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

by Neil Sheehan

  Some of Vann’s superiors in USOM frowned on his freewheeling relationship with the press and let him know it. Their disapproval convinced him to cultivate the relationship all the more. He had decided that he could never again depend on any bureaucracy for his rise as he had depended on the Army. He had made himself an outsider by leaving the Army. His climb would therefore have to be a singular one. He would have to take risks that other men were unwilling to take, because he would have to defeat the system in order to scale it. The news media were an ally in this simultaneous struggle to advance himself and to sell his ideas. His easy access to the reporters might make the bureaucrats jealous of the limelight they were afraid to seek and arouse their distrust for fear that he might leak something embarrassing, but it also intimidated them and gave him the kind of independence and protection he had unwittingly gained against Harkins. Publicity brought prestige, lent him a certain cachet. It made important people willing to listen to him whether they accepted what he had to say at the moment or not.

  He was offered a supervisory post on the staff at USOM headquarters in July. He turned it down and also talked his way out of a promotion to deputy director for the whole of the Mekong Delta that summer, because the jobs would have hidden him behind a desk. “The field,” he wrote to a friend in Denver, “… happens to be the element I am most at home in, and the one place I will attract the most attention.”

  Vann hoped to sell “Harnessing the Revolution in South Vietnam” through the contacts he had been building up over the past two years. Westmoreland had been cordial to him, inviting Vann that summer to come to Saigon and pass along his impressions on returning to Vietnam. Vann had done so at the beginning of July, briefing Westmoreland and his deputy, Lt. Gen. John Throckmorton, for well over an hour at MACV headquarters. Nevertheless, Vann decided that, given the radical nature of his proposal, he would be better off if someone high in Westmoreland’s headquarters did his selling for him. He had in mind Westmoreland’s new chief of staff, Gen. (then Maj. Gen.) William Rosson, who had a long acquaintance with Vietnam.

  Rosson had first seen Saigon in the year of the French defeat as a lieutenant colonel and principal aide to the head of the MAAG in 1954, Lt. Gen. John “Iron Mike” O’Daniel. He had cooperated with Lansdale when Lansdale had installed Diem as America’s fresh beginning. He and Vann had met at the Pentagon in 1963 while Rosson was concluding an assignment as head of Special Warfare for the Army. Rosson had been one of the generals in the building who had listened to Vann, because he had been incredulous at Harkins’s pronouncements. They had renewed acquaintance when Vann had called on him after briefing Westmoreland in July. Vann had mentioned some of the ideas on pacification he was developing in Hau Nghia. As the new chief of staff at MACV, Rosson was under extreme pressure, but he had promised to take a helicopter out for a visit as soon as he could break away for a couple of hours.

  In the second week of August, right after the first draft of his strategy paper was completed, Vann sent a copy to Rosson. He received a note from Rosson at the end of the month. “Be alert to receipt of expressions of interest from important quarters,” Rosson said. Vann took the “important quarters” to mean that Rosson was attempting to sell his ideas to Westmoreland. Rosson also urged him to submit the proposal formally through USOM channels, which Vann did as soon as the final draft was finished on September 10.

  For a proposal submitted by a man who was officially just a province representative, the paper also reached some unusually senior people on the civilian side. An acquaintance at AID Washington to whom Vann mailed the first draft for comment passed a copy up to Rutherford Poats, a former United Press International newsman and executive who had become AID chief for the Far East. Poats in turn sent copies to William Bundy, who had succeeded Roger Hilsman as assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, and to Leonard Unger, Bundy’s deputy and head of the Vietnam Task Force, the Washington committee to coordinate the work of the various government departments involved in the war. Poats said in a letter, a carbon of which he was kind enough to send Vann, that the paper gave the Viet Cong “more credit for a legitimate social objective than I would” and that he was not recommending “the proposed pilot ‘solution.’” Just the same, Poats said, Vann’s analysis “strikes me as a good description of the problem” and the proposal contained “some useful ideas.” Vann was not discouraged by this kind of reaction. To him it meant that the door was at least not barred.

