Tucker's Last Stand

by William F. Buckley

  Le Duc Sy’s imagination had always been vivid. Suddenly he was able, as the soldier in a movement, to shift perspectives. He paused, and found himself saying, “There is no doubt in heaven itself that she is the most alluring woman in Saigon. What is it proposed that I should do?”

  “You are to be ‘conscripted’ by the South Vietnamese army. This is very easy for us to effect, through our contacts within that army. You will be sent on maneuvers. And, on a night patrol, you will meet with a most unfortunate fate.”

  “Like what?” Le Duc Sy’s professional curiosity was now dominant.

  “You will be killed. Killed in action.”

  “Are you suggesting that Lao Dai will think me dead?”

  “No. We cannot expect a sacrifice of that character. She will be told what duty requires. You will be reported as having been killed, she will publicly mourn the event. And privately she will be confident that, at the correct moment in the future, you will be reunited. Meanwhile, your own operations will be transferred to Dong Hoi. Our naval facilities there are, after all, the true center of the objectives of Operation 34-A, concerning which you have already performed commendable work. Instead of surveying the work being done by the enemy in Danang through Operation 34-A, you will survey the effects of that work at Dong Hoi. We are almost certainly approaching a period when something will need to be done to obstruct the work of 34-A. All the more vital, this, as I devote myself to the work of keeping the Trail open. Our only other avenue to the South is by sea, in the Gulf. After your ‘death’ at the hands of our soldiers, you will go to Dong Hoi.”

  Le Duc Sy sat down. “I will need to consider your plan.”

  Bui Tin, finally relaxed, sipped the last of his beer. “My dear Sy, you are not given to ‘considering’ anything. Not even”—this was risky, Bui Tin thought hastily, but worth it—“impetuous marriages.”

  Le Duc Sy spoke gravely. “If you mean that I married Lao Dai after a very brief courtship, I acknowledge this. If you are suggesting that she is other than the woman I desire as my wife, you misunderstand our marriage.”

  “No, no. I am suggesting nothing of the sort. I honor your devotion to her. Even as I honor the devotion you have to our movement. But this is not merely my plan. It is the plan. You have no alternatives.”

  Le Duc Sy laughed. His laughter came in two volleys: the first, general merriment at the maneuvering of his old friend. The second reflected his sudden understanding of the “alternatives.”

  “Otherwise, I don’t get shot in the battlefield with a dummy bullet. I get shot with live ammunition here in Hanoi. Correct?”

  “Correct.”

  They finished their beer. Bui Tin leaned over to his desk and pressed a button. In short order an elderly clerk knocked on the door and an orderly brought in two trays with hot meals and a bottle of wine.

  “Notice the vintage, Sy—1954. The year of Dien Bien Phu. Amazing, what the French left behind.”

  17

  July 25, 1964

  Senator Goldwater’s Headquarters,

  Washington, D.C.

  Senator Goldwater and those three of his intimates who knew about “the general” who was supplying information clandestinely permitted themselves to laugh about it all, the helpful, sincere, anonymous “face” they called General X. It was late at night and they had talked at melancholy, frustrated length about the new vote-for-Johnson commercial. Drinks were passed about, and the drinks brought on organic, locker-room laughter. Barry Goldwater loved good company and good talk and he had a nice facility for taking a comic situation and carrying it to surrealistic lengths.

  “I mean, do you suppose his wife is called Mrs. X?”

  “Of course! And his oldest son is X major, the second boy is X minor, the third, X tertius,” Baroody said, never reluctant to exhibit his knowledge of classical constructions.

  “What about his daughter?” Clif White, the political intimate and consultant, insisted on knowing.

  There was hesitation. How to feminize “X”? Senator Goldwater said he supposed there was no alternative than to refer to her as “Little Miss X.”

  Goldwater had won at the convention the preceding week with 228 more votes than the 655 needed to nominate him as Republican candidate for President. He leaned back in his chair and took a drink of bourbon. To Baroody: “Do you know, Bill, here we are receiving information from a general in the Defense Department and we do not know who he is! Our General X. I’m trying to think. In the last ninety days, has he misled us?”

