A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  Throughout those long years, LBJ’s handling of the war in Vietnam was castigated relentlessly and in the most violent terms. Only those of us who saw him regularly knew the agony he bore day after day without complaint. No one tried harder, worked with more intensity or more compassion than President Johnson. Despite this effort, he never forgot his dedication to the domestic programs, the Great Society.

  I attended dozens of the luncheon sessions, and the one that occasioned my cable was no exception. The thrust of General Wheeler’s briefing was, as always, a version of “mission accomplished.” In this instance, the Air Force had “knocked out the grid and cut off electric power to Hanoi.” As Bus gathered up his charts and photographs, and the luncheon broke up, the President signaled me to remain behind.

  When the room emptied, LBJ asked what I thought of the briefing. I was well aware that Agency analysts often disagreed with the Pentagon on the relative success of bombing raids, code-named ROLLING THUNDER, and the most I might have said that day was that I was scarcely in a position to evaluate the photographs I had barely glimpsed. When LBJ felt strongly about making a point, he often moved within arm’s length of his interlocutor. As we got up from the table and walked toward the door, he put his hand on my shoulder. “If as Bus just said, the bombers demolished the grid and destroyed the generators, am I right in assuming that the lights must be out in downtown Hanoi?” He took another few steps before saying, “Let me know about that tomorrow.”

  On the drive back to the Agency, and while phrasing an urgent cable to our station in Saigon, I jotted down the message to my friend, whose station was indeed as remote from Hanoi as any the Agency had. I admitted that I had forgotten about it, and asked how the former chief of station had dealt with the cable.

  “As it happened,” he said, “I’d been cozying up to one of the local gentry who I’d heard had a relative in Hanoi representing some business or other. I took him to lunch, and by the time we’d finished the wine, he mentioned that his brother was in Hanoi. Over coffee, I decided to ask him to telephone his brother and inquire if the lights were on. He had a pretty good idea what my job was, but not much notion of how we went about our business. I could see his espionage fantasies fading, but the most he said was that if he telephoned halfway around the world, his brother would think he was crazy. The best I could do was suggest that he congratulate his brother on an imaginary anniversary or some such. A couple of hours later, I sent you an urgent cable. ‘As of twenty-three hours local, an untested source reported that the lights are on, repeat, the lights are on in Hanoi.’ ”

  —

  Vietnam was my nightmare for a good ten years. Like an incubus, it involved efforts which were never to seem successful, and demands which could never be met but which were repeated, doubled, intensified, and redoubled. It seemed I would never be free of it. Vietnam was invariably first and foremost with both Presidents Johnson and Nixon. On many occasions President Johnson would interrupt a discussion of an important problem in another area to press me for more intelligence on Vietnam. I recall Nixon saying, “Look, don’t talk to me about this, that, and the other thing. There’s one number one problem hereabouts and that’s Vietnam—get on with it.”

  Vietnam was not new to us. An OSS parachute mission had effected contact with Ho Chi Minh and a coalition of resistance groups known as the Vietminh as early as March 1945. The OSS team was withdrawn after the Japanese surrender, and the contacts with the communist-led Vietminh lapsed. Some of the Americans who dealt closely with Ho in those early days saw him as a nationalist and idealist, a person whom the United States might profitably have supported. Ho’s efforts to maintain his contact with American authorities were ignored and letters from Ho to President Truman were never answered. The fact that Ho was a proclaimed communist obscured the possibility that U.S. support for Vietnam’s independence from France, and our economic help, might have provided the opportunity to influence the political orientation of his government. At the time, there were indications that Ho’s passionate nationalism might have been nurtured to the point of overriding his communist convictions.

  French Indochina was far from center stage in the months that followed the German and Japanese surrenders. The obvious problems with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had deflected interest from the lesser countries in the Far East, and General Douglas MacArthur’s wartime refusal to allow OSS to operate in any of the areas under his command meant that there were few residual, in-place assets throughout the entire area.