  Of all his high-level connections, Vann was counting most on Lodge, who arrived at Tan Son Nhut on August 20, 1965, to replace Taylor and begin his second round as the president’s representative in Saigon. The Henry Cabot Lodge whom Vann had gotten to know after he organized a “Lodge for President” movement in Colorado was a public man with a highly personal modus operandi who delegated unusual authority to a subordinate he trusted. The most recent recipient of that authority had been another brilliant Army officer of Vann’s generation and a friend and classmate at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Lt. Col. John Michael Dunn.

  Mike Dunn was an Irishman in the Robert Kennedy image—a smile that is supposed to connote an altar boy and a pair of brass knuckles in his pocket. He was a Harvard graduate who had been drawn to an Army career by the challenge of the post-World War II American adventure. He had won his combat credentials in Korea with a Silver Star for Gallantry and had earned his intellectual credentials at Princeton with a Ph.D in international relations. When Lodge had come to Saigon in 1963 on his first tour as ambassador he had brought Dunn along to be his personal assistant. He had given Dunn power and all the latitude to exercise it that Dunn could handle, which was a great deal indeed, during the maneuvers to overthrow Diem and in the tussles afterward to see that Lodge continued to have his way against Harkins. Dunn had been such a formidable executor of Lodge’s wishes that after Lodge had gone home in 1964 and Dunn had returned to Washington and the Army, Harkins had started proceedings against him for a general court-martial. Westmoreland had also taken umbrage at a lieutenant colonel feisty enough to unhorse a general for a civilian superior. He had joined Harkins in the accusations. One charge was the equivalent of making false reports. Lodge had stood by Dunn. He had said he would testify that Dunn’s every act had been performed on his authority, and if the proceedings went forward, he was going to insist on bringing the entire matter out in public. Harold Johnson, by then chief of staff of the Army, had summoned Dunn to his office and told him to regard the proceedings, which were being dropped, as a misunderstanding. He was not to think that Harkins and Westmoreland were being vindictive, Johnson had said. They had merely been overzealous in seeking to protect the interests of the Army.

  Vann assumed that during his second turn at the ambassadorship, Lodge was going to emulate his first year in Vietnam and take an individual and imaginative approach to the war. Vann wanted to be the Mike Dunn of that enterprise. He had written Lodge in July, shortly after the White House announcement that Lodge would be returning, and given the ambassador a careful summary of his learning experience in Hau Nghia. He had proposed that Lodge create a special Field Liaison Office. Its purpose would be to keep the ambassador accurately informed on pacification and military operations by enabling him to get his information “without the interpretations of many intervening echelons.” The office would consist of just one or two men. They would have the authority to go anywhere Lodge designated, observe and ask questions, and report directly to him. Vann proposed that he head the office, citing his “unique combination of both military and civilian experience” in Vietnam and his conviction that he could serve “as a practical sounding board for [Lodge’s] ideas and programs.” The Field Liaison Office would, in short, be John Vann and an assistant.

  While noncommittal, Lodge’s reply was friendly and heartening to Vann:

  Dear John:

  I am glad to get your letter, which gives me much to think about. I look forward to seeing you when I return and talking it a
ll over.

  With warm regards,

  Sincerely yours,

  Henry Cabot Lodge

  If Lodge did not accept his “Harnessing the Revolution” strategy or some variation of it as the course to be adopted right away, Vann thought, the ambassador might still offer him the special assistant’s job he had proposed, because he was so well qualified for it. He would then have an opportunity to gradually sell his strategy ideas to Lodge in the course of keeping him informed of what was happening on the battlefield and in the hamlets. He waited for a call from the embassy with great impatience after Lodge’s arrival on August 20.

  A bureaucratic ban on Lansdale’s presence in South Vietnam had also been lifted as a result of Lodge’s return, and Lansdale came back at the beginning of September for another attempt to save the country he had brought into being ten years before. He visited Vann in Bau Trai a couple of days after arriving and brought along the team he had assembled to help him in his renewed endeavor. One member was a thirty-four-year-old Defense Department intellectual and former Marine named Daniel Ellsberg. Lansdale’s charter was vague. He and his team were officially supposed to act as a special liaison group between the embassy and the Saigon government’s Rural Reconstruction Council, a body that in theory coordinated the pacification programs of all the ministries.

