Quiet American was in opposition to American policy as it had developed since the early 1960s. He did not want U.S. troops in South Vietnam, certainly not in such large numbers. “The military can suppress the Communist forces . . . ,” he warned Ambassador Lodge, in an accurate summary of the lessons of thousands of years of guerrilla conflicts, “but cannot defeat them short of genocide.” He favored political action at the “rice roots” level to develop a “viable democracy,” guided by culturally savvy advisers rather than the kind of “heavy paternalism” he found among so many Americans in Vietnam who were in his view prolonging “the ills of colonialism.”105 He was aware of the need for military action but scathing in decrying the big-unit, firepower-intensive tactics of American and South Vietnamese forces. He warned in a 1964 Foreign Affairs article, “When the military opens fire at long range, whether by infantry weapons, artillery or air strikes, on a reported Viet Cong concentration in a hamlet or village full of civilians, the Vietnamese officers who give those orders and the American advisers who let them ‘get away with it’ are helping defeat the cause of freedom.”106
When Lansdale tried to advance an alternative approach to pacification, he later admitted ruefully, his “ideas got clobbered time after time by the U.S. officials.”107 His prescience, and that of other experienced counterinsurgency hands, such as Robert Thompson, John Paul Vann, and Roger Hilsman, was widely recognized only after the Tet Offensive, which occurred a few months before he left Vietnam for good.
ON THE NIGHT of January 30, 1968, General Vo Nguyen Giap, under pressure from hard-line Communist leaders, launched a surprise attack against Saigon and most of the other major cities of the south utilizing 84,000 fighters. Lansdale was awoken, along with many other residents of the capital, at 3 a.m. on January 31 by “some loud bangs nearby, followed by automatic weapons fire.” Before long, firing had broken out “all over the place.” A Vietcong suicide squad even managed to penetrate the heavily defended grounds of the U.S. embassy before being wiped out. Just like Giap’s premature thrust into the Red River Delta in 1951, this attempt to strike a “decisive blow” was a costly defeat. An estimated 37,000 Communists were killed and 5,800 captured, while only 1,001 American and 2,082 South Vietnamese troops perished. The general uprising that Hanoi hoped to spark never materialized. Instead Vietcong brutality in Hue, where they executed 2,800 civilians during the three weeks that they controlled the city, caused a popular backlash in the south.108
But while unsuccessful militarily, the Tet Offensive reaped a valuable propaganda windfall for Hanoi by discrediting official proclamations that, as Westmoreland had claimed in November 1967, the war’s “end” was in “view.”109 On the last day of March 1968, at 9 p.m., President Johnson took to the airwaves from the Oval Office, wearing a sober blue suit, a narrow red tie, and a grim expression on his heavily wrinkled face, to announce a partial bombing halt designed to “de-escalate the conflict.” In a stunning surprise at the end of the forty-minute address, he added that, in order to concentrate all his energies on achieving “our hopes and the world’s hopes for peace,” he would not seek or accept “the nomination of my party for another term as your president.” Thus the Vietnam War claimed its highest-profile victim: the Johnson presidency.110 Nine days earlier the president had already relieved Westmoreland, kicking him upstairs to become army chief of staff. Westmoreland’s request for even more troops was denied. This was a tacit admission that the war was not going well—something that the public already knew. Only 26 percent of those surveyed by Gallup shortly before his address approved of Johnson’s handling of Vietnam.111
The next president, Richard M. Nixon, and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, had no choice but to launch a policy of “Vietnamization,” which involved the gradual withdrawal of American combat troops while they searched for an “honorable” end to the conflict. Thanks to the mauling the Vietcong had received during the Tet Offensive, however, it was in no position to take immediate advantage of the American pullout. Westmoreland’s deputy and successor, General Creighton “Abe” Abrams, kept the pressure on by putting more emphasis on providing “security for the people of South Vietnam’s villages and hamlets” while gradually scaling back conventional operations. Abrams got rid of the “other war” mantra and replaced it with “one war.”112 He was greatly aided by the OSS and CIA veteran William Colby, who turned CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support), a subordinate command charged with pacification, into an effective instrument of counterinsurgency. Security conditions in the south actually improved even as the number of American troops fell. By 1971 Colby and his daredevil subordinate, John Paul Vann, were able to motorbike across the Mekong Delta with no bodyguards—and no trouble.113
The following year Giap launched a conventional attack on the south—the third repetition of the same mistake he had made in 1951 and 1968. Trying to prematurely end an irregular conflict can be a costly blunder for either insurgents or counterinsurgents; in this type of war there are no shortcuts to victory. Giap was generally a study in patience; certainly he had more of a long-term outlook than either the French generals he had fought or their American successors. But he was prone to roll the dice on premature offensives that came to perdition—and that marred his reputation as one of the most successful guerrilla strategists of all time. Although there were few American ground troops left, the 1972 Easter Offensive was smashed by the South Vietnamese armed forces aided by American airpower. By January 1973, following the bombing of Hanoi and the mining of Haiphong harbor, the Hanoi government was ready to sign the Paris Peace Accords bringing the war to a halt—at least temporarily.
