by Max Boot
The “Leader,” as he was known, became famous in Washington for giving senators, journalists, donors, civil servants, and anyone else who came into his orbit “the treatment.” Johnson was physically imposing, at more than six feet three inches tall, with gangly arms and huge hands, giant ears jutting from his head, and coal-black eyes blazing with intensity. He would often put his face next to the face of someone he was talking to, almost nose to nose, while he draped a giant arm around his interlocutor. “You really felt as if a St. Bernard had . . . pawed you all over,” the Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee recalled.18 No one in Washington was better than Johnson at intimidating people, ferreting out their weaknesses, and bending them to his will. Hubert Humphrey compared him to a “tidal wave. . . . He went through the walls. He’d come through a door, and he’d take the whole room over. Just like that.”19
The tidal wave was temporarily at low tide while Johnson was vice president—a job he hated because he was denied real power. He bristled at the condescension of Kennedy aides who called him “Rufus Cornpone” behind his back. His trademark energy, which throughout his life had led him to work brutally long hours and to eat, drink, and womanize on an equally prodigious scale, seemed to have dissipated. He was listless and had trouble getting out of bed. He wallowed in self-pity.
Everything changed the minute John F. Kennedy was struck down. LBJ’s Boswell, Robert Caro, quotes one of his aides remarking that her boss was a “ ‘changed man, transformed’ . . . the very movements of his body were different; . . . instead of the awkward, almost lunging, strides and ‘flailing’ movements of his arms that had previously often characterized Johnson under tension, now his stride was shorter, measured, and his arms were staying by his sides, hardly moving at all; . . . ‘there was no flailing.’ ”20 Another aide, Bill Moyers, said after JFK’s assassination, “I’ve never seen him as controlled, as self-disciplined, as careful and as moderate as he’s been this week.”21
Johnson plunged into the presidency with “cyclonic vigor.”22 Determined to outdo his hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he launched a “war on poverty” that was to result in the creation of the Job Corps, the Community Action Program, VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), Head Start, Food Stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, and many other idealistic and costly initiatives designed to foster a “Great Society.” Johnson also won passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and then of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, two landmark pieces of legislation that the less Machiavellian Kennedy had not been able to pass in the face of Southern filibusters. By the spring of 1964, Johnson’s approval ratings were over 70 percent and his election as president in his own right—once far from assured—now appeared to be a foregone conclusion. The columnist Joseph Alsop wrote that “in the few short months since last Nov. 22,” Johnson has been “making Washington and the government his own.”23
SOUTH VIETNAM, unfortunately, had no Lyndon Johnson of its own to take over from Ngo Dinh Diem—and given the newness and fragility of its national institutions, it needed a strong successor even more than the United States did. On November 4, 1963, just two days after Diem’s death, the architect of the coup, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, alerted Washington that “the Generals are quarreling among themselves” over the division of power and that if they “cannot come to an agreement within next day, then Marines who actually led the coup against the regime would lead a countercoup.”24 The generals just barely reached an agreement: General Duong Van Minh (“Big Minh”), the head of the 22-member Military Revolutionary Committee, would become president of South Vietnam. Nguyen Ngoc Tho, Diem’s vice president, would serve as prime minister to give a patina of civilian legitimacy to the arrangement. But generals would occupy all of the key posts. These military men were utterly unschooled in governance, suspicious of one another, and deeply insecure. They immediately unleashed a reign of terror against officials who had served Diem. Most of the 42 province and 253 district chiefs, including officials known for being especially effective in fighting the Communists, were replaced, often by men who did not know the areas they were assigned to govern.
Dreams that South Vietnam would become a more liberal place were shattered as the new military dictators imposed strict censorship, shut down newspapers, and arrested anyone suspected of disloyalty. Martial law would be invoked far more often after Diem’s demise than it had been while he was still in charge. Within weeks, thousands of students were marching in protests and more Buddhist monks than ever were immolating themselves in public. After years of nation building, South Vietnam was returning to the chaos of the 1954–55 period—just as Lansdale had warned would happen if Diem were removed.
This was a heaven-sent opportunity for the Vietcong. “Our enemy had been seriously weakened from all points of view, military, political and administrative. . . ,” a leader of the National Liberation Front crowed. “The police apparatus set up over the years with great care by Diem is utterly shattered, especially at the base. . . . Troops, officers, and officials of the army and administration are completely lost.”25 The number of “violent incidents” across South Vietnam increased from four hundred per week before the coup to more than a thousand in the week after the coup.26 The Strategic Hamlets program, the most promising counterinsurgency program initiated by Diem, was all but abandoned as hamlet after hamlet was overrun by attackers and not rebuilt. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was widened and improved to allow trucks to deliver supplies through Laos all the way to the border with South Vietnam, while seaborne shipments of weapons to transshipment points in Cambodia and to secret landing spots along the ill-patrolled South Vietnamese coast increased. (The South Vietnamese navy was all but immobilized after its chief was murdered during the 1963 coup.)27 The quantity of supplies reaching Communist forces in the South would be four times greater in 1964 than in 1963.28 Most ominously of all, in 1964 the first North Vietnamese regular troops began heading south. Le Duan and the hard-liners were intent on accelerating the conflict, regardless of the risk of American intervention.29
IN THE early morning hours of January 30, 1964, another coup—the second in less than three months—occurred in Saigon. The instigator was General Nguyen Khanh, a member of the anti-Diem cabal who was aggrieved because he had been promised that no harm would come to the president and that he would get a handsome reward for his treachery. Neither promise had been fulfilled: Diem had been killed, and Khanh had been relegated to a corps command in the northwest. Khanh placed most of the leading generals responsible for the anti-Diem coup under house arrest. Khanh also arrested Diem’s killer (and Big Minh’s bodyguard), Captain Nguyen Van Nhung, who was subsequently found hanging in his cell.