  The Japanese had moved into the French colony of Vietnam in 1940 with the concurrence of the Vichy French government. Throughout much of the war, the Vietminh was organized and led by Ho Chi Minh and Vietnamese communists. When the war ended, the French recognized Vietnam as a free state within the French Indochina federation but failed to implement substantive changes in the country’s colonial status. This was not acceptable to the Vietnamese, and the Vietminh rallied the nationalists to resist French rule. Guerrilla warfare continued until 1949, when the French ordained an ostensibly independent Republic of Vietnam within the French Union. The Vietminh saw this as another half measure and intensified its guerrilla operations. It wanted genuine independence and would accept nothing less.

  The struggle between the Vietminh and the French forces ended in May 1954 when, after two months of siege, the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu surrendered. In July, at a conference in Geneva, France and the Vietminh signed a cease-fire agreement, and established an International Control Commission to regulate the truce. The agreement specified the temporary division of Vietnam by means of a demilitarized zone running along the 17th parallel. The Communist Vietminh would govern the North, and the French-sponsored Emperor Bao Dai the South. National elections were to be held by July 1956. In the North, the Vietminh clamped down on the population, executed hundreds of anti-communists, and imprisoned even more dissidents. Thousands of non-communists streamed across the Demilitarized Zone to the South. There, a rigged election allowed a French-educated Vietnamese Catholic, Ngo Dinh Diem, to emerge as president of the Republic of Vietnam. Diem soon found reason not to push for the countrywide elections specified by the Geneva Conference and the North chose not to insist.

  As the communists consolidated their rule in North Vietnam, they initiated a vigorous, underground political subversion campaign in the South. This was supported by the Viet Cong, a strongly motivated paramilitary force largely infiltrated from North Vietnam. The political turmoil and the murderous Viet Cong activity paralleled the sharp increase in the American commitment to the government of South Vietnam.

  When I became DCI in 1966, I first had to cope personally with the reality that the Agency bore two quite different responsibilities in Vietnam. The task of our analysts in the Directorate for Intelligence was to judge the success or lack thereof of the U.S. military and civilian activities designed to win the war. The mission of the Directorate for Plans was to spy upon and penetrate North Vietnam; to monitor and penetrate the Viet Cong operations in South Vietnam; to train the South Vietnamese in counterinsurgency techniques; and, at the district level, to go all-out to maintain the conviction that there was—in the worn phrase of those days—light at the end of the tunnel.

  As early as 1961, President Kennedy was determined to bolster the failing government of Ngo Dinh Diem with strong U.S. military and civilian support. It was some two years before it became apparent that irrespective of U.S. counsel and support, Diem was determined to go his own way.

  From the outset, the intelligence directorate and the Office of National Estimates held a pessimistic view of the military developments. The operations personnel—going full blast in the effort to penetrate the North and to persuade the South Vietnamese that their future depended upon the government of South Vietnam—remained convinced that the war could be won. Without this conviction, the operators could not have continued their difficult face-to-face work with the South Vietnamese, whose lives were often at risk. In Washington, I fe
lt like a circus rider standing astride two horses, each for the best of reasons going its own way.

  A few weeks after my appointment as DCI, we completed a 250-page study, “The Vietnamese Communists’ Will to Persist,” which contained 50 pages of tables, charts, and graphs. It was classified Top Secret, with maximum hold-down security code words added. The document went directly to the President and secretaries of state and defense. The most important finding was: “Nothing happening to the Vietnamese Communists as of mid-1966 is bad enough to make them stop fighting.”

  I knew that President Johnson was hungry for every scrap of solid data that would suggest our policies were working, and realized that this assessment could only add to the, perhaps literally, heart-rending pressures he was under. The fact that he never mentioned the document to me meant that this was one of his devices for keeping information close to his chest and using it as he saw fit. My conviction that he had factored the information and conclusions into his own appreciation of the Vietnam dilemma seemed confirmed when a few days later Walt Rostow, the national security advisor, telephoned to say that LBJ wanted me to brief Senators Mike Mansfield, Richard Russell, and J. William Fulbright on the study’s findings.