Despite Nixon’s claims of having achieved “peace with honor,” more than 150,000 Communist troops remained in the south, and they began violating the accords almost at once.114 Even so South Vietnam might have survived if the United States had been willing to keep its troops in place, as it had done after the Korean War. But public opposition to the war and the Watergate scandal, which destroyed Nixon’s popularity after a landslide reelection, made that impossible. American aid to the south was cut off entirely in 1974, even as China and the Soviet Union continued their support for the north. In 1975 a North Vietnamese invasion led to a quick collapse of the south. The end of the twenty-year war was brought about by regulars riding T-54 tanks, not by pajama-clad guerrillas, but it was the guerrillas who made possible the final Communist victory by wearing down the will of the American people to continue the struggle.
HO CHI MINH, who died in 1969, did not live to see the end of the long struggle against “the imperialist and feudalist forces.”115 Long before his demise he had become an aging, ailing, avuncular figurehead while real power was exercised behind the scenes by the hard-line party leader Le Duan. More even than Vo Nguyen Giap, whom he derided as a “scared rabbit” for being afraid to confront the United States directly in 1965, Le Duan was the primary architect of one of the most humiliating drubbings ever suffered by a superpower.116 The cost of his single-minded dedication to victory was staggering—much higher than any democratic politician could have tolerated. Hanoi estimated that the twenty-year war cost 3.6 million Vietnamese lives on both sides.117
Conventionally minded American soldi
ers such as Colonel Harry Summers later argued that the conflict had been lost because they had been forced to devote too much attention to “the guerrilla war in the south,” while shortsighted politicians prevented them from addressing the “root of the trouble . . . at the source.”118 The war, it was claimed, could have been won only with a conventional invasion either of Laos to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail or, better still, of North Vietnam itself to depose the Communist regime. This ignored the likelihood of intervention by China, which by 1967 had 170,000 troops in the north, should U.S. troops cross the seventeenth parallel.119 It ignored, too, the lessons of the French Indochina War. The French had occupied the entire country and still had been defeated by determined guerrillas with supply lines stretching into China.
Fickle political leadership undoubtedly contributed to the worst military defeat in American history—but so did the obtuseness of a military establishment that tried to apply a conventional strategy to an unconventional conflict. The outcome might have been different if more attention had been paid to the advice of counterinsurgency experts such as Edward Lansdale, who had warned as early as 1964 “that the Communists have let loose a revolutionary idea in Viet Nam and that it will not die by being ignored, bombed, or smothered by us.”120 Lansdale did not believe the war was unwinnable if the right methods were applied. But that did not happen until after public support for the war effort had already collapsed in the United States.
Vietnam was far from the only place where guerrillas were triumphing over America’s allies during the “Radical Chic” era. Another notable success for “people’s war” was in some ways even more galling because it occurred right in the Yanquis’ backyard, in a country that the United States had dominated ever since it sent its troops in 1898 to help Cuban insurrectos oust their Spanish overlords.
