The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  Porter, Vann’s immediate superior, was next. Before he went home after two long years, he had to turn in a final report, and it was brutally frank. Aides suggested that Porter sweeten it by putting in a few positive notes, but he refused. He was angry and bitter over the way his subordinates were being treated, and after consulting with Ladd, Vann and Wilson, he handed in the most pessimistic report on the war so far, on the nature of the peasant, the enemy and the ally. Harkins went into a rage over it; normally final reports of senior advisers were circulated for all other top advisers, but Harkins had Porter’s report collected. He told other officers that it would be sanitized and that if it contained anything of interest, he might then make it available. It was never seen again, which did not surprise Porter, but enough was enough, he was leaving the Army.

  One other man entered the struggle, a general officer named Robert York who had a distinguished record as a regimental commander in World War II. He was in Vietnam doing special evaluation on guerrilla warfare, which he knew something about, having been stationed as an attaché in Malaya during that guerrilla uprising. He quietly went around the countryside, not touring, the way Harkins did, in chief-of-state style, with the seventeen-course lunch at the province chief’s house. Instead York unpinned his general’s stars and dropped in on unsuspecting ARVN units. Thus he saw the war and the ally as they really were. Typically, while Harkins came in by helicopter to chew out Vann at the battle of Ap Bac, York was still in the field, pinned down by artillery fire from a province chief. In early 1963, though he had just received his first star, York decided to put his career on the line and handed in a detailed and pessimistic report on the war. But he never heard from Harkins about it; his commander’s only response was to scribble “Lies,” “More lies,” “Vann,” “Porter,” “Vann again,” “Porter again” in the margins. It was indicative of the differences between Saigon and the field; the viewpoints of the command were those of men who lived with peacetime attitudes and had a peacetime military integrity; the men in the field were men at war.

  Of these men it was Vann, the most intense and dedicated of them, who came to symbolize the struggle against Harkins and his superior, General Taylor. By the time Vann went home in June 1963, he was the most informed American in the country. A statistician by training, he had managed to come up with a new kind of statistic. In contrast to the MACV, whose figures reflected only the greater American fire power and the American willingness to accept inflated ARVN body counts at face value, Vann had managed to compile a different kind of statistical story. Thus he documented the ARVN failure to fight (of the 1,400 government deaths in his sector in one year, only 50 were ARVN). This did not mean that the ARVN was fighting well, as Harkins implied; it confirmed that they were not fighting at all, and that the burden of the war was being borne by ill-equipped local militia who more often than not (Vann proved this too) were being killed asleep in their defensive positions. He was able to prove that commanders got troops from Diem not on the basis of Vietcong pressure, but on the basis of personal ties and their ability to protect Diem against a coup.

  Vann went home a very angry man, to find that Saigon had ordered that he not be debriefed in Washington. So he began to give his briefing to friends at the Pentagon. It was a professional presentation indeed, and very different from the usual briefings which were coming in from Saigon. What made it striking was that it was not just impressionistic, it seemed to be based on very hard facts. Vann began to get higher and higher hearings in the Pentagon until finally General Barksdale Hamlett, the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army, heard the briefing, was impressed and arranged for Vann to meet with the Joint Chiefs. Vann was warned by several high officers that above all he must not appear to be critical of General Harkins, who was the personal choice of Maxwell Taylor (by this time Chairman of the Joint Chiefs), since Taylor seemed to be particularly sensitive and protective of Harkins and his reporting. He was also warned not to show his briefing until the last minute to General Krulak, who was the Secretary of Defense’s special adviser on guerrilla warfare, and a person who was already surfacing as a man with a vested interest in the optimism, having just returned from a tour of Saigon and reported to the Chiefs that the war was going very well, every bit as well as Harkins said.

