A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  But progress was made slowly. The agreement of August 1962, based on an idea of Bunker’s, called in the United Nations to provide an interim administration while sovereignty passed, over an eight-month period, from the Dutch to the Indonesians. The agreement provided further that in 1969 the Papuans should be permitted a free choice as to whether they wished to continue as part of Indonesia. Critics could plausibly attack the settlement as a shameful legalization of Indonesian expansion, and indeed it was; but the alternative of a war over West New Guinea had perhaps even less appeal.

  Kennedy now moved to take advantage of the improved atmosphere. For a time relations between Djakarta and Washington improved. In an effort to persuade the Indonesians to turn inward and grapple with their development problems, the United States offered aid to the Indonesian stabilization program. When private American oil contracts were up for renegotiation and Sukarno threatened restrictive measures, Kennedy sent out Wilson Wyatt, the former lieutenant governor of Kentucky and manager of Stevenson’s 1952 campaign, to conduct negotiations for new contracts, a mission which Wyatt discharged with notable dispatch and success. Sukarno remained slippery and temperamental; but he was flattered by Kennedy’s attention and stayed precariously within the orbit of communication.

  Only later, after Sukarno determined to make the Federation of Malaysia his next target and after the United States had permitted itself to become identified with Malaysia against Indonesia, did the downward slide of relations resume, leading Sukarno eventually out of the United Nations and into the communist camp. The problem was intractable, but the Kennedy policy succeeded in delaying the slide and preserving for a time a basis of contact within Indonesia.

  2. DIEM

  Most intractable of all was the problem of Vietnam. In the end this was to consume more of the President’s attention and concern than anything else in Asia. The American commitment to the Saigon government was now of nearly seven years’ standing. After the Geneva Agreements of 1954 had split Vietnam along the 17th parallel, President Eisenhower had written Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam pledging American support “to assist the Government of Viet-Nam in developing and maintaining a strong, viable state, capable of resisting attempted subversion or aggression through military means.” The United States, Eisenhower continued, though without particular emphasis, expected that this aid would be met “by performance on the part of the Government of Viet-Nam in undertaking needed reforms.” The object of this American effort, Eisenhower concluded, was to “discourage any who might wish to impose a foreign ideology on your free people.”

  It was never clear that the people were so free or the ideology so foreign as Eisenhower supposed, but his language defined the mood in which Washington began the Vietnam adventure. That mood was essentially moralistic. The commitment to South Vietnam, like the parallel attempt to make the languid country of Laos a bastion of western power, followed directly from the Dulles conception of the world as irrevocably split into two unified and hostile blocs. In such a world, the threat of communism was indivisible and the obligation to oppose that threat unlimited. The moral imperative was reinforced by a popular construction, or misconstruction, of the Munich analogy, soon reformulated by Joseph and Stewart Alsop for Southeast Asia as the ‘domino’ theory. “You have a row of dominoes set up,” Eisenhower explained to a press conference, “you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is that it will go over very quickly. So you have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.” “If . . . Indochina passes into the hands of the Communists,” he told a doubting Winston Churchill, “the ultimate effect on our and your global strategic position . . . could be disastrous. . . . We failed to halt Hirohito, Mussolini and Hitler by not acting in unity and in time.”

  This was a moment of the supremacy of abstract principles (up to the point, of course, when they might lead to large-scale military action, as in the case of Dien Bien Phu). When Franklin Roosevelt had judged the Japanese occupation of Indochina a threat to vital United States interests in 1941, he had in mind, among other things, such a mundane fact as the need to keep open the supply routes which brought rubber from South Asia to the United States. The wartime development of synthetic rubber had long since ended American dependence on Asian rubber plantations; and no specific considerations of this sort seemed to underlie the abstractions of 1954. Nor, indeed, did there appear to, have been much consideration of the concrete situation in Vietnam. A more discriminating view might have regarded Ho Chi Minh, the boss of North Vietnam, less as the obedient servant of a homogeneous Sino-Soviet bloc than as a leader of nationalist communism, historically mistrustful of the Chinese and eager to preserve his own freedom of action. It might have taken a more relaxed attitude toward the evolution of Vietnam; and it might have decided to draw the American line on the Siamese side of the Mekong River, where both the political and military foundations for an American position were a good deal stronger. But abstractions prevailed, and the commitment was made. Dulles’s anti-colonial mood, moreover, required it to be in the main an American commitment, lest our effort in South Vietnam be tainted by suspicions of European imperialism. And, after Washington accepted Diem’s refusal to take part in the all-Vietnam elections promised by the Geneva Agreements for 1956, it became increasingly a commitment to one man.

