A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

by Neil Sheehan

  Joseph Alsop, the newspaper columnist and journalist of the American Establishment, was already inside the chapel. He was sitting in one of the center pews on the left, dressed in a sober blue suit made by his English tailor, with a matching polka-dot bow tie and a white shirt. John Kennedy had once displayed his esteem for Alsop’s advice and friendship by stopping at Alsop’s Georgetown home for a bowl of turtle soup on the night of his inauguration in 1961. It was fitting that Alsop should attend Vann’s funeral. He was a grandnephew of Theodore Roosevelt, an instigator and captain in battle in the Spanish-American War at the turn of the century. That “splendid little war,” as a friend and collaborator of Roosevelt had pronounced it at the time, had gained the United States the Philippines, made America a power in the Pacific, and started the nation on the course to Vietnam. Alsop was a faithful scion of the Anglo-Saxon elite of the Northeast that had determined the standards of taste, morality, and intellectual respectability for the rest of the country. He had given his professional life to public battle for the expansionist foreign policy his forebears had conceived. He regarded Vietnam as a test of the will and ability of the United States to sustain that policy and had been undeviating in his advocacy of the war. At sixty-one he remained the man of contrasts he had always been. A bulldoggish face belied his slight frame, and the many lines and wrinkles of his face were exaggerated by large, round, dark horn-rimmed glasses. He was an aesthete who collected French furniture and antique Chinese porcelain and Japanese lacquer; an accomplished amateur historian of art and archaeology and the ancient civilizations of Greece and the Middle East; a man of kindness, loyalty, and consideration to his friends and relatives—the godfather of nearly thirty of their children. In his professional life, however, he was the ferocious combatant his granduncle had been. He did not see those who disagreed with him as merely incorrect or misguided. He depicted them as stupid men who acted from petty or selfish motives. In the final years of Vann’s life, Alsop had been his principal champion in the press. Alsop had come to have a singular affection for this Virginia cracker who so differed from him in background and personality. He had felt toward Vann a sense of comradeship.

  Beside Alsop, wearing the three silver stars of a lieutenant general on the epaulets of his dark green Army tunic, was another warrior whom Alsop admired, William DePuy. Bill DePuy was also a slight man, but his features at fifty-two were the tawny, hard ones of a soldier who enjoys his trade and keeps himself fit for it. He had been a model of the generation of majors and lieutenant colonels who had led the battalions in Europe during World War II and then gone to war in Vietnam as generals accustomed to winning. He combined intelligence and skill at articulating his ideas with an impetuous self-confidence and courage. He had been convinced of the invincibility and universal application of the system of warfare the U.S. Army had derived from World War II. The system consisted of building a killing machine that subjected an enemy to the prodigious firepower that American technology provided. DePuy had been the main architect of the building and deployment of the machine in Vietnam. He had been chief of operations on Westmoreland’s staff in 1965 when Lyndon Johnson had persevered in Kennedy’s commitment and embarked upon a full-scale war. DePuy had planned the strategy of attrition that was supposed to achieve victory over the Vietnamese Communists. The machine was going to decimate the Viet Cong guerrillas and kill off the troops of the North Vietnamese Army faster than the men in Hanoi could send them down the Ho Chi Minh Trail into the South. The machine was going to make the Vietnamese soldiers on the Communist side die until the will of the survivors and their leaders was broken. Westmoreland had rewarded DePuy for his talent at strategic planning with the leadership of the 1st Infantry Division, “the Big Red One.” DePuy had set himself apart from his fellow generals by turning the firepower of the machine loose with even more lavishness than they did and by ruthlessly dismissing any subordinate commander who did not meet his standard of aggressiveness in battle. He and Vann had clashed because Vann had considered the war-of-attrition strategy the cause of needless death and destruction and a waste of American soldiers and munitions. Vann had been particularly contemptuous of DePuy’s practice of it. From Washington in 1972, however, DePuy watched Vann wield the firepower of the artillery, the helicopter gunships, the jet fighter-bombers, and the B-52 Stratofortresses to beat back the North Vietnamese Army at Kontum. When Vann was killed, DePuy paid him a DePuy tribute. “He died like a soldier,” DePuy said, and came to sit at his funeral alongside their mutual advocate, Joseph Alsop.

