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

by Neil Sheehan

  For every one of the regular visitors who saw the war as we did, there were others in the United States anxious to accept and defend the official view. The lack of precedent for such a wholesale failure by the military and political leadership of the country was too much for them to overcome. A famous foreign correspondent who had the professional stature that Halberstam lacked in 1963—Marguerite Higgins of the New York Herald Tribune—was an example. She had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1951 for her reporting in Korea, writing bravely of the debacles at the beginning of that war. The Joint Chiefs team had recommended encouraging “mature and responsible news correspondents” to go to Vietnam in order to correct the hysterical stories by the local reporters. Miss Higgins accordingly flew to Saigon in August at the urging of the Pentagon. During the approximately four weeks she spent in South Vietnam she filed a series of dispatches saying, in sum, that the Buddhist crisis was the invention of Machiavellian monks and gullible reporters, that General Harkins and the Diem regime were defeating the Viet Cong; and that “reporters here would like to see us lose the war to prove they’re right.”

  Joseph Alsop, who had not yet met Vann in 1963 and would not have approved of him if he had, flew out in September to accuse us of undermining Diem as some of the World War II correspondents in China had supposedly helped to undermine Chiang Kai-shek by calling attention to the corruption and incompetence in his regime. Our coverage amounted to “another of these egregious crusades/’ Alsop wrote in one of his columns. “The constant pressure of the reportorial crusade against the government has also helped mightily to transform Diem from a courageous, quite viable national leader into a man afflicted with a galloping persecution mania, seeing plots around every corner, and therefore misjudging everything.” Alsop accepted the Harkins-Krulak line that while the Buddhist crisis had caused political turmoil in the cities, the war in the countryside was progressing unaffected. We had, he said, erroneously painted “a dark, indignant picture” of the military situation. He suggested that we spend less time at the demonstrations and suicides and more at the “fighting front.” Halberstam thought his term a quaint one for the war we knew.

  Nevertheless, Halberstam was in serious trouble with his editors in New York. He was fighting for his professional life as well as to win a war. The Times did not believe in crusading journalism, and while Halberstam might have convinced some of the paper’s readers that he was correct about the regime and the war, he had not convinced his own superiors. The two senior news editors in New York, Turner Catledge, the managing editor, and his deputy, Clifton Daniel, who had married Margaret Truman, were Southerners and newspapermen of the Depression and World War II generation. They had no wish to see the Times used as a propaganda platform by the U.S. government. They enjoyed an occasional scrap with whichever administration was in office. Halberstam had forced the paper into a consistently adversarial position with the Kennedy administration. The decade of Vietnam was to change the attitudes of Catledge and Daniel. Both men were to become advocates of an aggressive and rigorously independent press, but in 1963 the adversarial role was new and they did not like it at all. The Times’ executives were also still feeling the pain of the controversy over Herbert Matthews’s sympathetic reporting of the pre-Communist phase of Castro’s revolution in Cuba. They were afraid that Halberstam might be bringing a similar scandal upon them. Diem’s supporters in the press, like Alsop with his echo of Chiang and the “Who Lost China?” witchhunts of the 1950s, did not hesitate to probe this fear. In early September the New York Journal-American and the other Hearst newspapers began to accuse Halberstam of being naive about Communism and preparing the way for a Vietnamese Fidel Castro.

  The doubts about Haiberstam’s reporting grew as one descended the news-editing chain of command at the Times, and at the lower level irritation reinforced the doubt. Haiberstam’s strengths as a journalist were his total commitment of time and energy to a story, the weight and quality of information that flowed from this commitment, and the speed with which he could write under deadline. During a three-week period in August and September the regime effectively denied us use of the telegraph office by imposing a censorship that let through nothing except propaganda. We had to send out all of our dispatches on commercial airliners and have them cabled from other Southeast Asian cities. On one morning four different articles totaling about 4,000 words came whirling out of Halberstam’s typewriter in time to make a noon flight from Tan Son Nhut—the main news story of the day, an article on a related development, a personality profile of a figure in the news that day, and an analysis for the “News of the Week in Review” section of the Sunday Times. The Times’ foreign news editor in 1963, Emanuel Freedman, and his senior copy desk editor, Nathaniel Gerstenzang, were clerkly men who had never been reporters. They had no sense of the tensions under which Halberstam was working, and instead of seeing Halberstam’s strengths, they saw his chronic shortcomings as a journalist—his run-on sentences, his mixed-up syntax, and his cabling at greater length than they thought a story warranted. Their own predilection for neatness led them to focus on the weaknesses, and so did the complaints from the copy desk editors, who had to struggle every evening to ready Halberstam’s dispatches for print.