  Whether we were right in 1954 to undertake this commitment will long be a matter of interest to historians, but it had ceased by 1961 to be of interest to policy-makers. Whether we had vital interests in South Vietnam before 1954, the Eisenhower letter created those interests. Whether we should have drawn the line where we did, once it was drawn we became every succeeding year more imprisoned by it. Whether the domino theory was valid in 1954, it had acquired validity seven years later, after neighboring governments had staked their own security on the ability of the United States to live up to its pledges to Saigon. Kennedy himself, who had watched western policy in Vietnam in the early fifties with the greatest skepticism and who as President used to mutter from time to time about our “overcommitment” in Southeast Asia, had no choice now but to work within the situation he had inherited. Ironically, the collapse of the Dulles policy in Laos had created the possibility of a neutralist solution there; but the survival of that policy in South Vietnam, where the government was stronger and the army more willing to fight, left us in 1961 no alternative but to continue the effort of 1954.

  It cannot be said that Diem had altogether kept his side of the bargain, especially in the performance of “needed reforms,” nor can it be said that the Eisenhower administration brought this omission very urgently to his attention. Diem, a profound traditionalist, ran a family despotism in the oriental manner. He held power in his own hands, regarded opposition as treason, showed disdain for the shallow institutions of western democracy and aimed to restore the ancient Annamese morality. “If we open the window,” his sister-in-law, the lovely and serpentine Madame Nhu once said, “not only sunlight but many bad things will fly in.” On the other hand, he had kept the country together in difficult circumstances. He had subdued the religious sects, cleaned up Saigon (once a swinging city of nightclubs, gambling houses and opium dens) and, with American aid, brought about a measure of economic growth and social improvement. Living standards, indeed, had risen faster in South than in North Vietnam, where Ho Chi Minh concentrated on investment rather than consumption. And Diem himself seemed a man of rectitude and purpose, devoted and incorruptible.

  The civil war had begun the year after the cancellation of the elections. Diem’s authoritarianism, which increasingly involved manhunts, political re-education camps and the ‘regroupment’ of population, produced a spreading resistance. At first the communists hung back, but, as the success of Diem’s economic policies convinced Ho Chi Minh that he could not wait passively for the Diem regime to collapse, he sent word to his comrades in the south to join the guerrillas. In March 1960 the Viet Cong, as the rebels were known,
established a National Liberation Front, and in September the Communist Party of North Vietnam bestowed its formal blessing and called for the liberation of South Vietnam from American imperialism. By this time Ho Chi Minh was supplying the Viet Cong with training, equipment, strategic advice and even men—perhaps 2000 a year by 1960. Nearly all those who came from North Vietnam in the Kennedy years, however, were South Vietnamese who had gone north in 1954; most of the Viet Cong in any case continued to be recruited in South Vietnam; and most Viet Cong arms and equipment were captured from Diem’s army.

  The Viet Cong unquestionably expressed a strain of fanatic idealism. “We are peasants in soldiers’ clothing,” they sang, “waging the struggle for a class oppressed for thousands of years. Our suffering is the suffering of the people.” Nationalists fought side by side with communists. But the Viet Cong did not precisely represent a movement of rural uplift. They extended their power as much by the fear they incited as by the hope they inspired. Still, the systematic murder of village officials—half a dozen a day by 1960—could be an effective weapon too, especially when the people of the countryside had been given little reason to prefer the government in Saigon to their own survival. It was warfare in the shadows, ambush and murder and torture, leaving behind a trail of burned villages, shattered families and weeping women.

