by Max Boot
There is no evidence that Johnson even read Humphrey’s proposal. His aides, who did read it, delivered a withering assessment. Major General Charles V. “Ted” Clifton, the president’s senior military assistant, defended the use of “heavy weapons” as being necessary to defeat North Vietnamese regulars, even at the cost of inflicting civilian casualties. And he dismissed calls for more civic action: “Our advisers have as their primary mission stabilizing the insurgency and protecting their own lives. I am afraid that the civic action effort will have to come later or be performed by a separate group of people.” This was a perfect reflection of the mindset that would relegate counterinsurgency—“the other war,” it would come to be called—to an irrelevant adjunct to the big-war effort run by generals who shared Clifton’s conventional mindset.31
Instead of seeing Lansdale personally, as Humphrey had urged, Johnson dismissed the whole matter with a handwritten scribble on a memo: “This is good. Carefully comb Humphrey for all ideas and then forward to appropriate officials.”32
LANSDALE’S IDEAS were not implemented by the “appropriate officials”—and there was never much hope they would be. On June 26, 1964, just as his “Concept for Victory” was getting a brush-off from the administration, Lansdale wrote presciently to Bill Connell that “the Taylor–Johnson team is only a better grade of Lodge . . . but doing the same old thing (even though doing more of the same old thing).” He was no more impressed by the well-turned-out Westmoreland or his key staff officers. “Deep down,” they “look upon Vietnam as a limited war, not as a revolution.” In Lansdale’s view, the choice confronting the military was simple: “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?”33 Lansdale strongly suspected that Westmoreland would choose the former option, and events would vindicate his foreboding.
Once again, Lansdale’s advice was being ignored by immodest officials who thought they had all the answers but lacked any grasp of on-the-ground reality in Vietnam. Denied yet again any semblance of power, Lansdale was relegated to his habitual role of observer and critic from the sidelines, even if his office was now located next to the seat of power. But then the disparity of influence between the White House and the Executive Office Building is infinitely wider than the few yards that separate those two structures. In Food for Peace, Lansdale had found a way to keep busy but not what he most wanted: a way to influence America’s Vietnam policy.
27
Escalation
I’m scared to death of putting ground forces in, but I’m more frightened about losing a bunch of planes from lack of security.
—LYNDON JOHNSON
AMBASSADOR Maxwell Taylor’s tenure in Saigon began during the tense summer of 1964, dominated by news of the disappearance in rural Mississippi of three civil rights workers whose bullet-riddled bodies were finally recovered after a six-week FBI manhunt. Upon arriving in Saigon, the general-turned-diplomat soon apprehended that the situation in southern Vietnam was even more volatile than in the southern United States. Given the internecine political warfare that had embroiled South Vietnam, he proved no more able than Henry Cabot Lodge to work with the military junta or to ease it out of power. The Johnson administration was still supporting General Nguyen Khanh, but Taylor realized that he was “too clever for his own good.” Far from unifying the armed forces or rallying the country behind the war effort, Khanh was alienating “his colleagues by his sudden turns and dodges.”1
In August 1964, emboldened by the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, Khanh declared a state of emergency, cracked down on dissent, and introduced a new constitution that would make him president, displacing the current chief of state, General Duong Van Minh. This power grab led to vocal protests from militant students, Catholics, and Buddhists. Khanh asked Taylor for support; Taylor infuriated Khanh by refusing to grant it. Khanh had to revoke the charter and return Big Minh as chief of state for the time being.