  No one could come up with any example, though several pieces of information he had passed on to Goldwater, Goldwater did not have the resources to verify. For instance, he had not been able himself to investigate the existence or the scope of Operation 34-A, which General X stressed was doing heavy work in the Gulf of Tonkin, virtually fingerprinting the locations and the characteristics of North Vietnamese installations. And now, tomorrow, Goldwater was scheduled to meet General X face to face.

  Their only conversations had been over the telephone. Clif White or Bill Baroody would get the call—from which telephone, where situated, they did not know. General X would announce that he had information he thought the senator would want to have. Baroody or White, both authorized to make binding commitments on behalf of the candidate, would give an exact time and a private telephone number. At exactly that time, Senator Goldwater would himself answer the private telephone and converse with the general, making notes of the information he was being given.

  The relationship could not have been initiated by the senator, and would not have been countenanced by him except for the odd way in which it had begun. It was at the funeral of General MacArthur in Norfolk. At the reception Mrs. MacArthur, the minute widow with the beautiful, stricken face who spoke in those comforting Southern accents one associates with loving aunts tending to the cares of helpless little children, signaled to him after her duties in the receiving line had been completed. A Coca-Cola and ham sandwich in hand, Goldwater went quickly to her side and she nudged him to the corner of the room. He leaned down in order to make out her quiet words.

  What she said was that there was a general in the Pentagon who had been an admirer of her husband, whom he had served as a lieutenant colonel in the Korean campaign. That general was critically situated in the Pentagon and despaired over the developing situation in South Vietnam. The anonymous general was a great admirer of Senator Goldwater and wished to give him information that would enable him to affect public policy during the forthcoming campaign.

  “Now heah, Senator, is the thing about it, and that’s that the general wohn’t under any circumstances let you know what his name is, an’ I guess I can understand that, when I remember all the intriguin’ done to mah general,” she tipped her head in obeisance in the direction of the crypt where her general had only just now been put to rest. So, she whispered, all she could say to the senator was that he must accept any telephone call he got from General X. And he was kindly to tell her—if he was willing to enter into this relationship—which single member of his staff would be advised of this “telephone pahtnaship, is how I think of it”—someone to whom the senator would say, Accept any calls from a man who announces himself as General Eggs. That was so that operators who received the call in the first place wouldn’t be tempted to make fun of someone calling himself General X. If a new operator asked how he spelled his name, he would say, “E-G-G-S.” Whenever the widow had looked up at him for a reaction, Senator Goldwater simply blinked. Now he said, “Tell him to ask for Bill Baroody.”

  “Is that B-a-r-o-o-d-y?”

  He nodded.

  She took his hand and gave it a warm little squeeze and said she now had to get back to her other guests.

  There had been, since April, six conversations with General X, and in the conversations he had given Goldwater the information about Operation 34-A and about captured North Vietnamese plans to transport as many as 20,000 men per month down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, with supporti
ng materiel. But in the exchange yesterday, General X had said that there was simply no alternative to arranging a personal meeting. What he now had to say to the candidate could not be said over the telephone and in any event might require a half hour’s common probing.

  “It’s not easy for me to move around these days, General. It’s easy enough for me to tell my own security to bug off, but there’s usually a bunch of reporters waiting outside, following me wherever I go. You got any ideas?”

  General X did. “I know that you are giving a speech tomorrow to the American Legion at the Armory. The speech is scheduled for eleven A.M. Arrive at ten-fifteen, and tell your host that you have arranged with a member of your staff to go over the speech with you and that he is meeting you in Room 24A—and you do not wish to be disturbed. Is that satisfactory?” Goldwater had said that yes, that was satisfactory.