  Strengthened by the irritation, the doubts came out in a rush when Marguerite Higgins arrived in Saigon and began to contradict everything Halberstam was saying. The foreign news desk badgered him with cables about her stories, the inquiries implying that she might be right and that he ought to hedge or correct what he had been reporting. Halberstam was furious and heartsick that after all these months his own editors did not believe him. He lost his temper completely. “Gerstenzang, if you mention that woman’s name to me one more time I will resign repeat resign and I mean it repeat mean it,” he cabled in response to yet another maddening inquiry. The New York editors did not want to transfer Halberstam out of Saigon or have him resign while the paper might be accused of moral cowardice, and so the inquiries about Miss Higgins’s stories stopped, but the doubts remained.

  A measure of how low Halberstam’s credibility was with his New York editors—and how high they held the credibility of government in 1963—came in late August when the regime staged a series of mass arrests and the U.S. Embassy and the CIA station gave the administration a version that was the opposite of what Halberstam reported. The State Department released the official version in Washington. The New York editors wanted to print the official version on the front page and to put Halberstam’s story inside the paper. His patron on the Times and the man who had hired him, Scotty Reston, then running the Washington bureau as well as writing his column, stopped them. He argued that they should not second-guess the man in the field. He persuaded them to run both versions side by side on the front page under the same headline with a statement below the headline explaining that the conflict reflected “the confused situation in South Vietnam.” The Times had never done anything like that before. Three days later other events forced the State Department to admit that the official version had been wrong.

  Halberstam’s personal behavior upset Catledge and Daniel in New York as much as the adversarial quality of his reporting. They heard about it through the newspaper grapevine and through informal complaints from officials in the State Department and the Pentagon. Adolph Ochs, the man who bought a bankrupt newspaper in 1896 and founded the modern New York Times, had consciously imitated The Times of London to the extent of creating a paper that provided respectable, as well as comprehensive and reliable, news. (“All the News That’s Fit to Print.”) In the early 1960s the newspaper as an institution still reflected the spirit of the apocryphal story of the English butler informing his titled employer that half a dozen reporters have arrived to interview him: “My lord, there are five men from the press waiting and a gentleman from The Times.” The New York Times did not attempt to control the private lives of its correspondents. The paper did want them to behave in public with a certain decorum. Times men were not supposed to car
ry on in Halberstam’s tempestuous manner.

  We all personalized the struggle, but Halberstam personalized it more than anyone else. While everyone felt contempt for Harkins, the rest of us observed civility and were polite to him. Halberstam was openly contemptuous. At the annual Fourth of July reception at the embassy residence, he refused to shake hands with the general, embarrassing Harkins, who was accustomed to a world where one concealed one’s hostilities.

  Richard Holbrooke, who was to become the youngest man ever to hold the office of assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, in the Carter administration fourteen years later at the age of thirty-five, remembered Halberstam on the subject of Harkins at dinner in a French restaurant in Saigon one night in the summer of 1963. Holbrooke was then a freshman Foreign Service officer assigned to a southern Delta province as a pacification advisor. Several of us had invited him to join us at one of the late dinners we often had after a long day. Halberstam began holding forth on what a swine Harkins was for faking reports and throwing away American and Vietnamese lives. As he talked he got angrier and his voice rose. He raised his big fist, banged it down on the table, and shouted his prosecutorial summation: “Paul D. Harkins should be court-martialed and shot!” Holbrooke looked slowly around the restaurant to see if anyone at another table might know him.

