by Max Boot
When it came to the President’s desk, the report was classified. But behind the official language of the report, the President saw a story of human valor and dedication to freedom, a reminder that Communism is not the wave of the future. It was a story, he felt, that many people ought to read, and he wrote a memorandum suggesting that the report would make “an excellent article for a magazine like The Saturday Evening Post. I would like to see this type of material have good distribution, as it shows what can be done.” The substance of the report is published herewith.
After this publicity, Father Hoa received not only thousands of weapons from the CIA but also assistance from U.S. and Taiwanese Special Forces teams.29
“We can put this down as having struck a blow for liberty,” Lansdale wrote to Redick. “A magazine writer changed a few words; otherwise think you’ll recognize this. At least you can read the ads to see what’s doing in the land of milk and honey.”30 For those in the know within the U.S. government, the publication of the Binh Hung case study, along with this flattering editor’s note spelling out the president’s endorsement, was a powerful blow not so much for liberty as for Lansdale’s reputation. And this was far from the last boost that Lansdale would receive from the Kennedy administration.
WHEN GRAVES ERSKINE finally retired, in February 1961, Lansdale replaced him as assistant to the secretary of defense for special operations. He did not inherit the other part of Big E’s responsibility, running the Office of Special Operations; it was abolished and its intelligence-oversight functions were folded into the newly created Defense Intelligence Agency.31 But this was still a big promotion for Lansdale, who was now performing duties equivalent to those of an assistant secretary of defense. He broke the news to South Vietnam’s minister of defense, Nguyen Dinh Thuan, in a typically lighthearted manner. “My penalty for visiting Vietnam and having an outing with you to the Fifth Military Region was a new job,” he wrote. “I pay for the fun now with a lot more papers and problems.”32 Nguyen extended congratulations not only from himself but from Diem, who was “jubilant” about the news, adding, “The President would like to get you here once more—Is it feasible?”33 General Lionel McGarr, Hanging Sam Williams’s replacement at MAAG, reiterated that message, telling a senior meeting that Diem would like to see Lansdale “stay in Viet-Nam as long as possible.”34
Walt Rostow, who was emerging as one of the administration hard-liners on Vietnam, was supportive of sending Lansdale. He later said, “I’ve met a handful of people in my life who have this particular genius for dealing with human beings in ways that make them feel dignified.” Ed Lansdale was one such man—“an extraordinary man,” a “first-class man.”35 Rostow told the president, “We must find a way to send Lansdale for a visit to Viet Nam soon in a way that will strengthen Nolting’s hand—not weaken it. This is wholly possible.”36 The job Rostow had in mind for Lansdale was to act, he wrote the president on April 13, 1961, as a “full-time, first-rate, back-stop man in Washington.”37
At Rostow’s urging, Lansdale drafted a memorandum laying out the role he could play in Vietnam policy.38 Lansdale’s unsigned memorandum, dated April 19, 1961, proposed that the president should “establish a Washington task force” that not only would come up with “an approved plan of action prior to sending a new U.S. ambassador to Vietnam” but would “then supervise and coordinate” the implementation of that plan. Writing of himself in the third person, he argued, “Fullest use should be made of the existing position of personal confidence and understanding which General Lansdale holds with President Diem and other key Vietnamese. In addition to giving a major assist to the new Presidential Task Force for Vietnam in Washington, General Lansdale should accompany the new U.S. Ambassador to Saigon to facilitate good working relations with the Vietnamese Government from the earliest moment and to be in command of the initial implementation of President Kennedy’s Task Force Plan for Vietnam.” “While in Vietnam,” Lansdale continued, he “could obtain President Diem’s permission and then call non-Communist political opposition leaders together and encourage them to rely on legal means of opposition, to help in the fight against the Communist Viet Cong, and to cease scheming coup d’etats.”