On September 13, 1964, just two months before the American presidential election, two lower-ranking generals who declared themselves to be Diem loyalists attempted yet another in a seemingly never-ending series of coups. “The sound of tank engines and the sudden appearance of unfamiliar troops at strategic points in Saigon had now become commonplace,” noted an American diplomat.2 Khanh just barely held on to power with the support of a new faction of generals nicknamed the Young Turks, led by Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky and Army General Nguyen Van Thieu, two men who would loom larger in South Vietnam’s future. A month later, in October 1964, Khanh ostensibly left politics altogether, appointing himself commander in chief of the armed forces while making Tran Van Huong, an aged former mayor of Saigon, the new prime minster. A High National Council of civilian worthies was formed to write a new constitution and oversee the transfer of power to civilians. This arrangement did not last any longer than those that had preceded it. In December 1964, shortly after Lyndon Johnson’s landslide win over Barry Goldwater, the Young Turks tried to persuade the High National Council to retire all military officers with more than twenty-five years of service, thus eliminating their superiors and rivals. When the High National Council, itself packed with aging eminences, refused this request, Khanh and the Young Turks dissolved the council and sacked Huong.
Maxwell Taylor, brimming with a quasi-colonial arrogance that the Vietnamese had seen before, was irate. Utterly lacking in Lansdale’s diplomatic skills, he called in a group of Vietnamese generals and lectured them: “I told you all clearly . . . that we Americans are tired of coups. Apparently I wasted my words.” The generals did not appreciate being treated, in Ky’s words, as if they were “errant schoolboys who had been caught stealing apples from an orchard,”3 and they left “white-faced with fury.”4 Refusing to back down, the four-star ambassador soon was telling Khanh that he “had lost confidence in him as an ally.”5 Khanh retaliated by giving interviews accusing Taylor of wanting to reimpose a colonial regime.6 In short, by the beginning of 1965, while Edward Lansdale was still laboring in obscurity at the Food for Peace program, relations between the leading American representative in Saigon and the leaders of the South Vietnamese government had become just as poisonous as they had been in the months leading up to the anti-Diem coup at the end of 1963.
Yet another coup broke out on February 18, 1965. This mutiny was suppressed, but by now the other generals had had enough of Khanh. He was luckier than Diem. Instead of being executed, he was merely sent into exile; he would wind up running a “shabby” Asian restaurant in West Palm Beach.7 A new civilian government was appointed under Phan Huy Quat, a physician who had been a leading figure in the Caravelle circle which had plotted against Diem. But Quat was no more able to rule effectively than any of Diem’s other successors had been, and in June 1965 yet another military coup occurred.
South Vietnam’s latest rulers were the flashy Vice Marshal Ky as prime minister and the more reserved General Thieu as head of state. The 1963 coup had been good for them; while Diem was still in power, they were a lieutenant colonel and a colonel, respectively. The two of them, in charge of what was at least the tenth government since Diem’s downfall, would now jockey for power to see who would emerge as South Vietnam’s next strongman.
EDWARD LANSDALE kept himself well informed about the dispiriting developments in South Vietnam through his regular contacts with South Vietnamese and Americans serving there. On November 26, 1964, for example, Edmund Navarro, a USAID officer stationed in Tay Ninh, the Cao Dai seat located fifty miles northeast of Saigon, wrote to him, “I am losing faith everyday in our ability to win.” Echoing Lansdale’s own opposition to a purely military response, Navarro wrote, “The military can send home 15,000 men right now and I honestly believe the other 6,000 can do a better job. You will find most of the former in and around Saigon only.”8
A few days later, USAID’s Bert Fraleigh, who had returned to Saigon, wrote to Lansdale, “These are sad days here. Rural Affa
irs morale has hit rock-bottom as has, in fact, all of USOM’s morale [U.S. Operating Mission, the name for the USAID office]. We don’t know what to expect next from either USOM, the Vietnamese or our own government.”9 Shortly thereafter, Fraleigh was fired by a capricious USOM director who refused to leave Saigon for more than a few hours to see for himself what was going on in the rest of the country. Another Lansdale friend, Lou Conein of the CIA, orchestrator of the 1963 coup, had been expelled a few months earlier by Ambassador Taylor, who unfairly blamed Conein, the embassy’s main line of communications to the generals, for his strained relations with Khanh.10
Throughout the fall of 1964, in a series of speeches, letters, and policy papers, Lansdale tried to give voice to disaffected officials such as Navarro, Fraleigh, and Conein by hammering away at the basic theme that the only way to save South Vietnam was to implement his program for political action. His most high-profile foray into the debate was an article for Foreign Affairs, the country’s premier foreign-policy journal. Lansdale’s essay in the October 1964 issue, “Viet Nam: Do We Understand Revolution?,” was essentially an unclassified version of the “Concept for Victory” paper minus the suggestion that he and his team be sent to Vietnam. The essay’s most-quoted line was, “the Communists have let loose a revolutionary idea in Viet Nam and . . . it will not die by being ignored, bombed or smothered by us. Ideas do not die in such ways.” In a “people’s war,” he explained, firepower was counterproductive: “When the military opens fire at long range, whether by infantry weapons, artillery or air strike, on a reported Viet Cong concentration in a hamlet or village full of civilians, the Vietnamese officers who give those orders and the American advisers who let them ‘get away with it’ are helping defeat the cause of freedom.” Lansdale did not argue for leaving Vietnam, as some were already doing, but rather for “conducting a successful counter-insurgency campaign.” Citing previous efforts in Malaya and the Philippines, he wrote, “The great lesson was that there must be a heartfelt cause to which the legitimate government is pledged, a cause which makes a stronger appeal to the people than the Communist cause.”
