by Max Hastings
6
Some of the Way With JFK
1 ‘THEY’RE GOING TO LOSE THEIR COUNTRY IF …’
When Dwight D. Eisenhower briefed his successor John F. Kennedy about the issues that he would confront on assuming the presidency, it was not Vietnam – of which he said nothing – but neighbouring Laos that evoked stridency from the old warhorse. Eisenhower said he had been warned by the State Department that Laos was ‘a nation of homosexuals’, which bemused Kennedy. This was the first domino, asserted the outgoing president, key to South-East Asia, loss of which could threaten neighbouring Thailand. Here would come a test of the new commander-in-chief’s resolve, a rite of passage. Such a view seems fanciful in the eyes of posterity, but appeared real at the time. Laos, Laos, Laos, once known as ‘the land of a million elephants’, made headlines around the world as a collision point between communist and anti-communist forces. In 1960 the New York Times devoted three times more space to this tiny country, a wilderness with few and very poor inhabitants, than it did to Vietnam.
The Lao people, or the multiplicity of ethnic groups that comprise them, have perplexed the outside world by appearing to giggle their way through the past century of political upheavals, famines, civil wars and foreign-fostered tragedies. They love parties and priapic jokes, especially at the spring rocket festival when everybody makes their own fireworks, some enormous, and launches them at mortal risk to life and property. In the late 1950s the Americans began to throw money at Laos, to which France ceded independence in October 1953, and which had since become an alleged focus of Chinese and North Vietnamese meddling. A visiting Wall Street Journal reporter described the leadership as ‘ecstatically drowning in American aid’, big cars and iceboxes, while the rest of the country subsisted on an average annual income of $US150. The CIA began to take an interest, not least because its officers such as Texan Bill Lair, who became famous there, fell in love with this new frontier. Lair’s colleague Robert Amory said later that many of the Agency’s men embraced Laos as ‘a great place to have a war’. Outside Vientiane, the frontier-town capital, you could do pretty much what you liked – come to that, fight whomever you chose and grow what narcotics you fancied – without bothering anybody who would make a fuss.
The Lao government, if a rackety clutch of local potentates and generals could be so dignified, sustained a precarious rule until in 1960 a civil war erupted between rival factions, and was fought out on the streets of Vientiane. On slender grounds, the Americans persuaded themselves that a communist takeover loomed. What was indisputable was that Reds were roaming the country, both indigenous Pathet Lao, who intermittently claimed a share in coalitions, and some North Vietnamese troops. Bill Lair achieved what was deemed a notable coup by making a deal with local Hmong chieftain Vang Pao. In return for cash and arms, this warlord launched a guerrilla campaign against the communists. The initial US investment in himself and his kind swelled from $5 million to $11 million in 1962, then to $500 million by the end of the decade, with Vang Pao claiming leadership of twenty thousand fighters and considerable battlefield success, as well as a fortune acquired through drug trafficking. Some seven hundred CIA personnel were deployed, most engaged in secret paramilitary activities, shifting food and weapons to the tribesmen and their families, leapfrogging hither and thither betwixt mountains in jeans and Pilatus Porter STOL aircraft, themselves occasionally joining a battle.
The tinpot country achieved a bizarre prominence on the agendas of both East and West. Mao Zedong asked Le Duan, ‘How big is Laos?’ The Vietnamese answered: almost eighty thousand square miles, with a population of two million. ‘My God,’ said Mao, ‘they have so much land and so few people. Yunnan is about the same size but has forty million. If we could send fifteen or twenty million over there to live, wouldn’t that be a good idea?’ The Poles and Indians on the ICC found it politic to avert their eyes from landings by Soviet transport aircraft at Hanoi’s Gia Lam airbase, delivering war materiel destined for Laos. The British Conservative government was pressed by Washington to support the American counter-commitment, and at a March 1961 summit with Kennedy, prime minister Harold Macmillan reluctantly promised some military gesture if the Vientiane government collapsed. When Pathet Lao troops moved near to the western border of Laos the following year, in response a squadron of RAF Hunters was deployed in neighbouring Thailand. It was the usual story: the British were desperate to avoid a new commitment, but obsequiously anxious to comply with American wishes.
