Lansdale’s more specific proposals were channeled through to Roswell Gilpatric, the Deputy Secretary for Defense (significantly, Vietnam was already being treated as a military problem). The suggestions were essentially antibureaucratic, with Lansdale opposing what he assumed was the inevitable Americanization of the operation, the creation of a mission based on American bureaucratic needs rather than on Vietnamese realities. In early 1961 Gilpatric was scheduled to head a task force which would oversee the operation in Washington, and Lansdale was to be its chief in Saigon; there would be a minimal increase in personnel, a few specialists in the Lansdale mold, operating of course under Lansdale. These recommendations, eventually made in late April, were soon pushed aside by bureaucratic needs; as soon as the game was opened, each competing agency began to beg for more men. It was like amoebae multiplying: every agency wanted to double itself; one would become two, two would become four. Under the revised recommendations the military mission, then totaling 685 men, would be increased to around 3,000 men in the training group; other agencies would grow proportionately.
The recommendations were brought before Kennedy, who greeted them with the greatest distaste. He was by no means anxious to send that many more Americans to Vietnam; he had just staggered through the Bay of Pigs, and if he was wary of being caught looking soft in a Cold War confrontation, he was also wary of jumping into another confrontation. Years later Gilpatric would remember, more than anything else, Kennedy’s reluctance to add anything at that time to Vietnam, particularly men. Even the small number the President finally approved was agreed to as grudgingly as possible. There would be no 3,000-men military group, although on April 29 the President did approve a 400-man Special Forces group for training missions; they were, after all, his special favorites, and they were supposed to be experts on this kind of war. But essentially his attitude was to remain conventional about it; instead of the Vietnam mission being taken over by antibureaucratic specialists, as Lansdale wanted, it would be run by regular career State and Defense officials in the conventional way. There would be no specialists and no Lansdale there.
The first move toward continuing the commitment had, however, been taken earlier without the Administration’s even being aware of how fateful a step it was taking. It was done in an attempt to avoid a real decision, but it would have long-range repercussions. This was the switching of ambassadors to Vietnam on March 15, 1961, when Elbridge Durbrow was replaced by Frederick E. Nolting, Jr. The Durbrow tour had not been a happy one; he had watched the beginning of the Vietcong pressure against Diem, and simultaneously the accelerated estrangement of Diem from friends, allies and reality. Their discussions had become longer and longer monologues, and then, as Durbrow insisted on interrupting and telling Diem how poorly things were going, their meetings became more and more infrequent. Durbrow was, if anything, a very conservative figure, but he had been told to be candid with Diem, and that candor was now becoming unpleasant; toward the end Durbrow suggested that Ngo Dinh Nhu be sent into exile as an ambassador to a foreign country. His pleas to Diem about governmental reform, about improving the quality of commanders, about broadening the base of the government, resembled nothing so much as the pleas of General Stilwell to Chiang Kai-shek to do the same thing, and they were met with the same lack of appreciation. By the end of his tour, Durbrow was virtually persona non grata. When the Administration decided to replace him, it did not change the policy; it did not doubt the accuracy of what Durbrow had been reporting, but it could not afford a serious re-evaluation of the policy, dependent as it was on Diem with all his faults. So the change in policy would go from being honest with Diem to being nice to him, hoping that somehow this would create a new confidence and mutuality of trust. To inspire this confidence the Administration picked Frederick Nolting.