  There were no American conventions to restrain our confrontation with the regime. The Ngo Dinhs wanted to beat the monks and the Buddhist faithful who took to the streets with them, as Madame Nhu said, but they wanted to do their beating in the dark. The presence of foreign reporters gave the Buddhist leaders hope that if they continued their campaign, sympathetic officers in the ARVN might eventually move against the regime, or the revulsion in the United States and the rest of the world might drive the Kennedy administration into encouraging a coup. They knew by July that peace with the family, which had always seemed to be impossible, was certainly impossible now, and if enforced tranquillity was restored they would be imprisoned one by one. The monks and their ever-growing number of followers were, in any case, prepared to die to bring down the regime. “There is blood on the orange robes,” a monk would cry with one of the battery-powered portable loudspeakers which, along with mimeograph machines to print pamphlets, these antique-looking figures quickly caught on to using. The crowd would shout back its willingness to shed more for the cause.

  The Ngo Dinhs did not understand that each act of repression bred more followers for the Buddhists. They did understand that photographs, television film, and news stories of the repression and the fiery suicides were the worst kind of publicity for their interests. When the moment of truth came at a demonstration the monks and nuns and their lay followers would kneel in prayer on the pavement. The companies of special Combat Police in helmets and camouflage uniforms, trained and armed by the CIA to hunt down guerrillas in the hamlets, would storm into the kneeling figures, kicking and flailing. They would grab the girls in the white ao dais by their long black hair and smash their faces with billy clubs and pistol butts before tossing them into trucks to haul them off to jail. The family was reluctant to expel us as a group for fear of an outcry in Congress that might disrupt the military and economic aid on which the South depended and trigger a coup by desperate ARVN officers. They decided to try to frighten us into staying away from the demonstrations.

  We were waiting for a scheduled demonstration to begin at one of the small pagodas in the city on the morning of July 7 when half a dozen plainclothesmen from the Süreté jumped the AP’s Peter Arnett. The place was perfect for an ambush, because we were crowded, with the plainclothesmen and the uniformed Saigon police, into a narrow dirt alley that led from the main street to the pagoda. The Süreté men threw Arnett to the ground so that they could kick him in the kidneys with the pointed-toe shoes they wore in the Saigon-French fashion of the day. Halberstam charged with a bellow before they had an opportunity to hurt Arnett seriously. He knocked and tossed the lightly built Vietnamese aside and stood over Arnett, his grizzly-bear shoulders hunched and his great fists poised, yelling: “Get back, get back, you sons of bitches, or I’ll beat the shit out of you.” Several of us who were close to Arnett pulled him to his feet. Malcolm Browne managed to take a photograph of Arnett standing behind Halberstam for protection a moment later, just before another plainclothesman sneaked up behind Browne and smashed his camera with a rock. The rock did not damage the film inside. The Süreté men backed off. They apparently had orders not to use clubs, and they decided Halberstam was too much for them hand to hand. The uniformed police did not intervene to protect us. Arnett escaped with some cuts and bruises.

  He and Browne were summoned to a precinct headquarters the next day and interrogated for four hours before being released. The interrogators kept alleging that they had “attacked” the Süreté men. Several sources in the regime explained that the family was now considering the possibility of exploiting the incident to arrest Arnett and Browne and prosecute them for assault. The CIA picked up the same report from the police. A number of the regular visitors like Kalischer of CBS had also been in the alley leading to the pagoda and had seen the beating. They joined us in a telegram of protest to President Kennedy. The president responded by sending out Robert Manning, a former Time correspondent who was then assistant secretary of state for public affairs. A friendly, patient man who was to become editor-in-chief of Atlantic Monthly after his tour in government, Manning listened to our complaints about the assault and our other grievances and persuaded Diem not to proceed with any charges.

