The Best of I.F. Stone

by I. F. Stone

  Saigon, as I emerged on it that Sunday afternoon, must have been a lovely French Asian capital before the war with its broad tree-lined boulevards, open squares and shady arcades. Now it seemed an Asiatic honky tonk. Though it was siesta time, here and there U.S. soldiers in pairs sauntered dolefully past the many bars looking like Bill Mauldin types in search of an ersatz Mama. Small boys were already out pimping in the hot afternoon, hinting in pidgin English at bizarre pleasures. The immemorial entrepreneurial spirit flourished in the world’s oldest commodity, women, but the soldiers seemed too shy to close such deals in broad daylight. Warding off importunate pedicab drivers I made straight for the big white building at Nguyen Hué street and Le Loi boulevard which is the center of journalistic activity in Saigon—JUSPAO, the Joint U. S. Public Affairs Office, on a square adjoining the white walled palace of Saigon’s City Hall. JUSPAO is surrounded by a barricade, with a guard house at either end. I got by one of them only to find the main entrance locked. As I walked from one locked door to another, alone behind that white-washed barricade, one lone American in full view of the promenading Sunday crowds, I felt conspicuously alone, an easy tempting target for any potshot from a VC sympathizer. That was my one moment of apprehension. Soon one treats the possibility of being hit by a bomb in Saigon as matter-of-factly as the chance of an auto accident in the States.

  Fortunately one locked side door was soon opened for me by a lonesome duty officer. I was greeted inside by a huge picture of Lyndon Johnson, looking in that setting almost Orientally inscrutable. Next to the picture was a sign in English and Vietnamese saying peremptorily, “Clear your weapon before going topside.” When I asked the duty officer what clearing one’s weapon meant, he said it meant taking any live bullet out before going upstairs but that actually the order had been superseded by a later one simply requiring all weapons to be left below. I was heartened by this sign of progress.

  Before being permanently accredited as an American correspondent, one has to obtain a press card from the South Vietnamese government. This is the sole act of deference to Vietnamese sovereignty required of the visiting American. The contrast between the two press HQs reflects the real balance of forces. JUSPAO has taken over a multi-storied elegant white building on one of the town’s most important squares. The ARVN press office is housed in a nearby second story loft, dark, grimy and cooled only by an old-fashioned fan. A press card is issued without question, and for most U.S. correspondents that one visit to the loft is all they will make during their tour of duty. A formal military press briefing is held there at 4:30 P.M. each day, a half hour before the daily briefing at JUSPAO, but only a few wire service men, on days when they are hungry for news, turn up. The military briefing officer speaks in Vietnamese but often interrupts his interpreter to correct the latter’s sometimes incomprehensible English.

  Back across the street, in the air-conditioned realm of JUSPAO, with its snack bar, its PX and—like oases—its clean water fountains, the American finds himself, as the French say, chez lui, at home. The newcomer, even if a stray heretic like myself, encounters that unpretentious amiability which is the most attractive and democratic side of our American character. I had failed to bring the required letter from one’s editor but after some good-humored joshing from a press officer who told the military I was chief cook and bottlewasher of my own publication, my card was issued. I was also asked to sign a form absolving the U.S. government from liability if anything happened to me while riding in a military plane. During the eight days I was in Saigon I met with nothing but courtesy from U.S. officers, civilian or military. The question in my mind was how so many well-meaning, friendly and intelligent people, with so much in the way of funds and Vietnamese informers at their disposal, could guess so consistently wrong about events in Vietnam. Honolulu, and its aftermath of anti-American riots, were only the latest examples of this incomprehension. I would like to sketch out a tentative answer on the basis of what I saw and heard.

