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

by Neil Sheehan

  It was twenty-five days before the flag of the Viet Cong was hauled down and the yellow-and-red-striped banner of the Saigon side hoisted again over the Zenith Gate. The Thai Hoa Palace of the emperors and the other monuments were grievously scarred. Enough homes were destroyed or seriously damaged to render 90,000 of the 140,000 inhabitants of Hue refugees in their own city. The local Viet Cong took advantage of the occupation to settle scores. They rounded up current and retired officials, civil servants, police officers, anyone connected to the regime or a known sympathizer, and killed them. Most of the victims were shot; some were beheaded; others were buried alive. The number of victims is impossible to establish with precision. One careful estimate put the toll at 3,000. The killings were as stupid as they were cruel. The massacre gave substance to the fear that a bloodbath would occur should the Communists ever win the war in the South.

  By the end of March 1968, the effect of Tet was apparent in the United States. Senator Eugene McCarthy had come within three hundred votes of beating Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic Party nomination in the New Hampshire primary, an unprecedented challenge to an incumbent president. (McCarthy won by a slight majority after the write-in votes were counted.) Robert Kennedy then pounced and was running for president too. His act was not entirely opportunistic. He had genuinely turned against the war. With his popularity and the ghost of his revered brother to help him, he seemed assured of appropriating McCarthy’s antiwar cause and inflicting the ultimate humiliation on Johnson.

  Westmoreland had finally undone himself by letting Wheeler use him in an unsuccessful scheme to try to force the president to mobilize the reserves and give Westmoreland another 206,756 men. Bunker, disillusioned with Westmoreland and angry at him for setting them up for such a hard fall at Tet, warned him against asking for the troops. He explained to the general that it was now politically impossible for the president to mobilize the reserves for Vietnam, even if Johnson wanted to do so, which was also more unlikely than ever. Bunker did not yet realize the complete extent of the psychological victory the Vietnamese Communists had won in the United States, but he sensed that the Tet Offensive had broken the will of the administration in the same way it had the public will. He could tell that nothing he and Westmoreland said was believed in Washington anymore. Rusk, normally the most restrained of men, was constantly on the phone to him with questions. Westmoreland did not heed the ambassador. The president suddenly announced on March 22 that he was bringing Westmoreland home to be chief of staff of the Army. “Westy, of course, was kicked upstairs,” Bunker said with his wry laugh after the war was over.

  Bunker was correct in sensing a break of will within the administration. After the president arranged McNamara’s departure to the World Bank, he said to his press secretary, George Christian: “The one man in this war I never need to worry about is Dean Rusk. He’s as tough as a Georgia pine knot.” The pine knot from Cherokee County, Georgia, had cracked. In early March, Rusk began circulating among senior members of the administration one of the proposals for which McNamara had been fired. It was to suspend indefinitely the bombing of North Vietnam except in the infiltration corridor below the 19th Parallel, what Rusk called “the area associated with the battle zone,” as a step toward the possible opening of negotiations. Rusk was not hopeful that Hanoi would respond positively, at least not right away. Not knowing the Vietnamese, he did not understand the import of a speech by Nguyen Duy Trinh, the foreign minister in the North, that had been publicized with care as part of the preparations for Tet. On prior occasions the Hanoi leadership had said that it “could” negotiate with the United States if the bombing ceased. In his speech at the end of December 1967, Trinh had said that his government “will hold talks” if all bombing was halted unconditionally. Rusk wanted to try just the same. Clark Clifford, the enthusiastic war hawk who had been sobered by Tet and the responsibility of confronting the war as the new secretary of defense, favored the proposal. Moreover, although the president was not committed to accepting it, Rusk was circulating the proposal with his permission, because something had cracked in Lyndon Johnson too.

