Pentagon Papers

by Neil Sheehan

  General Taylor, in a message to President Kennedy, said a “U.S. military task force is essential.”

  Mr. McNamara and Mr. Rusk, in a joint memo, backed General Taylor’s recommendations. They recommended, initially, “U.S. units of modest size” for “direct support” and “as speedily as possible”; they insisted that government reforms be a precondition.

  The President approved the major recommendations. President Diem was said to be upset by the U.S. response. The demands for reforms were softened, and the insistence on American participation in decision-making was withdrawn.

  1962

  A military briefing paper for the President reported 948 U.S. servicemen were in South Vietnam by the end of November; 2,646 by the next January 9. There were also helicopter combat-support missions.

  Mr. McNamara ordered planning for U.S. withdrawal, partly on the basis of what he called “tremendous progress,” and also because of the difficulty of holding public support for American operations “indefinitely.”

  Michael V Forrestal, a White House aide, reported to Kennedy that a long, costly conflict should be anticipated. He said that Vietcong recruiting was so effective that the guerrillas could do without infiltration from the North.

  The U.S., by October, had 16,732 men in Vietnam. Planning for withdrawal continued, the study says, on the basis of “the most Micawberesque predictions” of progress.

  Chapter 3

  The Kennedy Years: 1961—1963

  —BY HEDRICK SMITH

  The Pentagon’s study of the Vietnam war concludes that President John F. Kennedy transformed the “limited-risk gamble” of the Eisenhower Administration into a “broad commitment” to prevent Communist domination of South Vietnam.

  Although Mr. Kennedy resisted pressures for putting American ground-combat units into South Vietnam, the Pentagon analysts say, he took a series of actions that significantly expanded the American military and political involvement in Vietnam but nonetheless left President Lyndon B. Johnson with as bad a situation as Mr. Kennedy inherited.

  “The dilemma of the U.S. involvement dating from the Kennedy era,” the Pentagon study observes, was to use “only limited means to achieve excessive ends.”

  Moreover, according to the study, prepared in 1967-68 by Government analysts, the Kennedy tactics deepened the American involvement in Vietnam piecemeal, with each step minimizing public recognition that the American role was growing.

  President Kennedy made his first fresh commitments to Vietnam secretly. The Pentagon study discloses that in the spring of 1961 the President ordered 400 Special Forces troops and 100 other American military advisers sent to South Vietnam. No publicity was given to either move.

  Small as the numbers seem in retrospect, the Pentagon study comments that even the first such expansion “signaled a willingness to go beyond the 685-man limit on the size of the U.S. [military] mission in Saigon, which, if it were done openly, would be the first formal breach of the Geneva agreement.” Under the interpretation of that agreement in effect since 1956, the United States was limited to 685 military advisers in Vietnam. Washington, while it did not sign the accord, pledged not to undermine it.

  On May 11, 1961, the day on which President Kennedy decided to send the Special Forces, he also ordered the start of a campaign of clandestine warfare against North Vietnam, to be conducted by South Vietnamese agents directed and trained by the Central Intelligence Agency and some American Special Forces troops. [See Document #20.]

  The President’s instructions, as quoted in the documents, were, “In North Vietnam . . . [to] form networks of resistance, covert bases and teams for sabotage and light harassment.” The American military mission in Saigon was also instructed to prepare South Vietnamese Army units “to conduct ranger raids and similar military actions in North Vietnam as might prove necessary or appropriate.”

  The Pentagon study reports that the primary target of the clandestine campaign against North Vietnam, and Laos as well, was to be “lines of communication”—railroads, highways, bridges, train depots and trucks.

  The study does not report how many agents were actually sent north, though documents accompanying it described some of the build-up and training of the First Observation Group, the main South Vietnamese unit conducting the covert campaign.