  The Vann briefing was set for 2 p.m. on July 8, 1963. At 9:45 he sent a copy to General Krulak’s office. A little later Vann, eager, starched, finally getting his hearing, showed up outside the office of General Earle G. Wheeler, the Chief of Staff, to be on hand in case there were any new developments. He was sitting there when a phone call came in to one of Wheeler’s aides. “Who wants the item removed from the agenda?” the aide asked. The voice at the other end spoke for a few minutes. “Is this the Secretary of Defense’s or the Chairman’s office?” There was more talk. “Is that an order or a request?” Then more talk. “Let me get this right. The Chairman requests that the item be removed.” The aide turned to Vann. “Looks like you don’t brief today, buddy.” He went to Wheeler’s office, returned in a minute, picked up the phone and dialed a number and said, “The Chief agrees to remove the item from the agenda.”

  Thus a major dissenting view was blocked from a hearing at the highest level by Max Taylor, and thus the Army’s position on how well the war was going was protected (had Vann briefed, it would have been much harder for the high-level military to go into meetings with the President and claim that the war was going well). This charade was a microcosm of the way the high-level military destroyed dissenters, day after day in countless little ways, slanting the reporting lest the top level lose its antiseptic views, lest any germs of doubt reach the high level. It confirmed to many in the Pentagon that a good deal of the reason for the Harkins optimism and its harshness on doubters was not just Harkins’ doing. Rather, Harkins was a puppet controlled by Taylor and reflected Taylor’s decision that this should be the key to back-channel messages and the unofficial “word” which is so important in the Army, that the unofficial word for Harkins was coming from Taylor, and that the messenger between them was General Krulak.

  Since mid-1962 the American military had been turning to the handful of American journalists in Saigon, using them as an outlet for their complaints. It was not particularly deliberate; but it was also impossible to keep their skepticism hidden. The journalists kept showing up in the countryside, and it was only a matter of time before they saw how hollow the entire operation was, how many lies were being told, and how fraudulent the war was. It was only a matter of time before a version of the war and of the regime, far more pessimistic, began to surface in the American press. Both Washington and Saigon immediately chose to see this as a press controversy; in reality it was a reflection of a major bureaucratic struggle and of a dying policy. But since the policy now depended for its life on the public relations aspect, on the Administration’s attempt to sell a frail and failed policy both to itself and to Diem, the reporters became targets of the Administration, both at home and in Vietnam. They were the one element in Saigon that could not be controlled: Diem controlled his press, his military, his legislature; Harkins his reporting channels, and Nolting his. The only people who could be candid were the American reporters. “Get on the team,” Admiral Harry Felt told Malcolm Browne of the AP. “Stop looking for the hole in the doughnut,” Ambassador Nolting enjoined reporters. John Richardson, the head of the CIA in Saigon, spoke enviously to colleagues of how the Communists controlled their reporters. Nolting, increasingly angry with the journalistic accounts, ordered his press officer, John Mecklin, to write a major report for Washington saying that the policy “has been badly hampered by irresponsible, astigmatic and sensationalized reporting.” General Krulak, one of the shrewder political infighters, decided to assault the reporters by assaulting their manhood, and told favored journalistic friends that reporters in Saigon had burst into tears when they saw dead bodies. Favored journals such as Time or reporters such as Joseph Alsop and Marguerite Higgins were cranked up to write more posi
tive stories, which they gladly did.

  The reporters seemed to make an inviting target: they were young and without established reputations. Because the reporters were young, their views of the world and of war were not set in a World War II philosophy. Because only one of them was married, there was no wifely pull to become part of the Saigon social whirl, to get along with the Noltings or the Harkinses, the kind of insidious pressure which works against journalistic excellence in Washington. Unlike so many colleagues in Washington, they were not dependent on the good wishes of the people who ran the institution they covered; their friends and contemporaries were out in the field, where the war was. Their reporting of the political stagnation in Saigon, of the false promises of Diem, was consistently on target; and their reporting from the field was far more honest and accurate than that of the military (eight years later the Pentagon Papers would confirm this through analysis by the Pentagon’s own experts. It was a belated tribute of no small irony).