As a West Point cadet, Mike Eiland found himself participating in exercises in a fictional country called Soal – Laos spelt backwards – and in Washington the JCS favoured committing ground troops. In May 1961, however, President Kennedy declared that he preferred to reinforce covert operations, for which he nursed a romantic enthusiasm. Better still would be for all the foreign powers to stop messing on Laos’s Plain of Jars. The erratic Prince Norodom Sihanouk, ruler of neighbouring Cambodia, proposed an international conference, bastard offspring of 1954, to ‘neutralise’ Laos. With varied degrees of reluctance, all the interested parties signed up. After more than a year of negotiations in which Averell Harriman was a prime mover, in July 1962 new Geneva Accords were signed by the US, Russia, China and both Vietnams, for the neutralisation of Laos.
Hanoi’s leadership treated this arrangement with contempt, as a mere figleaf thrust over its military operations by Moscow, requiring no more respect than Saigon had given to the 1954 settlement. North Vietnamese troops continued to move freely through Laos, though their presence was always denied. CIA cynics dubbed the Ho Chi Minh Trail ‘the Averell Harriman Memorial Highway’, because the veteran diplomat had secured no safeguards against the communists’ systematic violations of the Accords. For the purposes of this story, which is Vietnam’s, all that matters is that Prince Souvanna Phouma thereafter ruled in Vientiane, ever more deeply in thrall to the US. Elsewhere across his wild and woolly country, a desultory and unacknowledged war raged in which several hundred thousand people fell victim to the insistence of Hanoi upon using Laos as an estuarial network of protected supply routes into Cambodia and South Vietnam; and to the desire of the Americans to stop them doing so, without too conspicuously flouting Neutralisation.
Almost from inauguration day, MIT economist Professor Walt Rostow, a World War II bomb-target analyst now translated into Kennedy’s deputy special assistant for national security and within a few months director of policy planning at the State Department, urged the administration to shift focus from Laos to Vietnam. The president himself soon agreed that the latter looked a better place to face down the communists: in the face of intensifying guerrilla activity, more must be done to shore up Diem. Security in the Mekong delta had become so precarious that medical supplies could be distributed to civilian hospitals only by the CIA’s planes and helicopters, amongst abandoned villages and untilled rice fields. In May 1961 Vice-President Lyndon Johnson visited Vietnam, pledged America’s continuing backing and dubbed Diem ‘the Winston Churchill of Asia’. David Halberstam wrote later of this trip: ‘He had given our word. It not only committed the Kennedy Administration more deeply … attached Washington a little more firmly to the tar baby of Saigon, escalated the rhetoric, but it committed the person of Lyndon Johnson. To him, a man’s word was important.’
In October Ed Lansdale wrote to World War II Airborne commander Gen. Maxwell Taylor, Kennedy’s personal military adviser until appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the following year: ‘The Vietnamese are an able and energetic people. They don’t seem to be themselves today. They are going to lose their country if some spark doesn’t make them catch fire to go to work to win this war. The spark could well be to place the right Americans into the right areas of the Vietnamese government to provide operational guidance … Such work will require Americans of talent and compassion.’
Lansdale thus recommended that the answer to the problems of the Vietnamese was to send them more Americans, and over the thirty-four-month span of th
e Kennedy presidency, that is what was done. In May 1961, four hundred Green Berets were dispatched, followed a few months later by forty US Army helicopters, along with four hundred personnel to fly and maintain them, together with a steadily increasing corps of advisers, soon serving alongside the ARVN down to battalion level, and by mid-1962 totalling eight thousand. The 8 February 1962 creation of MACV – Military Assistance Command Vietnam – was correctly interpreted by Hanoi as signifying Kennedy’s intention to lift his stake. By November 1963 there would be sixteen thousand Americans on the ground: soldiers, sailors and airmen; technicians and pilots; electronic eavesdroppers and agriculturalists; academic social analysts and flamboyant special forces cowboys; spooks and geeks of every hue.