Fritz to his friends, who were numerous. A proper man of proper credentials. He had been a college teacher at one time, he came from a good Virginia family, and he had a good war record, Navy of course. He was part of that special group of relatively conservative Democrats from Virginia who play a major role in the foreign service and control much of its apparatus from the inside, who regard the foreign service as a gentleman’s calling, and feel they produce a particularly fine brand of gentleman. He had compiled a very good record, this hard-working, straight, somewhat unquestioning man. He was steady and solid, and he had been sponsored by everyone he had ever worked for. Before coming to Vietnam, he had been at NATO, where he was head of the political section, with rank of minister, thus the first deputy to the NATO ambassador. Vietnam was his first ambassadorial post; he had never been to Asia before, and his ideas of Communism had all been fashioned through his European experience. It was axiomatic that those who knew most about Asian nationalism were not allowed to serve in their chosen area (they were contaminated by their past), and if they had not left the foreign service they had at least switched to another desk. Thus the price of the past was sending Europeanists like Nolting to Asia; the new ambassador, knowing nothing of Asia, soon asked for and received as his deputy chief of mission his prime deputy from NATO, William Trueheart, who had not been to Asia either. Trueheart was Nolting’s closest friend; they had been together at the University of Virginia, and it was Trueheart who had talked Nolting into joining the foreign service.
Coming from NATO, Nolting seemed to symbolize the continuity of an American belief that it was American policies and American arms which had held the line against the Communists; that we, with our determination, could in fact make our decisions and then implant them in foreign countries; that the world welcomed our protection and our values; and that NATO and Vietnam were one and the same thing—despite, of course, a war of independence fought in Vietnam against a NATO power. (“NATO,” Nolting said shortly after his arrival, “was formed as a barrier against overt attack and it has held up for thirteen years. We haven’t found a barrier yet against covert aggression. If we can find such a technique, we’ll have bottled up the Communists on another front.”)
No one in the Kennedy group knew very much about him; it was an appointment which seemed to slip by them at the time. Only one man seemed to be aware of its potential import, and that was Chester Bowles. He had already been arguing for a major change of policy toward Asia, and neutralization of Vietnam; he alone at that point seemed to see the inevitability of a larger conflict, and the dangers of continued support of the Diem regime. As Undersecretary of State he was responsible for most of the ambassadorial assignments, and he believed strongly that you changed policy by changing personnel. He learned of the Nolting appointment at the last minute and tried to intercede against it. He felt that Nolting was being pushed by the traditionalists and the hard-liners in the Department, which was not surprising, considering the NATO origins. Bowles had come up with what he thought was a particularly good man for Vietnam, a foreign service officer named Kenneth Todd Young who had served there in the past and had maintained a reputation for being unusually sensitive to indigenous problems and nationalism. He had felt so frustrated that he had left the State Department during the Dulles years in despair over American policies. Young had returned with the coming of the Kennedy Administration and was assigned to a task force on Laos, where he caught Bowles’s attention. At that point in early March, Young was ticketed to be ambassador to Thailand. Bowles, however, was even then convinced that Vietnam rather than Thailand was going to be the main problem in Southeast Asia, and he wanted his most sensitive man there. Besides, he thought that Young was politically more in tune with Kennedy than Nolting was, and he thought this would be very important for an ambassador whose country was teetering on the brink of survival.
So, after both men had been approved for their respective posts, Nolting for Saigon, Young for Bangkok, Bowles maneuvered to have them switched. He talked with Young about it and found him less than eager to accept the proposition because Young did not want to knock Nolting out of his assigned post, but more important, because of reservations he had a
bout working with the Ngo family. He told Bowles he wanted to sleep on it.
Young thought long and hard that night about all the problems. Since the Vietnamese President was an old friend, Young knew a good deal about Diem’s abilities and liabilities, and he was also a reluctant authority on Mr. and Mrs. Nhu. He thought they were nothing less than poison, and that nothing could be accomplished in Vietnam as long as they were part of the government. They would have to be split and split quickly from Diem if there were to be any chance of success. One could not hope to be there and work against the Nhus if they were still in the country; each night they would destroy each day’s work. The new ambassador would have to establish a relationship of total frankness with Diem, a relationship based totally on mutual professional needs, and not marked by the personal ups and downs of the past. The next day Young went to Bowles and said that he was willing to give it a try. Soon there was a phone call from Lansdale representing Gilpatric saying that Young was to rush over to meetings of the Vietnam Task Force. Young was puzzled: Why was he needed? “Don’t you know?” Lansdale asked. “The President’s agreed for you to go to Saigon.” So it appeared to go through, and then once again it was stopped, the protocol problems were too complicated and in addition, Nolting had reacted badly, finding the switch insulting, which in a way it was. So Ken Young went to Thailand, where he performed very well under far less pressure than if he had been in Vietnam. From Bangkok he watched Saigon with mounting horror as it became clear from the start that all demands for reform would be dropped and the Nhus would become the dominant figures in the government. And Fritz Nolting in Saigon would find himself under such tension that it finally drove him not just from Vietnam but from the foreign service as well.