53.
M-26-7
Castro’s Improbable Comeback, 1952–1959
“IT WASN’T A landing, it was a shipwreck.” So said one of the eighty-two revolutionaries aboard the Granma when it finally reached Cuban soil before daybreak on December 2, 1956.
The voyage from Mexico, where these exiles had conducted their training, had been nightmarish. The thirty-eight-foot yacht, which they had bought for $20,000 from an American expatriate, was designed to handle a maximum of twenty-five passengers. Overloaded as it was, the Granma rode too low in the rough seas and rotten weather and steered clumsily. One passenger, Faustino Pérez, a future member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, recalled how “enormous waves—like bobbing mountains—toyed with the small but tenacious boat.” Another passenger, a twenty-eight-year-old doctor named Ernesto “Che” Guevara, recalled how they made a “frantic search for antihistamines to combat seasickness, and could not find them.” Before long, he wrote, “the whole boat assumed a ridiculous, tragic appearance: men clutching their stomachs, anguish written in their faces, some with their heads in buckets, others lying immobile on the deck in strange positions, their clothes covered in vomit. With the exception of two or three sailors, and four or five others, the rest of the 82 crew members were seasick.”
When the Granma finally reached Oriente Province on the eastern coast of Cuba in the semidarkness of December 2, it grounded a hundred yards offshore. Most of the supplies and equipment had to be left on the boat while the men hopped into the water and waded ashore. “It was rough going . . . ,” recalled Faustino Pérez. “After endless hours in the enormous swamp, struggling through mud, mangroves, and water, we finally began to touch solid ground. We lay down on the grass, exhausted, hungry, covered with mud, knowing that we were finally on Cuban soil.”
Fidel Castro, the thirty-year-old lawyer who was the chief of this grandly named Rebel Army, had planned his landing in emulation of the landing of José Martí and other Cuban revolutionaries in 1895 to begin their war of liberation against Spain. It was designed to coincide with an uprising among urban revolutionaries in the nearby city of Santiago. But a longer than expected sea voyage had thrown the plan awry. By the time the Granma landed, there was nobody to greet them except the armed forces of dictator Fulgencio Batista. Within hours a coast guard vessel and army aircraft had arrived to bomb the mangrove swamps in which the Granma had gotten stuck. The rebels barely escaped. Fed and guided by local peasants who had no love lost for Batista’s corrupt regime, Castro and his men marched east through the sugarcane fields, moving at night to avoid air attack. They were attempting to reach the Sierra Maestra, where, amid peaks averaging 4,500 feet, they reckoned they would be safe.
On the morning of December 5, “on the verge of collapse,” in Che Guevara’s words, after an exhausting all-night march, they pitched camp on a low hillside at Alegría de Pío. Unbeknownst to them, one of their peasant guides had informed the Rural Guard of their location, which was not hard to find anyway, because they had sustained themselves en route by eating sugarcane, leaving a trail of cane peelings behind them that did not require a bloodhound to follow. At 4 p.m. the rebels began to see aircraft in the sky, and then “within seconds” came a “hail of bullets”—“at least,” Che later wrote, “that’s how it seemed to us, this being our baptism of fire.”
In the initial confusion Guevara and several other men were hit. “I felt a sharp blow in my chest and a wound in my neck; I thought for certain I was dead . . . ,” he wrote. “I immediately began to think about the best way to die, since in that minute all seemed lost.” Alone or in small groups, the inexperienced fighters scattered in panic, “flying like rabbits,” leaving their equipment behind. Many were captured and executed. Others deserted. After the battle of Alegría de Pío fewer than two dozen fighters were left.
In his olive-green uniform and heavy horn-rim glasses, Fidel Castro spent the next five days hiding in the cane fields with two compañeros, listening apprehensively for the sounds of approaching soldiers. When he went to sleep Castro positioned the barrel of his rifle against his throat, vowing, “If I am found, I’ll just squeeze the trigger and die.”