At Yale University on November 23, 1964, Lansdale rejected any suggestion that victory was impossible: “It’s not a question of can we win, but a resolve that we must win.”11 In a paper entitled “Thoughts on Vietnam,” written on New Year’s Eve and sent to Hubert Humphrey, he insisted that if his ideas were implemented the result “will be a definite win during the new U.S. Administration, a win credited to the leadership of President Johnson.”12
For the first time, such importuning was finding a receptive audience in the Oval Office. On December 30, 1964, the president wrote to Ambassador Taylor suggesting that “we ought to be ready to make full use of the specialized skills of men who are skillful with Vietnamese, even if they are not always the easiest men to handle in a country team. . . . To put it another way, I continue to believe that we should have the most sensitive, persistent, and attentive Americans that we can find in touch with Vietnamese of every kind and quality”13 (italics added). The original draft of Johnson’s letter had included the words “of the general type of Lansdale and Conein” in place of “men who are skillful with Vietnamese”; McGeorge Bundy must have blown a gasket and taken the names out, but the meaning remained clear.14 Coming from a president who placed such a premium on loyalty, Johnson’s willingness to even consider sending advisers who “are not always the easiest men to handle” was a sign of how desperate he was becoming to find some answer to the challenge of Vietnam.
Taylor, predictably, brushed off this suggestion, replying to the president, “On the whole, the quality of our personnel in Vietnam is high and I believe they meet pretty well your description of ‘sensitive, persistent, and attentive Americans.’ ”15 Maybe so, but their insights were not informing American decision-making or influencing the Vietnamese themselves in a more constructive direction.
JOHNSON, CONSUMED by his struggle to implement historic civil rights legislation, did not press to implement Lansdale’s policy ideas any more than he pressed for Lansdale’s dispatch to Vietnam. Rather than trying to improve the quality of South Vietnam’s governance or to restrain its military, he was mulling the options spelled out for him by McGeorge Bundy in a January 27, 1965, memo: “The first [option] is to use our military power in the Far East and to force a change of Communist policy. The second is to deploy all our resources along a track of negotiation, aimed at salvaging what little can be preserved with no major addition to our present military risks.” “Bob [McNamara] and I,” Bundy added, “tend to favor the first course,” that is, the military course.16
The argument for escalation finally became incontrovertible to Lyndon Johnson on February 7, 1965. That afternoon he received word from Bundy, who was visiting South Vietnam, that the Vietcong had just attacked an American air base and Special Forces camp at Pleiku in the Central Highlands. Ten American aircraft had been destroyed and fifteen more damaged; eight American soldiers had been killed and more than a hundred wounded. At a White House meeting, LBJ said, in that theatrical Texas way of his, “I have kept my shotgun over the mantel and the bullets in the basement for a long time now, but . . . the enemy is killing my personnel and I could not expect them to continue their work if I did not authorize them to take steps to defend themselves.”17
On his flight home from Saigon, Bundy completed a memorandum advocating “the development and execution of a policy of sustained reprisal against North Vietnam.” The intent was to convince Hanoi that the cost of attacking the South was too high without risking a wider war. So the air strikes would be “reduced or stopped when outrages in the South are reduced or stopped.” Rather than mobilizing the American public for a war against North Vietnam, Bundy recommended that “we should execute our reprisal policy with as low a level of public noise as possible”—“we do not wish to boast about them in ways that make it hard for Hanoi to shift its ground.”18
This was the genesis of Operation Rolling Thunder, a bombing campaign that over the next three years would dump more ordnance on North Vietnam than had been dropped on all of Europe in World War II.19 But in keeping with the desire of the president and his advisers to exquisitely calibrate the level of violence, Johnson personally oversaw the selection of targets. A master negotiator, he viewed bombs not as instruments of destruction but rather, in the words of his biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin, as a way of “bargaining without words.”20 Hanoi, however, did not understand what Johnson was up to. To the Politburo, bombs combined with offers to negotiate simply looked like duplicity.
