A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  Diem seemed unwilling or unable to undertake, for example, the programs of rural reform designed to close the gap between the president’s palace in Saigon and the people in the villages. Most likely the whole conception of seeking ‘popular support’ seemed to him one of those western delusions with no relevance to life in Asia. In his view it was the moral obligation of the people to respect their government. As for the Vietnamese Army, though it continued to regard Diem’s one-man rule with periodic restlessness, his divisive strategy kept it from acting against him. Moreover, the officers had been so well persuaded by American advisers of the virtues of conventional war that most had little heart for the chancy life of night patrols, small-unit action and hit-and-run tactics.

  The Johnson trip was followed by an economic mission, headed by Eugene Staley, and still more recommendations. But it seemed impossible to stop the disintegration. “The situation gets worse almost week by week,” Theodore H. White wrote us in August. “. . . The guerrillas now control almost all the southern delta—so much so that I could find no American who would drive me outside Saigon in his car even by day without military convoy.” He reported a “political breakdown of formidable proportions”: “. . . what perplexes hell out of me is that the Commies, on their side, seem to be able to find people willing to die for their cause. . . . I find it discouraging to spend a night in a Saigon night-club full of young fellows of 20 and 25 dancing and jitterbugging (they are called ‘la jeunesse cowboy’) while twenty miles away their Communist contemporaries are terrorizing the countryside.” An old China hand. White was reminded of Chungking in the Second World War, complete with Madame Nhu in the role of Madame Chiang Kai-shek. “If a defeat in South Vietnam is to be considered our defeat, if we are responsible for holding that area, then we must have authority to act. And that means intervention in Vietnam politics. . . . If we do decide so to intervene, have we the proper personnel, the proper instruments, the proper clarity of objectives to intervene successfully?”

  4. THE TAYLOR-ROSTOW MISSION

  In September the Viet Cong seized a provincial capital and beheaded the governor. Morale in Saigon sank even lower. Diem was plainly losing the war, and Theodore White’s questions were now more relevant than ever. Kennedy, absorbed as he was in Berlin and nuclear testing, faced a series of inescapable decisions in Vietnam.

  The broad alternatives ranged from Lyndon Johnson’s recommendation of a major American commitment to Chester Bowles’s idea of enlarging the concept of a “neutral and independent Laos” to include Burma, Thailand, South Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaya. Such a neutral belt, Bowles thought, could ultimately be guaranteed by Russia, China, India, Japan and the SEATO powers. Russia might well be willing to go along in order to block Chinese expansion into Southeast Asia. And, if the communists tried to use neutralism as a screen behind which to take over the whole area, then we would have, Bowles argued, a better chance of rallying international support in defense of neutralism than in defense of western hegemony.

  It was an imaginative proposal, but it seemed either too early or too late. Its opponents contended that it would be taken as a deliberate abandonment of regimes which depended on us and a monumental United States retreat—all in exchange for empty promises from Moscow and Peking. Instead, there seemed a strong case for trying the Johnson approach and making an increased effort to stabilize the situation in South Vietnam. Early in October Kennedy sent General Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow on a mission to Saigon to see if this could be done. Reminding them of his own visit to Indochina in 1951, he charged them to find out whether we were better off now than the French had been then—whether Vietnamese nationalism had turned irrevocably against us or still might serve as a basis for the fight against communism.

  The very composition of the mission—headed by a general, with a White House aide as deputy and no figure of comparable rank from the State Department—was significant. It expressed a conscious decision by the Secretary of State to turn the Vietnam problem over to the Secretary of Defense. Rusk doubtless decided to do this because the military aspects seemed to him the most urgent, and Kennedy doubtless acquiesced because he had more confidence in McNamara and Taylor than in State. The effect, however, was to color future thinking about Vietnam in both Saigon and Washington with the unavowed assumption that Vietnam was primarily a military rather than a political problem.

  The mission went about its work in an orderly way. Its members divided the job up on the way over and, after each had completed his assignment, retired to the cool breezes of Baguio in the Philippines to write the report. Their collective answer to Kennedy’s question was that South Vietnam had enough vitality to justify a major United States effort. The trouble, as Taylor and Rostow diagnosed it, was a double crisis of confidence: doubt that the United States was really determined to save Southeast Asia; doubt that Diem’s methods could really defeat the Viet Cong. To halt the decline, they recommended increased American intervention—in effect, a shift from arm’s-length advice to limited partnership. While only the Vietnamese could finally beat the Viet Cong, Americans at all levels, Taylor and Rostow argued, could show them how the job was to be done.

