On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  In Rangoon, I found the government of Premier U Nu in a state of alarm. It had appealed to the U.S. ambassador, David M. Key, for help in getting Li Mi’s forces out of Burma. The Burmese Army had proved ineffectual. U Nu feared that Li’s operations would provoke a Chinese Communist invasion of Burma or an internal Communist coup. Peking had declined to give U Nu assurance that this would not happen. The Burmese suspected American staging of the Li Mi affair and were convinced, quite rightly, that the operation would have required at least tacit White House sanction before it could be mounted. Ambassador Key repeatedly denied knowledge of American involvement, although he undoubtedly was aware of it to some degree. The Burmese government had imposed a ban on the travel of American officials north of Mandalay to the northeastern frontier areas. In Washington, State Department officials, except on the highest levels, were apparently not aware of the CIA operation, and officers in the field were authorized to issue flat denials in response to inquiries. Members of the staff of the American Embassy spoke frankly to me in confidence about what they knew about the operation. They were incensed and looked upon the whole operation as an act of folly from the standpoint of American interests. Relations with the neutralist Burmese government were in a shambles. The Li Mi forays could only have nuisance value, since sooner or later the Communists would mass overwhelming force to scatter the Nationalist columns. Li’s troops would then be compelled to fall back into Burma, remaining a constant irritant to the Rangoon government and a provocation to the Chinese Communists. The U Nu government, afraid of arousing the Chinese, had suppressed news of the Li Mi operations. Not a line was appearing in the censored Rangoon press.

  We flew to Singapore, where I filed my report to the AP. It evoked protests around the world on behalf of the Burmese but had little practical effects. Ambassador Key returned to Washington and, indignant over the CIA involvement, resigned. When the Eisenhower administration came into office, the new ambassador, William J. Sebald, was confronted by the same dilemma. He was assured by the State Department that the CIA was not continuing to support Li, and he was ordered to reply in this vein to mounting Burmese protests. The ambassador conducted his own investigation, which soon revealed to him that the CIA was still involved.

  Burma brought the matter before the United Nations in March 1953 and again in September. In November of that year, an evacuation by air to Taiwan of some of the Nationalist units via Thailand got under way. However, despite the announcement in Taipei by Li Mi on May 30, 1954, that the Yunnan Anti-Communist and National Salvation Army had been dissolved, the evacuation dragged on for years, with repeated clashes between Burmese and remnant Nationalist troops. The sorry affair was protracted until the Kennedy administration put an end to it by exerting strong pressure on Chiang Kai-shek to complete the withdrawal. By that time the affair had so embittered the Burmese that relations between Rangoon and Washington remained poisoned for years.

  The CIA operation reinforced Mao Zedong’s stated belief that China would not be secure from U.S. intrusion until American bases in countries bordering China were removed. It hardened his resolve to aid Ho Chi Minh in the struggle to oust the United States and its French allies from Vietnam.

  17

  THE KENNEDY BROTHERS IN SAIGON

  John F. Kennedy arrived in Saigon on October 19, 1951, accompanied by his sister Patricia and his brother Robert Kennedy. JFK was then a congressman, Democrat of Massachusetts. I remember so well how boyish Bobby looked as he embarked from the plane, ducked under a wing, and smiled broadly at me as he followed Jack to the line of French and American Legation officials waiting to greet them. Bobby was then twenty-six and John Kennedy was thirty-four. The party was traveling on what was described as a study tour of the Middle East and Asia. They had been in New Delhi, where Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru impressed them with a seminar on the dynamism and the irreversible nature of the anticolonial revolution in Asia. The visit seemed of such a routine nature that I gave it only one paragraph in a dispatch devoted to reporting the return that day after a three months’ absence of General de Lattre de Tassigny, the French high commissioner.