Just thirty-six years old, General Khanh “was a chunky man with a small, dark goatee and slightly protuberant eyes,” noted an American press adviser, and he was given to wearing a “sharply creased field uniform” with boots polished to a mirrorlike sheen.30 Now that he was prime minister, Khanh worked to improve his popularity by importing American-style campaign tactics. “From the way he button-holed passers-by on Saigon sidewalks,” raved Time magazine, “the pint-sized Vietnamese officer in green fatigues could have been Nelson Rockefeller campaigning in the New Hampshire primary.”31 But Khanh did not prove any more adept at governing than Big Minh had been. He was not to be the Vietnamese LBJ.
LYNDON JOHNSON had not been an advocate of the Diem coup; he thought it was “a tragic mistake.”32 Having inherited what Robert McNamara aptly described as “a hell of a mess” in Vietnam,33 the new president struggled to find the right response.
Although a liberal in domestic affairs, Johnson was a foreign-policy hard-liner. He had spent long years on the House Naval Affairs and Armed Services Committees and then on the Senate Armed Services Committee championing a strong national defense and, not incidentally, ensuring that a disproportionate share of the defense budget found its way back to Texas in the form of bases and weapons contracts. Like most of his generation, Johnson was haunted by the failure of appease
ment and isolationism in the 1930s. If Saigon fell, Johnson was terrified that he would be held politically responsible by Republicans as Truman had been held responsible for the Communist takeover of China. He would have recurring nightmares in which people kept shouting at him, “Coward! Traitor! Weakling!” Waking up “terribly shaken,” he would vow, “I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.”34 He urged his aides, “Don’t go to bed at night until you have asked yourself, ‘Have I done everything I could to further the American effort to assist South Vietnam?”35
Yet, determined as he was to save South Vietnam, Johnson hesitated to commit American forces to combat. He feared that a conflict would interfere with his Great Society agenda at home and that his popularity would suffer if he embroiled America in another land war in Asia like the Korean War.36 Balancing these competing imperatives, Johnson quietly shelved plans to reduce the American advisory presence as Kennedy had considered doing. In May 1964, he increased aid to South Vietnam by $125 million and sent another fifteen hundred advisers.37
He also embraced Nguyen Khanh as tightly as he could. Before Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor visited Saigon in March 1964, Johnson told them he wanted to see a picture “on the front pages of the world press” showing them holding up Khanh’s arms as a show of support.38 But far from strengthening Khanh, as LBJ expected, the resulting pictures strengthened the Vietcong narrative that Khanh was an American puppet. It did not help that McNamara, while grasping Khanh’s hand, tried to say Vietnam muon nam (“Vietnam ten thousand years”). But his pronunciation was so atrocious that it sounded to many listeners as if he had said, “Ruptured duck wants to lie down.”39
WHEN HENRY CABOT LODGE finally left Saigon in June 1964 to seek the Republican presidential nomination, after having done so much to undermine South Vietnam’s tenuous stability, Johnson named a high-powered replacement: Maxwell Taylor. Aloof, handsome, cerebral, the multilingual tribune of “flexible response” and advocate of “limited wars” had impressed Johnson as much as he had Kennedy. Assisting him as deputy ambassador would be one of the State Department’s rising stars, U. Alexis Johnson, a former ambassador to Czechoslovakia and Thailand and most recently deputy under secretary of state.
