The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  It was a shaky basis on which to found a policy, but it did not seem like a major decision at the time, nor a major policy. The attitude was essentially that there was little to lose, a certain small investment in American money, virtually no investment in American lives. In the beginning there was little illusion about the legitimacy of the government, or the state, or its chances for survival. That illusion would come gradually, later on, for a commitment is a subtle thing, with a life of its own and a rhythm of its own. It may, as in the case of South Vietnam, begin as something desperately frail, when the chances for survival are negligible. For a while, oxygen is breathed in, mouth-to-mouth, at great effort but little cost, and then the very people who have been administering the oxygen, desperate to keep the commitment alive (not because they believe in any hopeful prognosis, but because they do not want to be charged with failing to try and give first aid), look up one day and find that there is indeed a faint pulse, that the patient is more alive than dead. But at this point they are not relieved of their responsibility; instead, for the first time the commitment really begins, and now they are charged with keeping it alive. It is a responsibility, it is real. Its death would mean genuine political repercussions.

  In 1954, right after Geneva, no one really believed there was such a thing as South Vietnam. But Diem made it through the next few years largely because Hanoi did not pose a challenge and was busy securing its own base. Despite French and British protestations, Dulles encouraged Diem in his instinct not to hold the requisite elections, and slowly the idea of viability began to grow. Like water turning into ice, the illusion crystallized and became a reality, not because that which existed in South Vietnam was real, but because it became real in powerful men’s minds. Thus, what had never truly existed and was so terribly frail became firm, hard. A real country with a real constitution. An army dressed in fine, tight-fitting uniforms, and officers with lots of medals. A supreme court. A courageous President. Articles were written. “The Tough Miracle Man of Vietnam,” Life called him. “The bright spot in Asia,” the Saturday Evening Post said (“Two years ago at Geneva,” read the blurb for the latter, “South Vietnam was virtually sold down the river to the Communists. Today the spunky little Asian country is back on its feet thanks to a 'mandarin in a sharkskin suit who’s upsetting the Red timetable’ ”). A lobby for Diem began to emerge. Speeches were made in his honor. In 1956, in the modest words of Walter Robertson, Dulles’ Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs: “Among the factors that explain the remarkable rise of Free Vietnam from the shambles created by eight years of murderous civil and international war, the division of the country at Geneva, and the continuing menace of predatory Communism, there is in the first place the dedication, courage and resourcefulness of President Diem himself.” In all this there is a subtle change; the client state does not really come to life but the illusion does; as such, the proprietor state begins to live slightly at the mercy of the client state.

  It was a subtle genesis, and it was not matched by real political changes in South Vietnam, which was still a feudal society. Diem was supposed to be an anti-Communist nationalist, and there was, in fact, no such thing. His political base, always narrow, became over the years narrower than ever. Faced by great political problems, and possessing few political resources, he turned inward. Morbidly suspicious, he alienated his few allies in the government and turned more to his scheming, neurotic family, to his police force and to growing U.S. aid. He became more rigid, more isolated than ever, while ironically, the United States was becoming more committed to him. But at the same time year by year the U.S. sense of the futility of the whole enterprise diminished. By 1961 the Americans believed firmly in Diem, believed in his legitimacy; they saw South Vietnam as a real country, with a real flag. Having invented him and his country, we no longer saw our own role; our fingerprints had disappeared. In 1961 Kennedy could ruefully tell White House aides, “I can’t afford a 1954 kind of defeat now.”

  The trouble was that after seven years, none of the American rhetoric, none of the gestures that the Americans were making to reassure Diem, had had any effect on the most important people in South Vietnam, the peasants. Quickly, night after night, the Vietcong, the heirs and linear descendants of the Vietminh, were practicing the same kind of skilled guerrilla warfare and rural recruitment that the Vietminh had used during the French war, growing ever stronger, exploiting the multitude of local grievances against the government. In the field nothing had changed; the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, its commanders all former French officers and noncoms, resembled the French troops which had gone through the countryside in the daytime, using far too much fire power, and stealing and looting from the peasants; at night when the ARVN troops were gone, the Vietcong re-entered the villages and spread their skilled political propaganda, against which Diem was particularly impotent. (For a long time he had even refused to concede that a major insurgency was going on, since the very admission would have shown that his government was not perfect. Since he believed in his own rectitude, there could not be an insurgency against him.)

  Not surprisingly, though the pressure came from the South Vietnamese, and rural ones at that, Diem turned to white foreigners for help, for more aid, for air power, for a new treaty with the Americans. The idea of Ho Chi Minh needing help or reassurance from the Russians or the Chinese is inconceivable; the idea of Diem being able to understand the needs of the peasants and respond to them in kind is equally inconceivable.