  The report concentrated on military matters. In addition to a variety of recommendations designed to get the Vietnamese Army to take the offensive, Taylor proposed that American troops perform certain tasks, like airlift and air reconnaissance, which the Vietnamese were not prepared to undertake; be even envisaged sending an American military task force—perhaps 10,000 men—capable of conducting combat operations for self-defense and perimeter security and, if the Vietnamese Army were hard pressed, of providing an emergency reserve. As for Diem, the report gave a candid account of his political and administrative idiosyncrasies but rejected any idea that he be replaced. While it outlined a number of desirable political reforms—especially broadened participation in government and more work in the villages—it relied mainly on the expectation that the new system of limited partnership could work de facto changes in Diem’s methods of government and gradually narrow the gap between the regime and the people.

  Taylor and Rostow hoped that this program would suffice to win the civil war—and were sure it would if only the infiltration from the north could be stopped. But if it continued, then they could see no end to the war. They therefore raised the question of how long Saigon and the United States could be expected to play by the existing ground rules, which permitted North Vietnam to train and supply guerrillas from across the border and denied South Vietnam the right to strike back at the source of aggression. Rostow argued so forcibly for a contingency policy of retaliation against the north, graduated to match the intensity of Hanoi’s support of the Viet Cong, that “Rostow Plan 6” became jocularly established in the contingency planning somewhere after SEATO Plan 5.

  The Taylor-Rostow report was a careful and thoughtful document, and the President read it with interest. He was impressed by its description of the situation as serious but not hopeless and attracted by the idea of stiffening the Diem regime through an infusion of American advisers. He did not, however, like the proposal of a direct American military commitment. “They want a force of American troops,” he told me early in November. “They say it’s nefcessary in order to restore confidence and maintain morale. But it will be just like Berlin. The troops will march in; the bands will play; the crowds will cheer; and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. It’s like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another.” The war in Vietnam, he added, could be won only so long as it was their war. If it were ever converted into a white man’s war, we would lose as the French had lost a decade earlier.

  Though the Taylor report offered political as well as military remedies, the thrust of its argument and recommendation was that the crisis of confidence was military in its origins and could be ended by the commitment of American troops or at least by American partnership in the conduct of Vietnamese field o
perations. Not all the specialists concurred in the diagnosis. J. K. Galbraith, who was back in Washington for a few days, and Averell Harriman, who was about to take over as Assistant Secretary for the Far East, were sure on the contrary that the crisis of confidence was political in its origins and had resulted from Diem’s repressive and reactionary policies in face of a communist-managed peasant insurrection. “The trouble with the State Department,” Harriman said as we dined with Galbraith one autumn evening before his return to New Delhi, “is that it always underestimates the dynamics of revolution.” Someone wondered whether the removal of Diem would not be the answer. “Our trouble,” replied Galbraith sagaciously, “is that we make revolutions so badly.”

  Kennedy, still undecided about next steps, asked Galbraith to stop by in Saigon on his way back to India. Galbraith did so, viewed the scene with dispassionate eye and reported to Washington that the fundamental problem was the total ineffectuality of the Diem regime. If there were effective government in Saigon, the situation would be far from hopeless; for, with support from the countryside and something to fight for, the well-equipped Vietnamese Army of a quarter of a million could deal with the fifteen thousand or so lightly armed irregulars opposing them. How to get effective government? There was not “the slightest practical chance,” Galbraith said, that the administrative and political reforms now being pressed upon Diem would result in performance. We had no choice but to play out this course for a little while longer, but he could see no long-term solution which did not involve a change of leadership. Diem, a significant man in his day, had passed the point of rehabilitation. “While no one can promise a safe transition, we are now married to failure.” As for the cliché that there was no alternative, this was an optical illusion arising from the fact that eyes were always fixed on the visible figures. “It is a better rule that nothing succeeds like successors.”

  Reflecting on the situation and reposing particular confidence in McNamara and Taylor, Kennedy prepared to go ahead. Moreover, given the truculence of Moscow, the Berlin crisis and the resumption of nuclear testing, the President unquestionably felt that an American retreat in Asia might upset the whole world balance. In December he ordered the American build-up to begin. General Paul Harkins, as the new American commander in Saigon, and Ambassador Nolting worked closely together. Both saw Diem as the key to success, and both were convinced that attempts to bring pressure on him would be self-defeating. The proper policy in their view was to win Diem’s confidence by assuring him unswerving support and then try to steer him gently and gradually toward reform; if Diem felt this backing to be anything less than wholehearted, the policy would not work. This became known, in the phrase of Homer Bigart of the New York Times, as the period of “sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem.’’

  The result in 1962 was to place the main emphasis on the military effort. When the social and economic program developed in Washington in 1961 encountered the usual resistance in Saigon, it was soon dropped. In place of a serious attack on the central problems of land and taxation, the regime announced a number of marginal and largely meaningless reforms to placate the Americans and did very little to put even these into effect. The appeal to the peasants was concentrated in the so-called strategic hamlet program, launched by the regime in April.