  The senator looked very tired. It had been a grueling fortnight, never mind his formal convention victory. At San Francisco the attack on him by the candidate around whom the opposition had consolidated had been deeply wounding. It helped that Governor William Scranton had sworn to him over the telephone that he had never laid eyes on the scurrilous letter Scranton’s aides had written to Goldwater on Scranton’s stationery, addressed “Dear Barry” and signed (by typewriter) “Bill.” The letter suggested that the entire Goldwater movement was in the hands of kooks and warmongers. Every delegate found a copy of that letter under his door the next morning; this generated wild rumors, huge resentments, a divided convention, a divided Republican Party, and augured a defeat in November.

  The Johnson forces, sensing the possibility of an early knockout, had run a television commercial, the idea of press secretary Bill Moyers on which an inventive, expensive New York advertising agency had put the finishing touches. It showed a little girl in a sunny field of daisies. She began animatedly plucking petals from a daisy. As she plucked away, a male voice in the background began a countdown “… ten … nine … eight …” the voice becoming constantly stronger. The screen suddenly exploded and the child disappeared in a mushroom cloud. The voice concluded by urging voters to elect President Johnson. “These are the stakes: to make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die. Vote for President Johnson on November third. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.”

  Goldwater had heard about the ad minutes after it was shown over NBC and his indignation reached such furious pitch that he went to the telephone and called President Johnson—who denied any prior knowledge of the ad, and said he would see to it that it did not get shown again. But at that point Barry Goldwater had ceased believing anything Lyndon Johnson said.

  “More exactly,” Baroody corrected him, “you don’t think something is true merely because LBJ says it’s true. It might just happen to be true. That’s the way to sum it up, isn’t it?” Goldwater agreed. Yes, that was a better way to put it.

  As they made their way home, Goldwater and his one bodyguard and his driver in one car, Baroody and White in a second car, Baroody said to White, “I never saw him before exactly in this shape.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The combination of indignation and despair. Well,” he said, unsmiling, as the driver approached his own house before driving White to the hotel, “at least we got him laughing about all the X’s and little X’s in the general’s house.”

  “Your aide knows exactly where to go?” the American Legion hostess asked the candidate. Goldwater nodded. “Fine. And no one will disturb you, I can assure you of that. You can even lock that door from the inside.”

  Goldwater opened the door with some curiosity. It was a comfortable room with a large couch and three armchairs, a mirror for makeup and a private bathroom. He locked the door and sat down but immediately rose when he heard the knock. He approached the door:

  “Who is it?”

  “The general.” The voice was high-pitched and soft.

  Goldwater opened the door and admitted a man dressed in a seersucker jacket and khaki pants, without a tie, a large American Legion badge pinned to his chest pocket. He was perhaps fifty years old, slender, his hair sandy brown, his face tanned by years of exposure to the sun. His smile was genuine and relaxed. They shook hands; the general sat down and went immediately into his subject.

  “I can’t tell you this with the finality I have reported other things, Senator, like 34-A and the documents on the Trail. But I think I have pieced together an operation designed to do several things. First, persuade the American people that President Johnson is going to take a stronger stand on Vietnam, and two, get from Congress a blank check on anything he proceeds to do. Which, you ought to know, is a hell of a lot less than what he ought to do.”

  “Well, General, before we get into that, what exactly do you expect he’s going to do?”

  “One of the reasons I insisted on seeing you is that I have only pieces of information, and maybe you can put them together better than I can. Maybe between the two of us we can figure it out.”

  “Well,” said Goldwater affably, “we may as well begin. We’ve got some time, but not all day.”

  The general leaned forward and said:

  “Two destroyers, the C. Turner Joy and the Maddox, have been instructed to initiate patrols closer to North Vietnamese and Chinese territory by sixteen miles than they ever came before. The Maddox has been ordered to cruise right up to seven miles from Dong Hoi, and then within eleven miles of Hainan, the Chinese island northeast.

  “Now I can tell you this: There is nothing those two destroyers can accomplish up that close to enemy territory that they can’t accomplish at the conventional thirty miles away. The 34-A fake fishing boats are getting all the close-in intelligence we need, and there isn’t anything on those destroyers that will accomplish anything seven miles from shore that isn’t being better handled by those little boats with the South Vietnamese crews.”