  Throughout much of 1961, despite the pessimistic assessments of independent reporters and people like Lansdale, the American mission remained reasonably optimistic. Diem was doing better, went the line, and the ARVN was fighting better. Others, not in the chain of command, were more dubious. Theodore White, visiting Vietnam on his own in August, wrote to the White House of Vietcong control in the lower Mekong Delta, and of the fact that no American wanted to drive outside of Saigon even during the day without military convoy. Remembering what had happened in China, White sensed history about to repeat itself. In September the Vietcong began to use some of the muscle they had accumulated. They tripled the number of incidents, and after seizing a provincial capital fifty-five miles from Saigon, they publicly beheaded the provincial chief. The latter act had a profound effect in Saigon, where issues of morale and confidence were taken very seriously.

  By the end of the month there were strong demands in Washington for new military moves. Walt Rostow, ever enthusiastic and ready to use force (and not particularly knowledgeable about the rural realities), recommended that 25,000 SEATO troops be stationed on the border between the demilitarized zone and Cambodia in order to stop infiltration. (The insurgency, intelligence experts were noting, was almost entirely taking place within the South; all Vietcong troops were Southerners; the weapons were captured from government posts. Some Southerners, however, were cadre-trained in the North and then repatriated to the South. It was a small part of the war; 80 to 90 percent of the Vietcong were locally recruited, the National Intelligence Estimate said on October 5, 1961.) The Rostow proposal gave military men studying it a chill. It showed so little understanding of the rugged terrain; the 25,000 men would be completely swallowed up and ineffectual. The choice would be left to the enemy to either by-pass this thin line of men or systematically to eradicate it. Instead, on October 9 the Joint Chiefs of Staff responded to the Rostow proposal with a counterproposal, a commitment of American troops (around 20,000, but it would grow larger) to Vietnam. But the JCS wanted the troops in the Central Highlands and warned that under the Rostow proposal the SEATO troops would quickly be chewed up. Two days later the JCS reported at a National Security Council meeting that it would take only 40,000 American combat troops to clean up the Vietcong; in case the North Vietnamese and the Chinese Communists intervened, then an additional 128,000 troops would be needed.

  At almost the same time, as if it were all orchestrated, Diem sent a cable asking for more fighter-bombers, civilian pilots
for helicopters, more transport planes, and U.S. combat units for “combat-training” missions near the DMZ. He also asked that the Americans consider a request for a division of Chiang Kai-shek’s troops to support his own army. Ambassador Nolting recommended “serious and prompt” attention to all requests. Kennedy would soon have to make his first move on Vietnam.

  Thus the pressures were building on Kennedy all the time. He and his people had come to power ready to assert American power and they would find ample tests of it, ample pressures on them. Not just pressures from the Communists, but parallel political pressures at home. Even as he was about to make his first major move in response to the mounting urgency in Vietnam, he was similarly making another crucial appointment at the very top of his government, an appointment which reflected not so much his control of the government, his sureness of step, but his lack of control and his loss of balance. All of these major responses of the Kennedy Administration in the first year were based on two major premises: first, that the Communists were indeed a harsh and formidable enemy (if it was not a monolith, it was still treated as one) and that relaxation of tensions could only come once the Administration had proven its toughness, and second, that Kennedy’s political problems at home were primarily from the right and the center, that the left could be handled, indeed that it had nowhere else to go, and that it must accept the Administration’s private statements of good will and bide its time for the good liberal things which might one day come. The latter attitude, the belief in the essential political weakness of the liberal-left, encouraged the Administration in some of its harder-line activities and limited its inclination to look for diversity within the Communist world. If there were changes within the Communist world, Washington believed they were certainly not changes immediately apparent to most Americans, and this was politically crucial to the Administration. The Administration still felt itself under pressure to prove its own worth to centrists and conservative Americans, and it believed that liberal-left Americans would simply have to accept the Kennedy proposition that the Administration was by far the best they could hope for. Most of the key moves by Kennedy in 1961 reflected this attitude, including not just the decisions which followed the forthcoming Taylor and Rostow trip to Vietnam, but indeed the very decision to send Taylor and Rostow instead of, say, Schlesinger and Bowles. (He knew Rostow was aggressive on the subject of the war and that Taylor was committed to the idea of counterinsurgency. Thus in effect he was likely to get something along the lines of the report he received. Had he chosen representatives more dubious about the use of force, he would have a different kind of estimate. In fact, shortly after Taylor and Rostow arrived in Saigon, Kennedy dispatched his new ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith, to stop by and give him a personal report. Galbraith did, and in the very first of what was to be a series of trenchant, prophetic estimates on Vietnam, reported almost the opposite of Taylor and Rostow; he noted the decaying quality of the Diem and American operation there and saw enormous danger that the Americans might replace the French. Above all, he pushed for political rather than military solutions to the problem. But people like Galbraith were still on the outer periphery of the Kennedy Administration, there as much for window dressing as anything else, and his reports probably stirred doubts in the President’s mind, but that and little else.) That Kennedy still felt that the right was his problem, that he coveted respectable Establishment support as a form of protection from the right and that he felt more comfortable with the traditionalists was evidenced in another crucial appointment which he made.

