Neither Nolting’s return nor Kennedy’s temperate words had much effect, though, before Nolting left in mid-August, Diem did assure him there would be no more attacks on the Buddhists. Then six days later, Diem’s troops assaulted the pagodas, arresting hundreds of bonzes and seizing the temples of worship in a night of violence and terror. It was, Mecklin wrote later, “ruthless, comprehensive suppression of the Buddhist movement.” Madame Nhu described it to a reporter as “the happiest day in my life since we crushed the Binh Xuyen [a private army of brigands] in 1955.”
The Americans were caught completely by surprise. Genera] Harkins had noted the Vietnamese troop movements but thought they were being deployed for an attack on the Viet Cong. “We just didn’t know,” the CIA chief told Halberstam. It was an act of calculated contempt for the Americans. The next evening in the midst of a hot, soggy drizzle of rain Cabot Lodge arrived in Saigon.
4. THE SOUND OF MUTINY
The White House doubters had been mistaken about Lodge. We had forgotten his patrician’s preference for fair play and his patriot’s pride in the dignity of his country. Both had been considerably affronted as he read through the Saigon cable file in preparation for his mission. Now Diem and Nhu had obviously carried out their attack against the pagodas the day before his arrival in order to present him with a fait accompli, expecting that the Americans would give in, as they had always done before. But Lodge in Saigon agreed with Harriman and Hilsman in Washington that, if we were to retain any credibility in Vietnam, we had to stand up this time.
In Vietnam the brutality of the assault sent a shudder even through the Diem regime itself. The foreign minister resigned and, in a gesture of defiance, shaved his head like a bonze. Madame Nhu’s father resigned as ambassador to Washington with a denunciation of his daughter. Above all, the action crystallized the disaffection of the generals who, in the confusion, had been themselves blamed (by, among others, the Department of State) for the atrocity. Now they began sending clandestine messages to the new ambassador. They first wanted it made clear that they had nothing to do with the raids. Then they inquired with oriental suavity what our attitude would be if they were to take action against the regime, should Nhu, for example, make a deal with Hanoi. Lodge cabled Washington for instructions.
The reply was drafted on August 24. The American government, it suggested, could no longer tolerate the systematic repression of the Buddhists nor the domination of the regime by Nhu. The generals could be told that we would find it impossible to support Diem unless these problems were solved. Diem should be given every chance to solve them. If he refused, then the possibility had to be realistically faced that Diem himself could not be saved. We would take no part in any action; but, if anything happened, an interim anti-communist military regime could expect American support.
August 24 was a Saturday. The President was on Cape Cod; McNamara and Rusk were out of town; McCone was on vacation. The draft was cleared through all the relevant departments but not at the top level. Defense accepted it because it understood that the cable had already gone; McNamara, if he had been consulted, would have opposed it. So also would McCone. No one is sure what Rusk’s position would have been. The President saw the draft at Hyannis Port without realizing that the departmental clearances did not signify the concurrence of his senior advisers.
On his return to Washington Kennedy felt rather angrily that he had been pressed too hard and fast. He discussed the situation with Robert Kennedy, who talked in turn with McNamara and Maxwell Taylor. The Attorney General reported back with great concern that nobody knew what was going to happen in Vietnam and that our policy had not been fully discussed, as every other major decision since the Bay of Pigs had been discussed. The President thereupon called a meeting on Vietnam for the following day and asked that Nolting be invited.
The former ambassador gave a dignified and uncritical statement of the case for Diem and expressed doubt whether the generals involved could carry off a coup. He suggested that we should not jump unless we knew where we were jumping. The President agreed and began a process of pulling away from the cable of August 24. Vietnam meetings continued for several days, and messages flashed back and forth between Washington and Saigon. While the talks went on, the coup itself gradually evaporated. Nolting had been right: these generals could not carry it through.
Diem and Nhu proceeded quickly to exploit their victory. There were more arrests, especially among students, thousands of whom, including boys and girls of high school age, were carted off to indoctrination centers. In Washington policy weakly reverted to collaboration with Diem, encouraged by CIA’s suggestion that Diem might have been sufficiently alarmed by the coup rumors to do some of the things we wanted. The President, however, did not wish to leave Diem in any doubt about how he felt, especially about Nhu. In a television interview on September 3, he tossed aside a moderate statement his staff had prepared in light of his reaction to the August 24 telegram. Instead, he said:
I don’t think that the war can be won unless the people support the effort and, in my opinion, in the last two months, the government has gotten out of touch with the people.
The repressions against the Buddhists, we felt, were very unwise. . . . It is my hope that this will become increasingly obvious to the government, that they will take steps to try to bring back popular support. . . . With changes in policy and perhaps with personnel I think it can. If it doesn’t make those changes, I would think that the chances of winning it would not be very good.
No one could misinterpret the reference to changes in personnel. Kennedy also emphasized that “in the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it, the people of Vietnam.”