  De Lattre had been in Paris pleading with a reluctant government for troop reinforcements. His only encouragement came, not in Paris, but during a trip to Washington, where he received assurances that American military aid would be accelerated. “The world has come to realize the importance of our fight in the defense of this part of the world,” the general said at the Ton Son Nhut Airport. As for Jack Kennedy, to better identify the young congressman, unknown to most readers, an AP copy editor in New York added a sentence to my dispatch stating that the Massachusetts representative was the son of Joseph P. Kennedy, the former ambassador to Britain. Writers would describe that filial relationship in later years as one in which a son broke with his father on Indochina and other foreign policy issues. I had no reason to think that this visit by Kennedy to Saigon would have a profound impact on America’s Vietnam policy over the next decade. Walt Rostow, who would become Kennedy’s senior foreign policy adviser when he became president, would later write that the visit was Kennedy’s “formative experience” in the making of Vietnam policy. At cabinet meetings, when Vietnam policy was being formulated, Kennedy would often refer to what he had learned during his Saigon visit as the rationale for his assumptions.

  Kennedy was greeted warmly at the Saigon airfield by an old friend, Edmund Gullion, the counselor at the American Legation. They had become friendly four years earlier in Washington when Dean Acheson, the secretary of state, on Kennedy’s request, had sent over Gullion, his assistant, to help the young congressman compose a foreign policy speech. After chatting with Gullion, Kennedy walked across the tarmac to where reporters were standing and asked for Seymour Topping. He had been told that I was the first American correspondent to be stationed in Saigon. “I would like to have a talk with you,” Kennedy said with an engaging smile.

  “All right,” I replied. “I’ll come to see you.”

  “No,” he said. “I’ll come to see you.”

  I noticed that Kennedy was pale and thin, his neck scrawny. He wore no hat, and his mop of unruly hair was badly in need of trimming. I later learned that in Japan he had come down with a life-threatening fever, temperature at 106, and had been taken to an American military hospital in Okinawa, where he recovered and then insisted on continuing the tour.

  On the very day of their arrival, Gullion began briefing the Kennedy brothers on the political and military developments in Indochina. Seated in the evening in the rooftop restaurant of the waterfront Majestic Hotel, they glimpsed gun flashes as French artillery fired across the Saigon River to interdict sites used by infiltrating Viet Minh guerrillas to mortar the city. Gullion told the Kennedys of the recent French military reverses and then laid out what he believed to be the only policy that might contain Ho Chi Minh’s surging Viet Minh. What Gullion said that evening constituted, in fact, an extraordinary turnabout in how he viewed French prospects in the Vietnam struggle. On his arrival in Saigon in February 1950, Gullion had told me he believed that the French army with American material aid could defeat the Viet Minh. But by early 1951 Gullion had conceded to me privately that he no longer believed in a French military solution. Gullion had become a strong advocate of transforming the figurehead Bao Dai regime into a truly independent government that could rally the Vietnamese people against the Viet Minh. He had come to accept that an appeal to nationalism rather than an ideological struggle against Communism was the central issue. He was allied with Robert Blum, the head of the American economic aid mission, in insisting that military aid should be channeled directly to the embryo Vietnamese National Army. Gullion contended that continuing to funnel aid through the French had the effect of reducing the Bao Dai government to “the role of a French protected anonymity.”

  Gullion and Blum were disputing with General de Lattre, who was adamantly opposed to direct aid to the Vietnamese. The high commissioner had accused the two of “fan
ning the fires of extreme nationalism. French traditionalism is vital here,” he told them. “A new nation cannot be created overnight simply by giving out economic aid and arms.” Complaining of Blum’s close relations with the Vietnamese, he once exclaimed to him: “You are the most dangerous man in Indochina.” Although de Lattre was to concede to me at the end of that very year that the Viet Minh could not be defeated unless a strong Vietnamese army was mustered, the general never approved of direct aid to the Vietnamese army, nor did he sanction full independence for Vietnamese generals in field operations. General Francis G. Brink, the chief of the U.S. military aid group, complained to me that he was so continually under French surveillance and so harassed that he found it difficult to do his job. He returned to Washington in a deep depression and soon after committed suicide.

