by Max Boot
In the more wide-open, anything-goes media culture of the twenty-first century, JFK’s health woes and skirt chasing might well have doomed his presidency, but in the more repressed climate of the early sixties reporters either did not know the facts or did not consider them fit to print. Most Americans had a largely unvarnished portrait of their young president, a handsome war hero with a winsome family, a ready wit, and charisma to burn. The doubts about him concerned not his moral or physical capacity for the job but his sheer inexperience. Some feared that at only forty-three, and having accomplished little in the Senate, this rich man’s son was a lightweight who was not ready to shoulder the demands of the nation’s highest office.
But his masterful inauguration address, one of the greatest ever delivered, impressed even his critics. Its catchphrases, drafted by the speechwriter Theodore Sorenson and refined by Kennedy himself, still resonate more than half a century later: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. . . . Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate. . . . And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”7
As a Cold Warrior himself, as someone who had dedicated his life to fighting Communist insurgents in order to ensure the survival and success of liberty, Edward Lansdale could not help being impressed by the new president’s stirring call to action. Less than a week before the inauguration, Ed had written to Pat Kelly, “I’d gotten to know Nixon well enough so that I’d have had a real go if he’d won.” Now, “it’s going to take time to let the new bunch make their mistakes, learn a little, maybe, and then perhaps be ready to get away from the bureaucrats who really run our government.”8 Little did Lansdale suspect that the report he wrote on his trip to Vietnam would serve as a significant part of the “new bunch’s” learning process.
LANSDALE’S REPORT began, “1961 promises to be a fateful year for Vietnam. The Communist Viet Cong hope to win back Vietnam south of the 17th Parallel this year, if at all possible, and are much further along towards accomplishing this objective than I had realized from reading the reports received in Washington.” He found that the “Viet Cong have the initiative and most of the control over the region from the jungled foothills of the High Plateau north of Saigon all the way south down to the Gulf of Siam, excluding the big city area of Saigon–Cholon.” If “Free Vietnam” falls, he warned, “the remainder of Southeast Asia will be easy pickings for our enemy, because the toughest local force on our side will be gone.”
Lansdale argued, as he had done since 1954, that the key to saving South Vietnam lay in backing Ngo Dinh Diem, “still the only Vietnamese with executive ability and the required determination to be an effective President.” Rather than replace Diem, he continued, it was time to replace the U.S. ambassador, Elbridge Durbrow: “Correctly or not, the recognized government of Vietnam does not look upon him as a friend, believing that he sympathized strongly with the coup leaders of 11 November [1960].” In place of Durbrow, Lansdale recommended the appointment of an ambassador “with marked leadership talents who can make the Country Team function harmoniously and spiritually, who can influence Asians through understanding them sympathetically, and who is alert to the power of the Mao Tse Tung tactics now being employed to capture Vietnam and who is dedicated to feasible and practical democratic means to defeat these Communist tactics.”
To a casual reader—including, as it would turn out, the new president—it might have sounded as if Lansdale were promoting himself as the next ambassador. Numerous authors have stated as a fact that Lansdale’s “ulterior motive” in writing the report was to claim Durbrow’s job for himself.9 But, recognizing his own limitations, Lansdale told his friend Rufus Phillips that he had no desire to deal with all of the ceremonial and managerial tasks of being an ambassador. With his aversion to pomp and protocol, Lansdale was later to say, “I didn’t want to be an ambassador. Jesus. . . . That’s one of the world’s worst jobs.”10 According to Phillips, Lansdale preferred that the appointment go to one of his State Department friends—Kenneth Young, who had handled Southeast Asia issues during the Eisenhower administration—in the expectation that he could work as closely with Young as he had with other ambassadors such as Raymond Spruance and Donald Heath.11
That Lansdale did not have the ambassadorship in mind for himself was clear from his recommendation, within his trip report, that “a mature American, with much the same qualifications as those given above for the selection of the next Ambassador, should be assigned to Vietnam for political operations which will start creating a Vietnamese-style foundation for more democratic government without weakening the strong leadership required to bring about the defeat of the Communists.” Rather than the “Ugly American” or the “Quiet American,” the sobriquets bestowed on him by others, Lansdale saw himself as this “mature American”: an influential, behind-the-scenes political operator assisted by a small, handpicked team of loyalists—in other words, the role he had previously played in the Philippines and South Vietnam. “If the next American official to talk to President Diem would have the good sense to see him as a human being who has been through a lot of hell for years—and not as an opponent to be beaten to his knees—we would start regaining our influence with him in a healthy way . . . ,” he wrote. “If we don’t like the heavy influence of Brother Nhu, then let’s move someone of ours in close. This someone, however, must be able to look at problems with understanding, suggest better solutions than does Nhu, earn a position of influence.”
