Eisenhower has been praised by some historians for his prudence in keeping the United States out of the Indochina quagmire. But this analysis largely conflates his overall restraint in foreign policy—including in the broader Cold War—with his more aggressive approach to crises in the Third World, including in Vietnam. In 1954, he and Dulles were prepared to intervene directly to save the French position in the Indochina War, and came close to doing so; in the years thereafter, they gambled that they could build a new state in southern Vietnam with a mercurial and unproven leader. As the Saigon government skidded and careened down treacherous roads in the late 1950s, Eisenhower, his attention mostly on other foreign policy concerns and his trusted Dulles no longer by his side as of early 1959, ordered no reevaluation, even though an insurgency was under way in South Vietnam and even though Diem continued business as usual, rejecting all calls to enact far-reaching reforms and insisting on framing the problem as primarily military in nature.
As the Viet Cong attacks increased in frequency and intensity, Eisenhower indeed deepened U.S. military involvement in a way that had extremely important implications for the future. In mid-1959, the White House authorized American advisers to accompany South Vietnamese Army battalions on operational missions to offer combat guidance. Though the advisers were still forbidden to enter “actual combat,” the change was highly significant—hitherto they had been confined to corps and division headquarters, training commands, and logistic agencies and had been obligated to remain behind whenever their units were on patrol. Now they would be in the field, in harm’s way, their “advising” duties greatly expanded.
And still the challenges only mounted. Already in April 1959, before infiltration from the North had even begun, the CIA could report that the Viet Cong had achieved de facto control over much of Ca Mau in the far south. By the end of the year, sizable areas of South Vietnam—including some very close to Saigon—were under Communist control. “If you drew a paint brush across the South,” an intelligence agent told Senator Mansfield at the time, “every hair of the brush would touch [an insurgent].”56 The Viet Cong campaign of assassination, targeting village leaders and other notables, picked up pace in 1960, yielding more than two hundred monthly killings in February, March, and April, and a total for the year of more than sixteen hundred. The Central Highlands, hitherto firmly in government hands, was more and more up for grabs. That November, Diem barely quashed a coup attempt by disaffected ARVN generals upset by his cronyism and his management of the war effort.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff, in belated acknowledgment that the principal and most immediate security threat came not from the North Vietnamese military but from the southern insurgency, now outlined a plan to fight an antiguerrilla, or counterinsurgency, war in the south. Finalized in late 1960, the strategy operated from several core assumptions, none of them new: that Diem’s government at present offered “the best hope” for defeating the Viet Cong; that Diem in fact could cope with the Communist threat provided that “necessary corrective measures were taken”; and that the United States had a vital stake in helping to eradicate the insurgency. The plan provided for an increase in the size of the South Vietnamese Army and the Civil Guard, to be financed mostly by Washington. In return for this assistance, the Saigon regime would implement a series of measures designed to achieve and maintain economic and political stability and thereby win the hearts and minds of the general population. Intelligence and counterintelligence operations would be better coordinated, and more resources would be devoted to psychological warfare and civic action programs. Overall, the scheme, which had White House support, gave continued priority to the military dimensions of the problem, much to the collective satisfaction of MAAG and the Ngo family.57
VII
THERE OCCURRED IN THAT FATEFUL YEAR OF 1959 ONE OTHER EVENT that, with the knowledge of what was to come, perhaps looms largest of all.
In the early evening of July 8, eight American advisers stationed at a camp serving the South Vietnamese Seventh Infantry Division near Bien Hoa, twenty miles north of Saigon, gathered for dinner in the usual fashion. Earlier that afternoon, Master Sergeant Chester Ovnand, forty-four, had finished a letter to his wife in Copperas Cove, Texas, and dropped it in the mess hall mailbox. Ovnand had just about completed his tour of duty and was looking forward to returning home. Major Dale Buis of Imperial Beach, California, age thirty-eight, had arrived in Bien Hoa just two days before and during the afternoon had shown his new colleagues pictures of his three young sons. Tall and strong, Buis had played high school football and was known around the camp as a good-humored prankster.
The quarters were situated about a hundred yards from a river, in a grassy meadow ringed by a simple two-strand barbed-wire fence. On duty in front of the building were two South Vietnamese Army guards, who faced a road on the side away from the river. As the dishes were cleared, two of the officers drifted away to play tennis, while the others settled in to watch a movie, The Tattered Dress starring Jeanne Crain. At previous film screenings, the guards had been known to leave their posts to view the film through the windows of the gray stucco dining hall, a fact no doubt duly noted by the two Vietnamese women from the nearby town who usually attended but were not present this time (and who were later alleged to be Viet Cong agents).