  Once, after I had sent a dispatch which reported a curt French postponement of a direct U.S. aid program leading the Vietnamese to complain that they’d been humiliated, de Lattre in a rage summoned me. Two of his military aides came to the door of our apartment near midnight and insisted that I accompany them to the high commissioner’s palace. De Lattre was waiting with Donald Heath, the minister of the American Legation, who had arrived in July 1950, seated at his side. Heath, visibly embarrassed, had been harangued by de Lattre about my dispatch. I was in no mood to take abuse from de Lattre, since I was still smarting from a previous encounter in which the general had taken umbrage because I had interviewed Bao Dai and reported his aspirations for greater independence. When de Lattre accused me of undermining the French position, I retorted sharply, and a shouting match ensued, with Heath squirming between us. When I told de Lattre that I had stated the French position after exploring it thoroughly in a conversation with a senior French official, he expressed disbelief. The next morning he grimly lined up his cabinet and asked the members if any one of them had spoken to me. His senior political adviser confessed to having given me a background briefing. De Lattre exploded in wrath. Dubbed “le roi Jean” by his subordinates, de Lattre so terrified his deputies that it became very difficult to obtain interviews with them.

  Gullion and Blum did not prevail on the direct aid issue or on other recommendations for rapid evolution of the Vietnamese government to palpable independence. In Gullion’s words, Washington lacked or was unwilling to apply its leverage. The State Department retreated when the French government hinted that, if pressed too hard on the independence issue, it might withdraw entirely from the war, which was strongly opposed by much of the French public. There was also great reluctance to antagonize French officials at a time when French leaders were being urged to join in the creation of a European Defense Community, a proposal project which the French parliament eventually rejected in any case.

  As the political and military situation deteriorated, Gullion became more open in his espousal of Vietnamese independence, and this brought him into sharp conflict, not only with the French, but also with his superior, Donald Heath, the chief of mission. A conservative career diplomat, Heath was much more solicitous of French interests and sensibilities than Gullion and also more the unquestioning executor of State Department policy. As Gul-lion persisted in voicing his views, relations between the two diplomats deteriorated to the point where Heath denied Gullion, his deputy, access to his exchanges of messages with the State Department. This was the extraordinary situation within the legation when Kennedy arrived on his ten-day visit.

  On the afternoon of the day following Kennedy’s arrival, there was an unexpected knock on the door of our apartment, located on Boulevard Charner, just opposite the flower stalls in central Saigon. Kennedy had mounted the narrow stairs of the shabby hallway to our door. He was alone. As he greeted Audrey and me, he said: “I’ll only be a few minutes.” We ushered him into our small lounge, which served as living and dining room, and he seated himself in an easy chair near the bamboo bar. He stayed more than two hours, asking questions about every aspect of the Vietnam conflict. He wanted to know what the average Vietnamese felt about the United States. I told him that Americans were the most popular of foreigners when we first arrived in Saigon, many of them citing the American grant of independence to the Philippines as a model for the French. But now we were resented and even hated by many Vietnamese because of our new links to the French. As for the military situation, I told him of my experience on the frontier, which had led me to report that there was no prospect of a decisive French military victory given Ho Chi Minh’s control of the mountain passes to China. Having captured the leadership of the fervent nationalist movement, Ho had available to him a seemingly inexhaustible pool of recruits for his forces, which were being trained in South China, together with access to weaponry and other war matériel to outfit them. Kennedy asked if the Bao Dai government was given full independence, would that sway nationalists from Ho Chi Minh’s side. I replied I agreed in most respects to what Gullion was telling him, but I was pessimistic, citing my Chinese experience, about the prospects of any Vietnamese government winning popular support while visibly dependent on the presence of France or, for that matter, the United States. In China, one of the factors which had accounted for Chiang Kai-shek’s loss of popular support was his open dependence on the United States. For many Chinese it was a reminder of humiliating Western extraterritorial concessions. In the same sense, the Vietnamese associated any foreign dependence with their colonial experience.

