A short, muscular, athletic man, Vann was brilliant, if a bit undereducated. He was also ambitious, hyperactive, and egotistical. Like Frank Scotton, Vann was determined to live and work with the Vietnamese, whom he was supposed to help toward political and economic self-sufficiency, rather than hailing them from the nearest safe enclave. He deliberately drove around one of the most insecure provinces in Vietnam—night and day—in his International Harvester truck, armed with a carbine and a .45. His duty, as he saw it, was not to kill the Viet Cong, although he reacted with a vengeance when attacked, but to compete with them. If he and his comrades could build more schools, irrigate more crops, and cure more diseases while containing ARVN and South Vietnamese government corruption, then the struggle for the countryside just might be won.
Vann spoke only a few words of Vietnamese, but that did not keep him from attempting to have sex with every Vietnamese girl he encountered. Indeed, rumor had it that he was drummed out of the military as much for seducing a fifteen-year-old as for criticizing his superiors. Vann would show up at district and village outposts at any and all hours demanding an accounting from his American and Vietnamese staff. The recalcitrant were often invited to take a nighttime ride through the district of Cu Chi, which was laced with Viet Cong tunnels. Vann would come to know anyone who was anyone in Vietnam, but he became particularly close to Tran Ngoc Chau.
Following his return to Vietnam as an USAID employee, Vann would drive into Saigon from the provinces on almost a weekly basis for drinks, dinner, and long conversations with Frank Scotton, Ev Bumgardner, and, after his arrival in August 1965 as part of the Lansdale team, Daniel Ellsberg. When they were in-country, David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan joined the group. For these men, able as they were to move about the country at will interacting with whomever they pleased, Vietnam would be the greatest adventure of their lives. “While Vietnam was a tragedy for many,” Scotton later recalled, “I would not trade all of the wealth in the world for the experiences I had there.” After dinner with the group at a restaurant in Cholon, Patricia Marx, who would later marry Ellsberg, described its members as “desperate men” in the sense that they were detached from family; most of them were single or divorced and were willing to die for what interested them, she observed. There was nothing to keep Vann and his cronies from living a foreign, colonial-type existence in Vietnam, and they loved it. Indeed, Halberstam wanted Sheehan to entitle the book he was planning on Vietnam The Last Frontier. It was “the last place to have fun, to fool around with somebody else’s country,” Halberstam told his friend.14
Like Colby, the group understood that American troops were needed to prevent the collapse of South Vietnam, but they were deeply frustrated with General Westmoreland’s war of attrition. It was a rigid, unwieldy strategy that did not permit adaptation to varying local conditions, ignored the Maoist roots of the Viet Cong’s tactics, led to a great deal of collateral damage, and failed to take into account the complex political and cultural divisions in Vietnam. According to the Vann group’s math, the North Vietnamese could reproduce and conscript soldiers at a faster rate than the Americans and their ARVN allies could kill them. Moreover, the enemy had captured the flag. “They are imbued with an almost sacred sense of mission,” Scotton observed. “This is the generation [in its own view] that is going to unify the country and expel the foreign presence.”15
Indeed, the ongoing refusal of the US Mission to acknowledge that a communist could be an authentic nationalist was as great a problem as Westmoreland’s obsession with conventional warfare. Typical was a MACV report asserting that “VC reservoir of strength can be found in intimidated farmers and villagers; anti-government dissidents; isolationists; kidnapped persons who have been brainwashed; various sorts of malcontents throughout the country; and those who believe that the VC will prevail.” On the document, Vann scribbled, “The one kind of person no American can imagine joining the VC is a patriotic Vietnamese who wants to kick the foreigners and those who serve them out of his country.” Something had to be done.16
During the summer of 1965, Vann, Scotton, Bumgardner, and Ellsberg put together their position paper, “Harnessing the Revolution.” The National Liberation Front and the Viet Cong were winning the war because their program promised a better life for the average Vietnamese, they wrote. Until and unless Washington and Saigon seized control of the revolution and used it for their own purposes, there could be no progress. The paper called for a different kind of government in South Vietnam, “a national government . . . responsive to the dynamics of the social revolution,” a regime that the masses would fight and die for and that would survive the inevitable American withdrawal.17 The ongoing fears of some Americans that their country was slipping into imperialism was nonsense; the United States did not want to convert Vietnam into a colony, but it was going to have to interfere in the political and military life of the country to the extent necessary to end corruption and warlordism and establish a responsive, if not democratic, government. Vann and his colleagues called for placing all military and civilian authority in the hands of carefully selected province chiefs. Combat had to take a backseat to conversion. MACV and the ARVN must be utilized as a tool to facilitate counterinsurgency and pacification.
In Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge read “Harnessing the Revolution” and endorsed it. That Westmoreland had reservations only solidified the ambassador’s support. Indeed, the relationship between MACV and the embassy under Lodge was almost as bad as that between MACV and the CIA. Shortly after Westmoreland had arrived in Saigon in 1964, he attended a dinner Lodge was hosting. When the general began to sing “I Want to Be an Airborne Ranger,” Lodge turned to Mike Dunn, his military aide, and said, none too quietly, “Oh dear. First they send us Paul Harkins, and now they send us this fellow, Westmoreland. You know Mike, we just might not make it this time.”18 The ambassador’s relationship with Vann was the antithesis of that with Westmoreland—cordial and trusting. It did not hurt that during his time in the States, Vann had actively and conspicuously campaigned for Lodge when he was running for the Republican presidential nomination.
Colby also read “Harnessing the Revolution” eagerly—he had been apprised of the paper’s existence while it was in gestation—and enthusiastically recommended it to Richard Helms. But powerful forces from expected quarters arrayed against it. Some in the military failed or refused to grasp its significance. “Pacification . . . depends upon the degree of security in the countryside,” Maxwell Taylor—at the time supposedly the military’s foremost intellectual—observed. “We found that in our frontier days we couldn’t plant the corn outside the stockade if the Indians were still around. Well, that’s what we’ve been trying to do in Viet Nam. We planted a lot of corn with the Indians still around. . . . As security becomes greater . . . pacification will move along much better.”19
Westmoreland expressed a similar if somewhat more sophisticated view. “Pacification could not be the objective—eliminate the enemy and all the rest falls into place,” he declared in a postwar interview. He acknowledged the contributions made by the Rural Development Cadre, the Popular Forces, and the Provincial Reconnaissance Units, but he saw them as merely auxiliary forces, not the building blocks of a new nation. Hawks in the diplomatic establishment were equally dismissive of the notion that mobilizing the countryside was the key to victory. “I don’t think this war is going to end by pacification of most of the country,” Walt Rostow, McGeorge Bundy’s successor as national security adviser, wrote to the president in a memo. In his opinion, attrition of the enemy’s forces in the south, bombing the north, interdicting the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and establishing a stable regime in Saigon were the keys.20
Nevertheless, the Vann group had its supporters—not only Colby, Lodge, and Lansdale, but also Army Chief of Staff Harold K. Johnson and Westmoreland’s deputy, General Creighton Abrams. Just as important were Halberstam, Sheehan, and the New York Times. After Vann had been forced out of the military in 1963, it was Halbe
rstam who had rescued him from oblivion, praising him extensively in a long profile in Esquire magazine and in his 1964 book, The Making of a Quagmire. At lunch at the Harvard Club in late 1964, Halberstam briefed Dan Ellsberg on the war and on John Paul Vann. Thus, when Ellsberg came to Saigon in August 1965 as part of the Lansdale team, he was already a Vann fan and acted as a link between his boss and the proconsul of Hau Nghia Province.21
In February 1966, President Johnson called an impromptu summit meeting in Honolulu. Following the formal opening session, LBJ retired to the King Kalakuau Suite in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel for private talks with Prime Minister Ky and President Thieu. He pointed out that 85 percent of the South Vietnamese were peasants who had suffered terribly from the ravages of war during the previous ten years. That must stop, and the regime must earn the support of the people. At the conference’s close, the two sides issued the Declaration of Honolulu, in which the United States and South Vietnam pledged to keep fighting until an honorable peace could be negotiated and to launch immediately an accelerated program of social, economic, and political reform. Before they departed Honolulu, LBJ informed Ky that there would be another meeting somewhere in the Pacific in three to six months “to evaluate the progress toward social justice and democracy that had been made in South Vietnam.” Johnson was realistic. “He [Ky] certainly knows how to talk,” LBJ subsequently observed. “Whether he knows how to do as well as he knows how to talk is different.”22