  The Wise Men made up the president’s mind. Johnson convened a second meeting of his senior counselors at the end of March. The group that assembled at the White House on the morning of March 26, 1968, had received briefings at the State Department on the evening of the 25th that were quite different from the briefings of November. Most of those present were changed men too. A memorandum prepared by McGeorge Bundy to summarize their views explained why: “When we last met we saw reasons for hope.” Cyrus Vance, who had been forced to give up the post of deputy secretary of defense in 1967 because of complications from back surgery, was one of the newcomers to the group, but he had worked for Johnson since the president’s days in the Senate. “Unless we do something quick, the mood in this country may lead us to withdrawal,” he warned.

  In one of the greater ironies of the war, it was left to Dean Acheson to pronounce the death sentence on the venture that he had been so responsible for commencing. He had spoken the previous evening after the briefings at the State Department. McGeorge Bundy had written down Acheson’s words because they summed up the views of the majority. He read them to the president and the gathering: “We can no longer do the job we set out to do in the time we have left and we must begin to take steps to disengage.” Justice Fortas now sought to argue with Acheson. He was in the minority who wanted to hold firm. Acheson put him down: “The issue is not that stated by Fortas. The issue is can we do what we are trying to do in Vietnam. I do not think we can. … Can we by military means keep the North Vietnamese off the South Vietnamese. I do not think we can. They can slip around and end-run them and crack them up.”

  Five days later, on March 31, 1968, Lyndon Johnson gave his televised speech to the nation restricting the bombing of North Vietnam and renouncing any possibility of another term as president in order to hold the country together in the time he had left. Three days later, on April 3, 1968, the Vietnamese surprised the president and his secretary of state again. Radio Hanoi announced that they would negotiate with the Americans.

  John Vann could not accept the death of the war. He could not admit that Tet had written a finis to it. His inability to do so was to transform him in the years that lay ahead.

  Tet gave him something to grasp at as a rationalization to continue. The price of the political and psychological victory the Vietnamese Communists achieved was the destruction of the Viet Cong. Except in northern I Corps and parts of the Central Highlands, the guerrillas were the force employed at Tet, because they could most easily maneuver into the cities and towns. The result was that tens of thousands perished during the original Tet attacks and in a second offensive into the urban centers the Hanoi leaders ordered in May to keep the pressure on the Johnson administration. The army of Southern peasants that the Viet Minh survivors had first raised in fighting bands during the winter of Diem’s terror, which had grown into regiments and divisions from the ordeal of Ap Bac, was as torn as the country it would have won had American soldiers not denied it victory in 1965. By late June 1968, Vann estimated that the Communist forces in HI Corps had suffered more than 20,000 killed.

  The replacements were almost all North Vietnamese. The clandestine Viet Cong government could not possibly replace losses this rapidly from its shrunken recruiting base, and demoralization was widespread within the guerrilla movement that remained. The Viet Cong fighters did not see the will-breaking effect their sacrifice had in the United States. They saw only the loss of their comrades on missions that had become so unrealistic in military terms by May that they were suicidal.

  Where Tet savaged the reputations of men like Komer and Westmoreland, it vindicated Vann’s realism of the fall. His credibility within the bureaucracy and among the journalists rose higher than ever. A friend sent him a sample of the remarks being made in the upper reaches of the Pentagon and the State Department about his November briefings: “Nothing that John s
aid turned out to be an exaggeration.” Tet thrust Vann into his element too. He had once said to Ellsberg in Hau Nghia that he harped on the failings of the ARVN and the Saigon regime “because everyone else is singing a merry tune. If they were all discouraged, I would be saying, ‘Look, it’s not hopeless; here’s what can be done.’” He was appalled by the turning loose of American firepower on the cities and towns. Twitchy-fingered ARVN and U.S. soldiers doubled the risk of driving the roads and flying in and out of province and district centers at night, yet bullets from any direction put Vann that much more into his element. He was all over the corps, encouraging his CORDS teams, reorganizing, preparing to hit back. As early as the third week of February he sent a pep-talk memo around to his teams:

  Now is the time, quite literally, to separate the men from the boys. I have been disappointed in several instances to find advisors who are obviously feeling sorry for themselves and mentally wringing their hands. … Get your counterparts and their troops out from behind their barbed wire and aggressively on the offensive, both day and night. The enemy has never been more vulnerable to effective military action than he is today.