In addition to promoting political unity, he advocated what could be seen as his Greatest Hits: create “a Presidential Complaints and Action Commission” to make the government more accountable; set up an Economic Development Corps (EDCOR) to offer free land to Vietcong prisoners who could be induced to defect; improve public administration across South Vietnam using American and Filipino volunteers; step up psychological operations against North Vietnam; and implement a plan to eventually overthrow the Hanoi regime, beginning with “initial actions against symbols of Communist power; the railroad, the cement plant, and the larger modern printing plan[t] in Hanoi”—in other words, the targets that Lou Conein had not been permitted to blow up in 1954. He did not call for sending U.S. combat troops to South Vietnam, but he did advocate increasing the number of military advisers and for easing the prohibition that forbade them to participate in combat alongside South Vietnamese forces. Lansdale summed up his ambitious agenda as follows: “1. Pacification—to end the internal Communist threat in South Vietnam. 2. Stabilization—to promote the growth of healthy democracy in South Vietnam. 3. Unification—to provide a favorable climate for a free choice by the Vietnamese to unify their country.”39 The implementation of this program would, of course, be overseen by the memorandum’s author and his trusted associates. To buttress his case, Lansdale sent a copy of his top-secret 1955 Saigon Military Mission report to senior Kennedy officials under the title “A Cold War Win” to show them what he had done in the past—and implicitly what he could do in the future.40
Lansdale’s proposal for a new Presidential Task Force on Vietnam was adopted by John F. Kennedy on April 20, 1961, the very day that the Bay of Pigs invasion reached its catastrophic denouement. Having failed to topple Fidel Castro, the president was determined to stop the advance of Communism in Southeast Asia.41 The head of the task force was Deputy Defense Secretary Roswell Gilpatric. A product of the Hotchkiss School and Yale University, Gilpatric had been a prominent corporate lawyer in New York and was a well-known ladies’ man; he would be married five times and romantically linked to Jacqueline Kennedy after she became a widow. Like Rusk, he viewed Lansdale as a “solo operator” and an “unusual military type” who “didn’t go along with the usual channels and guidelines,” but, unlike Rusk, he found him to be “very useful,” “knowledgeable,” and “very able.” “Lansdale was not in favor . . . with either the military or with the State Department,” Gilpatric said. “And I was convinced they were wrong. I was convinced he was not a wheeler dealer; he was not an irresponsible swashbuckler.”42 “To the best of my knowledge,” Gilpatric wrote in early 1961, “General Lansdale is the most highly qualified officer on active duty today serving in the area of counter-insurgency affairs.”43 With Gilpatric’s endorsement, Kennedy designated Lansdale as “operations officer” of the task force.
The Vietnam Task Force met for the first time on Monday, April 24, four days after receiving its mandate from the president. Notwithstanding the mutual antipathy between Lansdale and the State Department representatives—similar to the poisonous relations that had existed between him and the French in Vietnam in the mid-1950s—the task force produced a draft plan just a few days after the initial meeting. As the Pentagon Papers were later to note, this first draft was “very much a Gilpatric–Lansdale show,” incorporating many of Lansdale’s suggestions. In a covering memorandum to the president, Gilpatric wrote that Lansdale “will proceed to Vietnam immediately after the program receives Presidential approval.” Lansdale sent off letters to various individuals from his old team, asking them to meet him in Saigon on May 5, 1961, in the expectation that he would resume his old position of prominence. “This appears to have been the high point of Lansdale’s role in Vietnam policy,” the Pentagon Papers concluded. Lansdale’s downfall
was as swift and unexpected as his ascent. On Robert McNamara’s copy of the memorandum, he crossed out the words “will proceed to Vietnam immediately” and scrawled instead “will proceed to Vietnam when requested by the Ambassador”44—a request that, as McNamara knew, was not likely to come until the Mekong Delta froze over.