  We met in Senator Mansfield’s office in the Senate. After presenting the core of the study orally, I handed each of the senators a summary of the key points so that they could read together precisely the language that was used in the study. It was soon clear that nothing in the document would change their positions. Senator Fulbright allowed that we should not become involved in what he believed was a civil war. Senator Russell stated that he would by himself “have come to essentially the same conclusions” as those of the study. Senator Mansfield’s only comment was that he was particularly pleased that the Agency had “presented the President with such an objective and thorough report.” No one had changed his views, but the President had played the game fairly, and given the senators an objective, if painful, independent analysis.

  This episode was one of many that underlined my appreciation, or perhaps understanding, of the impossible problems President Johnson faced and the manner in which he coped with the running of an ugly war. It was at about this time that my deputy, Vice Admiral Rufus L. Taylor, testifying before Congress, mentioned civilian casualties as the result of our bombing military and industrial targets in North Vietnam. The following day, I saw the President on some other matter. As LBJ and I moved along the walkway from his office, he clasped my elbow and said, “The next time you or one of your fellas plans to mention civilian casualties in North Vietnam, I want you both to come down and have a drink with me before you go to testify on the Hill.” There was no more sensitive subject for President Johnson than civilian casualties in that war.

  In 1967, I caught another glimpse of LBJ in action when Senator George Aiken of Vermont, a venerable congressional landmark, and a longtime close friend of the President, suddenly found the White House door slammed shut. The senator, who was noted for his outspoken opinions, had made the mistake of publicly advising LBJ to “declare victory in Vietnam and get out.” He was never again invited to the White House. Sometime later I asked Leonard Marks, LBJ’s personal lawyer for twenty-five years and head of the United States Information Agency (USIA) under him, if this gossip could possibly be accurate.

  “Oh, yes,” said Leonard. “Let me tell you what happened to me. One morning while LBJ was still dressing and I was discussing a business matter he had called me about, LBJ abruptly said, ‘Leonard, you look as if you have something on your mind, you’re suddenly so silent.’

  “ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I was thinking about advising you to declare victory in Vietnam and get out.’ Whereupon, the President stared at me for a few moments and then thundered, ‘Get out, get out!’ I gathered up my papers and departed. That was the last I heard from the White House—even notices of NSC and cabinet meetings stopped coming. Finally, I mentioned to my wife that I had about decided to resign since I was obviously completely out of favor. Dorothy’s advice was to be patient, that LBJ was known on occasion to change his mind. A few days later, a phone call from Lady Bird invited us to a surprise birthday party for the President. As we went through the receiving line, I was startled to hear LBJ turn to another guest and extol the way I was running USIA.

  “Sometime after that, I was bold enough to ask the President why he had been so rough on me. He shook his head, and said, ‘You know, I secretly agreed with you and Aiken, but I knew I could not go that route without being torn apart by the Kennedys.’ ”

  One day at lunch with Bob Strauss at the Metropolitan Club, I asked the Democratic oracle if he experienced anything like the way LBJ had treated Marks. “Of course,” Bob said. “LBJ felt let down when someone he liked and trusted seemed to undermine his resolve not to let the U.S. be defeated.”

  Whatever reason LBJ had for pursuing the war as he did—and he seemed to have several reasons which he used selectively with different audiences—it is my hunch that he was driven by the heartfelt belief that he could not let the country fail. He simply could not tolerate the thought of being the President who presided over the first military defeat in American history.

  Lingering in the background to some of the foreign affairs thinking during that turbulent time was President Eisenhower’s belief in the “domino theory,” which was valid in Europe during Hitler’s early foreign policy successes, but to me seemed much less apposite in Southeast Asia. This, plus an overwrought concern for how China and the USSR might react in various circumstances, such as the U.S. launching a major ground attack on North Vietnam, led LBJ and his most senior advisors to take the greatest care in any initiatives. The prospect of possibly widening the area of hostilities was always present in LBJ’s thinking. This resulted in the President feeling himself confined as well as confronted.