  Komer bore Vann no grudge. He was generous enough to accept the vindication of another man despite the cost to himself. He demanded in a cable to AID’s Washington headquarters in April that Vann be promoted to FSR-1, the highest Foreign Service Reserve grade. James Grant, the assistant administrator for Vietnam, was happy to oblige. Komer was also not yet ready to give up on the war, and he too saw possibilities of rebound in the destruction of the Viet Cong. His unwillingness to accept the logical consequences of Tet was symptomatic of the attitude of many senior figures within the American power structure. Having come to maturity in a system that had usually had its way in international affairs, they resisted conceding that this time they would not prevail. The thought of what they had invested in the war made them more inclined to resist. As the shock of Tet receded they looked around for alternatives.

  Vann seized on the decimation of the guerrillas as the turn that could bring victory to the United States and the Saigon side. He quickly convinced himself that the North Vietnamese Army could not take up the share of the burden the guerrillas had been carrying and win the war by itself. In his judgment the long-term threat to the existence of the Saigon regime was the Viet Cong, with its capacity for political and military action. He tended to view the NVA as a physical force that could be contained. The guerrilla movement had now been so severely weakened that he decided it could be ground down further and contained too.

  What most impressed Vann about the Viet Cong losses was not the number—ordinary soldiers could be replaced with a bit of time—but the loss of the company- and battalion-level officers and the seasoned NCOs. These men were the fruit of years. The mix of North Vietnamese and Southerners in the Viet Cong units in III Corps had worked well prior to Tet because most of the NVA had been common soldiers. Southerners had continued to hold the leadership positions. The majority of Southern company and battalion officers and NCOs had then died at Tet and during the “May Tet” attacks. Northerners had arrived to take their places. About 70 percent of all officers and men in the regular and local force battalions in III Corps were North Vietnamese by late June. The Northerners were too conventionally trained to adapt to guerrilla warfare, Vann concluded, and they would never master the necessary political rapport with the Southern peasantry. The regional differences simply could not be overcome. “In fact, they [the NVA] are nearly as alien in this country as are our U.S. forces and receive only that support and assistance from the population that they are able to coerce through fear,” he wrote to Bob York.

  On the basis of these assumptions, Vann devised a new plan to win the war. He wanted to “pacify the main stream of the American public” with “a phased reduction” of U.S. forces while gradually transferring to the ARVN responsibility for combat with the NVA and the Viet Cong regulars who remained. The number of U.S. servicemen in South Vietnam reached 536,000 in May 1968 and was to peak at 543,000 in April 1969, because of a token increase Johnson had included in his March 31 speech to try to mollify the generals. Vann thought that large withdrawals could be made quickly just by choosing to live more leanly and eliminating a lot of the base camps and the “almost unbelievable layering of headquarters and the proliferation of many nice-to-have (but not essential) units and activities” that Westmoreland had insisted on having. “I consider it entirely feasible to phase down our troop involvement here to a level of 200,000 by mid-1971,” he said in an April 1968 letter to Edward Kennedy, one of the first political figures to whom he tried to sell his plan, because he was upset by Robert Kennedy’s antiwar statements.

  Tet also made his plan feasible, Vann persuaded himself, because the blow must have shaken many within the Saigon government into realizing that they could not continue to tolerate the extent of the regime’s corruption and incompetence. The Communists had inadvertently created an atmosphere in which American pressure to curb these ills might at last have an effect. A phased reduction of U.S. troops “would provide the necessary stimulus to the GVN” to move seriously in this direction, Vann told Edward Kennedy.

  John Vann did not want to withdraw all American military men. He wanted to keep a residual force of about 100,000 in South Vietnam for the foreseeable future, mostly advisors, technical personnel, and helicopter and fixed-wing aviation units to support the Saigon troops. The ARVN was at last receiving M-16 rifles in quantity, and M-16s were soon to be distributed to the RF and PF too. Vann felt that a better-armed, better-led ARVN, backed by B-52S and the fighter-bombers of the U.S. Air Force and the Navy, could handle the NVA.