By the time the interagency process had finished rewriting the task force report, Lansdale’s role had been all but eliminated.45 The leadership of the task force passed to the State Department, where it faded into insignificance. Most of Lansdale’s specific recommendations were replaced with meaningless gobbledygook—for example, “the Ambassador should also consider such special arrangements within the field organization as he may deem required to assure a capability for rapid County Team response to evolving problems.”46 The only real victory Lansdale won was the task force’s recommendation, as the Pentagon Papers put it, “to take a crack at the Lansdale approach of trying to win Diem over with a strong display of personal confidence in him.”47 After reading the final Vietnam Task Force report in dismay, Lansdale “strongly” recommended to McNamara and Gilpatric that the Pentagon stay out of the task force altogether: “Having a Defense officer, myself or someone else, placed in a position of only partial influence . . . would be only to provide State with a scapegoat to share the blame when we have a flop.”48
LANSDALE HAD tried but failed to take control of the Kennedy administration’s policy toward Vietnam. He had won the president’s favor before being just as swiftly marginalized. Lansdale was to say that “by the summer of 1961, I was practically without voice on the number one problem area for CI [counterinsurgency], Viet Nam.” 49
He believed that his influence “had been severely damaged” by Kennedy’s suggestions that he be appointed either ambassador or MAAG chief. Those rumored promotions stirred jealousy and animosity that Lansdale did nothing to dissipate. Once again, he had been outmaneuvered by his bureaucratic adversaries. “I don’t know which has the worst jungle, Vietnam or Washington,” he complained.50 He was certainly not proving as sure-footed in navigating the latter as he had been in the former. He had erred, in particular, by making an enemy at the very top of his own department.
22
“The X Factor”
Your list is incomplete. You’ve left out the most important factor of all.
—EDWARD LANSDALE TO ROBERT MCNAMARA
BEING secretary of defense was, from the start, an almost impossible job. Although the National Security Act of 1947 had created this post to preside over the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps, it gave the officeholder scant power. The first secretary of defense, the Wall Street banker and former Navy secretary James Forrestal, spent his tenure locked in internecine battles with the military services over their funding and missions. He left office in 1949 a broken man, suffering from what psychiatrists diagnosed as the equivalent of combat fatigue. Just two months later, he jumped to his death from the window of the naval hospital where he was receiving psychiatric treatment.1
After Forrestal’s tragic exit, a revolving door was in effect, with none of Harry Truman’s remaining secretaries of defense serving longer than a year and a half. Eisenhower’s first secretary of defense, Charlie Wilson, was in office much longer—nearly five years—but he was widely regarded as a figurehead; the five-star president was, in many ways, his own defense secretary. A former automobile executive, Wilson would be remembered primarily for saying that “what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa.” The first secretary of defense who would exercise real, indeed nearly absolute, authority was John F. Kennedy’s choice: Robert Strange McNamara. This would be good news for those who believed that the Pentagon’s unruly bureaucracy needed a firm hand at the top. It would be bad news, however, for Edward Lansdale and his hopes of influencing the nation’s Vietnam policy.
Lansdale got his first intimation of what McNamara was like in the early days of 1961 when he was summoned to the Pentagon’s inner sanctum, Room 3E-880, to give the new defense secretary a ten-minute briefing—and not a second more—on his Vietnam trip. He knew that McNamara, who had come to the Pentagon, like Charlie Wilson, from a car company, in his case the Ford Motor Company, had no background whatsoever in guerrilla warfare in general or Vietnam in particular. McNamara later admitted as much, conceding, “I had never visited Indochina, nor did I understand its history, language, culture, or values.”2 Lansdale sought to begin McNamara’s education by bringing with him a collection of Vietcong weapons, including “handmade pistols and knives, old French rifles, and bamboo punji sticks,”3 that he intended to donate to the Special Forces headquarters at Fort Bragg.
Lansdale found the defense secretary wearing, as always, a dark suit, his thick brown hair slicked back on his head and parted in the middle, old-fashioned wire-rim spectacles framing his mirthless eyes, his jaw clenched tight, a severe expression on his face, looking very much like the Presbyterian elder that he was. He was ensconced behind his nine-foot-long mahogany desk, which was polished to a mirrorlike shine and adorned, as a reporter noted, “with half a dozen in-and-out baskets brimming with problems of peace and war.”4 Behind him was a portrait of his tightly wound predecessor James Forrestal. It was a fitting if unconscious warning of the way that McNamara himself would crack under the pressure of the Vietnam War.
Lansdale unceremoniously dumped his cargo of dirty weapons, caked with mud and blood, on the secretary’s immaculate desk with a “great clatter.” He recalled telling McNamara,
The enemy in Vietnam uses these weapons—and they were just using them just a little bit ago before I got them. Many of them are barefoot or wear sandals. They wear black pajamas, usually, with tatters or holes in them. I don’t think you’d recognize any of them as soldiers, but they think of themselves that way. The people that are fighting there, on our side, are being supplied with our weapons and uniforms and shoes and all of the best that we have; and we’re training them. Yet, the enemy is licking our side. Always keep in mind about Vietnam, that the struggle goes far beyond the material things of life. It doesn’t take weapons and uniforms and lots of food to win. It takes something else, ideas and ideals, and these guys are using that something else. Let’s at least learn that lesson.5
“Watching his face as I talked,” Lansdale was to say, “I got the feeling that he didn’t understand me. Too unconventional. Somehow I found him very hard to talk to.”6 That was because Lansdale did not speak McNamara’s language—the language of numbers.
Ever since he was a schoolboy, Robert S. McNamara had been entranced by the seductive logic of mathematics. As an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley, in the 1930s, he began, he later said, “to talk and think in numbers.”7 That tendency became even more pronounced during his postgraduate studies at Harvard Business School, where he became convinced that a mastery of financial data was the key to business success. Cold, unemotional, aloof, and intolerant of those less brilliant than him, Bob McNamara began to cultivate a reputation as a human computer—an “IBM machine with legs.”8 During World War II, he became a statistician in uniform, helping the Army Air Forces to maximize the effectiveness of their bombing campaign against Japan. In a sign of what was to come in Vietnam, his number crunching helped kill hundreds of thousands of civilians, but he remained seemingly impervious to the human cost of his work. After the war, he and his fellow Air Force statisticians, dubbed the Whiz Kids, moved en masse to the Ford Motor Company, where they engineered a turnaround employing quantitative methods, much to the chagrin of automobile enthusiasts such as Lee Iacocca. McNamara’s incisive biographer Deborah Shapley was to write that he became “the epitome of a bean-counting manager who understood nothing about engineering cars.”9 By the end of 1960, he had risen to become president of Ford, the first nonfamily member ever to hold that post.
The president-elect had said that he wanted a Republican or two in the cabinet, and McNamara seemed to fit the bill. “That a young Republican
businessman could also be well thought of by labor, be Harvard-trained, support the ACLU, and read Teilhard de Chardin were all bonuses,” Shapley wrote.10 (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a trendy French philosopher.) Jack Kennedy instructed his aides, sight unseen, to offer McNamara his choice of cabinet posts, either Treasury or Defense. McNamara chose Defense, and began, with the help of his Whiz Kids, to apply his number-crunching philosophy to the armed forces.
“You can’t substitute emotions for reason,” he often said.11 He honestly believed that if only you got the inputs right, his mathematical models would unerringly spit out the right answers to such complicated questions as: How big should America’s nuclear arsenal be? What kind of next-generation fighter airplane should the Air Force and Navy buy? And how should the United States respond to Vietcong attacks? Anyone like Lansdale who tried to challenge McNamara’s “systems analysis” was given short shrift by the imperious secretary.
A year later, in early 1962, Lansdale was called in again to McNamara’s office to help him “computerize” the war in Vietnam. McNamara presented him with a long list of entries, written out with a pencil on graph paper, including factors such as the number of Vietcong killed—the “body count” of later infamy.
“Your list is incomplete,” Lansdale said. “You’ve left out the most important factor of all.”
“What is it?” McNamara demanded.
“Well, it’s the human factor,” Lansdale said. “You can put it down as the X factor.”
McNamara duly wrote down in pencil, “X factor.” “What does it consist of?”
“What the people out on the battlefield really feel; which side they want to see win and which side they’re for at the moment. That’s the only way you’re going to ever have this war decided.”
