The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  The tightening of the bind of the commitment would continue shortly. In late April 1961 Kennedy, deciding against increasing the American mission substantially, thought he would boost Diem’s confidence by intangible instead of tangible aid. The means would be the Vice-President of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, then somewhat underemployed. Though Johnson was scheduled to visit a number of Asian countries, the key stop would be Vietnam. Curiously enough, it was not a stop that the Vice-President particularly wanted to make. Just as a year later he would balk when the President asked him to make a symbolic trip to Berlin—feeling somehow that he was being used, and that his career (and possibly his life) might be damaged—Johnson was so unenthusiastic about going to Saigon that Kennedy had to coax him into it. “Don’t worry, Lyndon,” he said. “If anything happens to you, Sam Rayburn and I will give you the biggest funeral Austin, Texas, ever saw.”

  The trip came nonetheless at an opportune time for Johnson, who was at the lowest point in his career, being neither a Kennedy political insider nor a Kennedy intellectual. To intimates he would occasionally talk about how his chauffeur had advised him not to leave the Senate to become Vice-President, muttering that he wished he had had that chauffeur with him in Los Angeles when Kennedy made the offer. With others, of course, he went to great pains to show that he was deeply involved in the inner decisions of the Administration, that he was the real insider. One day in early 1961 Russell Baker, then a Hill reporter for the New York Times, who knew Johnson well, had been coming out of the Senate when he was literally grabbed by Johnson (“You, I’ve been looking for you”) and pulled into his office. Baker then listened to an hour-and-a-half harangue about Washington, about how busy Lyndon Johnson was, how well things were going. There were these rumors going around that he wasn’t on the inside; well, Jackie had said to him just the other night at dinner as she put her hand on his, “Lyndon, you won’t desert us, will you?” They wanted him. It was pure Johnson, rich and larger than life, made more wonderful by the fact that if Baker did not believe it all, at least for the moment Johnson did. And in the middle of it, after some forty minutes, Baker noticed Johnson scribble something on a piece of paper; then he pushed a buzzer. A secretary came in, took the paper, disappeared and returned a few minutes later, handing the paper back to Johnson. He looked at it and crumpled it. Then the harangue continued for another fifty minutes. Finally, exhausted by this performance, Baker left and on the way he passed a friend named David Barnett, also a journalist. They nodded and went their separate ways, and the next day when Barnett ran into Baker, he asked whether Baker knew what Johnson had written on that slip of paper. No, Baker admitted, he did not know. “ 'Who is this I’m talking to?’ ” said Barnett.

  Now, on the trip all that energy with which he had overwhelmed Washington in his earlier capacity as Senate Majority Leader, the most influential Democrat in Washington, burst loose. He was away from Washington, he had something to do, barnstorming, finding that all people were alike, that he could reach out by being with them, hunkering down with them, discovering what goals they had in common (eradication of disease, food for all, access to electric power). There he was, campaigning among the villagers, the more rural the better, riding in bullock carts, inviting a Pakistani camel driver to the United States. Johnson loved it all (“There is no doubt the villagers liked it,” wrote John Kenneth Galbraith, recently appointed ambassador to India, “and their smiles will show in the photographs”).

  As a gesture of the President’s concern, Johnson had brought with him Kennedy’s sister and brother-in-law, Jean and Stephen Smith. Being a good campaigner, Lyndon did not neglect to show their symbolic value of traditional American concern for Asians. At every stop they were introduced, their importance heralded, their own positions magnified with typical Johnsonian exaggeration: Jean Smith, who started out being “the President’s lovely little sister” soon became his “tiny little baby sister,” and then his “itsy-bitsy little baby sister.” And Steve Smith, perhaps the only member of the family who was not in the government, was introduced as “the President’s brother-in-law, one of the closest members of his family,” then as “a State Department official,” then as “an important State Department official,” and finally as “a man who held one of the most important and most sensitive jobs in the State Department.”