  But the questions they brought up were the smaller ones. They too did not challenge the given, and by accepting it, they too failed (had they challenged the very premise of the war, they would undoubtedly have been shipped out the next day). Only in the latter part of 1963 and in early 1964 did they begin to perceive that the problem was not just Diem, that Diem was simply a symptom of a larger failure and that the real problem had its roots in the French Indochina war. By then it was very late. Fifteen years earlier in China, restless young State Department officials had played the same role as the reporters did, had conveyed what they saw without jeopardy to their jobs. Now that kind of reporting could not be done through State and had to be done through independent newspapers. But the State Department people had been area experts and thus recognized immediately the root causes of what they saw on the surface, which the young American journalists in Vietnam lacked the sophistication to do (unlike the official personnel, they knew that our program did not work, but unlike their State Department predecessors in China they were not able to trace the reason back far enough why it failed. Whereas the State Department officials in China saw their pessimism come to its logical conclusion—that the United States did not belong in China—the reporters in 1962 and early 1963 did not yet see the parallel in Vietnam). Like everything else in Saigon, the American press did not work quite well enough. It did, however, represent the beginning of an end of an era of American omnipotence by challenging the information which supported the policy; the country and the Administration had overreached itself, and this was the DEW-line warning signal.

  The Administration countered quickly enough. If the reporters would not write upbeat stories, the Kennedy Administration, facile, particularly good at public relations, would generate its own positive accounts. Thus optimism and optimistic statements became a major and deliberate part of the policy; warfare by public relations, one more reflection of the Kennedy era. High-level Americans were sent over not to learn about Vietnam, not to see Vietnam or to improve what was privately known as a frail policy, but to pump up this weak policy. Their speeches and statements had been written for them before they left, full of praise for Diem, full of talk of a national revolution, of the end of the long war, of victory in sight. One day at the Saigon airport, with television cameras focusing on one of them as he descended the plane and began reading his statement, Neil Sheehan, then a twenty-five-year-old reporter for UPI, remarked, “Ah, another foolish Westerner come to lose his reputation to Ho Chi Minh.”

  But it became increasingly a policy based on appearances; Vietnamese realities did not matter, but the appearances of Vietnamese realities mattered because they could affect American realities. More and more effort went into public relations because it was easier to manipulate appearances and statements than it was to affect reality on the ground. In part the controversy with the American reporters became so bitter because for the first time there was a threat to the American mission on appearances (significantly, whenever reporters came up with a story showing that something was grievously wrong, the instinct of the American mission was to assault the reporters and their credibility, not to find out whether or not in fact the story was right). The Buddhist crisis would be troubling because it shattered appearances of tranquillity, not because it showed that the regime was stupid and cruel. And Vietnamese elections from the very start, once the original Geneva elections were avoided, were always aimed not at expressing Vietnamese aspirations, but at implanting American values on the Vietnamese and reassuring Americans. (This was true right through to 1967 when General Lansdale was back, this time in a civilian capacity, and trying to run elections which, though blocking out the Vietcong, would nonetheless, he hoped, be honest. He was, however, receiving little support from the rest of the embassy on his idea, so when Richard Nixon, an old friend of his, visited Saigon in mid-1967, Lansdale seized on the idea of using Nixon to build support for the elections, really honest elections this time. “Oh sure, honest, yes, honest, that’s right,” Nixon said, “so long as you win!” With that he winked, drove his elbow into Lansdale’s arm and slapped his own knee. Such were to be elections; like everything else they were to ratify American decisions and present American policies in a favorable light.)

