Yet Ridgway and his allies were not able to keep the United States out altogether. There is a subterranean aspect to the first ten years of American involvement in Vietnam, from 1955 to 1965. In the wake of Dien Bien Phu, the Americans stepped in to take over the military burden from the French—not in fighting but in advising and training South Vietnamese forces. Patterns and tendencies that became obvious later were set then, most notably an American inclination to push the Vietnamese toward building a conventional military designed to repel a North Vietnamese invasion, rather than a force tailored to conduct a domestic counterinsurgency campaign. As Gen. Westmoreland would observe years later, “American advisers in the 1950s saw the main threat to South Vietnam not from within but from the North Vietnamese army. In organizing and training the South Vietnamese forces, the Americans thus created conventional forces much in their own image.” Unfortunately, invasion from the North was not the threat South Vietnam would face, at least until much later in the war.
The senior American adviser in Saigon from late 1955 to late 1960 was “Hanging Sam” Williams, recovered from his battlefield firing in Normandy in 1944. Despite their facing a guerrilla insurgency, which generally calls for paramilitary forces performing police functions while living among the people, ideally among their longtime neighbors, Williams and his comrades tried to create versions of the U.S. Army divisions of World War II—that is, regular forces designed for regular, state-on-state war.
Lt. Gen. Williams “was convinced that that was the way the war was going to go . . . and that was the way he trained and organized the Vietnamese forces,” said Army Col. James Muir. “I don’t recall anybody ever trying to talk him out of it because that was one of those things you just didn’t do with General Williams.” Nor did Williams restrict his tongue lashings just to Americans. Describing his plans for the Vietnamese military, he was interrupted by a French officer who said that the Vietnamese were not capable of fighting. “Hell,” Williams responded, in a manner reminiscent of John Wayne’s film persona, “they just whipped your ass at Dien Bien Phu.” Elbridge Durbrow, the U.S. ambassador, in an official report on Williams, questioned his “tact, judgment on other than military matters, and his ability to cooperate with other members of the Country Team.”
The paradox of Williams is that he was advising South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem to engage in pacification programs. “The real danger lies in the local Viet Minh cadre,” Williams told Diem, according to a memorandum of a conversation between the two in December 1955. Diem apparently agreed; the memo noted, “The President stated that to be successful against the Viet Minh [the nationalist and Communist opposition] you must use the same tactics they employ.”
Yet Williams did not follow through on that thought. Instead, in 1958, at his encouragement, the South Vietnamese government disbanded its six light infantry divisions, which Williams had criticized as being unable to hold their own against North Vietnamese divisions. When the Communists attacked in the late 1950s, they concentrated on heavily populated rich rural farmlands, which Gen. Cao Van Vien, chief of South Vietnam’s general staff from 1965 to 1975, noted were “precisely the areas which had not received adequate attention in the RVN [Republic of Vietnam] defense system.” The disbanded light divisions would have proven useful when small Viet Cong guerrilla units, conducting hit-and-run operations, “gradually gained control in rural areas,” recalled Lt. Gen. Ngo Quang Truong, generally regarded as one of the most combat capable and tactically sharp of the South Vietnamese officers. He continued:
When fighting finally broke out, it did not take the form of a conventional, Korean-style invasion. It rather began as a brushfire war fought with subversive activities and guerrilla tactics away from the urban centers. Day and night, this small war gradually gained in tempo, nipping away at the secure fabric of rural areas. In the face of a growing insurgency, ARVN [Army of the Republic of Vietnam] units found themselves ill-fitted to fit this type of war, for which they had not been trained.
In February 1960, the government of South Vietnam began a new program designed to improve counterinsurgency operations in the countryside—which, in retrospect, was exactly the right thing to do, and which the Americans would support vigorously nine years later. But at the time, their American advisers were appalled. Williams denounced the move as “hasty, ill-conceived and destructive to overall instruments of power.” Williams departed Vietnam in September of that year. His legacy, said Gen. Truong, was that of “a long and valuable time . . . irretrievably lost,” during which security could have been built up in the villages of Vietnam. (Lest this be dismissed as sour grapes, a March 1966 study by the U.S. Army staff would arrive at the same conclusion: “From 1954–61, our predominantly military advice nurtured a conventional GVN [Government of Vietnam] military force structure to repel overt armed invasion. Events have proved this formulation to be grossly in error.”)