  The family temporarily stopped beating reporters and switched to the more sinister tactic of threatening assassination. With the Ngo Dinhs, especially Nhu and his wife, one could never be certain whether they were bluffing in a war of nerves or meant to carry out the threat. When Madame Nhu told an English correspondent, “Halberstam should be barbecued, and I would be glad to supply the fluid and the match,” one could know that her wish, at least, was genuine.

  Our first tip came from the police. The disaffection that had spread through most of the bureaucracy had also touched them. They would still execute orders from the palace to keep their jobs, but many were fearful of the future and, despite their acquaintanceship with moral filth, guilt-ridden. At a demonstration one day in late July a plainclothesman walked up to the Vietnamese television cameraman who worked for me, taking film for UPI Movietone News. “Tell your boss to be careful when he goes out at night,” he said. “We may get orders to kill him and make it look like the VC did it.”

  By this time Nguyen Ngoc Rao, the Vietnamese reporter in the UPI bureau, had developed excellent police sources. They told him that the Nhus had drawn up an assassination list. It included a number of reporters and senior ARVN officers and civilian Vietnamese intelligence officials who were considered disloyal and potential coup plotters. The Nhus were serious, the police said, and they might soon be instructed to carry out the killings. Halberstam and I were on the list. As they had nothing against us personally, the police officials advised Rao to warn us to take precautions. A couple of CIA sources passed along the same information, saying that several of their people were also on the list because the Nhus suspected them of fomenting plots.

  Halberstam and I were still reluctant to accept the threat as genuine, because we were already living with so much tension, when one of the Vietnamese intelligence officers on the list (he was ostensibly the regime’s deputy director general of information) confirmed it for us. He was a bachelor and a womanizer who frequented a nightclub that was a hangout for some of Saigon’s gangsters. They said they had been hired by the Nhus to conduct possible assassinations and that he was one of their potential targets. Would he please be careful, the gangsters said. He was a friend and they would not like to have to kill him.

  The White House announced in July that Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., would replace Frederick Nolting as ambassador at the end of the summer. By the time Nolting departed in mid-August, the broadcasts of “Radio Catin
at”—as Saigon’s rumor mill was called for the gossip gatherings in the coffee shops and cafés of the main street—said that the arrival of Lodge meant an end to the U.S. policy of supporting the Ngo Dinhs. “I do not think that Mr. Cabolodge will be President Diem’s cup of tea,” the witty monk who was the press spokesman for the Buddhist leadership said to Halberstam in his best pronunciation of Lodge’s name. On Sunday, August 18, the Buddhists displayed their mounting strength as if to impress the soon-to-arrive Lodge through the news reports. They assembled about 15,000 people at the main Xa Loi Pagoda, one of the largest and most enthusiastic crowds they had ever summoned, for hours of speeches by the monks denouncing the regime for its tyranny and its outrages against Vietnamese Buddhism. Prayers alternated with the speeches, and occasionally the monks broke the tension with a favorite intermission—a scurrilous joke about Madame Nhu. This time the palace did not order the police to intervene, despite the provocation, and the demonstration ended peacefully.

  The restraint was ominous. Two nights later, half an hour after midnight on the 20th, Diem and Nhu took a brutal gamble to end the Buddhist crisis in a stroke and force the Kennedy administration and “Mr. Cabolodge” to drink their cup of tea. Thousands of police and ARVN Special Forces troops simultaneously assaulted the pagodas in Saigon, Hue, and the other cities and towns where the Buddhists were strongest. Thanks to Mert Perry’s ability to understand French, Halberstam and I reached the main Xa Loi Pagoda with the raiders. Perry and his wife, Darlene, lived in the apartment just above mine, and we shared the same phone number. (Telephones were scarce in Saigon in 1963.) An anonymous tipster, probably a police or intelligence officer, called shortly before midnight. Perry had just undressed for bed. The caller asked for me. Perry said that I was not there. (I had dropped off Halberstam after checking the pagodas with him and was on my way back in one of the city’s little rattletrap Renault taxis.) “Tell him they will arrest all of the monks right after midnight,” the tipster said in French.