  The first thing that strikes one is the extent to which the Americans in Vietnam live in enclaves—not just military but psychological enclaves. JUSPAO, the Embassy, the various AID missions and the military HQs in Saigon are like miniature fortresses in a hostile land. They reminded me strongly of the sand-bagged and barricaded offices of the British in their conflict with Israel’s Haganah and the terrorists in the three turbulent years before Britain withdrew from Palestine in 1948. But these fortresses are vulnerable from within; they depend on Vietnamese employes and there is no certain way to distinguish friend from foe. The situation must be apple pie for Viet Cong intelligence. Our press and our soldiers live in a world apart; few speak even such bad French as mine, much less Vietnamese. The mentality we develop is the “compound” complex which has always afflicted foreigners living as traders or soldiers in a foreign land. We bring America with us wherever we go, and live wrapped in a kind of cellophane which separates us from the people of the country. Our relations with them are almost entirely mercenary, and the women, the informers and the soldiers we buy are about as unsatisfactory as bought love is everywhere. They must secretly regard us with amusement or contempt.

  To watch the young Ivy Leaguers arriving briskly at the Embassy of a morning is to feel oneself on the eve of the Harvard–Yale game. The team spirit is bursting out all over; it demands optimism; patriotism is equated with euphoria. All is for the best, albeit not in the best of all possible worlds. One day the official spokesman is enthusiastic about the firing of General Thi as a move against “war-lordism.” When This removal turns out to be a bad mistake, the same spokesman discovers that these are just the birth pangs in South Vietnam of “federalism,” the problem of integrating each region into the national whole. He even touches on the U.S. Civil War until a tart newsman suggests there are enough civil wars going on in South Vietnam without rehashing the problem of the Gray and the Blue. Everything is public relations and public relations is make-believe. Every top official is more concerned with his “image” than with unpleasant realities. To mention these is to get off the team. Bright gimmicks are turned into speeches and proliferate into pamphlets long before anything has been accomplished or even after hopes have collapsed. The word is taken for the deed. As one moves from talking to the men who work in the field to those who work in Saigon and then think of the men in Washington, one sees that the further from the scene the more imaginary the picture we have created. The most confining enclave of all is this enclave in our heads.

  Under the supposed benevolence of our policy one soon detects a deep animosity to the Vietnamese and a vast arrogance. We assume the right to remold them, whether they choose to be remolded or not. The war, like the cold war, has developed a vein of zealotry alien to the easy-going American character. An enthusiastic psychological warrior, anxious to impress me, took me out for a drink on the cool veranda of the Continental Palace; one could imagine how the French planters and civil servants must have gathered there in the afternoons for their aperitifs. My new found friend—he claimed to know all about me—told me that in working with captured VC he found that 95 per cent were “recoverable” human beings. It was my first evening and I did not dare repay his hospitality by asking what we did with the other 5 per cent—dispose of them like Kleenex? Directives go down from on high to treat the villagers with some discrimination. But the poor GI’s one encounters are too full of rage at the fate which has brought them there. A boy from Mobile told me 50 per cent of the people in Saigon were VC, 45 per cent indifferent and 5 per cent with us; he thought we ought to go all-out to win the war—smash Hanoi—or go home. His buddy from Minnesota said at first he had been afraid all the time. He described the sleepless nights in the jungle, the stink of the water. Now he had become a fatalist; he felt he might get it anywhere, so why worry? Terrorism is hard to take, to see a buddy blown up by a mine or knocked off by a sniper hardly makes one benevolent to the natives. One hears frightful stories of troops in the field setting fire to villages or, on evacuating them,
defecating in the cooking utensils, out of sheer hate and resentment.