Williams was replaced late in 1960 by Lt. Gen. Lionel McGarr, who was a bit of an eccentric. He made a habit in Saigon of staying in his house for days at a time, its steel shutters closed tight, while tape-recording instructions that he had delivered to his subordinates. He was even less congenial than his predecessor. “General McGarr was not an adept change agent,” wrote John Cushman, who worked with McGarr on “the Atomic Field Army” and would go on to become a lieutenant general. “McGarr came across as blunt, rough, humorless and suspicious—not easy to like.” Even the Army’s official history concludes that during his Vietnam tour, “Splithead” McGarr “made himself thoroughly unpopular in Saigon and Washington.”
In 1961, when the British proposed a classic counterinsurgency plan for Vietnam that was aimed more at winning control over the population than at killing insurgents, McGarr objected to it, worrying that, among other things, it would take too long to implement and also would undercut the “offensive spirit” he thought needed to be inculcated in the South Vietnamese army. Throughout the 1960s, recalled Brig. Gen. Tran Dinh Tho, chief of operations of the Vietnamese general staff for seven years, the Americans would show only “lukewarm interest” in counterinsurgency and pacification operations, which they did not regard as their mission. Meanwhile, American focus on the conventional South Vietnamese military would intensify, with such intense “mirror imaging” of American forces that by the mid-1960s, recalled one American general, every South Vietnamese division had its own marching band, just like American units. Gordon Sullivan, who went on to become Army chief of staff in the 1990s but was then a young adviser in Vietnam, recalled, “I never got the feeling that the U.S. advisory effort was coherent and ‘Okay, guys, here is what we are trying to do.’”
Part of the incoherence was due to a difference between what was needed and what was done. One of the jobs of generals is to ensure that the military bureaucracy responds to instructions. This was a problem in Vietnam. Robert Komer, the CIA officer who took over the pacification program in 1967, wrote years later that there was a striking “discontinuity between the mixed counterinsurgency strategy which U.S. and GVN police called for at the outset, and the overwhelmingly conventional and militarized nature of our actual response.” He concluded that the military bureaucracy had done not what it was told to do but rather what it knew how to do.
The attitude of the Joint Chiefs toward Indochina shifted somewhat after Gen. Taylor became a power at the Kennedy White House, with the Chiefs beginning to support direct military involvement. “Kennedy’s preferred battleground appeared to be Southeast Asia, an area that the Army had not wanted to enter in 1954,” wrote Army Major Jay Parker. “That reluctance was not gone, but gradually the Army became willing to accept military involvement as both a national security imperative and as a means of validating its role.” Taylor also appears to have been the first American official to discuss bombing North Vietnam, in a memorandum to the president in November 1961. “The risks of backing into a major Asian war . . . are present but are not impressive,”
he assured Kennedy, in large part because, he assumed, “NVN [North Vietnam] is extremely vulnerable to conventional bombing.” When the nature of such a campaign was being discussed in 1964, he and Gen. Westmoreland would jointly argue for a graduated response, which they termed “a carefully orchestrated bombing attack.”
Yet the Chiefs still had their own ideas, which neither Taylor nor the other Kennedy men much liked. In April 1961, Gen. George Decker, then Army chief of staff, told Kennedy, “we cannot win a conventional war in Southeast Asia; if we go in, we should go in to win, and that means bombing Hanoi, China, and maybe even using nuclear weapons.” Decker would serve as Army chief for just two years, half the normal tenure, as would Lemnitzer as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Taylor advised the president to replace Decker with Earle Wheeler, a pliable officer, while Taylor himself became the Joint Chiefs chairman.
• • •
Taylor in the early 1960s became almost the opposite of George Marshall. He was intensely politicized. He did not seek to allay distrust between generals but instead played on it. He made a habit of saying not what he knew to be true but instead what he thought should be said. In a study written decades later, Maj. Gen. H. R. McMaster concluded that Taylor’s character flaws had played a central role in deepening American involvement in Vietnam:
When he found it expedient to do so, he misled the JCS, the press, and the NSC. He deliberately relegated his fellow military officers to a position of little influence and assisted [Defense Secretary Robert] McNamara in suppressing JCS objections to the concept of graduated pressure. . . . To keep the Chiefs from expressing dissenting views, he helped to craft a relationship based on distrust and deceit in which the president obscured the finality of decisions and made false promises that the JCS conception of the war might one day be realized.
To extend his influence even further, Taylor suggested another key change: a new top officer for the American presence in Vietnam. He had in mind Paul Harkins, who had been on Patton’s staff during World War II, helping draft the plan for the invasion of Sicily. Harkins said that, after Patton’s death, “Taylor . . . had sort of adopted me.” Under Taylor’s influence, Harkins was dispatched to Vietnam to take over the American advisory effort.
Harkins almost certainly was not a good fit. “I think General Harkins was an unmitigated disaster,” said John Dunn, later an Army general but at this point a lieutenant colonel working as an aide to Harkins’s bureaucratic foe, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. “He was totally insensitive to all the political considerations and simply gave his blind loyalty to whoever was running things at the time” in the government of South Vietnam. “He was not a clever man.” Early in 1964, about six weeks after Lyndon Johnson succeeded the assassinated Kennedy, national security adviser McGeorge Bundy informed the new president, in a memo labeled “TOP SECRET—EYES ONLY,” that his top general in Vietnam was a loser. “I do not know anyone except perhaps Max Taylor, in the top circles of your government who believes that General Harkins is the right man for the war in Vietnam now,” he began.
Harkins has been unimpressive in his reporting and analyzing, and has shown a lack of grip on the realities of the situation. . . . Harkins and Co. have been dead wrong about the military situation for months. . . . McNamara himself thinks Harkins should be replaced.
Defense Secretary McNamara certainly was underwhelmed by Harkins, telling the presidential historian Henry Graff that the old tank officer “wasn’t worth a damn so he was removed.” The problem, McNamara added, was a basic one: “You need intelligent people.” Gen. Donn Starry, who considered Harkins “a good friend,” agreed with McNamara about the nature of the general’s ouster. “When they relieved General Harkins and brought him out of there, it was in large part because things were not going well in the countryside.” The U.S. Army’s official histories of its wars usually are extremely discreet about personnel moves, to the point of not even mentioning them, but the volume that covered the Harkins era stated that in May 1964 the general “abruptly” was told by the president to travel back to Washington and then told not to return to Vietnam, an order that a “dismayed and embittered Harkins” viewed “as a thinly disguised dismissal.”
The way had been cleared for Westmoreland.
CHAPTER 16
William Westmoreland
The organization man in command
T he selection of William Westmoreland to replace Harkins came during an unsettled time, not long after Kennedy’s death, and was approved by a new president neither familiar nor comfortable with his generals. The result was that, even though his choice of Harkins had not worked out, Maxwell Taylor likely enjoyed a disproportionate influence in picking Harkins’s successor. “I think that General Westmoreland sort of was a pick of General Taylor’s,” recalled Gen. Harold K. Johnson, who at the time was the Army’s deputy chief of staff for operations.
Indeed, Westmoreland was, more than anything else, another Taylor man. The two had first met in Sicily in the summer of 1943, when Westmoreland, looking for action, had wandered over to Taylor’s headquarters to volunteer his artillery battalion to support Taylor’s paratroopers. The offer was eagerly accepted, in part because the artillery unit possessed trucks that the light infantrymen lacked. Twelve years later, when Taylor became the head of the Army, he selected Westmoreland to be the secretary of his general staff—essentially the chief of staff to the Army’s chief of staff.