The contrast between this statement and his reaction to the August 24 cable suggested Kennedy’s own perplexity; and, in a new effort to find out what the situation was, he sent another mission early in September. It consisted this time, not of the usual senior officials, but of two old Vietnam hands, General Victor Krulack of the Marines and Joseph Mendenhall of State, a Foreign Service officer. After a frenzied weekend of inspection and interrogation, the two men flew back to Washington. Mecklin, who came back with them, observed that “the general and the FSO not only appeared to dislike each other, but also disagreed on what should be done about Vietnam. On the whole flight they spoke to each other only when it was unavoidable.” They reported immediately to the National Security Council. Krulack told the assembled dignitaries the war was going beautifully, that the regime was beloved by the people and that we need have no undue concern even about Nhu. Mendenhall told them that South Vietnam was in a desperate state, that the regime was on the edge of collapse and that Nhu had to go. The President listened politely and finally said, “Were you two gentlemen in the same country?” And so the meetings on Vietnam continued.
INTERLUDE
MINUTES OF THE NEXT HIGH-LEVEL MEETING ON VIETNAM*
The Secretary of State opened the meeting, in the absence of the President, by urging that priority be given to the key question of the past thirteen hours, How did we get here, and Where do we go from here?
On the one hand, he said, it was important to keep moving forward. But on the other hand, we must deal with things as they are.
The Secretary of Defense concurred but felt that we must not permit the views of a handful of neurotic Saigon intellectuals to distract us from the major goal, which was to get on with the war. He asked General Krulack to report on his latest sampling of opinion among the trainers of Vietnamese secret police at Fort Belvoir.
General Krulack reported that morale among the trainers at Fort Belvoir was at an all-time high. Many felt that we had turned a corner, and all were intent on moving on with our objectives.
Mr. Hilsman asked if General Krulack had had an opportunity to talk to the Vietnamese at Fort Belvoir as well as the trainiers.
General Krulack responded that the American trainers had advised him to refrain from talking with the Vietnamese since their views were well known to the trainers, and conversation would distract them from the purpose at hand, i.e., to win the war.
Governor Harriman stated that he had disagreed for twenty years with General Krulack and disagreed today, reluctantly, more than ever; he was sorry to say that he felt General Krulack was a fool and had always thought so.
Secretary Dillon hoped that press leaks on the cost of opinion-sampling at Fort Belvoir would be kept to a minimum as the dollar reserve problem was acute. He, for one, was against moving forward until the risks had been calculated.
General Taylor said that if risks were involved, “you can count me out.”
The Secretary of State re-phrased the basic question in terms of Saigon’s 897. What were we to do about the 500 school-girls who were seeking asylum in the American Embassy?
(At this point, the President entered the room.)
The President said that he hoped we were not allowing our policies to be influenced by immature twelve-year-old school-girls, all of whom were foreigners. He felt that we must not lose sight of our ultimate objective, and in no state was the Vietnamese vote worth very much.
The Attorney General said that it was high time to show some guts, and here was a good place to begin. “After all,” he said, “I too am a President’s brother.”
The Secretary of Defense heartily concurred; as a former businessman, he said, he knew the importance of getting on with business as usual.
Mr. Hilsman raised the question of disaffection among ninety percent of the soldiers, as reported in Saigon’s 898. Was not an action plan, phase by phase, now clearly necessary?
The Vice President said that he had lived with both affection and disaffection in Texas and the Senate for thirty years, and he felt we could ride this one through. We must not lose our sense of humor, he said.
The President asked that interagency committees be put to work on the nature of our dialogue with Diem, and he suggested that the ExCom meet again in a week or so. Next time, he said, he hoped that a good map of South Vietnam might be available.
5. THE FALL OF DIEM
Lodge had begun his Saigon tour with the usual calls on Diem and Nhu. When he got nowhere with them, he stopped calling on them. “They have not done anything I asked,” he would explain. “They know what I want. Why should I keep asking? Let them come to ask me.” The anti-Diem section of the Embassy and American press in Saigon, enormously cheered, said to each other: “Our mandarin is going to beat their mandarin.” Lodge kept cabling Washington that the situation was getting worse and that the time had arrived for the United States to increase its pressure. He recommended in particular the suspension of American aid.
McNamara and Rusk were at first opposed. The suspension of aid, they said, would hurt the war effort. And Lodge did not help his case by a Bostonian high-handedness which not only turned his embassy into a one-man show but also made him uncommunicative and at times almost derisive in response to inquiries from Washington. But Kennedy, I believe, came to the conclusion in mid-September that Lodge, Harriman, Hilsman and Forrestal were right on the question of pressure, though he remained wary of anything which might involve the United States in attempts against the regime. Accordingly he decided to send McNamara and Taylor on one more trip on the Saigon shuttle in the hope that exposure to Lodge and the facts would convince them too that pressure was essential.