Lansdale envisioned that the American envoys to Saigon would also “be given the task of creating an opposition party which would coalesce the majority of the opposition into one organization.” How it would be possible to work at the same time with both Diem and the opposition he did not explain. But if Lansdale’s prescription for solving Vietnam’s most pressing political problem was overly ambitious, his description of what would happen if something did not change rang all too true, all the more so when viewed in hindsight, with full knowledge of what was to come in 1963. He warned, “Unless the energies of the malcontents, the frustrated, the patriots on the outs are quickly channeled into constructive political works, they are going to explode into destructive political work. The opposition situation in Saigon–Cholon is at the bursting point, and there is no safety valve. When it next blows, and if Diem cannot cope with it, the Saigon political scene has all the makings of turning into anarchy. It can happen, and soon.” Just as prophetic was Lansdale’s warning of the cost of abandoning Diem: “If the 11 November coup had been successful, I believe that a number of highly selfish and mediocre people would be squabbling among themselves for power while the Communists took over.”12
In addition to this Cassandra-like twelve-page report, Lansdale penned a separate thirteen-page memorandum on his experiences with Father Hoa.13 His intent was to balance out the more negative tone of his main report by holding out hope that successful resistance to the Vietcong was still possible if the Sea Swallows’ example was emulated elsewhere. Yet his case study did not address the main reason why the experience of Binh Hung was not readily applicable in other parts of South Vietnam: much of Father Hoa’s community was made up of Catholics, who were ideologically distinct from the mainstream Vietnamese population and largely impervious to appeals from atheist insurgents. Lansdale later argued that there were other “free villages” out there—“Catholic villages, Hoa Hao villages etc.”—that could be pillars of a successful counterinsurgency strategy.14 But keeping the Vietcong out of ordinary Vietnamese villages without a distinctive religious identity would prove much tougher.
GENERAL ANDREW GOODPASTER, one of Eisenhower’s most trusted aides, gave Lansdale’s trip report to Walt Whitman Rostow, an economist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was Kennedy’s new deputy national security advi
ser, telling him, “I think President Kennedy ought to see this.” Rostow read it and concluded that Goodpaster was right—“it was an ominous draft.” He took it into the Oval Office, saying, “Mr. President, I think you ought to read this.”
Kennedy was feeling rushed. “I’ve only got half an hour today,” he said. “Can you summarize it?”
“No sir,” Rostow replied. “I think you must read it.”
“I may have no time for anything else,” Kennedy warned. “Must I read it?”
“Yes, sir,” Rostow insisted.
Kennedy put on the horn-rimmed glasses that he used for reading and that the public did not realize he wore,15 and read it all. When he was done, he looked up and said, “That’s the worst one we’ve got, isn’t it? I’ll tell you something. President Eisenhower never mentioned it. He talked at length about Laos, but never uttered the word Vietnam.”