  American assistance to Diem in the fifties averaged about $300 million a year. This was mostly economic aid, which South Vietnam, unlike Laos, put to fairly good use, though only a fraction got to the countryside where most of the South Vietnamese lived. On the military side, our advisers, many of them veterans of the Korean War, conceived their mission as that of training a conventional army designed, not to fight guerrillas, but to repel a Korean-style invasion from the north. They accompanied this by a systematic barrage of self-serving reports—all too reminiscent of the French military a few years before—about the commendable efficiency of this army and its capacity to control any situation. Cheered by such bulletins, a Senate committee concluded in 1960, “on the basis of the assurances of the head of the military aid mission in Vietnam, that the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) can be phased out of Vietnam in the foreseeable future.”

  Some officers, like Brigadier General Edward Lansdale, who hadfought the Hukbalahaps in the Philippines and whose report on Vietnam Walt Rostow handed Kennedy shortly after the inauguration, dissented with vigor from both MAAG’s strategy and its complacency. Lansdale thought that it was essentially a guerrilla war and that it was going very badly. For a long time this was a heretical view. But by the end of 1960 even the professional optimists found it hard to wave aside the Lansdale points. The guerrilla attacks were increasing in audacity and scope; the success of the Pathet Lao had opened up the corridor of assistance from North Vietnam to South Vietnam through Laos; there were now perhaps 15,000 Viet Cong in South Vietnam, and they were overrunning half the country, and more by night.

  In Saigon there was increasing dissatisfaction with Diem, his government and the conduct of the war. This included the Vietnamese intellectual community, embittered by Diem’s methods of political repression, but it centered in the Vietnamese Army. American training had given the younger officers a sense of modern methods, and they regarded Diem’s old-fashioned absolutism with growing resentment. In November 1960 a military coup almost succeeded in overthrowing the regime. Diem rode this out. Once back in control, he cracked down on all varieties or potentialities of opposition. He imprisoned or exiled a number of younger officials and, to guard against future military coups, began a process of pitting one general against another and thereby dividing the army. Trusting no one, he based himself more and more narrowly on his family, especially on his able and aggressive younger brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu.

  3. JOHNSON IN SAIGON

  Vietnam confronted the new American President, not with an immediate crisis, like Laos, but rather with a situation of deepening military and political shakiness. Kennedy had long believed, and Khrushchev’s January speech had confirmed that belief, that the main communist reliance in the coming period would be on neither nuclear nor conventional but on guerrilla war. The battle in Vietnam was obviously not along the frontier but in the villages; and it could be won only by a flexibility and mobility which matched that of the guerrillas themselves. Moreover, it could not be won by military means alone. Guerrilla warfare was essentially political war. Effective counter-insurgency action, for example, depended on swift and sure intelligence from the countryside. The Viet Cong could never be defeated unless the Saigon regime could enlist the support of the peasants. Magsaysay’s campaign against the Hukbalahaps in the Philippines provided a model: tough counterguerrilla action, generous provisions for amnesty, real and sweeping political and economic reforms.

  Middle-level officials in State and Defense had already reached this conclusion, and Rostow gave their effort new sharpness and support. A counter-insurgency plan for Vietnam, prepared in the winter of 1960 and approved by Kennedy in early 1961, proposed an extensive program of military and social reforms; if these recommendations were carried out, the report said, the war could be won in eighteen months. A Vietnam Task Force, set up in April, reduced the report to forty points; Frederick Nolting, a Foreign Service officer who had been consul general in Paris, was sent to Saigon as ambassador, his predecessor being accounted too anti-Diem; and in May the Vice-President visited in Saigon as part of a general tour of Southeast Asia.