His situation was every bit as desperate as that of Toussaint Louverture after the arrival of Victor Emmanuel Leclerc’s expeditionary force in Haiti in 1802, of Mao Zedong after the failure of the 1927 Autumn Harvest uprising, or of Ho Chi Minh in his isolated Pac Bo stronghold after the occupation of Indochina by the Imperial Japanese Army. Yet even in this seemingly hopeless position Castro, like those other revolutionary icons, never lost faith. Trapped as he was, the loquacious young rebel could not refrain from talking—and dreaming. Speaking day and night in a “controlled whisper,” he regaled his two companions with his future plans: how he was going to mobilize the peasants, carry out a social revolution, vanquish the Yanquis, and much else.
His two companions thought he was hallucinating. They were liable to be caught and killed any minute. Even if they escaped alive, how could a handful of ill-armed rebels overthrow an entrenched regime defended by forty thousand well-equipped soldiers? “Shit, he’s gone crazy . . . ,” one of Fidel’s comrades told himself. “How can we beat Batista with these few people?”
The answer would come in the next twenty-five months.121
TITO WAS A poor peasant. Mao a well-to-do peasant. Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap impoverished mandarins. Fidel Castro was downright rich. He was born in 1926 to a landowner who controlled over 25,000 acres in Oriente Province and lorded over his field hands with a silver-handled whip. Fidel’s father, Angel, was a self-made man, an immigrant from Spain who had started out as a simple laborer and learned to read only as an adult. His lack of aristocratic lineage hindered Fidel socially when he attended an elite Jesuit high school in Havana; the other students looked down on him as “primitive” and “not cultured” even though he was captain of the basketball team. It did not help that he bathed infrequently and had “bad table manners.” A resentful loner with a violent temper, Fidel was filled, a fellow student recalled, with “hatred against society people and moneyed people.” He also clashed with his parents and teachers. “I’d started b
eing a rebel . . . at like six or seven,” he later said.
In this respect he was similar to the young Mao, Tito, and Stalin: all of these future Communist insurgents turned dictators had found themselves in conflict with their parents and society from a young age. All of them nursed a grudge against their supposed “superiors” and a political system that denied them the power that they saw as rightly theirs—and they were ready to use violence to seize what they wanted. Castro was different from Mao, Tito, and Stalin, if not from Giap, in having the benefit of a university education. Like a growing number of twentieth-century radicals and, for that matter, the nineteenth-century Russian Nihilists, he had become active politically while attending university—in his case the law school at Havana University, which he entered in 1945. Politics in Cuba was not a sport for milquetoasts; Castro usually carried a gun and was often involved in violent altercations with other students and the police. He neglected his studies, was twice accused of murder, and acquired a reputation as a swaggering “young political hoodlum.” In those years “El Loco Fidel,” as he was called by his schoolmates, had only one thing on his mind. A friend recalled, “Even if he was with a girl he kept talking about politics.” Years later, once in power, he would become a prolific womanizer, like Mao and Tito, but, also like them, he would never lose his overriding interest in political machinations.
After graduating from law school in 1950, Castro opened a law practice yet did little legal work. Money was tight despite an allowance from his father that would continue until he was on the cusp of power. His beautiful blond wife, Mirta Díaz-Balart, a member of a pro-Batista family whom he had married in law school, often had no milk for their newborn son, “Fidelito.” But the boy’s father was too busy carousing with his political cronies to care. He was preparing to run as a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies in 1952 when the elections were suspended. Fulgencio Batista, a onetime army sergeant who had been president from 1933 to 1944, seized power for a second time. During his first stint in office he had been a progressive and popular leader who had won the backing of the labor unions and the Communist Party. However, upper-class Cubans had never much liked this mulatto from a lowly background who had once worked as a common laborer. Batista’s brutality and corruption during his second stint in power ensured that he became increasingly unpopular with all classes. Castro immediately began plotting a revolution—as did many other radicals. If they could not seize power by the ballot box, they would do so by force.