MACV (Military Assistance Command—Vietnam) was also receiving new leadership. The relentlessly upbeat General Paul Harkins was replaced in June 1964 by another up-and-comer: General William Childs Westmoreland. Like Max Taylor, his mentor and friend, “Westy” was an Army golden boy with an airborne pedigree. A courtly native of South Carolina, Westmoreland had been an Eagle Scout as a boy. At West Point, where he transferred after beginning his college years at The Citadel, he was named first captain, the top cadet. He led an artillery battalion ashore in North Africa in 1942, and he landed in Normandy on D-Day. After the war, he joined the 82nd Airborne Division—a more glamorous assignment than staying in the field artillery. When the Korean War broke out, Westmoreland was dispatched as a regimental commander. Further promotions followed rapidly once his patron, Max Taylor, became chief of staff in 1955. Westmoreland became the army’s youngest major general at age forty-two, assigned to command the storied 101st Airborne Division, Taylor’s old outfit. In 1960, he was appointed Superintendent of West Point, his alma mater. By early 1964, he was in Vietnam as Harkins’s deputy and successor-in-waiting.40
Fifty years old, tall, lean, vigorous, gray-haired, and handsome, Westy looked the very image of a “rugged, no-nonsense soldier”41—a “Tough Man” for a “Tough Job,” as one magazine put it.42 Some of those who knew him better were less impressed. Westy did little reading, and he had little interest in, or understanding of, Asia or counterinsurgency warfare. His level of intellectual sophistication was displayed when he told a visitor to Saigon—the Harvard professor Henry Kissinger—that the Americans in Vietnam were much better liked than the French had been because “when the French wanted a woman they simply grabbed her off the streets and went to bed with her,” whereas “when an American soldier wants a woman he pays for her.” “I thought at first he was kidding,” Kissinger recorded in his diary, “but I then found out he was absolutely serious.”43
A brigadier general who had served under Westmoreland warned the secretary of the army, Cyrus Vance, that “it would be a grave mistake” to send him to Vietnam. “He is spit and polish, two up and one back. This is a counterinsurgency war, and he would have no idea of how to deal with it.”44 Such prophecies were ignored by McNamara and Johnson, as was any unease that might have been stirred by one of Westmoreland’s early directives. He demanded that all American advisers “accentuate the positive,” “bring best thought to bear,” and avoid “frustration and stagnation.”45 This was designed to instill a positive, can-do attitude, but it became a prescription for wishful thinking and the denial of certain grim realities.
WHILE PRESIDENT JOHNSON was assembling a new team in Saigon, he was also authorizing a covert-harassment plan against the North cobbled together by an interagency committee chaired by Lansdale’s old rival Major General Victor “Brute” Krulak. In outline, it was reminiscent of Lansdale’s ineffectual Mongoose plans against Cuba: it called for increased intelligence collection, psychological operations such as leaflet drops and radio broadcasts, and a small number of “destructive undertakings,” that is, hit-and-run raids that would be carried out by South Vietnamese personnel with American support. Operation Plan (OPLAN) 34A, approved by Johnson on January 16, 1964, was designed “to inflict increasing punishment upon North Vietnam and to create pressures, which may convince the North Vietnamese leadership, in its own self-interest, to desist from aggressive policies.” 46
It did not occur to anyone that there might be a problem with staging OPLAN 34A raids along the North Vietnam coast at the same time that U.S. naval ships were offshore on intelligence-gathering patrols. The confluence of these two operations provoked North Vietnamese patrol boats on August 2, 1963, to stage an unsuccessful attack on the destroyer USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. The next day, the Maddox and another destroyer, the Turner Joy, reported a further attack. The two warships fired 372 shells and at least four depth charges while reporting that they had dodged multiple torpedoes and enemy gunfire. But American pilots flying overhead could not see any enemy vessels, and later analysis concluded that the second attack, unlike the first one, had not really occurred. “Hell, those damn, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish,” Lyndon Johnson concluded a few days later. But such doubts did not prevent Johnson from sending to Congress, and Congress approving with near unanimity, a resolution giving the president the authority “to take all necessary measures to repel armed attacks against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression” as well as to aid any American ally in Southeast Asia “requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.”
Neither the members of Congress nor Lyndon Johnson himself had any idea that the vague language of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution would be used to justify a ground war that would eventually draw in half a million American troops. On both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, there was fervent hope that South Vietnam’s government would be able to fight its own battles. But with South Vietnam still buffeted by the divisive reverberations from the anti-Diem coup, and with North Vietnam continuing to ramp up its offensive, the pressure would build to prevent a total collapse through the introduction of American combat troops. There was nothing inevitable about the outcome, but in hindsight it is easy to see the course upon which America was now embarked toward the deadliest guerrilla conflict in its history.47
26
“Concept for Victory”
Are paddy farmers in a combat zone to be shot just because they inadvertently are standing in the way of Vietcong targets or are they to be protected and helped?
—EDWARD LANSDALE
WHILE South Vietnam was struggling with the destabilizing aftereffects of Ngo Dinh Diem’s ouster and murder, Die
m’s greatest American champion was struggling to find a role for himself. Edward Lansdale was only fifty-six years old. Normally this would be the prime of a man’s working life, but he was unemployed for the first time since 1942, when he had moved from advertising to the OSS. He had no desire to leave the fight for freedom, as he conceived of the Cold War, but also no firm idea of how he could continue to contribute. On his last day in the Pentagon, October 31, 1963, he wrote to Pat Kelly, “All I can think about is trying to catch my breath and catch up on some rest before even starting to think about what comes next.”1
Publishers were approaching Lansdale to write a book. He told Pat that he kept “thinking of how nice it would be to get a house on the beach at maybe San F’do La U [San Fernando La Union, a beach town on Lingayen Gulf] and sit with a typewriter maybe a couple of hours a day, and the rest of the time really live again.”2 In this fantasy, writing a book would have provided an excuse for rekindling their romance. “My heart’s with you,” he told Pat. When he got word that her mother had died, he wrote, “I ached to comfort you. I know how much she meant to you, and the feeling of loss with someone you love. Doggone this distance between us when you need me!”3