  Senator Edward Kennedy was late. He got to the funeral shortly before the service was to begin at 11:00 A.M. He entered the chapel as unostentatiously as was possible for a Kennedy—by having one of the ushers seat him in a pew in the back. The last of the Kennedy brothers had turned against the war that his elder brother John had set the nation to fight. He had not kept the faith, as Vann had, with the call of his brother’s inaugural address, which was engraved on the granite of John Kennedy’s tomb at Arlington: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to insure the survival and success of liberty.” Liberty as defined by John Kennedy and the statesmen of his Presidency had meant an American-imposed order in Kennedy’s “New Frontier” beyond America’s shores. The price of trying to organize the world had been the war in Vietnam, and that price had gone too high for Edward Kennedy to bear. His brother Robert had also begun to turn against the war before he too had been assassinated and buried in a simple grave near John’s elaborate tomb. Edward Kennedy and John Vann had become friends, because Edward Kennedy had shared Vann’s concern for the anguish of the Vietnamese peasantry and had, like Vann, attempted to persuade the U.S. government to wage war with reason and restraint. Edward Kennedy had made it his special mission to alleviate the suffering of the civilian war wounded and the peasants who had been reduced to homeless refugees. He had traveled to Vietnam to see their plight, had held Senate hearings, and had brought political pressure to bear for more humane conditions in the refugee camps, for adequate hospitals, and for an end to the indiscriminate bombing and shelling of the countryside. He and Vann had corresponded, and Vann had briefed him in Vietnam and passed him information to help exert more influence on the administration in Washington.

  Daniel Ellsberg, the turncoat knight of the crusade, was sitting in the second pew just behind Vann’s family at the right front of the chapel. He had flown to the funeral from Los Angeles, where his lawyers were engaged in pre trial maneuvering. He was a pariah to those within the closed society of government secrecy, who had once considered him a valued member of their order. He was a traitor who had violated their code of morality and loyalty. Some resented the conspicuous seat he occupied in the chapel. He did not appear the pariah. He still dressed like one of them, as he had learned to do at Harvard. His suit was a conservative three-button model, a blue pinstripe with a matching striped shirt and an equally conservative foulard tie in a narrow knot. At forty-one he had let his hair grow from the crew-cut style he had worn when he had first met Vann in Vietnam seven years earlier. The frizzly, gray-black curls framed his high forehead and gentled the angular features of his lean and tanned face.

  Ellsberg was a complicated man. The son of middle-class Jewish parents who had converted to Christian Science, he was an intellectual and a man of action. His mind had surpassing analytical ability. His ego was so forceful it sometimes got out of control. His emotions were in conflict. He was at once a florid romantic and an ascetic with a pained conscience. What he believed, he believed completely and sought to propagate with missionary fervor. He had benefited from the social democracy practiced by the American Establishment by obtaining an education that had qualified him for a position of eminence in its new state, the great web of military and civilian bureaucracies under the presidency that World War II had created. A competitive scholarship funded by the Pepsi-Cola Company h
ad put him through Harvard. He had graduated in 1952 summa cum laude, and had been given a fellowship to continue his studies for a year at Cambridge University in England. He had then demonstrated his militancy by serving the better part of three years as an infantry officer in the Marine Corps. Harvard had selected him while he was still in the Marines to be a junior member of its Society of Fellows, the most illustrious assemblage of young scholars in American academia, so that he could earn his doctorate. From Harvard he had joined the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California, the brain trust of the Air Force, and had helped to perfect plans for nuclear war against the Soviet Union, China, and the other Communist states. He had been permitted to learn the nation’s most highly classified secrets. His performance at Rand had been rewarded by a position in Washington as the special assistant to the Pentagon’s chief for foreign policy, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.