  There were of course some official Americans who were not enthusiastic about being manipulated by the executive branch. In late 1962 Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield came through Saigon at Kennedy’s request. Mansfield had visited Vietnam many times in the past and had been one of the original liberal-Catholic sponsors of Diem (the hope of liberal-Catholic Americans of sponsoring a liberal-Catholic regime in Saigon). Since he knew a good deal of the background, he was appalled by the deterioration of Diem, the growing isolation of the man, the sense of unreality around the palace, and the dominance of Mr. and Mrs. Nhu. Mansfield had skipped some of the official briefings provided for him by Nolting and had instead spent a four-hour lunch with the American reporters, a lunch which confirmed his own doubts. The next day at the airport, as he prepared to leave, he was handed a statement drafted for him by the embassy (a small courtesy on the part of the ambassador in case the Senate Majority Leader did not know what to say). Mansfield, however, rejected it; and his own farewell speech, by its absence of enthusiasm, reflected his disenchantment. When he returned to Washington he gave Kennedy a report of mild caution for public consumption, but in addition he gave him a private account that was blunt and pessimistic about the future of it all. Kennedy had summoned Mansfield to his yacht, the Honey Fitz, where there was a party going on, and when the President read the report his face grew redder and redder as his anger mounted. Finally he turned to Mansfield, just about the closest friend he had in the Senate, and snapped, “Do you expect me to take this at face value?” Mansfield answered, “You asked me to go out there.” Kennedy looked at him again, icily now, and said, “Well, I’ll read it again.” It was an important conversation, coming as it did about a year after the Taylor-Rostow mission and after a year of the policy of deliberate optimism. It showed that if this policy had not fooled anyone else, it had deceived the deceivers.

  But the articles in the daily newspapers, combined with the reports from men like Mansfield, had slowly been having an effect on the President. Increasingly bothered by discrepancies in the reporting, he dispatched two of Harriman’s people in late December to make their own check, Roger Hilsman of State and Michael Forrestal of the White House. He told Forrestal that in order to get at the truth he wanted a fresh look, but warned him not to become too involved with the journalists there and not to see events through their prism. Forrestal, he said, should find out what was really happening there and how the people of South Vietnam felt about the war.

  Listening to the President, Forrestal, who had been devoting himself to Laotian problems and had not worked on Vietnam, sensed his own doubts beginning. Those doubts were confirmed when he arrived in Saigon and found that the only people who believed in the regime were Americans. He also discovered that their belief was in direct propor
tion to the importance of their position, and that the more independent their position, the less faith they had in the regime or the viability of the war effort. He reported to Kennedy in early February that “no one really knows how many of the 20,000 'Vietcong’ killed last year were only innocent or at least persuadable villagers, whether the Strategic Hamlet program is providing enough governmental services to counteract the sacrifices it requires, or how the mute mass of villagers react to charges against Diem of dictatorship and nepotism.” Forrestal foresaw a long and costly war and also reported that Vietcong recruitment within the South was so successful and effective that the war could be continued without infiltration from the North, a point which jarred Saigon and Pentagon and some civilian sensibilities, since much of the Washington thinking was postulated on the basis of invasion from the North.

  By early 1963 the President had become unhappy with his team in Saigon; in particular he was dissatisfied with the reporting that was coming in, it was all too simplistic, too confident, and there was too little nuance, too little concern about the population reflected. But it was not so much a distaste for the Harkins and Nolting simplistic reporting as a distaste for the war itself and the problems of Vietnam, a belief that, as Forrestal had reported, it was not going to be easy, an intuition that it was somehow going to pull us in deeper and deeper. In private he began to voice concern over where we were going. He had a feeling that Harkins and Nolting did not share his misgivings, and that Nolting in particular, who was supposed to be the President’s man there, had not been a particularly good choice. Maybe for some other President, but not for him. So increasingly it was his own White House staff which had to fight to limit the military instead of the President’s ambassador to Vietnam. The more the reality of the commitment and what it was doing to the peasantry was unveiled, the more uneasy Kennedy became, but Nolting was not disturbed; he was committed to supporting the regime at all costs. What the President was learning, and learning to his displeasure (once again, the Bay of Pigs had been lesson one), was something that his successor Lyndon Johnson would also find out the hard way: that the capacity to control a policy involving the military is greatest before the policy is initiated, but once started, no matter how small the initial step, a policy has a life and a thrust of its own, it is an organic thing. More, its thrust and its drive may not be in any way akin to the desires of the President who initiated it. There is always the drive for more, more force, more tactics, wider latitudes for force.