At some point after the opening credits rolled, six Viet Cong guerrillas crept up from the river and slipped through the fence undetected. Two edged to the front of the building to cover the guards, two positioned a French-made submachine gun in the mess hall’s rear window, and two placed their gun muzzles against the pantry screen. When Ovnand snapped on the lights to change reels, the guerrillas opened fire. Ovnand and Buis were hit and died within minutes, the former after crawling up a flight of stairs. Captain Howard Boston of Blairsburg, Iowa, was seriously wounded but survived. One of the guards was killed, as were a Vietnamese cook and his eight-year-old son. The others in the room might have met the same fate, had not Major Jack Hellet of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, leaped across the room to turn out the lights—and had not one of the guerrillas mishandled a homemade bomb (two milk cans filled with explosive and welded together) and blown himself up. Within minutes, Vietnamese troops arrived, but the remaining attackers had gotten away.58
Ovnand’s wife, Mildred, was sipping coffee and watching NBC’s Today show in her small brick Texas home when she got the first inkling of her husband’s death. The show’s correspondent announced that two U.S. servicemen had been killed outside Saigon. Soon thereafter the phone rang. “I heard a man say, ‘I’m with the AP in Dallas,’ ” she recalled years later. “When did you first hear about your husband?”59
In Imperial Beach, eight-year-old Kurt Buis was darting about the house with his brothers, six and four, when the word arrived. “I only knew something awful had happened,” he said later. “A doctor came and gave my mother a sedative.” Then an aunt arrived and took the boys for a drive to give them the news.60
Ovnand and Buis were not the first Americans to die by hostile fire in Vietnam. Peter Dewey of the Office of Strategic Services had been killed by the Viet Minh in September 1945, it will be recalled, and pilots James McGovern and Wallace Buford were shot down after delivering supplies to the besieged French post at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. But Ovnand and Buis were the first to be killed in the Second Indochina War—or, in the official American euphemism for an undeclared war, the Vietnam Era. Theirs are the first two names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, at the apex, on Panel 1E, Row 1, directly below the large engraved “1959.”61
U.S. military officers and intelligence analysts in Saigon suspected immediately that the Bien Hoa attack exemplified an important transition in the conflict, from the serious yet irregular and piecemeal actions by the Viet Cong during the previous two years to a program of sustained and carefully coordinated terrorism and military action that would gain in intensity and size in the months and years to come. And so indeed it would be. A new chapter in the struggle fo
r Vietnam had begun.62
But in the United States, the event passed by largely unremarked, a seemingly minor incident in a faraway land. Time published a short three-paragraph account written by a newly arrived young reporter, Stanley Karnow, and there were brief mentions also in a few newspapers and on the Today show. That was all. The White House stayed silent, and few on Capitol Hill took notice.63
No one knew then, in the summer of 1959, that Bien Hoa would in a few years become a gigantic American base, complete with a seedy strip of brothels and bars. And no one knew then that Chester Ovnand and Dale Buis were merely the first of more than 58,000 Americans whose names would be etched on that stark and moving monument in the nation’s capital, its black granite walls gradually sunken within a gentle slope, within sight of the Lincoln Memorial.
EPILOGUE
DIFFERENT DREAMS, SAME FOOTSTEPS
ON JANUARY 20, 1961, JOHN F. KENNEDY TOOK THE OATH OF OFFICE as the thirty-fifth president of the United States. He was forty-three, the youngest man ever elected to the job. During the campaign, Kennedy had criticized Eisenhower’s foreign policy as unimaginative and stuck in the past, and once in office he surrounded himself with mostly young advisers of intellectual verve and sparkling résumés, who proclaimed they had fresh ideas for invigorating the nation. On Vietnam, however, as on most policy issues, continuity was the watchword in the early months. The Kennedy team, no doubt mindful of the fact that they had come in with the slimmest electoral majority of the twentieth century, undertook no wide-ranging discussion of the involvement they had inherited in Southeast Asia, no comprehensive review of options, no major analysis of the struggle’s importance to American national security. A White House aide of the time, when asked years later how the U.S. interest in Vietnam was defined in 1961, answered that “it was simply a given, assumed and unquestioned.” The given was that Ho Chi Minh could not be allowed to prevail in Vietnam, that the Saigon government must survive, that failure to thwart the Communists here would only make the task harder next time.1
The continuity was to be expected, of course. It’s the way of Washington, not least in the area of diplomacy and statecraft. A new administration comes to power, with so much to learn, so much to do, so many powerful constituencies to accommodate. Invariably, staying the course looks prudent and sensible, especially on second-tier policy issues that are not at the forefront of popular consciousness. At least for now. Later, when things have settled down a bit and everyone’s had a chance to read and digest the briefing papers, there will be ample time to reconsider options.