  In 1965 his intense desire for confrontation in the American cause had led him to volunteer to fight in Vietnam as a Marine company commander. When told that he ranked too high in the bureaucracy for such mundane duty, he had found another way to the war. He had gone as a member of the new team Lansdale had organized when Lansdale had returned to Vietnam in 1965 to try to reform the Saigon regime and devise an effective pacification program. Two years later, Ellsberg had gone back to the Rand Corporation from Vietnam dispirited by an unhappy love affair and ill from an attack of hepatitis. He had been discouraged too by the repetitive violence of the war of attrition Westmoreland was pursuing and by the unwillingness of the U.S. leadership to adopt an alternative strategy that he believed was the only way to justify the death and destruction and to win the war. The Tet 1968 Offensive had turned discouragement into disillusion. His inability to bring about a change had destroyed his faith in the wisdom of the system he served. He had concluded that the violence in Vietnam was senseless and therefore immoral. His conscience had told him that he had to stop the war. During the fall of 1969 he had begun covertly photocopying the top-secret 7,000-page Pentagon Papers archive on Vietnam and started an antiwar crusade with a public letter to the press demanding the withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Vietnam within a year. After the New York Times had published the secrets of the Pentagon archive in a series of articles in June and July 1971, Ellsberg had been indicted at the order of Richard Nixon, who intended to send him to prison for as many years as possible. Ellsberg, the man who had staked his life on a career in the service of a power he had thought was innately good, had come to see buried the friend he had also lost to this war.

  Ellsberg was sitting with the family because Mary Jane, Vann’s wife of twenty-six years until their divorce eight months earlier, had asked him to do so. She needed the strength of his friendship at this time and she valued the calming influence he had on Jesse, her twenty-one-year-old son, who was sitting next to Ellsberg in the second pew. She had also asked Ellsberg to sit with the family as an act of defiance. She intended to have her gesture say to those in the chapel who resented Ellsberg’s presence that she admired his actions against the war and shared his views. The previous year she had said as much to two agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who had come to the family home in Littleton, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, to question her about Ellsberg’s relationship with Vann.

  Mary Jane considered herself John Vann’s widow despite the divorce. The divorce had been a gesture of frustration, a self-defeating attempt to strike back at him for a marriage that had become one of form rather than substance after Vann had gone back to Vietnam in 1965, this time to stay. He had been the love of her youth, her first man, the father of her five children—four sons who were with her in the chapel and a married daughter who could not come to Washington because she had just given birth to Vann’s first granddaughter. Mary Jane had clung to the marriage as long as she could. She could not imagine loving any other man the way she had loved him. The raising of their children and the keeping together of a marriage had been a calling as central to her background and character as this war had been to his.

  Her father had been a proper family man, the chief court reporter in Rochester, New York. Her mother had possessed a sense of respectability that had approached a passion. When Mary Jane had married John at the age of eighteen, the year after her graduation from high school, she had been slightly plump, yet quite attractive. Her brunette hair had been lovely in the wavy set of the day, her hazel eyes pleasing, her mouth nicely formed. Her values had been those of family, church, and country, as defined for her by her parents and the other figures of authority in her middle-class world. A calm marriage and a warm family life had been the dream of her maiden years. Because she had known nothing but security in her childhood, she had expected to find it as well in marriage and motherhood. She had not found security in marriage, however hard she had sought it. The war and the want of a father who was there when needed had also profoundly disturbed Mary Jane’s second son, Jesse. The conventions of patriotism and the socially approved behavior that she had thought beyond question had threatened Jesse and clashed with her vocation of motherhood.