Nolting was, above all, a man of the surface. If Diem could have designed an ambassador for his country and his regime, he would have come up with Fritz Nolting. He was a fine example of the foreign service officer who commits himself only to the upper level of the host government and the society, not to the country itself. If you get along with the government and pass on its version of reality, then you are doing your job. It was not his job to ask questions; it was his job to get things done. There was no doubt that Nolting believed in what he was doing and saying. He had looked and listened, and had decided that Diem was the best anti-Communist around (there was, of course, no one else; Diem had systematically removed all other opposition—Communist, neutralist, anti-Communist). People who worried about the regime’s lack of appeal, of the growing isolation of the regime, were, in his words, taking their eyes off the ball. Stopping Communism was having your eyes on the ball. If civilians in Saigon discussed growing political resentment and repression he would assure all, including Washington, that he knew nothing of it, which was true, of course; no Vietnamese other than the family trusted him. He had forbidden members of the embassy staff to talk to any Vietnamese dissidents; if one did not hear it, it did not exist; if one did not see it, it never happened.
Duty instead of intelligence motivated Nolting. He was there to hold the line, not to question it. His policy was to build credit with Diem by agreeing to everything Diem wanted, hoping that one day he could cash in the due bills. It necessitated reassuring Diem constantly, by always giving in, always nodding affirmatively. There was a curious irony in this, because Americans always warned that Asians tended to tell you what you wanted to hear; now we had an American ambassador who told Asians what they wanted to hear. But the special significance of Fritz Nolting was that in the very choice of him, and his decision that yes, we could make it with Diem, we were binding ourselves into an old and dying commitment, without really coming to terms with what it meant.
The tightening of the bind of the commitment would continue shortly. In late April 1961 Kennedy, deciding against increasing the American mission substantially, thought he would boost Diem’s confidence by intangible instead of tangible aid. The means would be the Vice-President of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, then somewhat underemployed. Though Johnson was scheduled to visit a number of Asian countries, the key stop would be Vietnam. Curiously enough, it was not a stop that the Vice-President particularly wanted to make. Just as a year later he would balk when the President asked him to make a symbolic trip to Berlin—feeling somehow that he was being used, and that his career (and possibly his life) might be damaged—Johnson was so unenthusiastic about going to Saigon that Kennedy had to coax him into it. “Don’t worry, Lyndon,” he said. “If anything happens to you, Sam Rayburn and I will give you the biggest funeral Austin, Texas, ever saw.”
The trip came nonetheless at an opportune time for Johnson, who was at the lowest point in his career, being neither a Kennedy political insider nor a Kennedy intellectual. To intimates he would occasionally talk about how his chauffeur had advised him not to leave the Senate to become Vice-President, muttering that he wished he had had that chauffeur with him in Los Angeles when Kennedy made the offer. With others, of course, he went to great pains to show that he was deeply involved in the inner decisions of the Administration, that he was the real insider. One day in early 1961 Russell Baker, then a Hill reporter for the New York Times, who knew Johnson well, had been coming out of the Senate when he was literally grabbed by Johnson (“You, I’ve been looking for you”) and pulled into his office. Baker then listened to an hour-and-a-half harangue about Washington, about how busy Lyndon Johnson was, how well things were going. There were these rumors going around that he wasn’t on the inside; well, Jackie had said to him just the other night at dinner as she put her hand on his, “Lyndon, you won’t desert us, will you?” They wanted him. It was pure Johnson, rich and larger than life, made more wonderful by the fact that if Baker did not believe it all, at least for the moment Johnson did. And in the middle of it, after some forty minutes, Baker noticed Johnson scribble something on a piece of paper; then he pushed a buzzer. A secretary came in, took the paper, disappeared and returned a few minutes later, handing the paper back to Johnson. He looked at it and crumpled it. Then the harangue continued for another fifty minutes. Finally, exhausted by this performance, Baker left and on the way he passed a friend named David Barnett, also a journalist. They nodded and went their separate ways, and the next day when Barnett ran into Baker, he asked whether Baker knew what Johnson had written on that slip of paper. No, Baker admitted, he did not know. “ 'Who is this I’m talking to?’ ” said Barnett.