So impressed was Kennedy by the importance of this looming problem that he instructed Rostow “to go deeply into the problem of Vietnam and get him some materials to read about guerrilla warfare in general.” Thus Lansdale’s report directly sparked Kennedy’s interest both in the Vietnam War and in guerrilla warfare more broadly, two of the defining themes of his administration.16
BECAUSE OF Kennedy’s “keen interest in General Lansdale’s recent report and his awareness of the high importance” of Vietnam, the new national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, decided that a White House meeting on January 28, 1961—the second Saturday after the inauguration—would be broadened to include a discussion of Vietnam.17 The new defense secretary, Robert S. McNamara, asked Lansdale to join him at the White House that chilly morning without telling him whom he would brief. Lansdale was surprised when he was ushered into the Oval Office—the most famous room in the world—to find himself at a meeting not only with McNamara but also with President Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, General Lyman Lemnitzer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Assistant Secretary of State Paul Nitze, Deputy National Security Adviser Walt Rostow, and his old mentor, CIA Director Allen Dulles.
Kennedy, as was his habit, must have been sitting in his favorite rocking chair, the rattan-and-oak Carolina Rocker, wearing a two-button, single-breasted, narrow-lapel suit, and radiating what an aide called “a contained energy, electric in its intensity.” When he became impatient with the discussion, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. noted, Kennedy’s fingers would begin “drumming the table, tapping his teeth, slashing patient pencil lines on a pad, jabbing the air to underscore a point.”18 The blue-green rug, inherited from the office’s previous occupant, still bore visible golf-cleat indentations, but the new president had added some personal touches of his own. Scattered around were naval bric-a-brac—a coconut paperweight (a memento of the sinking of PT-109), paintings of the sailing ships USS Constitution and USS Bonhomme Richard, models of the Coast Guard cutter Danmark and the China clipper ship The Sea Witch—which served as reminders of his heroic wartime service in the Navy as well as his long-standing love of the sea nurtured by summers at Hyannis Port. Winter sunlight streamed through the three majestic windows, each more than eleven feet tall, located behind the president’s massive desk. The White House Rose Garden, bare and brown at this time of year, could be glimpsed through the French doors.19
The assembled policymakers had already been discussing the CIA’s plans for the Bay of Pigs for forty-five minutes when Lansdale joined the meeting at 10:45 a.m. along with J. Graham “Jeff” Parsons, the assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs. President Kennedy thanked Lansdale for his memorandum and said that “it, for the first time, gave him a sense of the danger and urgency of the problem in Viet-Nam.”20 The group then turned to Parsons to hear a presentation on the existing counterinsurgency plan for Vietnam, which called for greater U.S. funding to increase the size of the South Vietnamese army by twenty thousand men in return for a promise from Diem to institute political reforms. Kennedy interrupted this presentation to express skepticism that such a military increase would appreciably change the balance of power on the ground. Showing that he had digested Lansdale’s report, Kennedy wanted to know “whether the situation was not basically one of politics and morale.” He then opened the floor to Lansdale.
“The essentials,” Lansdale said, “were three: first, the Americans in Viet-Nam must themselves be infused with high morale and a will to win, and they must get close to the Vietnamese; secondly, the Vietnamese must, in this setting, be moved to act with vigor and confidence; third, Diem must be persuaded to let the opposition coalesce in some legitimate form rather than concentrate on the task of killing him.”
In response to a question from Kennedy about Durbrow’s job performance, Lansdale did not hold back. “Well, I’m a little hesitant, but you’re the President and you need the truth, so I’ll tell you right now, I think he’s a very ill man. His judgment’s impaired by his physical condition. He’s a fine professional Foreign Service officer and could be used in some place, but don’t keep him on in Vietnam anymore.”21 Secretary of State Rusk did not bother to defend the ambassador he had inherited from the Eisenhower administration, conceding that “it was now time for a change and he should be relieved in the near future.” Thus Lansdale effectively claimed the scalp of yet another ambassador in Saigon, having previously helped force out Donald Heath and J. Lawton Collins.