  At forty-four, Mary Jane Vann was still a pleasant woman to look at when she took the trouble to dress nicely and to make up her face and set her hair, as she had done on this funeral morning. It was ironic, she thought, that Christmas was the last time John had come home. Christmas was always when she most wanted him to be at home, because they had met at Christmas and their first son, John Allen, had been born on a Christmas morning. She remembered all the Christmas days when he had not been there and she had needed him. The day she learned of the crash she had looked through the house for his dress uniform, that dark blue uniform with the gold trim that the soldiers of the honor guard were wearing today. He had once told her to dress his body in it if he was killed. She had not been able to find it. Perhaps he had taken it to Vietnam. When she got to Washington they had told her that the casket was sealed and that she would not have been able to bury him in his dress blues anyway. She remembered that he had kissed her on the cheek that last Christmas, even though they were divorced, instead of shaking hands when he said goodbye as he had been doing for a number of years before.

  There was silence in the chapel now. The organist had stopped playing. It was time for the service to begin. From outside, Mary Jane heard the shouts of commands and the sounds of rifles being slapped by white-gloved hands as the honor guard came to present arms. This was her first military funeral, but she had been an Army wife. She knew what those shouts and those sounds meant. They were bringing John into the chapel in his coffin. He really is dead, she thought. She began to sob quietly.

  The coffin, shrouded in a flag and resting waist-high on a wheeled frame, was rolled down the center aisle by two soldiers from the honor-guard regiment who were acting as ushers. Eight official pallbearers followed it in two columns of four. Ellsberg looked at them. Three he did not know. Two of these were civilian officials from AID, and the third was a South Vietnamese army colonel who was the military attache at the embassy and was representing his government. Ellsberg recognized the other five prominent men. In his grief and bitterness he remarked to himself that they were appropriate pallbearers for Vietnam.

  Three of them were generals in white summer dress uniforms. The first was Westmoreland, now chief of staff of the Army, a position to which President Johnson had elevated him in 1968 after relieving him of the Vietnam command. He walked at the front of the right file, the place of highest rank, as protocol required. When the United States Army had gone to war in Vietnam in full array in 1965, Westmoreland had seemed, in his handsomeness and proud demeanor, to represent the Army’s pride and accomplishment. Today, seven years later, still outwardly the model of a general at fifty-eight, he represented as chief of staff the institution of the Army, which was claiming Vann in death as one of its own. It was an Army that sensed its defeat in Vietnam, although it did not understand the reasons for its defeat. Westmoreland would ne
ver understand. The Army had spent so much of its pride in Vietnam that it could not help but hope for the ultimate vindication of its aims there. Vann had implicitly been seeking to vindicate those aims. In his last battle in the mountains of the Central Highlands he had been trying to accomplish with the South Vietnamese Army, the protégé of the U.S. Army, what the Army had been unable to accomplish by itself. The Army also knew that Vann had never left it in spirit. He had finally become the fighting general he had always wanted to be, despite his nominal civilian status, and in his refusal to accept defeat he had embodied the Army’s ideal of leadership.

  Gen. Bruce Palmer, Jr., the vice chief of staff, a contemporary of Westmoreland—a fellow member of the West Point class of 1936—walked at the head of the left file of pallbearers. He had served in Vietnam as one of Westmoreland’s deputies, after having commanded the expeditionary force that President Johnson had dispatched to the Dominican Republic in 1965 to prevent that small Caribbean country from going the way of Fidel Castro’s Cuba. The paratroopers and Marines under Palmer’s command had made it possible for Ellsworth Bunker, currently the U.S. ambassador in Saigon, to reimpose on the Dominican Republic a government that would function as a surrogate for American interests. Palmer had been one of Vann’s Army patrons since the mid-1950s, when Palmer had been a colonel commanding the 16th Infantry Regiment in Germany and Vann had been a captain in charge of his heavy mortar company. Vann had been the best of his company commanders, if the most difficult to handle, Palmer remembered. Four days prior to Vann’s death, Palmer sent him a note praising his leadership at Kontum. Vann received and read the note just before he died.