  Within weeks of President Kennedy’s May 11 decision, moreover, the North Vietnamese Government made repeated protests to the International Control Commission that its airspace and territory were being violated by foreign aircraft and South Vietnamese ground raids thrusting into the demilitarized zone along the border between the two Vietnams.

  In July, 1961, Hanoi announced publicly that it had captured and was putting on trial three South Vietnamese participants in undercover operations who had survived the crash of a plane that was shot down, Hanoi said, while preparing to drop them into North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese, protesting formally to Britain and the Soviet Union—the co-chairmen of the 1954 Geneva conference on Vietnam—described in detail what they said the survivors had disclosed about their American training and equipment.

  Mr. Kennedy’s May 11 orders, the study discloses, also called for infiltration of South Vietnamese forces into southeastern Laos to find and attack Communist bases and supply lines.

  On Oct. 13, moreover, the President reportedly gave additional secret orders for allied forces to “initiate ground action, including the use of U.S. advisers if necessary,” against Communist aerial resupply missions in the vicinity of Tchepone, in the southern Laotian panhandle.

  The Pentagon study does not analyze these covert operations in detail, but it shows Mr. Kennedy’s decisions as part of an unbroken sequence that built up to much more ambitious covert warfare against North Vietnam under President Johnson in 1964.

  The analysts handling the Kennedy period put more stress, however, on the evolution of President Kennedy’s decision in November, 1961, to expand greatly the American military advisory mission in Vietnam and, for the first time, to put American servicemen in combat-support roles that involved them increasingly in actual fighting.

  In a cablegram to Washington on Nov. 18, cited in the study, Frederick E. Nolting Jr., the United States Ambassador in Saigon, described the significance attached to those moves.

  He said he had explained to President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam that the new roles of American servicemen “could expose them to enemy action.”

  “In response to Diem’s question,” Mr. Nolting continued, “[I] said that in my personal opinion these personnel would be authorized to defend themselves if attacked. I pointed out that this was one reason why the decisions were very grave from U.S. standpoints.”

  Questions for Kennedy

  The Pentagon study shows President Kennedy facing three main questions on Vietnam during his term of office: whether to make an irrevocable commitment to prevent a Communist victory; whether to commit ground combat units to achieve his ends; whether to give top priority to the military battle against the Vietcong or to the political reforms necessary for winning popular support.

  President Kennedy’s response during 34 months in office, as the Pentagon account tells it, was to increase American advisers from the internationally accepted level of 685 to roughly 16,000 to put Americans into combat situations—resulting in a tenfold increase in American combat casualties in one year—and eventually to inject the United States into the internal South Vietnamese maneuvering that finally toppled the Diem regime.

  The judgment of the Pentagon study is that while President Kennedy’s actions stopped short of the fundamental decision to commit ground troops, nonetheless, “the limited-risk gamble undertaken by Eisenhower had been transformed into an unlimited commitment under Kennedy.” Later, more cautiously, the study says that Mr. Kennedy’s policies produced a “broad commitment” to Vietnam’s defense, giving priority to the military aspects of the war over political reforms.

  The study also observes that the pervasive assumption in t
he Kennedy Administration was that “the Diem regime’s own evident weaknesses—from the ‘famous problem of Diem as administrator’ to the Army’s lack of offensive spirit—could be cured if enough dedicated Americans, civilians and military, became involved in South Vietnam to show the South Vietnamese, at all levels, how to get on and win the war.”

  President Kennedy and his senior advisers are described in the study as considering defeat unthinkable and assuming that the mere introduction of Americans would provide the South Vietnamese with what the authors call “the élan and style needed to win.”

  The description of the debates in the Kennedy Administration presented in the study are revealing—particularly when the President decides against committing ground troops—because they emerge, in effect, as a rehearsal for the planning in the Johnson era that led to outright war in 1965. Many of the same officials advanced many of the same arguments, and the intelligence communitiy offered some of the same ominous forewarnings.