  Vann had been alerted to expect an invitation to join the Lansdale team. Lansdale did not extend the offer that day, and in any case Vann thought he would decline the invitation when it was extended. His aspirations had outgrown Lansdale, and he was uncertain how much influence Lansdale was going to have in this South Vietnam of September 1965. For all his crusading and egocentricity, Vann had a keen sense of the realities of government. Lansdale would have no agency under his control with money and manpower to lend him weight in a world where bureaucracies and the men who ran them were going to compete and clash. Lodge had real power, with which Vann could accomplish something if he could gain a role in wielding it. “I’ll have to know one helluva lot more about what Lansdale’s plans are before I tie in with him,” he wrote a friend in Denver on the night of Lansdale’s visit. “I am still waiting for a call from Lodge, and I’m not about to jump until I find out what his ideas may be.”

  The call came in a few days. Vann put on a suit and tie for the occasion, quite a contrast to the blue jeans and short-sleeved sports shirt that had become his working garb. He also had a freshly typed copy of the final draft of “Harnessing the Revolution” in his hand when he took the elevator up to Lodge’s office on the sixth floor of the embassy. The building had been refurbished and fitted with shatterproof windows since the huge car bomb Vann had missed by ten minutes on his last visit five and a half months and a lot of learning ago. The blast had also shattered the official unwillingness to show fear and given the embassy more resemblance to one of the regime’s ministries. The traffic on the busy Saigon riverfront streets was now kept a block away in all directions by barricades of barbed wire stretched across welded iron frames.

  Lodge was friendly and seemed pleased to see Vann, but apologized that they would have to keep the visit short because his schedule was still so crowded with the business of his return. After the pleasantries Vann had time only to hand Lodge the proposal and explain that he and his friends had devised this strategy to win the war from their collective experience in the field and that he hoped Lodge would find what he had written persuasive. Lodge said that he was glad to have the paper and would read it. Vann mentioned his Field Liaison Office idea. Lodge was again noncommittal. He promised Vann a “lengthy chat” soon and said that in the meantime Vann should hold down the risks he was taking in Hau Nghia, that he was too valuable a man to lose.

  Later that week Vann ran into two political officers from the embassy. Lodge had sent the paper to the political section for comment. The two political officers told Vann that he was “out of line” as a USOM province representative to be handing papers on grand strategy to the ambassador. What did they think of the ideas in the proposal? Vann asked. They refused to say.

  Vann was not upset. Theirs was the attitude he expected from bureaucrats. “I make nearly all the professional staff people in there [Saigon] damned uneasy,” he said in another of his letters to a friend at home. He would wait for his serious talk with Lodge. “Someone must be a catalyst if our policies are to be even remotely dynamic,” he wrote to an acquaintance at the Pentagon.

  General Rosson kept his promise to break away for a couple of hours from his duties as Westmoreland’s chief of staff and flew out to Bau Trai for a briefing by Vann. He restated his approval of the ideas in Vann’s proposal. James Killen was being replaced as head of USOM in Vietnam by Charles Mann, who had been running AID operations in Laos. Mann was due in Bau Trai for a visit the third weekend of September. Vann hoped to make a convert of him.

  He also won what he called “a small but significant victory” in the first half of September. He got unobserved artillery and mortar fire banned in Hau Nghia. Unless the shells were being directed onto a specific target by a ground or air spotter or an outpost or unit was under attack and calling for protective fire, the guns could not shoot. As random firing accounted for most of the firing, there was a sudden and unusual quiet much of the time in Bau Trai and the district centers. Vann had apparently complained about the shelling when he briefed Westmoreland in July, pointing out that it violated a directive forbidding unobserved fire in the provinces around Saigon that Westmoreland had designated for priority pacification. Westmoreland seems to have responded to Vann’s complaint by having JGS issue an order forbidding unobserved shelling in Hau Nghia. Colonel Chinh was in a rage over it. He somehow got the idea that Hanh was the instigator and was angrier at him than he was at Vann. The order did not apply to sections that had been declared free-bombing or free-fire zones, and the preplanned air strikes were continuing. John Vann the pragmatist saw half an evil eliminated.