In 1966, as it would throughout the remainder of the Second Indochinese War, the United States faced a choice—whether to fight a war of search and destroy or of counterinsurgency and pacification. Was physical security paramount, or should building a society based on social and economic justice take priority? There was no question that the generals in control of the South Vietnamese government favored the first option in both cases. In the eyes of the regime in Saigon, the Vann group was profoundly subversive. Its members were seen as revolutionaries no less dangerous than those of the National Liberation Front and the Viet Cong. The Americans threatened the existing order—a kind of militarized Confucianism in which the Military Revolutionary Council and its extended families controlled the guns and money in South Vietnam. The Ky-Thieu regime tolerated counterintelligence and pacification only as means to defeat the Viet Cong and to “pacify”—in the infantile sense—the rural population. As the Saigon generals had proven in their attitude toward the Civilian Irregular Defense Groups program, and would demonstrate again in their attitude toward the Rural Development initiative at Vung Tau, they did not view local self-defense and community development as sources of popular empowerment, the building blocks of a vital and independent nation. Reconstruction, not revolution, was their watchword. Vann, Scotton, and company wanted to harness the revolution, but the regime in Saigon was profoundly counterrevolutionary.
Colby understood this and attempted to confront the dilemma. “If . . . the American position supports the reactionary trends which a new sense of nationalism is attempting to shake off,” he wrote to Michael Forrestal, Rusk’s special assistant for Vietnam, “can we hope to maintain a position in these new emerging nations[?] Even with the use of considerable force as in Vietnam, can we hope to have other than a discouraging stalemate with an aggressive communist movement which aligns itself with the aspirations of the young and arising leadership and repudiates us along with the old and colonialist leadership?”23 Citing Ed Lansdale’s 1964 article in Foreign Affairs entitled “Do We Understand Revolution?” Colby in his memo pointed to the overwhelming irony of the American position in Vietnam. The United States was the product of the most successful revolution in history—success defined as participation of the electorate, the guarantee of personal freedoms, the rule of law, and the steady (if uneven) economic betterment of the populace. Why was it that the United States was losing out to the National Liberation Front and the Viet Cong in the struggle for hearts and minds?
Colby did not say so, but the answer was clear: in Vietnam, as in other Cold War battlegrounds, the United States was consistently aligning itself with the forces of reaction. This was so sometimes because ideological conservatives controlled the foreign policy agenda, but more often because of the institutional mechanisms that emerged with the founding of the nation-state system. Perhaps, as McGeorge Bundy had remarked to Colby, there was no institutional means by which the United States could nurture a “rice-roots” revolution that would bring to Vietnam the same blessings that Americans enjoyed. The United States could apply diplomatic and economic leverage to a friendly government—even support coups against it—but it did not possess the means or the will to foment revolutions that would change the social and political equation in other countries. This seemed particularly true in South Vietnam. For the most part, the South Vietnamese Army, one of MACV’s principal tools in the war with the communists, was one of the most counterrevolutionary entities in South Vietnam. If things did not change, Colby told Forrestal, the United States was going to lose the fight against the forces of international communism. His people on the ground were urging a policy shift whereby the United States would seek out rising young leaders even if they had joined the National Liberation Front. This would mean working with “dynamic young men” in the trade unions, in peasant organizations, in veterans groups, and on college campuses.24
Throughout 1965 and 1966, the Johnson administration operated on the assumption that it did not have to make a choice, that it could pursue counterinsurgency and pacification vigorously in the countryside without repudiating the Ky-Thieu regime. If the United States just refocused and redoubled its efforts, victory was still in reach. The picture of the nationbuilding effort in South Vietnam painted for President Johnson in 1966 was not compelling. “[I] don’t think there’s a single area pacified,” McNamara reported on January 11, following one of his many fact-finding trips to Vietnam. Returning from a similar mission in August, Henry Kissinger, an unofficial adviser to the State Department, observed that eighteen months after the Marines landed at Danang, one could not go outside the city at night without running the risk of being shot. Traveling by helicopter, he had observed numerous Viet Cong roadblocks across some of South Vietnam’s principal highways. There was not a moment to be lost, the president decided, and ordered his advisers to draft a plan to pursue the “other war.”25