  “What’s the point, then?”

  “There can’t be any other motivation that I can think of except to provoke the NVA.”

  “But why would the NVA permit themselves to be provoked? What’s Ho Chi Minh got to gain by shooting a couple of torpedoes at U.S. ships?”

  “That’s what I don’t have the answer to, Senator. I don’t know why the NVA would do that. It isn’t as though they had the resources to do a Pearl Harbor on us. So what if they hit the Maddox or the Turner Joy? So they have damaged or even sunk a U.S. destroyer, and run the risk of getting the United States into an all-out war with their country—”

  Goldwater held up his hand. “Wait, wait. Another thing, General: What do the captains of those two destroyers, or for that matter the commander of the Seventh Fleet, what do they think they’re accomplishing by going up that close?”

  “I can answer that one. The CIA station in Danang has reported that intercepts of NVA military radio transmissions indicated that the NVA are on to 34-A, and are thinking of going out after those fake South Vietnamese fishermen. Our idea has got to be that a show of strength by the Seventh Fleet will nail down the freedom of the seas, which includes the right of the 34-A ‘fishermen’ to go right up there to the three-mile limit. As far as the Navy is concerned, they’re there to assert the U.S. three-mile rule.”

  “Have the North Vietnamese proclaimed a twelve-mile limit?”

  “That’s something very curious. CIA has intercepted NVA messages in which they refer to a ‘twelve-mile limit’ but there haven’t been any public assertions on the subject. None. No complaints to the International Control Commission, to the U.N., to the State Department—none.”

  “Does Admiral Sharp know about those radio intercepts?” Senator Goldwater’s reference was to the CINCPAC in Honolulu.

  “I don’t know. I may be able to find that out. I’m already doing some discreet digging on that point. Right now I just don’t know.”

  Barry Goldwater had a faculty widely remarked by his staff of as
king the same question of very nearly anyone he engaged in serious conversation. It didn’t have to be a highly placed person close to him. It could be and had been known to be the hotel bellman or cleaning woman. He asked it now:

  “What would you do, General, if you were in my shoes?”

  The general was surprised, but not taken aback. “I don’t know. The fact of the matter is, Senator, the Johnson administration has no strategy. They do have the big Igloo project I’ve told you about, to tie up the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and they’re getting more and more data for that big notebook McNamara keeps filling up that results in no action that stops Ho Chi Minh in his tracks. I can guess only this: President Johnson isn’t going to take any decisive action before the third of November. And I haven’t seen anything to suggest that they have a strategy for after the election. But whatever you decide to do, I figured you ought to know what’s going on.”

  Goldwater paused. “Did you see the business on television night before last? The little girl with the daisies?”

  “I didn’t see it. I might as well have; it’s the talk of the Pentagon. And I’m not the only officer there who was pissed off about it.”

  “You don’t happen to know if LBJ knew about that commercial. I mean ahead of time?”

  “Senator, there isn’t anything relating to his campaign the President doesn’t know about ahead of time.”

  A knock. Goldwater rose, went to the door and said in a voice loud enough to be heard at the other side, “I’m coming, I’m coming. Joe, take the folder back to the office. See you later.” He turned to the general and whispered; “Thanks, General—” he smiled, “Eggs. You are a good man. I mean, a good general.”

  “Good luck, Senator.”

  They shook hands.

  18

  July 27, 1964

  Saigon, South Vietnam

  For their next meeting in Saigon, Rufus took the precaution of calling Tucker into town one day before Blackford. His message said merely that he was calling him in from Nakhon Phanom one day before their joint meeting “to give you a few hours of leisure in a city where you can order a decent meal.” Blackford flew in from Danang on Air America, went directly to the apartment (a different one, of course) to which they had been directed. Tucker had spent several days making tests and his mood was transparently high. He welcomed Blackford warmly, as Rufus did, in his own way.