But Kennedy, more than most national political figures of the time, might have gone against the grain and ordered a full-scale review of Vietnam policy. For a decade, he had taken a special interest in the struggle there, and he was more informed about the issues on the ground than virtually any senior Democrat in Washington. More interesting, Kennedy had long shown a capacity for nuanced and independent thought on international affairs, not least on the Indochina conflict. Already in the autumn of 1951, during his visit to Vietnam, he had seen through the French expressions of optimism and bravado and voiced trenchant doubts about the ability of Paris—or, by extension, any outside force—to overcome Ho Chi Minh’s nationalist cause. To act “apart from and in defiance of innately nationalistic aims spells foredoomed failure,” JFK told a Boston audience a few days after returning home that fall, adding that a free election would in all likelihood go in favor of Ho and the Communists.2
Later in the decade, Kennedy moved closer to Cold War orthodoxy, as we have seen. He now spoke less and less of “nationalistic aims” and the French analogy and more of falling dominoes and the urgent need to thwart Communist aggression. But the skepticism did not go away; it was always there, just under the surface. Sometimes he expressed it openly, as in 1957, when he went well beyond official U.S. policy in supporting Algeria in her war of independence against France. “The most powerful single force in the world today,” JFK declared in a Senate speech on the North African crisis that summer, “is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile—it is man’s eternal desire to be free and independent.” Washington must respond effectively to this hunger, he went on, which meant urging Paris to pursue negotiations leading to Algerian independence.3 Both before and after becoming president, Kennedy showed an appreciation for the vicissitudes of history and—increasingly, as time wore on—for the limits of American power. From time to time, he expressed doubts about the ability of the West to use military means to solve Asian problems that were at root political in nature; on several occasions, and notably in the fall of 1961, he resisted aides’ calls for committing U.S. ground forces to Vietnam. He also deflected the departing Eisenhower’s urgings that he intervene militarily in Laos (“the key to the entire area of Southeast Asia,” Ike insisted), where the anti-Communist position had eroded significantly over the previous two years and where the DRV-supported Pathet Lao now seemed on the cusp of victory. And always the French experience gnawed at him, as when he confided to an aide, early in his presidency, “If [Vietnam] were ever converted into a white man’s war, we would lose it as the French had lost a decade earlier.”4
A commitment had been made, however, and Kennedy maintained it, as Richard Nixon, his Republican opponent in 1960, surely would have done had he won the election. Publicly, JFK and his aides voiced full-throated support for the Saigon regime and gave every indication that achieving victory in Vietnam was crucial to American interests. More than that, over the first year, as the Saigon government’s problems steadily deepened and the insurgency grew stronger, and while the president resisted options for even faster escalation, they dramatically increased the U.S. military commitment. Already in May 1961, Kennedy reported to Congress that four thousand local officials had been killed in South Vietnam in the previous year alone. In 1962, vast quantities of the best American weapons, jet fighters, helicopters, and armored personnel carriers arrived, along with thousands of additional military advisers. That year a full field command bearing the acronym MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) superseded MAAG (Military Assistance Advisory Group) with a three-star general, Paul D. Harkins, in command.
A secret U.S. war was under way. Ostensibly, Americans were serving purely as advisers and never engaging the Viet Cong except in self-defense; in reality, their involvement extended further—in the air as well as on the ground. “I’d heard stories that U.S. pilots were actually dropping bombs,” Associated Press bureau chief Malcolm Browne, who arrived in the fall of 1961, later recalled, so “I went out to Bien Hoa, the biggest military airfield in South Vietnam, to have a look. I was barred from entering but I watched from outside the perimeter fence and saw two-seat T-28s taking off with full racks of bombs. When they returned, I could see that their racks were empty and there were smoke stains behind the guns. As often as not, a Vietnamese was sitting in the back and the actual pilot was blond and blue-eyed and obviously not from Vietnam. By reporting that, I was threatened with expulsion. The official American line was that the U.S. role in Vietnam was subordinate to that of our Vietnamese ally.”5
The truth was plain to see. Homer Bigart, the venerable military correspondent of The New York Times, minced no words in a front-page article in February 1962. “The United States is involved in a war in Vietnam,” the piece began. “American troops will stay until victory.” Bigart noted the “passionate and inflexible” U.S. support for South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem and speculated that the United States “seems inextricably committed to a long, inconclusive war.” He quoted Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who on a visit to Saigon that month vowed that America would stand by Diem “until we win.”6
Never mind that a principal stated rationale for the containment policy in Asia, namely the need to check a worldwide Communist expansionist conspiracy directed from Moscow, demonstrably no longer pertained, if it ever had. For years, evidence had accumulated of a Sino-Soviet split; by 1960, Soviet econom
ic and military assistance to China had ceased, Soviet technicians had been withdrawn, the ideological war of words between Moscow and Beijing had become intense, and international Communism had become fragmented. U.S. intelligence analysts were well aware of these developments, yet at the highest levels, officials made few adjustments. In January 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara of the strategic advantages that could accrue to the “Sino-Soviet bloc” if the United States did not deepen her involvement in Indochina.7
By mid-1962, American military advisers in Vietnam numbered 8,000, by the end of the year over 11,000, and by the time of Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas in November 1963, almost 16,000. Just three weeks before the Dallas tragedy, Ngo Dinh Diem had himself been murdered along with his brother Nhu, after a U.S.-sanctioned coup d’état by dissident generals. The coup followed months of widespread anti-government agitation in urban as well as rural areas. Notably, Buddhist monks protesting the Roman Catholic Diem’s religious persecution poured gasoline over their robes and ignited themselves in the streets of Saigon. Intellectuals stepped up their long-standing complaints about government corruption and Diem’s penchant for concentrating power in the hands of family members, and they condemned his policy of jailing critics to silence them. Kennedy and his aides vacillated before determining that Diem and the influential Nhu should go.
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