Listening to the six o’clock television news, Lyndon Johnson heard the statement read out by the State Department’s press officer. He was much cheered on hearing it. “That’s telling them,” he muttered to his wife. Lady Bird agreed.
27
September 12, 1964
Saigon, South Vietnam
At the safe house, Tucker Montana asked Rufus what was it exactly that de Gaulle had said.
“I just this afternoon read the cables, after Blackford and I got back. You heard about it? The press conference? Where …?”
“From my friend. My girlfriend. Lao Dai—Black knows her. She’s pretty affected by it, says de Gaulle said we can’t win a ‘military victory’ unless we’re prepared for a world war. Makes a big difference, you bet, hearing this here from the biggest cheese in France. I guess a lot of the locals figure, if the same country that lost in Indochina ten years ago is now saying the Americans can’t win in Indochina unless they want a world war, that kind of cools their optimism, right, Rufus?”
“I assume it had that effect on your friend, Tucker?”
Tucker nodded. “Right.”
“I imagine the State Department or the White House will have a reply in the next few hours. I’ve left word for it to be brought in, if it’s while we’re still here; otherwise we can get the news tonight or tomorrow. But you’re right. What de Gaulle said is worth a lot of strategic hamlets to the enemy. It’s one more burden, but let’s hope it won’t be decisive. Our problems are more mundane. Blackford, give Tucker the figures you’ve accumulated—the Agency, Tucker, wanted gross figures on the operations of 34-A, now that it is a—public enterprise.”
“After what de Gaulle said”—Blackford looked grim—“I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those people we’re talking to, yesterday and today, are looking at all those junks out there and thinking, Dunkirk! Only where would they sail to? But that’s another question—sorry. Yes, the figures.
“Well, Tucker,” Blackford brought out his notebook, “to give you a little perspective: In the last six months of 1961 the South Vietnamese clocked one hundred and forty incidents of infiltration by sea. These included infiltration of bazookas and groups of up to sixty-five men strong, by single junks. The estimate is that fourteen hundred infiltrators passed through the coastal system during those six months. That’s a lot of armed men shipped here to kill rural schoolteachers, mayors, and guards, and any women and children who get in the way.
“Back in the fifties, the South had a total of only eighty junks, all of them sailing boats, no motors. Beginning in December 1961, President Kennedy moved in. Five hundred junks were built with U.S. funds, sixty more using South Vietnamese funds. Three kinds of junks: About thirty ‘command junks,’ each carrying a crew of ten, with automatic weapons and radios. About two hundred and fifty sailing junks, for conducting surveillance as pickets or patrols. These are stationed in specific harbors. A few hundred motorized sailing junks for patrolling extended areas of the sea. By the beginning of this year we had about six hundred and fifty all told.”
“What have they accomplished?”
Blackford didn’t need his notebook. The figures were logged in his memory. “You’ve already seen the figures on the number of searches—three hundred and fifty thousand. They fingered one hundred forty VC agents. They’re going at it every day, covering eight hundred miles of coastline. Obviously we have no way of knowing how many got through, either because they were detained, examined, and thought innocent, or because they penetrated the naval screen.
“Now, Rufus, this isn’t in our Gulf-Trail script, but I just want to make one point. If, after he gets through with his Igloo operation on the Trail, Tucker finds his front as leaky as mine is, what have we accomplished?”
“Don’t we have to assume that the number of North Vietnamese is finite, Blackford?”
“Yeah, I guess I’d weigh in with that, if I were a Pentagon planner. But nothing seems to discourage these people. Nothing. Goddamn, three hundred and fifty thousand at-sea searches, and there’s no indication, we all know that, of any decrease in the level of guerrilla activity out there. Hell, we’re surrounded by it. Now, Tucker, you’ve got something real fancy coming up here, the Igloo operation. But these bastards are regenerating at one hell of a rate—”
Tucker broke in. “Never mind. What do you do when your junks finger a couple of NVAs with bazookas hiding in a fishing boat? They’re brought in. Maybe they’re put in prison. Maybe they’re shot. But that’s small potatoes, and we’re always going to lose on the small-potato front, even if the gooks don’t succeed in bringing down enough infiltrators to win the war. We know what they’re planning on, they’re planning on twenty thousand troops per month coming down the Trail, and that’s the big artery we’re going to choke up. If we can seal that off, then at your end all you’ve got to do is intensify the search procedures, maybe sink a few more of those buggers out there at sea: then give the South Vietnamese a chance. If ever they stop playing musical chairs with the presidency, they can go out there in the country and sniff out the North Vietnamese guerrillas and their allies in the South—who, we’ve all agreed, aren’t numerous.”