The commitment of American airpower brought with it the commitment of American ground forces, because, as numerous attacks had made clear, South Vietnamese troops could not adequately guard American bases. “I’m scared to death of putting ground forces in,” Johnson confided to McNamara, “but I’m more frightened about losing a bunch of planes from lack of security.”21
On March 9, 1965, the front page of the New York Times depicted Marines storming ashore from landing craft onto the beaches of Da Nang, a coastal city in central Vietnam, as if it were Iwo Jima. Thirty-five hundred leathernecks, two battalions’ worth, were to provide security at the nearby American air base. They were not supposed to undertake offensive operations or engage in any combat at all unless first attacked. But it was not long before what a later generation would call “mission creep” set in. By August, despite growing unrest at home, there were more than 125,000 American troops in South Vietnam, and they were beginning to take the offensive against the Vietcong. By the end of what would become a pivotal year, the U.S. commitment would swell to 184,000 troops.
THE AMERICAN military escalation was supported by almost all of Johnson’s inner circle—but not by the liberal stalwart and vice president, Hubert Humphrey. He remained convinced that the Lansdale approach, focusing on political reform and advisers rather than firepower and combat troops, was still the way to go. At a National Security Council meeting on February
10, 1965, called to discuss a response to a Vietcong attack on a U.S. outpost, Johnson went around the room asking whether anyone dissented from the meeting’s consensus that it was imperative to launch a retaliatory air strike. Humphrey, being his usual ebullient self, spoke up to express “doubts as to whether the strike should take place today” while Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin was visiting North Vietnam. In fact, “he had mixed feelings about whether we should retaliate as Secretary McNamara had recommended.” Johnson seemed to take such reservations seriously. He suggested that the United States send “a message to the Soviet officials as to why we have to react the way we are.” The meeting then moved on, with the president authorizing “execution of the strike plan as revised” before everyone walked out.22
The vice president did not think that anything momentous had occurred: he had expressed his dissent, the president had heard him and decided to act anyway. In Humphrey’s mind he was doing nothing more than what he had done before when he had worked with Lyndon Johnson in the Senate—nothing more than any good counselor would do for his commander in chief. The following day, he asked his aide John Reilly to “keep a good file on Vietnam. Shortly I shall be sitting down with the president, the secretary of state and others to discuss U.S. policy on Southeast Asia in all its implications.” Reilly had to inform him what he had learned from another staffer: that Humphrey was not going to be sitting down anymore with anyone in power to discuss Vietnam. The president was now conducting top-level meetings on Vietnam without notifying the vice president.
Without realizing it, Humphrey had committed an unforgivable sin in the eyes of Lyndon Johnson by contradicting him in front of others. As far as the president was concerned, Humphrey had broken his pledge of “complete and unswerving loyalty.” Johnson wanted Humphrey, as he told his intimates, “to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses.” By that demeaning standard, the vice president was falling egregiously short.23