The question now was who would succeed Durbrow. Walt Rostow’s minutes note, “The question of whether General Lansdale or Mr. Kenneth Young should go to Viet-Nam as the new ambassador was considered.” Lansdale’s own recollection was that the president, who was sitting directly across from him, said to him, “Did Dean [Rusk] tell you I want you to be ambassador to Vietnam?” “No, he didn’t,” a startled Lansdale replied. There followed a “long, painful silence” as he tried to figure out how to respond.22 His hesitation adds further credence to the notion that he was not lobbying for the job, but it must have puzzled Kennedy, because that was the impression the president undoubtedly had received from Lansdale’s own memorandum. Kennedy liked men of action; he would not have appreciated this sudden indecisiveness.
Lansdale’s recollections of what happened when he finally spoke varied, and no transcript of the meeting was made. In a 1984 interview, Lansdale remembered stammering, “Thank you very much, but I’m a regular military officer and I don’t think my place is in diplomacy.”23 On two other occasions, including a 1970 interview, Lansdale recalled saying, after a considerable pause, “It would be a great honor.”24 Whatever he said, he had not enthusiastically and immediately embraced a job offer that engendered predictable opposition within the State Department. Later Lansdale was to hear from one of Rusk’s aides that the normally passive and deferential secretary of state, a gracious product of rural Georgia and Oxford University, had threatened to resign if Lansdale were selected. Rusk apparently felt so strongly not just because he viewed Lansdale as a “lone wolf” but also because Lansdale was an active-duty military officer as well as a former CIA officer, and Rusk, a stickler for diplomatic protocol, did not want either military or intelligence officers as ambassadors.25
The ambassador’s job went instead to a career Foreign Service officer, Frederick “Fritz” Nolting Jr., a handsome and courtly Virginian with a PhD in philosophy who spoke fluent French and was serving as an envoy to NATO. Lacking the kind of personal history with Diem that Lansdale possessed, Nolting would find himself hard-put to influence the stubborn president even though he tried to adopt the conciliatory approach that Lansdale advocated. Only Lansdale, of all the Americans who might have been sent to Saigon, had any chance, however remote, of persuading Diem to peacefully reform and thus to avert his own overthrow two and a half years later. The failure to appoint Lansdale as ambassador, in the judgment of the New Yorker correspondent (and Lansdale friend) Robert Shaplen, “was another vital turning point in the long and tortuous history of America’s Vietnamese involvement.” If this episode had turned out differentl
y, Shaplen was to write five years later, it “might have made all the difference in the world in our relations with Vietnam and in the prosecution of the war.”26
Having failed to appoint Lansdale as ambassador, Kennedy considered promoting him to three-star rank and sending him to Saigon as head of the Military Assistance Advisory Group. This appointment also could have changed the course of American–Vietnamese history, but it aroused as much opposition from the Joint Chiefs of Staff as his potential ambassadorship had aroused from the State Department. The chiefs did not view Lansdale as a “real” soldier, and they scolded him for putting Kennedy up to the job offer—something he insisted that he had not done.27
A FEW days after the January 28 Oval Office meeting, Lansdale got a call on his office telephone. Picking up the receiver, he heard a man with a familiar Boston accent identify himself as “President Kennedy.” The caller proceeded to tell Lansdale how much he had enjoyed reading his case study on Binh Hung and urged him to publish it in a magazine such as the Saturday Evening Post so that it would become more widely known. The whole time Lansdale was wondering to himself, “Which of my friends is trying to imitate the new president?” As soon as he hung up, he called the White House and spoke to one of the president’s military aides, who assured him that it had indeed been President Kennedy on the line.28 His next call was to the editor of the Saturday Evening Post.
On May 20, 1961, the Post published Lansdale’s case study, along with Joe Redick’s photos, under the headline “The Report the President Wanted Published.” The byline read simply, “By an American Officer.” The editors appended a note of explanation:
