With the facts deemed irrelevant to policymaking, the Kennedy administration proceeded to make disastrous policy. Support for the anti-Diem policy was not unanimous. Vice President Johnson, CIA Director John McCone, and General Maxwell Taylor were opposed to abandoning Diem. But three days after the pagoda raids, a powerful coalition of top officials set in motion events that resulted in a military coup against Diem’s government, acting with at best cursory consideration of the consequences. A sober examination of Diem’s likely successors was never undertaken. No attention was paid to the abysmally low caliber of the men with whom they were plotting. None of the generals even approached Diem in leadership qualities.
On August 24, Harriman, Hilsman, Rusk, and Undersecretary of State George Ball collaborated on a telegram to Henry Cabot Lodge, the new American ambassador in Saigon. Kennedy approved it over the phone from his vacation home in Hyannisport. It stated that the current situation was intolerable and that Diem’s brother and closest adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu, whom Kennedy’s men held responsible for the raids, had to be replaced. “We wish [to] give Diem reasonable opportunity to remove Nhu,” the cable read, “but if he remains obdurate, then we are prepared to accept the obvious implication that we can no longer support Diem. You may tell appropriate military commanders we will give them direct support in any interim period of breakdown [of the] central government mechanism.” It added that Lodge should “urgently examine all possible alternative leadership and make detailed plans as to how we might bring about Diem’s replacement if this should become necessary.”
The cable’s message was unequivocal. Since everyone knew Diem would never dismiss his brother Nhu, Lodge interpreted it as a direct order from the highest authority to prepare a coup against Diem. Another cable somewhat qualifying the first was sent to Lodge a few days later, but it was too late to slow the momentum of events in Saigon. The gun aimed at Diem’s head had already been fired; the bullet could not be recalled. Lodge was an efficient ambassador, and he carried out his orders. He instructed the CIA in Saigon to make the rounds of their contacts in the military. Several South Vietnamese generals later testified that they had been sounded out by United States officials that summer on the possibility of leading a coup.
On August 29, Kennedy told his National Security Council staff that he supported the idea of a coup if its success was guaranteed. Lodge was already reporting progress. In a cable to Rusk, Lodge said, “We are launched on a course from which there is no respectable turning back: the overthrow of the Diem government.” He added, “The chance of bringing off a Generals’ coup depends on them to some extent; but it depends at least as much on us.” Rusk authorized Lodge to suspend aid to Diem at a time of his choosing and instructed him to do whatever was necessary to “enhance the chances of a successful coup.” Rusk also ordered the head of the American military mission in Saigon to establish a liaison with the coup leaders and to review their plans. One plot misfired in late August, but the generals soon regrouped.
Meanwhile, direct, relentless pressure was leveled on Diem. United States delegations toured South Vietnam without calling on him. Lodge granted Tri Quang political asylum in the American embassy. The CIA cut off support for South Vietnam’s special forces. The White House publicly suspended United States aid for financing commercial imports. Kennedy stated in a televised interview that South Vietnam’s government needed changes in policy and “perhaps” in personnel. The administration sought to do everything possible to show its disapproval of Diem and to do nothing to undermine the impression that it would welcome a change in government.
On November 1, 1963, the troops of General Tran Van Don and General Duong Van Minh besieged the Presidential Palace. Four days earlier, Lodge had asked those plotting the coup if they needed any help and assured them of American support afterward. Throughout the fighting, a CIA agent in constant contact with the United States Embassy was present at the military’s headquarters. Diem and Nhu temporarily eluded the generals and surrendered only when Lodge and the generals gave them guaranties of safe conduct. But after they turned themselves in, the generals murdered them in cold blood with American weapons in the back of an American-made armored personnel carrier.
The Kennedy administration had concluded that Diem should be overthrown because he had completely lost touch with his people. But in fact Kennedy and his advisers were the ones who were out of touch. Kennedy was shocked when he heard that Diem had been murdered by the generals, but he should not have been surprised. Diem’s assassination was no accident. Those who overthrow popular leaders frequently must kill them in order to remove the possibility of their return to power. General Minh later explained, “Diem could not be allowed to live, because he was too much respected among simple, gullible people in the countryside, especially the Catholics and the refugees.”
Prime Minister Tran Van Huong, whose government lasted only three months amid the political chaos in late 1964, concurred with Minh, saying, “The generals knew very well that having no talent, nor moral virtues, and no popular support whatsoever, they could not prevent a spectacular comeback of the President and Mr. Nhu if they were alive.”
• • •
President Diem stabilized South Vietnam as a keystone holds up a dome. Political forces converged on him from all directions, but by balancing one against another, he locked all of them into place. And just as a keystone’s importance is not apparent unless it is removed, Diem’s vital role became clear only after his demise, when the entire South Vietnamese political system came crashing down.
What the coup supporters in the Kennedy administration should have known all along now became painfully clear: The choice in South Vietnam had been not between Diem and somebody better but between Diem and somebody worse.