  At the end of what had been an intense discussion, Kennedy remarked: “I’m going to talk about this when I get home. But it will give me trouble with some of my constituents.” Then he rose, peeked at our year-old Susan in her crib, and smiling told Audrey she looked like a Madonna out of a Botticelli painting. A legation car was waiting for Kennedy in the street.

  When Kennedy left me, he seemed persuaded that only a truly independent Vietnamese government had any prospect of attracting popular support away from Ho Chi Minh. But evidently he did not grasp the full import of what I tried to impart about the critical advantage gained by Ho Chi Minh in seizing control of the frontier mountain passes. The Viet Minh access to a totally secure safe haven in South China for the training and equipment of their troops would prove to be a determining factor in the outcome of the French Indochina War and the American sequel.

  After Jack Kennedy’s talks with Gullion and me, the Kennedys dined with Bao Dai and came away unimpressed. Two days later they had dinner with General de Lattre. JFK posed challenging questions about French colonial policy that irritated the high commissioner. De Lattre was so indignant that he addressed letters of complaint to Ambassador Heath and his own contacts in Washington citing the congressman’s “impertinence.” Nevertheless, de Lattre arranged for the Kennedys to visit Hanoi and tour the fortifications guarding the Red River delta approaches to the city. A French colonel in one of the forts told them he was confident of victory against the Viet Minh but this might not be achieved during his lifetime. Bobby recorded this comment in his journal with exclamation marks.

  Jack Kennedy arrived in Asia infected by the “Who lost China?” syndrome at home. His voice had been among those who charged that responsibility for the Communist conquest of China could be attributed to advice given the Truman administration by China specialists in the State Department. He was also critical of the opinions of two of the most distinguished American China scholars, John King Fairbank and Owen Lattimore. In a speech before the House of Representatives on January 25, 1949, he accused the Truman administration of crippling Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government by delaying needed aid while pressuring it to enter into a coalition with the Communists. It was a contention, as regards the supply of military aid, which defied the facts. His Asian tour, and especially his talk with Nehru, spurred him to a reappraisal of what was transpiring on the continent. In the month following his visit to Saigon, Kennedy asserted in a speech:

  In Indochina we have allied ourselves to the desperate effort of the French to hang on to the remnants of an empire. There is no broad gen
eral support of the native Vietnam government among the people of that area . . . To check the southern drive of Communism makes sense but not only through reliance on the force of arms. The task is rather to build strong native noncommunist sentiment within these areas and rely on that as a spearhead of defense rather than upon the legions of General De Lattre, brilliant though he may be. And to do this apart from and in defiance of innately nationalistic aims spells foredoomed failure. To the rising tide of nationalism, we have unfortunately become a friend of its enemy and as such its enemy and not its friends.

  In June 1953, now in the Senate, Kennedy was still hammering at the same theme: “It is because we want the war to be brought to a successful conclusion that we should insist on genuine independence . . . I strongly believe that the French cannot succeed in Indochina without giving concessions necessary to make the native army a reliable crusading force.” He also modified his attitude toward China and retracted publicly his 1949 remarks blaming scholars and State Department officials for the collapse of the Chiang Kaishek government in the Civil War.

  Seen as the most influential adviser to Kennedy on Vietnam, Gullion found himself under fire within the State Department as the senator persisted in criticizing the prevailing policies of the Eisenhower administration. He was warned by associates that he might be risking his career by remaining so close to Kennedy. Gullion continued, nevertheless, to be a close friend and adviser to Kennedy all through his years in the Senate and after he entered the White House in 1961. When Gullion was returning from service as ambassador in the Congo in 1961, Kennedy thought of appointing him as ambassador to Saigon, replacing Frederick Nolting, but was dissuaded by the secretary of state, Dean Rusk. Gullion persisted, however, in impressing upon the Kennedy brothers his belief that creation of a popular Saigon government, supported directly with American military and economic aid, was the key to the solution of the Vietnam problem. It was a view that JFK first adopted in Saigon, and it would profoundly influence his shaping of Vietnam policy when he became president.