Blackford sighed audibly. “Yes. I know that’s the plan. And we’re here to set the plan in operation. But I’ve got to say, Rufus, it doesn’t look good.”
Rufus was brisk with him. “Our job is to make the situation better. It is Washington’s responsibility to decide whether making it better is not enough.”
Rufus resolutely pursued his agenda. But Blackford knew that Rufus’s rare display of anger, frustration, disappointment and disagreement wasn’t directed at him.
Should he try to sleep? Or should he not try to sleep? He had Richard Tregaskis’s Vietnam Diary, from which he got reconfirmation on the subject of the dogged spirit of the Vietnamese, in particular those in the North, who had borne the brunt of the bitter war against the French.
The book was engrossing, if depressing. He considered turning to the new novel by Harold Robbins, or to Faulkner’s Sanctuary, which Sally had sent him in paperback. (“If you haven’t read this forty-eight hours after receiving it, give up whatever else you’re doing. You can’t grow one week older without reading Sanctuary!”) Her weekly call came in, generally, between 2 and 3 A.M. Not an incivility of hers, to call at that hour. For some reason 6 to 7 P.M., Mexico time, was the best hour for getting through; she couldn’t figure out why, nor could he, and to tell the truth, after a while they didn’t try.
As a rule she called the BOQ, because he was usually in Danang; and that meant he had to pull up a cot by the side of the phone at the end of the corridor, so as not to wake other officers housed there. But she knew this week to call the hotel in Saigon. Should he try a quick nap? It would be harder, after they spoke, because her voice put him in high gear. Soon he was dreaming that he was trying to decide whether to dream … and the telephone rang.
“Hello, my darling Blacky.”
“¿Qué tal, mi querida Sally? ¿Cómo estás? ¿Cómo está el bebito?”
“Not bad. No, not bad. Not terribly taxing, those sentences, granted. But even the Spanish accent sounded good. Great heavens! Is that you, Blackford, or is it some spy brought in from the Mexican cold, pretending to be you?”
“You kech me up, gringa. Fok you!”
Sally laughed. She asked how he was. He was fine, thanks. Had he been to church the preceding Sunday? In fact he had, had she? Yes, she said, Tony was a very faithful Catholic and the little boy would be brought up in the Church so she figured she might as well learn a little more about it. “You’ve always been more of a Christian than I, darling,” she conceded. “Maybe I can catch up one of these days. On the other hand, it isn’t absolutely clear, is it, that your profession exemplifies the practice of Christianity?”
“Not if it isn’t certain that communism exemplifies the anti-Christ.”
“Oh dear, darling, here we go again. We mustn’t, of course, and it’s my fault, tho
ugh your retaliation just now was, really, a little massive, don’t you think? No, you don’t think. I guess I just ought to tell you this, that the majority of the people I talk to among the faculty at the university here in Mexico think that the Vietnam war is simply a matter of an assertive North wanting for the South the same independence the North has achieved—”
“Darling?”
“Yes, darling.”