Whatever his faults, Diem possessed a significant measure of legitimacy. He was a strong leader of a nation that desperately needed strong leadership. With him gone, power in South Vietnam was up for grabs. The administration officials who had so eagerly hatched the plots against Diem soon discovered that their South Vietnamese collaborators were hopelessly bad leaders. Skills needed to overthrow a government are not useful for running one. Leading a coup and leading a country are two entirely different jobs. The chaotic leadership crisis that followed in South Vietnam was a direct consequence of the overthrow of President Ngo Dinh Diem.
For two years, the gates of the Presidential Palace were a revolving door. South Vietnam endured ten changes of government, and even more in the military high command. Intrigue became Saigon’s form of government. During one chaotic week, a new government took power, one faction attempted a coup against the commander in chief, another faction suppressed the attempt, and then the suppressors of the coup ousted the commander in chief. Every time I visited South Vietnam in that period, I found a new President or Prime Minister in power. I have never met more pitiful incompetents.
South Vietnam’s military had thrown out not only Diem but also the country’s constitution. The Military Revolutionary Council was now responsible for appointing the government. Politics among its members were a free-for-all. Loyalties ran not to the country but to personal careers. Unity of purpose or policy did not exist. Opportunism was the only common ideal. Never were the generals sufficiently united to appoint effective government leaders and back them up with complete support.
Journalists, who thought only they knew what was best, had always characterized American policy with the ditty “Sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem.” South Vietnam foundered at times under Diem. Now it was going down for the third time, sinking toward political collapse. It would take two years for power to come into the hands of another strong leader, General Nguyen Van Thieu.
As government-by-intrigue became business as usual, the business of fighting the war ground to a halt. Hanoi was elated. Diem, who had personified stubborn resistance to communism, had been eliminated without their having to lift a finger. Nguyen Huu Tho, the head of the National Liberation Front, said, “The Americ
ans have managed to do what we couldn’t do for nine years.” He added in disbelief that the coup was “a gift from heaven.”
Ho seized the opportunity the United States and the generals had given him. Captured documents and the testimony of defectors indicated that Ho now believed North Vietnam could win quickly. Within months, he injected regular units of the North Vietnamese Army into the South. At the beginning of each year, Radio Hanoi customarily proclaimed that it would be a “year of victories.” But in 1965, after political chaos overtook South Vietnam, Hanoi declared that this would be the year of victory.
South Vietnam’s survival all along had depended on whether it developed stable institutions and the ability to defend itself before North Vietnam acquired the power to deal it a death blow. Diem at least had his country moving in the right direction. Now, while Saigon’s government and army were sliding downward by every index, Communist strength on the battlefield skyrocketed. Guerrillas inundated the countryside. Communist forces began to form larger units and engage in set-piece battles. Outside Saigon, Danang, and other major cities, Communist forces crushed South Vietnam’s mobile reserve battalions one by one, and soon there would be no reserves at all left.
Time was running short. The United States would have to act soon. President Kennedy’s assassination had followed Diem’s by three weeks. As Vice President, Lyndon Johnson had strongly opposed the steps we took against Diem. He later told aides that our complicity in the coup was the greatest mistake we made in Vietnam. Now, as President, he had to try to pick up the pieces.
When we arrogated to ourselves the right to choose South Vietnam’s government, we also assumed responsibility for its fate. Johnson wanted neither an American war nor a Communist victory. With the unraveling of South Vietnam, those choices were rapidly becoming our only choices. We could let the Communists conquer South Vietnam or send in our own troops to prevent it. The Kennedy administration sowed the seeds of intrigue that led to the overthrow and murder of Diem. Now we would reap a bitter harvest.
• • •
Most Americans believe that the Tonkin Gulf incident triggered our entry into the Vietnam War. Although it was an important turning point, it was not our opening volley.
President Kennedy had increased the number of United States military advisers in Vietnam to over 16,000 in 1963. They did much more than simply give advice; Kennedy had authorized them to accompany South Vietnamese forces into battle and to return fire if fired upon. Whether we called them “training personnel” or “combat advisers” was a matter of semantics; by the end of 1963, our forces had sustained 612 casualties. President Johnson stepped up our involvement in 1964. He ordered limited air strikes against the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and increased the number of our advisers by 7,000.
The first direct American attack on North Vietnam was a reprisal for two North Vietnamese attacks on our ships in August 1964. On August 2, while patrolling in the Tonkin Gulf to gather intelligence and spot Communist infiltration of men and supplies into South Vietnam by sea, the destroyer USS Maddox was attacked by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats. Our ship sustained no serious damage, and President Johnson ordered no retaliation. At the time, South Vietnam had been making a series of small-scale strikes on North Vietnamese shore facilities from which Communist infiltration operations were launched. Johnson believed that the North Vietnamese might have mistakenly thought the Maddox was involved in one such attack, though the ship was 120 miles away at the time. He therefore ordered that our ships stay even farther away from South Vietnamese coastal forays. But on August 4 North Vietnamese patrol boats attacked the Maddox and the USS C. Turner Joy with torpedos and gunfire. The Johnson administration retaliated with our first air strikes on targets in North Vietnam.