  This idea, adapted from the British experience in fighting the guerrillas in Malaya, called for the relocation of peasants into fortified villages, surrounded by barbed wire fences and ditches filled with bamboo spikes. The theory was that the hamlets would give the peasants protection and a sense of security, control the movement of people and supplies through the countryside and cut the Viet Cong off from their primary sources of food, intelligence and recruits. Village defense units would arise to fight the enemy. Each hamlet would elect its political representatives by secret ballot. And each hamlet would eventually become the unit for education, medical care and the distribution of pigs, fertilizer and low-interest agricultural loans. It was an idyllic conception. Ngo Dinh Nhu made the strategic hamlet program his personal project and published glowing reports of spectacular success, claiming 7 million people in 7000 hamlets by the middle of 1963. One might have wondered whether Nhu was just the man to mobilize the idealism of the villages; but Nolting and Harkins listened uncritically to his reports and passed them back to Washington, where they were read with elation.

  In military matters the enlargement of the American presence appeared to have even more encouraging effects. The advisers flocked in with the weapons of modern war, from typewriters to helicopters. They worked with local ‘counterparts’ in all sections of the government in Saigon. In the field, they lived with the Vietnamese Army, helped plan military actions and sometimes participated themselves. The military assignment was frustrating, because the power to advise was not the power to command. It was also thankless, because as a matter of policy the American role was systematically played down. But the advisers themselves were brave and devoted as well as anonymous; their courage and selflessness were deeply impressive; and they made a difference.

  Morale rose in Saigon. Viet Cong activity declined in the countryside. No more provincial capitals were attacked. ‘‘Every quantitative measurement we have,” Robert McNamara said on his first visit to Vietnam in 1962, “shows we’re winning this war.’’ Maxwell Taylor, when he returned for a fresh look a year after his first visit, thought he detected “a great national movement” rising to destroy the Viet Cong. No one could doubt a widespread and substantial improvement in the military situation. In Washington, the President, who had other matters on his mind, accepted the cheerful reports from men in whom he had great confidence. His 1963 State of the Union message summed up the mood at the turn of the year: “The spearpoint of aggression has been blunted in South Vietnam.”

  XXI

  Africa: The New Adventure

  IN NO PART of the third world did Kennedy pioneer more effectively than in Africa.

  Of all the continents this one had stayed longest on the outer fringes of the American consciousness. As late as 1960, our direct interests in Africa, political or economic, military or intellectual, were meager. No traditional doctrines guided our African policies. No alliances committed our troops. Our foreign aid programs made only token contributions to African development. Of our $30 billion of overseas investment, less than 3 per cent was in Africa. Our very sense of the continent below the Mediterranean rim was vague and dim. No historic ties bound us to black Africa except the slave trade; and here we had done our best to repress the memory (and, by a sentimental concern with the state of Liberia, to allay the guilt). Even Americans of African descent were not much interested. I can remember in the campaign of 1956 proposing to one of Stevenson’s Negro advisers that we make something of the Eisenhower administration’s resistance to UN resolutions against the slave trade, only to be told sorrowfully that the American Negro couldn’t care less about such matters.

  The explosion of African nationalism after the Second World War had at first only a limited impact. There was a stirring of interest in African studies in the universities. John Gunther insided Africa in 1955. In 1957 the State Department established a Bureau of African Affairs. But that year there were still more Foreign Service personnel stationed in West Germany than in all of Africa. As we considered Latin America primarily our own responsibility, so we considered Africa primarily a Western European responsibility. Now that the European colonial powers were joined with us in the Atlantic Alliance, there seemed all the more reason, in the interests of NATO solidarity, to defer to them in African matters. Our nominal sympathy with the anti-colonial movement did lead us to occasional exhortations about the virtues of orderly transition to self-government; but, when the chips were down, as with the United Nations anti-colonial resolution of December 1960, we gave priority to NATO. Our African policy remained general and perfunctory.

  Still African nationalism was now a burning fact in the world—never more than in the months of September and October 1960,
when sixteen new African states flocked into the UN. During this year the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba became the bright symbol of nationalist militance; and Lumumba’s murder a few weeks after Kennedy’s inauguration set off a reaction of outrage through the continent. Whether or not he was killed at the instigation of Moise Tshombe, the ruler of the province of Katanga in the Congo, Tshombe and through him his white mercenaries and European and American sympathizers were held accountable. The martyrdom of Lumumba at the presumed hands of an imperialist agent raised the mistrust of the west to a sudden frenzy of hatred. In Moscow Khrushchev lost no time in embracing the protest and demanding the punishment of the imperialists, hoping thereby to capture the energies of African nationalism. By March 1961 the Congo was in turmoil; a number of the new states, especially Guinea, Mali and Ghana, seemed well launched on the Marxist road; and most of the rest of Africa was consumed with bitterness toward the west. The Atlantic countries had never stood lower nor the Soviet Union higher in the minds of politically conscious Africans.