US aid was running at $400 million a year, with military equipment and vehicles shipped in unprecedented quantities. In April 1962 the Diem government embarked on a ‘strategic hamlets’ programme, a refinement of the earlier agrovilles, designed to separate peasants from guerrillas by relocation behind barbed wire – at the cost of displacement from the burial plots that meant so much to every family. A RAND Corporation report questioned the policy’s acceptability, but at the Pentagon Marine Maj. Gen. Victor ‘Brute’ Krulak pounded the table and asserted that his country would ‘force the peasants to do what’s necessary to make the program succeed’. The hamlets had significant tactical success, making life tougher for the Vietcong, but the social and political cost was high. Old Indochina hand Howard Simpson watched as a ‘sullen, bedraggled group of peasants’ was herded from their huts for resettlement. An old man with sores on his scalp protested vehemently, and in rapid French, to a TV crew filming the scene, ‘It isn’t just! They are making us move. We don’t want to move. Tell them. It is not just!’ As security men hustled the old peasant away he wailed disconsolately, ‘The Americans don’t understand. Tell the Americans we don’t want to leave!’
At a 23 July 1962 strategy conference in Honolulu, Gen. Paul Harkins told an audience of politicians and brass headed by defense secretary Robert McNamara: ‘During April, 434 ground operations were mounted … increased to 441 in May. Over 1,000 air sorties were flown in June … PRES DIEM has indicated that he plans his troops will get out into the field more often and stay out longer … There is no doubt that we are on the winning side.’ Asked about timings, Harkins said that he thought victory over the NLF could be attained by the end of 1963. McNamara entered a cautionary note, saying, ‘We must expect the worst and make our plans accordingly,’ which the defense secretary interpreted as scheduling Vietcong defeat for year end 1965.
In those Kennedy years, many of the characters who would play roles throughout the American war, some prominent and others less so, gathered around the stage and set about learning their lines. In 1961 Duong Van Mai travelled from Saigon to Washington to study. She was fascinated by the US, but troubled by segregation in Southern states, feeling unsure whether she was expected to use a White or Coloured bathroom. Then she met David Elliott, who would become her husband and the other half of a remarkable partnership that committed most of two lifetimes to studying the Vietnamese people. A Bostonian, he had attended Yale before serving with the US Army’s radio interception unit at Tan Son Nhut. He then spent a year with MACV intelligence before joining RAND, for which he embarked on a protracted research programme in the delta. Why Vietnam? Elliott said: ‘This was where it was happening, the most intense front in the Cold War. I was offered a front seat to see history being made.’
Idealists and sensation-seekers alike plunged into the heady mudge created on Saigon’s streets by diesel fumes, spices, obsessive vehicle-horn abuse, breathless heat. Some of those strolling up Tu Do and gawking at the sights – or, more likely, at the girls – were bright young men eager to set the world to rights, who came to care passionately about the Vietnamese. Frank Scotton, born in 1938, grew up in Massachusetts, ‘where the revolutionary war against oppressive foreign occupiers is part of the culture’; his father had been killed at the Bulge in 1944. ‘I thought that I would perform some sort of service. In the past we had been good tinkerers abroad, getting in there and fixing things. We had the folk belief that we would always win, even after Korea sandpapered that ideal a little.’ Throughout Scotton’s long stint in Vietnam he remained powerfully conscious of his own heritage, his family’s record of physical courage: ‘I didn’t want them to feel that I wasn’t measuring up.’
He joined the US Information Agency rather than the Foreign Service, ‘because I’m a natural field man’. In Washington before flying, he met three young Vietnamese lieutenants who asked if he spoke their language. No, he said, but he had been told that French would do. They looked uncomfortable. One said, ‘That is the colonial language.’ When the American reached Vietnam in 1962, he quickly became aware of the handicap imposed on almost all his countrymen by the inability to converse: ‘They couldn’t even pronounce place names. I also became very conscious of the weight of history against which we were contending. Within a few weeks, I was a sufficiently wise guy to recognise that Diem was not “the Winston Churchill of Asia”.’
Scotton became an impassioned student of the country, travelling fearlessly and indeed recklessly through paddies and jungle, supervising a survey for the US ambassador about sentiment in remote hamlets. One of a small band of Americans who became committed to the cause, he said, ‘I was always looking for other people who felt the same way. There was a divide between those who really cared, and those who did not.’ Young Saigonese who met him soon began to say that Scotton was ky qua – strange or eccentric – and plenty of Americans would have agreed: embassy people called him ‘the maverick mongrel’. Vietnam cost him a marriage: his wife Katherine did her utmost to make a life at their house in Qui Nhon, organising English classes. After some months, however, she went home, they divorced, and thereafter he formed a series of passionate local relationships.