“Why is the average university professor so stupid? I mean—now listen, Sally; just once, listen. We’ve got a perfect phone connection, so just pretend this is another seminar, without Jane Austen. The North Vietnamese are totally dependent on the Soviet Union and China. Without them they couldn’t build a tin canoe, let alone a SAM missile. What’s our record in this part of the world? Sure, we conquered the Philippines. But that was sixty-five years ago and had to do with war against Spain. So, after planting a few democratic seeds there, and fighting a war of liberation against the Japanese, in fifty years we made the Philippines free. We occupied Japan and then left it to run itself. We fought for Korea, then let it fend for itself, with a couple of divisions sitting there in case they were needed. Intellectuals who think the North Vietnam business is only about anticolonialism just don’t think, except for that Anti-U.S. Think which most foreign intellectuals go in for, their special brand of masturbation. How do they account for the impulse of Communist-driven leaders to expand their power? East Europe, Greece, Berlin, Korea, Vietnam—”
“Blacky, Blacky. Yes, and of course there’s a lot of packaged anti-U.S. thought among these people. But on the other hand, you can’t account for the popular support for Ho’s movement in the North—”
“How can you say that, darling? That popular support shows itself, among other ways, in that one million people have left the North since Geneva—”
“Well, you can’t tell me all those people coming down to fight for Hanoi are all conscripts, can you?”
Blackford thought: He did not have an answer to that point. Sure, he could edge away by saying that most Germans fought for Hitler, and Russians for Stalin, and no doubt their understanding of what they were doing transcended any question of personal loyalty to Hitler, and to Stalin, whom so many of them loathed. But Sally was pressing her point.
“I heard a Spaniard, a journalist,” Sally was saying, “just back from Saigon—charming man. If he goes back to Vietnam I will tell him how he can get in touch with you. There were six of us, and he was telling this story after dinner. It goes like this: A North Vietnamese nineteen-year-old soldier starts out from North Vietnam with an eighty-pound pack. He goes down the Trail. He makes out with bread and water as he can. He wades through fetid swamps, climbs icy mountains, gets bitten by snakes and mosquitoes, sweats with malarial fever, but plods on and on and on and on and two months later he has covered four hundred miles and delivers his cargo to the Vietcong unit where the captain meets him, gives him some rice, tells him to rest up for a day, and then to go back to Hanoi and bring another bundle of the same.… Kind of gets you, doesn’t it?”
Yes, Blackford said, it does kind of get you. By polemical forward inertia he’d have gone on to say that history was full of surprises about the stamina shown by tyranny when colonizing, but he was exhausted. Not physically; it was something else. The awful, demoralizing, subversive plausibility of what Sally was saying. This tired him, he thought, reaching with his right hand to press the flesh on his right thigh so hard as to cause him to start up with the pain of it; anything to wake him from the sudden torpor his mind, not his body, had taken him to. He managed to rouse himself, and for a few minutes more they traded small talk and then love talk, and he hung up. He went to the closet and brought out a small bottle of gin, poured a quarter glass, gave it a little water from the jug on the table and drank it down. He sat and thought. And then he knelt down and, as he had done so many times before, but so infrequently in the past year or so, prayed for guidance. Prayed that General de Gaulle was mistaken. Prayed that he, Blackford Oakes, on a mission for his country and, yes, for the free world, would regain his faith in the Vietnamese venture. A faith, he realized, he had—only just tonight—realized he had lost.
28
September 14, 1964
Goldwater’s Headquarters
Washington, D.C.
When Senator Barry Goldwater stepped out of the White House, escorted to the door by the President himself, the entire West Wing lit up with flashbulbs.
What ground did you go over with the President, Senator?
Did you talk with him about the civil rights bill?
Did Vietnam come up?
Is there any chance, Senator, of a televised debate?
What do you think, Senator, of the President’s campaign ads?
Did you have coffee?
Barry Goldwater, groping his way to his limousine, interrupted his smiled silence to bark, “I don’t drink coffee.” In his car, the glass divider up, his campaign manager Denison Kitchel asked how it had gone.
“All right. He gave me one of those half-Johnsons. You know, hand on my shoulder. I was watching for what in the Senate we call a ‘full-Johnson.’ That’s when his arm stretches all the way to your other shoulder. That’s when he really wants something. If he had given me one of those, I’d have expected him to tell me I ought to drop out of the race.”
“So?”
“Well, it was my meeting, I asked for it, and I told him he ought to get a new Secretary of Defense, that the Vietnam scene was a mess, but that I didn’t think we ought to divide the country on that issue during the campaign. Wait till it’s over.”
“He liked that, I guess.”