  This was Kennedy’s choice, on September 27, 1961, of John McCone, an extremely conservative, almost reactionary California Republican millionaire to head the CIA. Ever since the Bay of Pigs earlier in the year Kennedy had wanted to change personnel in both the JCS and the CIA; he regarded Allen Dulles as a sympathetic man but an icon of the past, a man with too imposing a reputation for the younger men of the Administration to challenge. Now, in September, Kennedy made his move. He had tentatively offered the job to Clark Clifford, who had impressed him during the changeover from the Eisenhower Administration. But Clifford was not interested; perhaps he sensed that there was not enough power at the Agency to lure him away from his own law practice. The next possibility was Fowler Hamilton, a Wall Street lawyer cut classically from the Establishment mold; in fact the White House was close to announcing the Hamilton appointment when a problem developed at the Agency for International Development, and Hamilton was shifted there. Thus Kennedy, urged on by his brother Robert, turned to McCone.

  The appointment caught the rest of the Administration by surprise, and the liberals in the Kennedy group were absolutely appalled by it. One reason the President had been so secretive even within his own Administration (he did not, for example, tell the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board of his intention, nor solicit the views of its members) was that he knew the opposition to McCone within the government would be so strong as to virtually nullify the appointment. There was a variety of reasons for liberal distaste for McCone. During the Stevenson-Eisenhower campaign in 1956, a group of scientists at the California Institute of Technology had come out in support of Stevenson’s proposals for a nuclear test ban; McCone, a trustee of Cal Tech, immediately retaliated. He claimed that the scientists had been “taken in” by Russian propaganda and were guilty of attempting to “create fear in the minds of the uninformed that radioactive fallout from H-bomb tests endangers life.” In addition to his words, which seemed quite harsh, the scientists had good reason to believe that McCone tried to have them fired (a charge which McCone not entirely convincingly denied). Nor did the liberals find very much else in McCone’s background which was reassuring (including, for instance, the statement of Strom Thurmond during the Senate hearings that he did not know McCone well, “but in looking over this biography to me it epitomizes what has made America great”).

  McCone came from a wealthy San Francisco family; he had been in steel before the war, but with the coming of World War II he had become the principal figure in a new company which was formed to go into shipbuilding. The business turned out to be an enormous financial success, and there were many contemporaries who felt McCone was nothing less than a war profiteer (in 1946 during a congressional investigation Ralph Casey of the General Accounting Office, a watchdog of the Congress, testified that McCone and his associates of the California Shipbuilding Corporation had made $44,000,000 on an investment of $100,000. “I daresay that at no time in the history of American business,” Casey remarked at the time, “whether in wartime or peacetime have so few men made so much money with so little risk and all at the expense of the taxpayers, not only of his generation but of future generations”). McCone served as a special deputy to James Forrestal, worked with Forrestal in creating the CIA, and later became an Undersecretary of the Air Force under Truman. A convert to Catholicism, he believed that Communism was evil and must be stopped—along with Claire Booth Luce, he represented Eisenhower at Pope Pius’ funeral in 1958. During the Eisenhower years he was known as the classic hard-liner, a believer in massive retaliation and nuclear deterrents.

  Thus the liberals within the Administration were appalled by the appointment, and if anything, they regarded it as a step back from Allen Dulles. But it was a very calculated appointment. McCone had been pushed by Robert Kennedy, then very much in his hard-line incarnation, who was also trying to get control of the apparatus of government. Bobby Kennedy wanted movers and doers and activists, men who could cut through the flabby bureaucracy, and McCone had precisely that kind of reputation (which McCone intended to keep—no sooner had he taken over than he called in the various heads of the other intelligence operations and told them to play ball with him, he intended to be the intelligence czar, that if they played his game, he would increase their power in the government). But in particular, McCone was chosen by Kennedy because he offered one more bit of protection for a young President already on the defensive; having McCone at the CIA would de
flect right-wing pressure against his Administration. Which McCone did, though the price was not inconsiderable. Though McCone was reasonably straight in reporting what his subordinates were saying from the field, his own views, when volunteered, and he was not bashful about volunteering them, were always extremely hard-line (he would also from time to time use people in his Agency for causes that were not necessarily Administration causes, such as lending CIA people to the Stennis committee to help make the case against the Administration’s test ban treaty position). And it was also a gesture by Kennedy of turning over key parts of his government to people who were in no way part of his domestic political constituency. (In the last months of Kennedy’s life Kenneth O’Donnell, annoyed by the fact that the most important jobs in the government had gone to people who had not supported the Kennedy political candidacy, or if they had supported it, had been only marginally sympathetic in their commitment, was pushing for a new kind of appointment. He wanted to replace John McCone at CIA with Jack Conway, who had been Walter Reuther’s main political lobbyist, a man committed to Kennedy on domestic issues and fully capable of making judgments on foreign affairs as well. Had Kennedy lived and made the appointment it would have been almost unique in the entire history of national security appointments, a break in class and outlook of considerable proportion.)