  He failed to convince Dan Ellsberg. They had long discussions about the Tet Offensive and Vann’s new plan when he was in the United States for three weeks in July on regular home leave and to recuperate from abdominal surgery. Lee had found him unconscious in a puddle of blood on the bathroom floor of the Bien Hoa house on the night of May 30. Wilbur Wilson, awakened by her screams, summoned a helicopter to rush him to the Long Binh hospital. The Army surgeons assumed he had a bleeding ulcer and nearly killed him pumping ice water into his intestines through his nostrils for ten hours to try to stop the bleeding before they decided to operate. They discovered he had suffered a rare accident called a Mallory-Weiss syndrome. While vomiting from nausea caused by a series of booster vaccination shots against typhoid and the other nineteenth-century diseases still common in countries like Vietnam, he had torn a gash in his esophagus at the point where it reaches the stomach. The exceptional stomach muscles he had built up from so many years of gymnastics had given him the strength to rip himself apart. The surgeons clipped several of the muscles so that he couldn’t do it again. He lost and received fourteen pints of blood.

  Tet had brought despair rather than hope of renewal to Ellsberg. The shock had provoked him into a reexamination of the war, an intellectual journey complicated by emotions as turbulent as those he had known in Vietnam. He had started psychoanalysis to try to cope with a case of writer’s block that was interfering with his work at Rand, and he was experimenting with the sexual freedom fashionable in California in the 1960s. An Australian pacification specialist working in Vietnam had lectured at Rand in May and spoken of the “opportunities” the grave weakening of the Viet Cong had opened for the United States and the Saigon regime. “My own attitude about such matters now,” Ellsberg had written Vann, “is that the VC are right to bet that the GVN and U.S. will fail to exploit any such ‘opportunities’ and fanatics like you, me (before), [and] our friends were always wrong to imagine otherwise.”

  Vann took it as a good omen that important men in Washington did welcome his reasons for being encouraged. He called Harry McPherson, President Johnson’s chief speech writer, soon after reaching the house in Littleton in July. They had met when McPherson visited South Vietnam during the summer of 1967. McPherson was so impressed by Vann’s heartening words over the phone that he typed up a memorandum of
their conversation and gave it to the president.

  Lyndon Johnson had become immobilized after his March 31 speech, gripped by the same resistance that was affecting Komer and so many others. He was seeking to salvage through his negotiators in Paris, Harriman and Vance, what his general had lost in the field. He let Westmoreland linger on in Vietnam too as a kind of lame-duck commander. Creighton Abrams did not take charge until mid-June. Johnson wanted to negotiate a mutual withdrawal of the NVA and the U.S. forces, persuading himself this was compromise. The Vietnamese Communists were prepared to discuss the conditions of an American withdrawal. Mutual withdrawal did not interest them. They sat down for the years of haggling they had known might ensue until the course of the war and the continued alienation of the American public could settle the issue. At the end of October they were to trade Johnson unwritten, indefinite assurances of de-escalation along the DMZ and around Saigon and the other major cities for an end to all bombing of the North and admission to the talks of a delegation from the National Liberation Front.

  This concession by the United States put the Saigon regime and the Viet Cong on an equal footing. While this arranging of the chairs around the table in Paris dawdled along, 14,589 Americans fell in battle in Vietnam during 1968, more than half again as many as in 1967, the highest for any year of the war. Although Lyndon Johnson was not interested in a withdrawal of American troops during what was left of his administration, because this did not fit into his negotiating strategy, he obviously had reason to be looking for cheer in July when he received McPherson’s memo on the phone call from Vann. He was glad to have someone tell him that time might be on the side of the United States and the Saigon regime. He read the memorandum to a meeting of his cabinet. Vann was thrilled at the compliment.