In 1960, Westmoreland had become superintendent of West Point, where he was perhaps best remembered for rejecting a plan to hire Vince Lombardi to coach the academy’s football team. “Lombardi was too tough, too obsessed with winning, and he had slapped around a cadet while he had been Red Blaik’s assistant,” Westmoreland told his friend and subordinate Gen. Phillip Davidson. “This was not the kind of man I wanted around cadets.” Westmoreland’s habit of wanting to look good, even when he was not, apparently extended to his tennis game. His best biographer, Lewis Sorley, tells about his aide calling a captain on the faculty who was a frequent opponent of Westy on the courts and suggesting that he let the general win more often. The speaker at the 1963 commencement, Westmoreland’s last as superintendent, was Gen. Taylor.
Westmoreland’s shortcomings were well known in the Army. Gen. Johnson was not pleased with the choice of Westmoreland, an artillerist by training before becoming an airborne infantry officer. “I felt at the time that he went out to Vietnam he was not the best qualified to put out there. My reason for that opinion was that I felt it was an infantry war, really a squad leader’s and a platoon leader’s war, to be fought in a way that would not alienate large segments of the population.” Johnson added, “I don’t happen to be a fan of General Westmoreland. I don’t think I ever was, and I certainly didn’t become one as a result of the Vietnam War or later during his tenure as chief of staff of the Army.” When Westmoreland’s name emerged as the likely choice to command in Vietnam, Brig. Gen. Amos Jordan intervened with the secretary of the Army, Cyrus Vance, to warn against it. “He is spit and polish, two up and one back,” said Jordan, who was on the faculty at West Point when Westmoreland was superintendent. “This is a counterinsurgency war, and he would have no idea of how to deal with it.” Vance responded that the decision already had been made.
William Westmoreland himself was a new thing in the Army, an organization man more educated in corporate management than in military affairs. He was an odd combination of traits: energetic and ambitious, yet strikingly incurious, and prone to fabrication even as he considered himself a Boy Scout in his ethics, according to Sorley. He did well in World War II as a battalion commander, especially at a crucial moment early in the war, at Kasserine Pass. Yet in his subsequent career, he would embody the empty approach of looking good rather than being good—the opposite of the old Terry Allen type, but dismayingly common in the uncertain Army of the 1950s. For example, in his memoirs he depicted himself as a student of military history, someone w
ho always kept a few classics at his bedside. This was untrue. “He simply doesn’t have any interests,” Charles MacDonald, the military historian who helped Westy write his memoirs, told Sorley. “I would venture to guess that the man has not read a book from cover to cover in a hell of a long time.” Another officer, Lt. Gen. Charles Simmons, said that “General Westmoreland was intellectually very shallow and made no effort to study, read or learn. He would just not read anything.” Westmoreland told people he had no idea that he had been invited to address a joint session of Congress while in Washington in April 1967, yet in fact he had been notified of this before leaving Saigon and had prepared for it for weeks.
Such minor instances of mendacity probably were harmless, but the habit carried over into his conduct of the war and his defense of it for decades afterward. He provided false evidence in 1967 that his attrition strategy was working, telling the president during his April trip that “the crossover point” had been reached and claiming on Meet the Press that November that North Vietnamese “manpower cannot be replaced.” As Sorley notes, this was “in no way accurate.” As Army chief of staff, he oversaw the preparation of a history of the Vietnam War that was laden with omissions and evasions, yet he would assert to the editor of Reader’s Digest that “the fact remains that this is the only authentic publication on the war.” Westmoreland would persist in making such statements late into his life, sometimes flatly denying facts that historians knew from documents to be demonstrably true. For example, he would deny to historians working for the Marine Corps that he had developed a low opinion of Marine tactical abilities, a statement that, wrote Sorley, was “not only false, but reckless, given the existing paper trail.” Ultimately, the habit of saying whatever sounded good at the moment would catch up with him when he sued CBS News for libel, only to have the network’s defense lawyer read to him passages from his memoirs that undercut his testimony.
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