  In Saigon, on R and R (rest and recreation), the bar girls gyp the troops with the skill of their sisters in the clip joints of Greenwich Village. A soldier can spend a month’s pay on “Saigon tea” and emerge as virgin as he entered. The soldiers feel that they are taken advantage of on every hand, and they are. I heard a burly sergeant explode one night at the Caravelle when he found, as usual, that advance reservations had been ignored. “We’re out there in the jungle trying to hold this country together,” he shouted angrily, “and this is what we get for it.” There is hardly benevolence in the words one hears so frequently at the daily military briefing—“search and destroy”—as if we were an Old Testament God. In the cool panelled classroom in which the briefings are held, the only theory of the war which seems to emerge is implied by the “kill count” as if we were on an insect extermination mission and could go home when all the termites had been destroyed. It is significant that those like General Lansdale and Colonel John Paul Vann who would approach the Vietnamese as people soon find themselves sidetracked, suspect and frustrated. The machine instinctively reacts against the human, and what we are running, or what is running us, is a bureaucratic war machine.

  Americans with cameras search out VC atrocities with indignation, but the use of napalm and saturation bombing is regarded merely as another form of technology. The machine is forgiven atrocities many-fold more terrible than those of the guerrillas. The Vietnamese are expendable. I came across cold warriors who had operated in Germany, in Bolivia, in Brazil and in Santo Domingo and now, in all innocence, commit similar follies in Vietnam. They place a very high value on the purity of their intentions and a very low estimate on the motivations of the Vietnamese. One old acquaintance gave me a briefing on all we were doing for the Vietnamese and then dropped remarks which revealed a very different attitude. The editors in Saigon, who have been asking for freedom of the press, called a one-day general strike to protest an attack on a pro-government editor (the military could hardly object to that) but appended to this a demand for greater press freedom. When I asked my friend about this, he said cynically, “they only wanted to save a day’s newsprint.” Yet he had been telling me we were there to protect democracy from communism. Every demand for democratic rights is regarded as perverse if not subversive; this is also the basic attitude toward elections. One often feels our people regard the Vietnamese as irrelevant to our worldwide holy war against communism. As my friend said, “After all it’s only an accident that this war is being fought here. We have to smash the idea of wars of liberation.” If Vietnam and the Vietnamese are badly battered in the process, it’s too bad. The growing awareness of this essential indifference to their fate is giving the Vietnamese a common despair that might some day prove stronger even than fratricidal passion.

  Our capacity for overlooking the obvious is enormous. Even one of the best and most independent reporters here was shocked by the anti-Americanism of recent demonstrations in Saigon and in Hué and Danang. He shares the naive view that we are there to help the Vietnamese and regards the demonstrations as sheer ingratitude. The simple fact that occupying armies, whether allied or enemy, always become unpopular hardly ever figures in official calculation. It would be too hard to reconcile it with the planned steady increase in the number of troops. This, in a country as fiercely nationalistic as Vietnam, spells more trouble of the same kind but to face the facts might force us to recast our policy. An experienced British correspondent told me that several months ago he raised the question with a U.S. official of the resentment and annoyance created by the influx of foreign troops, with the money to get first choice of everything from women to pedicabs. He predicted that urban unrest might prove worse than the trouble in the villages. He was told he ought to try and be more “constructive.”

  A group of Buddhist neutralists of whom I shall tell more in my next letter published a volume in French and English called Dialogue. In one of them Pham Cong Thien writes, “Here is my Nada prayer: Lead us not into Salvation, but deliver us from Deliverance.” This is the true cry of the heart from a country torn apart.

  * * *

  *Committee for Nonviolent Action.

  Why We Fail as Revolutionaries

  Another essay on Vietnam with relevance to other U.S. attempts to reshape foreign governments and cultures: “How often,” Stone asks, “can intelligent and well-meaning Americans see glamorous ‘revolutionary’ programs collapse into the same old repression without noticing there is something fundamentally wrong?”

  . . .