Years later, antiwar journalists asserted that the August 4 incident never occurred and accused Johnson and the military of fabricating it as a pretext to intervene in the war. While some respected military observers have questioned whether the attack took place, I have concluded that it did and there is no credible evidence that we provoked it. Even official North Vietnamese histories of the war include it in their narratives. And when Admiral Thomas Moorer, who was in charge of the ships on patrol, was later asked whether the attack really happened, he said the North Vietnamese bullets that were dug out of the Maddox looked real enough to him.
On August 7, President Johnson, who had wanted for some time to “get Congress on board” before taking strong actions in Vietnam, sent Congress the Southeast Asia Resolution or, as it became known, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It was not, as some would later say, a cynical ploy to obtain broad powers to fight the war. It was an honest effort to get congressional support for the deepening involvement that had been forced upon us.
The Tonkin Gulf incidents were not the reason we went into Vietnam, just as the sinking of the Lusitania was not why we entered World War I. Johnson’s resolution stated that the attacks were “part of a deliberate and systematic campaign of aggression that the Communist regime in North Vietnam has been waging against its neighbors and the nations joined with them in the collective defense of their freedom.” It resolved “that the Congress approves and supports the determination of the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed aggression against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.”
We did not go to war because of two brief naval skirmishes but because North Vietnam was trying to take over Indochina.
Many have faulted Johnson for not asking Congress for a declaration of war. He almost certainly could have gotten one after the Tonkin Gulf incidents. But he had several reasons to stop short of a declared state of war.
Neither Congress nor the Pentagon was demanding a declaration of war, because nobody expected the conflict to last very long. Johnson believed that tactical bombing in South Vietnam and limited strategic bombing in North Vietnam would soon cause the Communists to cease their aggression. He feared that China might intervene in Vietnam as it had in Korea and that a formal declaration of war would enable North Vietnam to cash in on both Chinese and Soviet security guaranties. And finally, Johnson, understandably, did not want to go to war in an election year.
Congress approved the Tonkin Gulf Resolution overwhelmingly. The House voted 416 to 0 in favor of it after only forty minutes of debate. The Senate debated the resolution for eight hours and passed it 88 to 2. These votes showed that Johnson had a solid consensus behind his policy. Congressional sentiment was best summarized by one legislator who later became a vehement opponent of the war. “There is a time to question the route of the flag,” said Senator Frank Church, “and there is a time to rally around it, lest it be routed. This is the time for the latter course, and in our pursuit of it, a time for all of us to unify.”
Those who supported the resolution but later turned against the war tried to absolve themselves by accusing Johnson of duping the Congress about the extent of the powers it was delegating or of acting beyond his authority. Neither was the case. The record of the Senate debate shows that Congress went into the war with its eyes open. Senator John Sherman Cooper asked, “[I]f the President decided that it was necessary to use such force as could lead us into war, we would give that authorization by this resolution?” Senator J. William Fulbright, who steered the measure through the Senate, answered, “That is the way I would interpret it.” Senator Daniel Brewster asked whether “the resolution authorized the landing of large American armies in Vietnam or in China.” Fulbright answered that this was the last thing the administration wanted but that “the language of the resolution would not prevent it. It would authorize whatever the Commander-in-Chief feels is necessary.” And one of two senators who voted against the resolution, Ernest Gruening, warned that it was “an authorization which would be the equivalent of a declaration of war by Congress.”
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was not the President’s sole legal basis for conducting the war. Johnson was acting in accordance
with the security provisions of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). And Congress exercised its war powers every year when it authorized spending for our forces in Vietnam.
Congress reaffirmed its support for the war in March 1966, long after our troops had become deeply involved in the ground war. Senator Wayne Morse introduced a measure that denounced the way the President used the powers granted by the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Johnson made it a test of congressional support for his policy. He urged that “senators who want to reverse the Tonkin resolution because of a change of heart should vote for the Morse amendment.” The Senate rejected the amendment—and therefore supported the war—by a vote of 92 to 5.
• • •
In July 1965, eleven months after the approval of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, we took our most fateful step into the quicksand of the Vietnam War. President Johnson simultaneously faced two sets of critical decisions: He had to maneuver the legislation for his Great Society programs through Congress, and he had to decide what to do to prevent the imminent collapse of South Vietnam. How he resolved these two problems set the pattern for his handling of the war and had a great deal to do with what went wrong in it.
Until 1965, Johnson hoped words, not deeds, would be enough to deter North Vietnam’s aggression. “We will remain as long as is necessary,” he said in April 1964, “with the might that is required, whatever the risk and whatever the cost.” But like Kennedy on Laos in 1961, Johnson, however expansive his rhetoric, was reluctant to take the military action necessary to back it up. For about a year he had made little use of his war powers under the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. At first he ordered limited bombing in Laos and North Vietnam and then deployed additional ground troops in South Vietnam, but only to protect our air bases. Johnson made the fatal mistake of committing American prestige without committing adequate American forces to back it up.
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