In the past, McNamara’s susceptibility to quantification had led him to take excessive comfort in General Harkins’s statistical optimism, embodied, for example, in tables purporting to correlate government and Viet Cong casualties; and Nolting had done little to assert the importance of things which could not be quantified. In Saigon, as in Washington, the State Department had acquiesced in the theory that Vietnam was basically a military problem. But Lodge considered intangibles like political purpose and popular support as of the highest importance. For a few days after McNamara’s arrival, Lodge and Harkins engaged in a quiet duel for the Secretary’s ear. In the end Lodge made the political case so effectively that McNamara agreed there was no alternative to pressure; indeed, McNamara returned to Washington doubting whether Diem could last even if he took corrective action. But he also thought that the political mess had not yet infected the military situation and, back in Washington, announced (in spite of a strong dissent from William Sullivan of Harriman’s staff who accompanied the mission) that a thousand American troops could be withdrawn by the end of the year and that the major part of the American military task would be completed by the end of 1965.
This announcement, however, was far less significant than McNamara’s acceptance of the Lodge pressure program. Some thought had already been given to the problem of picking out of the aid effort the cuts which would do the least harm to the war, and early in October a selective suspension went quietly into effect. It was hoped that the absence of publicity would encourage Diem to do something about the Nhus and the Buddhists without seeming to act under pressure and thereby losing face. But, in due course, the Vietnamese bitterly announced the suspension themselves. Madame Nhu now appeared in the United States to lobby against the new policy; for a moment she won support from right-wing politicians, though in the end her extravagances injured her own cause. In Saigon her husband apparently renewed his efforts to make contact with Hanoi. Speculation bubbled up again about possible successors to Diem. One official, asked about specifications for the new man, replied crisply, “First of all, he should be an only child.”
As for Diem, there is some suggestion that the program of pressure, so belatedly adopted, was having effect. “With or without American aid,” he said in mid-October, “I will keep up the fight, and I will always maintain my friendship toward the American people.” On the last day of the month Diem and Lodge made a trip together to dedicate an experimental reactor at Dalat. Diem for the first time indicated an interest in compromise and asked Lodge what he had to do. Lodge told him to send Nhu out of the country and institute some reforms. Diem, instead of turning this down out of hand, said that he needed a little time to think about it. It was too late. The next day the generals struck. Diem and Nhu were murdered, and the history of Vietnam entered a new phase.
It is important to state clearly that the coup of November 1, 1963, was entirely planned and carried out by the Vietnamese. Neither the American Embassy nor the CIA were involved in instigation or execution. Coup rumors, epidemic in Saigon since 1960, had begun to rise again toward the end of October; and on October 29 the National Security Council met to consider American policy in the event that a coup should take place. The Attorney General characterized the reports as very thin. The President, noting that the pro-Diem and anti-Diem forces seemed about equal, observed that any American action under such conditions would be silly. If Lodge agreed, the President said, we should instruct him to discourage a coup. But Lodge knew little more than he had reported to Washington. Indeed, on the morning of November 1 he actually took Admiral Felt to call on Diem—an incident which alarmed the conspirators who, knowing Diem’s gift for long-distance talking, feared he would detain his visitors past one-thirty in the afternoon, when the revolt was scheduled to begin.
What lay behind the coup was not the meddling of Americans, quiet or ugly, but the long history of Vietnamese military resentment against Diem, compounded now by the fear that Nhu, with his admiration for totalitarian methods of organization, might try to transform South Vietnam into a police state. It was almost inevitable that, at one point or another, the generals would turn against so arbitrary and irrational a regime. As Lodge later put it, the coup was like a rock rolling downhill. It could have been stopped only by aggressive American intervention
against the army on behalf of Diem and the Nhus. This course few Americans in Saigon or Washington were willing to recommend.
I saw the President soon after he heard that Diem and Nhu were dead. He was somber and shaken. I had not seen him so depressed since the Bay of Pigs. No doubt he realized that Vietnam was his great failure in foreign policy, and that he had never really given it his full attention. But the fact that the Vietnamese seemed ready to fight had made him feel that there was a reasonable chance of making a go of it; and then the optimism of 1962 had carried him along. Yet, with his memory of the French in Indochina in 1951, he had always believed there was a point at which our intervention might turn Vietnamese nationalism against us and transform an Asian civil conflict into a white man’s war. When he came into office, 2000 American troops were in Vietnam. Now there were 16,000. How many more could there be before we passed the point? By 1961 choices had already fatally narrowed; but still, if Vietnam had been handled as a political rather than a military problem, if Washington had not listened to General Harkins for so long, if Diem had been subjected to tactful pressure rather than treated with uncritical respect, if a Lodge had gone to Saigon in 1961 instead of a Nolting, if, if, if—and now it was all past, and Diem miserably dead. The Saigon generals were claiming that he had killed himself; but the President, shaking his head, doubted that, as a Catholic, he would have taken this way out. He said that Diem had fought for his country for twenty years and that it should not have ended like this.
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