  President Kennedy was told that sending ground troops would be a “shot in the arm” that would “spark real transformation” of the Southern Vietnamese Army. The Joint Chiefs of Staff calculated that, at worst, no more than 205,000 American soldiers would be required to cope not only with the Vietcong but also with North Vietnam and Communist China if they should intervene. Both military and civilian advisers contended that American bombing of the North—even the mere threat of it—would hold Hanoi and the other Communist nations at bay.

  In secretly urging the first commitment of American ground troops to Vietnam in November, 1961, Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor, then the President’s personal military adviser, discounted the risks of a major land war. In a private message to the President from the Philippines, on his way home from Saigon on Nov. 1, he said:

  “The risks of backing into a major Asian war by way of SVN are present but are not impressive. NVN is extremely vulnerable to conventional bombing, a weakness which should be exploited diplomatically in convincing Hanoi to lay off SVN.

  “Both the D.R.V. [Democratic Republic of (North) Vietnam] and the Chicoms would face severe logistical difficulties in trying to maintain strong forces in the field in SEA [Southeast Asia], difficulties which we share but by no means to the same degree. There is no case for fearing a mass onslaught of Communist manpower into SVN and its neighboring states, particularly if our airpower is allowed a free hand against logistical targets.”

  In General Taylor’s recommendations for an initial commitment of 6,000 to 8,000 American ground troops, the account relates, he had a co-author, Walt W. Rostow, then the senior White House aide working on Southeast Asia.

  On Nov. 5 Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara sent President Kennedy a memorandum stating that he and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were “inclined to recommend” General Taylor’s proposal—but with the significant warning that much greater troop commitments were likely in the future. [See Document #29.]

  “The struggle may be prolonged and Hanoi and Peiping may intervene overtly,” the McNamara memorandum told the President. It estimated that even so, “the maximum U.S. forces required on the ground in Southeast Asia will not exceed six divisions, or about 205,000 men.”

  The President eventually rejected this approach. But the Pentagon study comments that the ground-troop issue so dominated the discussions that Mr. Kennedy’s ultimate decisions to approve the advisory build-up and the introduction of combat-support troops was made “without a careful examination” of precisely what it was expected to produce and how.

  The study concludes that the Kennedy strategy was fatally flawed from the outset for political as much as for military reasons. It depended, the study notes, on successfully prodding President Diem to undertake the kind of political, economic and social reforms that would, in the slogan of that day, “win the hearts and minds of the people.”

  “The U.S. over-all plan to end the insurgency was on shaky ground on the GVN side,” the study comments. “Diem needed the U.S. and the U.S. needed a reformed Diem.”

  It also says: “If he could not [reform], the U.S. plan to end the insurgency was foredoomed from its inception, for it depended on Vietnamese initiatives to solve a Vietnamese problem.”

  And in the end, the Pentagon account relates, the Kennedy Administration concluded that President Diem could not reform sufficiently and in 1963 abandoned him.

  Abandoning President Diem was what Ambassador Elbridge Durbrow had suggested in September, 1960, [see Document #16.] and again that December, shortly before Mr. Kennedy took office as President. Drawing on the Ambassador’s reports, among others, a national intelligence estimate provided for Mr. Kennedy on March 28, 1961, gave a bleak appraisal of the situation in Vietnam:

  “An extremely critical period for President Ngo Dinh Diem and the Republic of Vietnam lies immediately ahead. During the past six months the internal security situation has continued to deteriorate and has now reached serious proportions . . .

  “More than one-half of the entire rural region south and southwest of Saigon, as well as some areas to the north, are under considerable Communist control. Some of these areas are in effect denied to all government authority not immediately backed by substantial armed force. The Vietcong’s strength encircles Saigon and has reecntly begun to move closer in on the city . . . .

  “The deterioration in the position of the Diem Government reached a new extreme in November when army paratroop officers joined forces with a number of civilian oppositionsts in a narrowly defeated attempt to overthrow Diem. On the surface, Diem’s position appears to have improved somewhat since then. . . .