  President Kennedy’s supporters were much given to shaking their heads and opining that JFK would early on have withdrawn from Vietnam. That theory flies in the face of JFK’s relentless determination to oust Castro and his government. In relative terms, once Cuba was free of nuclear weapons, there was little strategic comparison between the U.S. stake in Vietnam and the annoying Castro problem. What at the time appeared to me to be an excessive concern with Castro would surely have paled had JFK lived to face a conspicuous defeat in Vietnam.

  In August 1968, I sent President Johnson an evaluation of the effects of the bombing of North Vietnam. The document stated that since March 1967 the Air Force had flown some ten thousand bombing runs over North Vietnam, a figure that nearly doubled those undertaken in 1966. After noting that these raids had increased hardship, and economic and logistics problems in the North, the report concluded that Hanoi still had managed to meet its essential needs, to continue the fighting in South Vietnam, and to move vital military and economic traffic.

  The domino theory “believers” who cautioned that if South Vietnam fell to communism, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos would topple in turn effectively drowned out those who disagreed. It was in this atmosphere that I asked one of our most sophisticated analysts, John Huizenga, chief of the Office of National Estimates staff, to prepare an assessment of the U.S. stake in the Vietnam conflict. He titled the paper “Implications of an Unfavorable Outcome in Vietnam,” and without indicating his purpose, interviewed some thirty of the most informed persons in the Agency. In my cover letter to the President, dated some two weeks after the bombing assessment, I stated that although there was considerable diversity of view as to details and degrees of emphasis in this study, “there was much fuller agreement among those consulted than might have been expected on so difficult a subject.” I explained that the paper was not an argument for or against ending the war, but an effort to assess the consequences of any unfavorable outcome for American policy and interests as a whole.

  The thirty-three-page paper summarized the discussion with these assessments: an unfavorable outcome would be a major setback to the reputation of U.S. power and would to
some degree influence and prejudice our other interests to a degree not easily foreseen; the net effects would probably not be permanently damaging to this country’s ability to play its role as a world power; the worst potential damage would “be of the self-inflicted kind; internal dissension would limit our future ability to use our power and resources wisely and to full effect, and lead to a loss of confidence by others in our capacity for leadership”; the “destabilizing effects would be greatest in the immediate area of Southeast Asia,” and “similar effects would be unlikely elsewhere or could be more easily contained.”

  The document closed with this observation. “If the analysis here advances the discussion at all, it is in the direction of suggesting that the risks [in an unfavorable outcome] are probably more limited and controllable than most previous argument has indicated.”

  I was fully aware that this document was as politically explosive as any we had ever prepared and took care that it got to President Johnson in a sealed envelope, with the blunt warning, “The attached paper is sensitive, particularly if its existence [emphasis added] were to leak.” The intensity of the conflicting views on the conduct and purposes of the war were such that I wanted to be sure that LBJ would personally be responsible for any further dissemination, even to Dean Rusk, Bob McNamara, and General Wheeler. The mere rumor that such a document existed would in itself have been political dynamite.

  President Johnson never mentioned the document to me, nor, to my knowledge, did he raise it with anyone else. As Bob McNamara rather politely pointed out, he first saw the document, which had been declassified, when he was researching his book.* Bob agrees with me in doubting that LBJ ever showed it to anyone.

  I have always concurred with Harry Truman’s conviction that the buck stops at the President’s desk, but I must doubt that LBJ’s persistent determination to keep not one but a number of “hole cards” to himself, concealed from his closest and most trusted advisors, was an effective, or even acceptable, way to discharge his office. As much as I liked and admired him, I must note that the political habits ingrained by his experience in local politics and in Congress served to diminish his acceptance of advice and counsel from which he and the country would have profited. The sad fact is that the President did not explore the likely consequences of an unfavorable end to the war in Vietnam even when they were presented to him as a reasonable gamble.