Doug Ramsey also arrived in 1962, fresh from language school, and was posted to spend his first months circulating USIA material from an office in Dalat: ‘I found it ironic to be distributing a paper entitled “Free World” in the interests of the Diem dictatorship.’ Local people proved wary of expressing opinions about anything to a foreigner unless or until they knew him well, but Ramsey quickly decided that Diem was not a credible or sustainable leader, and developed a matching enthusiasm for some elusive political ‘Third Force’. ‘I got interested in what Frank Scotton was doing – trying to build from the bottom.’ He came increasingly to believe that a decade or two of communist domination was preferable to ‘the imbecility of our policies’, an interminable war. Dominance of a given area by either side ‘in many places extended to no more than the lethal range of an AK-47 or an M-14’. Ramsey professed to be less dismayed by communist terror than by ‘indiscriminate artillery and air strikes by the US and Saigon regime’. Down in the Mekong delta, he caught an early glimpse of the limitations of government forces when the mere rumour of an impending attack caused the local ARVN unit to take flight.
Bob Destatte was one of sixteen children in a Catholic family of poor but fiercely hard-working Ohio factory workers. He abandoned a college teaching course in favour of the army: ‘I wanted to see something outside my small town.’ He volunteered for the Army Security Agency because a military friend told him this would ensure overseas postings, and he became a morse interceptor. In 1961 he was sent to Saigon. On the plane flying in, he expected something, he said, ‘like those people in Terry and the Pirates – sneaky folk hiding in the shadows’. But from the moment that from the back of a truck he glimpsed his first two girls in ao-dais, he thought differently: so differently, indeed, that within months and at the age of twenty-two he was married to Nguyet Thi Anh. He met her when a young Vietnamese boy who worked with their unit, in those days based in two vans at Tan Son Nhut airbase, invited him to a family dinner. He liked the mother from their first meeting, and the boy’s sister taught him to use chopsticks. ‘I guess it was love at first sight.�
� They were joined in a civil ceremony, but in collusion with his officers the marriage was not made official until just before he rotated back to the US in 1963, because local weddings triggered instant repatriations. Unlike many such partnerships, that of the Destattes lasted.
Bob Kelly, a psychological-warfare adviser working with the South Vietnamese in Quang Ngai province, organised pro-government rallies, of which the first was not an unqualified success. Local people were herded like cattle to attend, then left sitting without water under a hot sun. The occasion’s highlight was to be a C-47 flying low overhead, broadcasting government propaganda. The plane arrived early, and from a thousand feet its raucous tones drowned out the local province chief’s speech on the ground. Then the airborne broadcaster demanded in Vietnamese: ‘Mr Province Chief, have you finished yet?’ This infuriated and humiliated local officials, whose temper was not improved when the plane began to drop leaflets in bundles that failed to burst in the air, so they landed like bombs. It never occurred to the Americans involved, some laughing and others almost tearful amid the shambles, that it was wildly inappropriate for them to be seen to be orchestrating a Vietnamese political rally.
William Colby, born in 1920, spent part of his childhood in China, then attended Princeton. In 1944–45 he served some months with the OSS in occupied France and Norway, which he found an intensely romantic experience, then spent a few boring years working for ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan’s law firm. Better times started in 1950 when he joined the CIA, ‘a band of brothers’. He did an apprenticeship in Sweden and Italy, then in 1959 was posted to Saigon. He travelled widely across the country, and decided that containment of the communists was the only realistic objective. He dissented when Max Taylor and Walt Rostow recommended a dramatic increase in US advisory strength: Vietnam ‘really wasn’t a military problem’. In July 1960 Colby became CIA head of station, and presided over a series of doomed efforts to infiltrate paramilitary groups into the North, and to launch counter-terror operations against the Vietcong. Like many Americans, he grasped a few strands of the Vietnam tangle, but never enough to promote coherent policies.