  “However, the facts which gave rise to the coup attempt have not been seriously dealt with and still exist. Discontent with the Diem Government continues to be prevalent among intellectual circles and, to a lesser degree, among labor and business groups. There has been an increasing disposition within official circles and the Army to question Diem’s ability to lead in this period. Many feel that he is unable to rally the people in the fight against the Communists because of his reliance on virtual one-man rule, his toleration of corruption extending even to his immediate entourage, and his refusal to relax a rigid system of public controls.”

  This assessment, the Pentagon study relates, echoed the themes and even some of the language of Ambassador Durbrow’s cablegrams. One of these, on Sept. 24, 1960, suggested that if President Diem was unable to regain support through political and social reforms, “it may become necessary for U.S. Government to begin consideration alternative courses of action and leaders.”

  A Challenge for the U.S.

  However serious the problem in South Vietnam, the situation in Laos was far more critical. “The Western position was in the process of falling apart as Kennedy took office,” the Pentagon account says.

  And during the spring of 1961, when President Kennedy made his first series of Vietnam decisions, Laos—not Vietnam—was the dominant issue and largely determined how Vietnam should be handled, according to the Pentagon account.

  The Eisenhower Administration had chosen to back right-wing elements in Laos, and by early 1961 they were reeling under Communist and neutralist attacks. President Kennedy chose to seek a political compromise and a military cease-fire rather than to continue to support the Laotian rightists.

  Because of this shift in strategy in Laos, the Pentagon study says, the Kennedy Administration felt impelled to show strength in Vietnam to reassure America’s allies in Asia.

  In what the Administration saw as a global power competition with the Soviet Union, the account notes, Washington thought it dangerous to give ground too often. Summing up the Administration’s reasoning, the author writes: “After the U.S. stepped back in Laos, it might be hard to persuade the Russians that we intended to stand firm anywhere if we then gave up on Vietnam.”

  Moreover, the Kennedy Administration sensed a particular challenge in the declaration by the Soviet Premier, Nikita S. Khrushchev, on Jan. 6, 1961, that Moscow intended to back
“wars on national liberation” around the world. In response, counterinsurgency—as strategy against guerrilla war became known—grew to be a primary preoccupation of the Kennedy White House, as a steady flow of Presidential decision papers testifies.

  “Vietnam was the only place in the world where the Administration faced a well-developed Communist effort to topple a pro-Western government with an externally aided pro-Communist insurgency,” the Pentagon study comments. “It was a challenge that could hardly be ignored.”

  On April 12 Mr. Rostow, the senior White House specialist on Southeast Asia and a principal architect of counterinsurgency doctrine, put Vietnam directly before President Kennedy with a memorandum [see Document #22] asserting that the time had come for “gearing up the whole Vietnam operation.” He proposed a series of moves that the study calls “pretty close to an agenda” for the Kennedy Administration’s first high-level review of Vietnam. Among other things Mr. Rostow proposed these measures:

  • “The appointment of a full-time first-rate backstop man in Washington.”

  • “A possible visit to Vietnam in the near future by the Vice President.”

  • “The raising of the MAAG [Military Assistance Advisory Group] ceiling, which involves some diplomacy, unless we can find an alternative way of introducing into the Vietnam operation a substantial number of Special Forces types.”

  • “Setting the question of extra funds for Diem.”

  • “The tactics of persuading Diem to move more rapidly to broaden the base of his Government, as well as to decrease its centralization and improve its efficiency.”

  Virtually all the Rostow proposals eventually became policy except his suggestion for a “first-rate backstop man.” His candidate, the study notes, was Brig. Gen. Edward G. Lansdale, a long-time Central Intelligence Agency operative who was close to President Diem and who in 1961 was in charge of “special operations” for the Pentagon. The State Department blocked his appointment, the study reports.