Would-be architects of a comprehensive counterinsurgency/pacification program were struck first by the huge advantage the communists held in the field of command and control. Department of Defense analyst Townsend Hoopes wrote, “For the enemy the war remained fundamentally . . . a seamless web of political-military-psychological factors to be manipulated by a highly centralized command authority that never took its eye off the political goal of ultimate control in the South.” By contrast, the United States was fighting three very loosely connected conflicts: the large-scale conventional war on the ground, the air war over North Vietnam, and the counterinsurgency effort in the countryside. The counterinsurgency campaign was just as bureaucratically splintered in 1966 as it had been when Lansdale had left Vietnam for the first time. Lodge insisted on absolute authority and overall command, but he was lazy, leaving the military, USAID, USIS, the Joint US Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO), and the CIA to go their own ways in the provinces. As a consequence, dozens of counterinsurgency/pacification operations unfolded without any interaction whatsoever between them. Matters were further complicated by the always complex relationship between the South Vietnamese and the Americans, from the US Mission and the government in Saigon down to the village-level advisers. As one pacification official later observed of the struggle in the countryside: “It was everybody’s business and nobody’s.”26
As early as 1964, Bill Colby had recommended the appointment of a counterinsurgency/pacification “czar” to oversee the “other war” in South Vietnam, but his suggestion had gotten lost in the turmoil of escalation. Nevertheless, he had been heard, especially by McGeorge Bundy. In early 1966, the national security
adviser arranged for a conference on pacification to be held at Airlie House, the CIA retreat near Warrenton, Virginia. The State Department was represented by Leonard Unger and William Porter. Colby headed the Agency delegation, with Chester Cooper, an assistant to Bundy, representing the White House. Lansdale was there as well. After much pulling and tugging, the group decided to recommend to the president that he appoint a deputy ambassador for pacification. LBJ did just that at the Honolulu Conference in February, naming Porter to the post and gently nudging Lodge to get on board. LBJ followed up on March 28 by naming Robert Komer, a National Security Council staffer, to the post of special assistant to the president for pacification and rural reconstruction. In doing so, he took the first major step toward shutting the bureaucratic Pandora’s Box.
Colby had known Komer since his days with the CIA in the early 1950s. A short, bespectacled, intense man, the new presidential assistant for counterinsurgency and pacification was a Harvard graduate and fervent Democrat who had joined with Colby in advocating an “opening to the left” in Italian politics during the 1950s. He subsequently became a member of Kennedy’s NSC staff and earned his spurs as a Middle East expert. Impressed with Komer’s energy and initiative, Johnson and Bundy subsequently asked him to concentrate on Vietnam, which he did.27
Komer came to his new post determined to bring the apparatchiks and even the politicos like Lodge to heel. His primary task, however, was to keep the president converted. What followed was a series of trips to Vietnam during which Komer would thoroughly irritate the civilian members of the US Mission while deluging LBJ with reports and recommendations. The United States had no choice but to work with and through the South Vietnamese government, he declared. “Suggestions that we must take over Vietnam miss the very purpose of the exercise,” he observed to Johnson. Lodge had proved incapable of coordinating the military and civilian sides of pacification. The military’s efforts to secure the country in the short term through free-fire zones and the deliberate creation of refugees was doing more to lose hearts and minds than win them. “We can spur a socioeconomic revolution in a non-country even during wartime,” he told the president, “but it won’t be easy at best.” Although he was at pains to keep the fact secret, Komer’s chief inspiration and mentor was the iconoclastic Vann. In a letter to a friend in which he reminisced about crucial influences, Komer wrote, “And above all [there was] the incomparable John Paul Vann—whose role in counseling me during 1966–1968 had never been told.”28
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