  July 30, 1966

  SOME THINGS CANNOT BE LEARNED. A man cannot learn not to breathe. There are limits on the adaptation of societies, as of organisms. An established order cannot run a social revolution. Nicholas I was so impressed with the Decembrists who tried to otherthrow him that he ordered a summary of their criticisms to be drawn up for the guidance of his government, though only after they had been exiled or executed. “It is necessary,” this document said, “to improve the condition of the farmers, to end the humiliating sale of human beings.” Nothing came of these proposed reforms. Instead the regime established, in the dreaded Third Section, a new type of political police. This is the inescapable pattern of counter-revolution when it tries—in the currently fashionable phrase—to win the hearts of the people. The regime may be aware of the need for social reform, but is unable by nature to bring it about. The failure of the Decembrists was the high water mark of the Holy Alliance, which sought to police Europe against the dangers of liberalism, as the U.S. since the Truman Doctrine has sought to police the world against the dangers of communism. Without overstressing historical parallels, it is instructive to go back and notice that the Holy Alliance, in intent, was not as bleakly reactionary as it was in practice. It, too, sought to combine progress with repression, as we do in Vietnam. Metternich’s famous secret memorandum to Alexander I envisaged a stability which “will in no wise exclude the development of what is good, for stability is not immobility.” A new pamphlet from Mr. McNamara’s Defense Department, arguing the case for military assistance, uses almost identical phrases. It quotes with approval a study of the military in underdeveloped countries which says “The military . . . may be able to play a key role in promoting mobility while maintaining stability.” The military dictators we supply nevertheless do turn out to be immobile, as did the Holy Alliance before them, though it too was not without social insight. The reactionary Catholic theologian Baader who helped frame the Holy Alliance “maintained,” long before McNamara’s computers came up with the same revelation at Montreal, “that revolutionary sentiments are due . . . to the poverty of the masses.” These are distant branches of the same family tree which gave us the Honolulu Declaration.

  This perspective is necessary if we are to understand why we have failed in twelve years to bring about the social revolution so often promised in Vietnam. Four Americans who took part in this effort record their experiences in a new book, Men Without Guns: American Civilians in Rural Vietnam. The editor, George K. Tanham, went to Vietnam in 1964 as Director of Provincial Operations for AID and is at present deputy to the Vice-President of the RAND Corporation. He was writing the book’s concluding chapter when the Honolulu Declaration was made public. “It should be noted,” he comments somberly, “that similar high-sounding declarations in the past have accomplished little. However,” he concludes, with an obvious effort to sound a bit hopeful, “with the full backing of the Saigon government and with such high level American support, this new rural-development effort may succeed.” Considering Mr. Tanham’s experience and position, that is not a very hearty testimonial, though events since Honolulu already make it look too optimistic.

  Mr. Tanham’s three collaborators have each provided a close-up from firsthand experience of the AID program in three different types of provinces. Robert Warne covers Vinh Binh in the Mekong Delta. Earl Young tells of his work in Phu Boh, in the Central
Highlands. William Nighswonger describes his work in the coastal province where the U.S. air base at Danang is located. Like so many Americans who have worked at the grass roots in Vietnam, their reports have an honesty and sobriety very different from the glossy version of events which figures in Saigon’s pamphlets and Washington’s speeches. But at a certain point even these men stop short, as if at a wall they dare not climb.

  How often can intelligent and well-meaning Americans see glamorous “revolutionary” programs collapse into the same old repression without noticing there is something fundamentally wrong? In his preface, Mr. Tanham makes the familiar point that while the Viet Cong have exploited rural dissatisfaction, “the governments of South Vietnam from Diem to the present have not met this challenge . . . and shown the way toward real economic and social progress. In spite of frequent high sounding government declarations, there has been no real revolutionary effort.” Why should this be surprising? Mr. Tanham has long been one of the government’s experts in studying communist revolutionary warfare. These experts pore through communist literature but seem to miss the elementary and essential points, perhaps because to speak plainly in terms of class interests is regarded today as slightly subversive if no politically pornographic. How can you expect revolutionary changes from a government based on the possessing classes? We have been supporting a series of dictatorial regimes based on absentee landlords, military men and urban business type who can no more think in revolutionary terms than a horse can fly.