Now, on the trip all that energy with which he had overwhelmed Washington in his earlier capacity as Senate Majority Leader, the most influential Democrat in Washington, burst loose. He was away from Washington, he had something to do, barnstorming, finding that all people were alike, that he could reach out by being with them, hunkering down with them, discovering what goals they had in common (eradication of disease, food for all, access to electric power). There he was, campaigning among the villagers, the more rural the better, riding in bullock carts, inviting a Pakistani camel driver to the United States. Johnson loved it all (“There is no doubt the villagers liked it,” wrote John Kenneth Galbraith, recently appointed ambassador to India, “and their smiles will show in the photographs”).
As a gesture of the President’s concern, Johnson had brought with him Kennedy’s sister and brother-in-law, Jean and Stephen Smith. Being a good campaigner, Lyndon did not neglect to show their symbolic value of traditional American concern for Asians. At every stop they were introduced, their importance heralded, their own positions magnified with typical Johnsonian exaggeration: Jean Smith, who started out being “the President’s lovely little sister” soon became his “tiny little baby sister,” and then his “itsy-bitsy little baby sister.” And Steve Smith, perhaps the only member of the family who was not in the government, was introduced as “the President’s brother-in-law, one of the closest members of his family,” then as “a State Department official,” then as “an important State Department official,” and finally as “a man who held one of the most important and most sensitive jobs in the State
Department.”
Johnson had been told to inquire in Vietnam whether Diem wanted troops, but it was not a particularly meaningful query; neither State nor Defense had given much thought to the question of sending troops to Vietnam other than as a symbol, the way American troops stood in West Berlin as a symbol of American intent; these would, if they were accepted, be troops to stand and be seen rather than fight. By their presence they would show the Communists that America was determined to resist; this would give the Communists something to think about. If that did not work there would be other gestures, gestures as much to the American people as to the Communists. Johnson met with Diem and found that Diem was in no rush to have Caucasian troops on his soil. Diem knew, first, that his people would resent seeing any successor to the French there and that it might be counterproductive, and second, that it would be a sign of personal weakness as far as the population was concerned if he accepted American troops too readily. He was already too dependent on the Americans as it was.
Johnson was impressed by Diem; yet the entire episode became an example of the gamesmanship of the period. In his final report to the President, Johnson wrote that Diem “is 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 . . .” All in all it was a reasonably fair analysis, particularly for that time, when no one tied the problems Diem faced to the problems created by the French Indochina war. But if that was Johnson’s private view (which was not much different from what American reporters were writing at the time), what he was saying in public was quite different. In public Diem was hailed as “the Winston Churchill of Southeast Asia.” It was a comparison which boggled the mind of everyone except members of the Ngo family, who found it only fitting and proper. On the next leg of the trip Stan Karnow, who was then working for the Saturday Evening Post, asked Johnson if he really believed that about Diem. “Shit, man,” Johnson answered, “he’s the only boy we got out there.” (Later there would be some criticism in the Eastern press of his flamboyance in general and his lauding of Diem in particular, the impression that once again the Texas cowboy had overdone it in his exuberance, that he had, unlike the Kennedys, no subtlety, that he did not know foreign affairs. Privately Johnson was quite bitter about that, feeling that he had acted and spouted off under orders, and he would tell aides that he was angry about the charges that he had cut the cards. “Hell,” he said, explaining that he was under orders, “they don’t even know I took a marked deck out there with me.”)
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