  Vann was in trouble in his war on corruption in the province, but he was fighting gamely. Over dinner with Hanh one Sunday evening toward the end of July, about a week after Lyndon Johnson decided to give Westmoreland 200,000 American soldiers to save South Vietnam, he learned that he had a new problem bigger than the crooked contractor. Hanh said he had just been put on notice that he was going to have to start conforming to the generate-the-graft pattern or lose his province-chief job.

  The military government presided over by Air Marshal Ky was consolidating its position and turning on the pressure. Hanh’s patron in the regime was understandably a fellow Catholic, Nguyen Van Thieu, who had become the chief of state. (Ky held the executive power as prime minister.) Hanh had been told that to remain province chief of Hau Nghia he would have to contribute 250,000 piasters to the “High Command.” Hanh told Vann he did not know what was happening in the coastal provinces of Central Vietnam and in the Highlands, but that the squeeze for more graft was occurring all over the IV Corps zone that encompassed the Delta and in III Corps, which included Hau Nghia and the other provinces around the capital. The district chiefs were being dunned for amounts ranging from 100,000 to 300,000 piasters, depending on the wealth of the district.

  As usual, the generals’ wives were overseeing the transactions. The wife of the IV Corps commander, a rotund brigadier general named Dang Van Quang who was a close ally of Thieu’s, had flown up from Can Tho the past week and laid down payment conditions to district chiefs’ wives who were living in Saigon. Hanh had been advised that he could embezzle up to 750,000 piasters on this occasion. He was to share the additional 500,000 piasters with the Hau Nghia district chiefs to help them meet their obligations. It was suggested that he submit phony bills for materials provided free by the Americans or hand in budget requests for nonexistent projects.

  Hanh wanted Vann to get the demand stopped, naturally without letting on that Hanh was the informant. The next day, Vann had typed up a memorandum listing the main points of the conversation. He had stated that Hanh was the source of the informat
ion, to lend the memorandum credibility, but had marked it “Personal and Confidentiar and handed it to Wilson after giving him an account of the dinner. He had asked Wilson to pass the memorandum to Killen and to Taylor, still the ambassador at the time, so that the Saigon generals could be told the United States government knew about their games and would no longer tolerate this filth. Wilson was concerned about corruption too. He had said he would pass the memorandum along. Vann had not heard of any action by the time of his brief call on Lodge in early September. He was determined to bring the matter to Lodge’s attention himself if he did not hear soon. In the meantime he was encouraging Hanh to stall on embezzling the money.

  In late September he flew home to Littleton for a two-week leave. Mary Jane and the children did not see much of him, because he found it difficult to resist invitations to speak about the war. When he wasn’t lecturing on the war he tended to be on the phone about it to someone in Washington or to one of his newspaper contacts.

  As soon as he returned to Vietnam in October, Charles Mann, the new USOM director, told him that he would be leaving Hau Nghia at the end of the month. He had not, during Mann’s weekend visit, converted Mann to his main thesis, but Mann was a practical-minded individual who liked a number of the ideas in Vann’s paper. He also liked Vann’s dynamism and knowledge and ability to work with the Vietnamese. He was promoting Vann to a more important field position as USOM representative and advisor on civilian affairs to Maj. Gen. (soon to be Lt. Gen.) Jonathan Seaman, the commander of all U.S. forces in the III Corps area. Seaman was in the process of bringing the 1st Infantry Division into South Vietnam. He was going to put “the Big Red One” together with the 173rd Airborne Brigade, which had already arrived, to start forming a U.S. Army corps to subdue the Viet Cong in the eleven-province region. Vann’s job would be to advise Seaman on anything affecting the population and to act as a liaison officer in dealing with the province governments and the USOM advisors in each province.