  Johnson was accompanied by Jean and Stephen Smith, the President’s sister and brother-in-law, and his primary purpose was to reassure Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan, Diem in South Vietnam and Sarit in Thailand that the new American policy toward Laos did not signify a general intention to withdraw from the area. After a stop in Taiwan, where he was pleasantly surprised to find Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang talking about social progress like old New Dealers, he went on to Saigon. There, in the interests of reassurance, he somewhat imprudently hailed Diem as the Winston Churchill of South Asia. Privately he discussed the military and economic situation with Diem; and in an address to the National Assembly he urged the importance of meeting the needs of the people in education and rural development.

  Before he left the United States, an old friend from New Deal days, Arthur Goldschmidt, then with the United Nations, had called his attention to a UN project for the multi-purpose development of the lower Mekong River. This project would bring together the countries of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and South Vietnam in a joint effort for electric power, irrigation, navigation and fisheries development for the benefit of the whole area. It strongly appealed to Johnson; as he said when he visited the headquarters of the UN Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East in Bangkok, “I am a river man. All my life I have been interested in rivers and their development.” He invoked F.D.R., TVA, Bonneville and Grand Coulee in public speeches; the memory of the Mekong valley project was to stay with him a long time.

  From Thailand he went on to India, where he had useful talks with Nehru, and then back to Washington. “Our mission arrested the decline of confidence,” he reported to Kennedy on his return. “It did not—in my judgment—restore any confidence already lost. . . . If these men I saw at your request were bankers, I would know—without bothering to ask—that there would be no further extension on my note.” Time was running out, and “the basic decision in Southeast Asia,” he told Kennedy, “is here. We must decide whether to help these countries to the best of our ability or throw in the towel in the area and pull back our defenses to San Francisco and a ‘Fortress America’ concept. More important, we would say to the world in this case that we don’t live up to our treaties and don’t stand by our friends. This is not my concept. I recommend that we move forward promptly with a major effort to help these countries defend themselves.”

  He did not consider Southeast Asia lost, “and it is by no means inevitable that it must be lost.” In each country, he said, it was possible to “build a sound structure capable of withstanding and tu
rning the Communist surge.” But this could only be done if the nations of Southeast Asia had “knowledge and faith in United States power, will and understanding.” The long-term danger, he added, came not from communism but “from hunger, ignorance, poverty and disease. We must—whatever strategies we evolve—keep those enemies the point of our attack, and make imaginative use of our scientific and technological capacity.”

  As for Vietnam, he found Diem a complex figure beset by many problems. “He has admirable qualities, but he is remote from the people, is surrounded by persons less admirable than he. The country can be saved—if we move quickly and wisely.” The Vice-President did not envisage the commitment of American troops beyond training missions. American combat involvement at this time, he said, was not only unnecessary but undesirable because it would revive anti-colonial emotions throughout Asia. Instead, Johnson favored the reorientation of the military effort along with programs of political and economic reform. “It would be useful,” he said, “to enunciate more clearly than we have—for the guidance of these young and unsophisticated nations—what we expect or require of them.”

  Under the pressure of Johnson and Nolting, Diem agreed in May to a number of points in the task force report in exchange for American support on an increase in the Vietnamese Army. However, Diem’s assurances led to little or nothing in the way of performance. This was increasingly the pattern of Washington’s relations with the Diem regime. Indeed, American attempts to advise Diem became a classical exercise in what anthropologists might call cross-cultural frustration. The Americans did tend to regard Vietnam, in the Vice-President’s words, as a “young and unsophisticated” nation, populated by affable little men, unaccustomed to the modern world, who, if sufficiently bucked up by instruction and encouragement, might amount to something. The Vietnamese, regarding their nation as infinitely older and more sophisticated than the United States, looked on the Americans as impatient, naïve and childlike, lacking all sense of form or history. Diem in particular viewed the Americans with a mandarin’s disdain and increasingly responded to their advice by the simple but powerful device of doing all the talking himself. What perhaps began as a tactic soon became a disease. By 1961 Diem’s compulsive talking was becoming legendary: survivors would vie with each other in accounts of conversations lasting six or seven or twelve hours and would exchange dodges intended to help trapped victims extricate themselves from the presidential flow.