“Said he did. Said of course we both had to continue to campaign as we’ve been doing, and I said sure, but maybe it would be good if we agreed none of our people would call him a pinko, and none of his people would call me a Nazi.”
“Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
They left the car on Connecticut Avenue and went into a staff meeting. Goldwater had in front of him notes assembled during the week. He began by telling his staff that he had told LBJ the Goldwater camp would not make a big issue of Vietnam, but he thought we were losing out there. Look—he pointed to his sheaf of notes—just one week, and look. He adjusted his glasses.
“Casualties: 1,387 U.S. to date—163 killed in combat, more than one thousand wounded. That’s men killed in action.
“LBJ orders five thousand more military into Vietnam. That was last Tuesday. Thursday, new estimates from the Pentagon say the Vietcong number more like 75,000 than 25,000. How come? How come they are increasing, after six months of our 34-A operation in the Gulf? Did a lot of South Vietnamese just happen to fall in love with communism? With President Ho?” He turned to Baroody.
“I don’t know, Bill. You say it isn’t a good campaign issue to go out there and just say the whole Vietnam operation is screwed up; maybe you’re right, you’re probably right. The minute I touch on foreign policy, I’m identified as a warmonger. It’s just that simple. We should make a note to tell the Republican candidate in 1968: Don’t touch foreign policy. Just pretend it doesn’t exist.”
“Oh come on, Barry.” The voice of Bill Baroody, pacifier.
“What do you mean, come on? They asked me in California what I would do about the Trail, I told them not what I would do, but what the Pentagon at one point was considering—defoliation by nuclear tactical weapons. And I tell them I don’t think that’s too good an idea—and the press has me in favor of nuclear war in Vietnam! I tell ’em defensive tactical nuclear weapons have to be at the disposal of the NATO commander, next day I’m in favor of giving every staff sergeant in NATO a nuclear weapon. So General Partridge, who was head of NORAD, pops up and says he was authorized by Ike to use tactical nuclear weapons in combat defense, and Ike up at Gettysburg doesn’t deny it. Does anybody notice? No. Fuck it.” He sank into a chair and said:
“You see what Sulzberger wrote in the Times?”
There
was silence in the room. They had all seen it. But Goldwater insisted on reading it aloud. He picked the paper on which it was clipped out of his notebook. “‘The possibility exists that, should Goldwater enter the White House, there might not be a day after tomorrow.’
“So, since we all want a day after tomorrow, we’ll hit the Vietnam question on the broad front. We’ll just say we’re in favor of meeting our commitments to SEATO, of observing the Containment Doctrine, of maintaining a strong presence in the Pacific, of helping the South Vietnamese as best we can, that kind of thing. But we aren’t going to tell Lyndon Johnson how to win that situation out there. Nobody’s going to listen, and he’ll make us sound like warmongers. He’s already done that. So unless he really screws up in the next few weeks we let it alone. And if I do decide to go after him on it, I’ll call him up and let him know ahead of time.”
“You’re not likely to have to do that, Barry.” It was Kitchel talking. “They’ve got a mole in our outfit. Don’t know who he/she is, but all those rumors about a mole have got to be right. Every time you give a speech, even speeches we keep from the press till you deliver them, the Democrats have a point-by-point answer ready for distribution to the press in about half an hour.”
“Denis,” Goldwater spoke with mock gravity, running his hand across the table to include all the eight staff members in the room, “give ’em all lie dectector tests by tomorrow.”
The tension broke. Goldwater left the room, and Kitchel took over, going down the agenda. There was the speech tomorrow in Cleveland—
“Deny, does the senator mean we can’t use something like this?” Freddy Anderson, the young speechwriter, handed the campaign manager a clip. Kitchel read out loud the AP bulletin. “‘General Maxwell Taylor, U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam, met yesterday with Premier Nguyen Khanh. He told Premier Khanh that his threats of carrying the war beyond South Vietnam’s borders were contrary to U.S. policy …’” Kitchel moaned, and finished reading the clip. “It is contrary to U.S. policy to cross over to their side of the fifty-yard line. No, Fred, you heard the candidate. We don’t use it.”
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