  Johnson had been told to inquire in Vietnam whether Diem wanted troops, but it was not a particularly meaningful query; neither State nor Defense had given much thought to the question of sending troops to Vietnam other than as a symbol, the way American troops stood in West Berlin as a symbol of American intent; these would, if they were accepted, be troops to stand and be seen rather than fight. By their presence they would show the Communists that America was determined to resist; this would give the Communists something to think about. If that did not work there would be other gestures, gestures as much to the American people as to the Communists. Johnson met with Diem and found that Diem was in no rush to have Caucasian troops on his soil. Diem knew, first, that his people would resent seeing any successor to the French there and that it might be counterproductive, and second, that it would be a sign of personal weakness as far as the population was concerned if he accepted American troops too readily. He was already too dependent on the Americans as it was.

  Johnson was impressed by Diem; yet the entire episode became an example of the gamesmanship of the period. In his final report to the President, Johnson wrote that Diem “is a complex figure beset by many problems. He has admirable qualities, but he is remote from the people, is surrounded by persons less admirable than he . . .” All in all it was a reasonably fair analysis, particularly for that time, when no one tied the problems Diem faced to the problems created by the French Indochina war. But if that was Johnson’s private view (which was not much different from what American reporters were writing at the time), what he was saying in public was quite different. In public Diem was hailed as “the Winston Churchill of Southeast Asia.” It was a comparison which boggled the mind of everyone except members of the Ngo family, who found it only fitting and proper. On the next leg of the trip Stan Karnow, who was then working for the Saturday Evening Post, asked Johnson if he really believed that about Diem. “Shit, man,” Johnson answered, “he’s the only boy we got out there.” (Later there would be some criticism in the Eastern press of his flamboyance in general and his lauding of Diem in particular, the impression that once again the Texas cowboy had overdone it in his exuberance, that he had, unlike the Kennedys, no subtlety, that he did not know foreign affairs. Privately Johnson was quite bitter about that, feeling that he had acted and spouted off under orders, and he would tell aides that he was angry about the charges that he had cut the cards. “Hell,” he said, explaining that he was under orders, “they don’t even know I took a marked deck out there with me.”)

  Johnson reported to the President that Communism must be and could be stopped in Southeast Asia (“The battle against Communism must be joined in Southeast Asia with strength and determination to achieve success there”) and that even Vietnam could be saved (“if we move quickly and wisely. We must have a coordination of purpose in our country team, diplomatic and military. The most important thing is imaginative, creative American management of our military aid program”). It was a fine example of the hardening American view of the time, looking at Vietnam through the prism of American experience, American needs and American capacities. American purpose with Americans doing the right things could affect the destinies of these people. The Vietnamese were secondary, a small and unimportant people waiting to be told what to do by wiser, more subtle foreigners. If it was one more example of the can-do syndrome, it was similarly to stand as an example of the dangers of the game of commitment. Kennedy had sent Johnson to Vietnam as a sign of good will, as a means of reassuring a weak and unsatisfactory government of his commitment; the lasting effect, however, was not on the client state but on the proprietor, and in this case, most importantly, o
n the messenger himself, Lyndon Johnson; he had given our word. It not only committed the Kennedy Administration more deeply to Diem and Vietnam, attached Washington a little more firmly to the tar baby of Saigon, escalated the rhetoric, but it committed the person of Lyndon Johnson. To him, a man’s word was important. He himself was now committed both to the war and to Diem personally.

  There was a special irony to the game of commitment as it was played with South Vietnam, great verbal reassurance in lieu of real military support, for that was exactly how South Vietnam had been created, an attempt to strengthen a military-political position on the cheap. Instead of intervening directly in the French Indochina war, the United States had decided that the benefits were not worth the risks; then, later, after the Geneva Agreement in 1954, the United States had tried to get the same end result, an anti-Communist nation on the border of Asian Communism, again with others doing the real work for us.

  The Americans who were wary of the French colonial war had seen their reservations pushed aside by the fall of China in 1949 and the coming of increased domestic political pressures against any similar signs of weakness. Gradually the war had in our eyes gone from being a colonial war, to a war fought by the West against international Communism. At the same time the Americans began to underwrite it financially in 1950. But this brought little change. The Vietminh were scarcely affected by Washington’s will and dollars, and by 1954 the Americans were more committed to the cause in Indochina than an exhausted France. At that time the question arose of whether to intervene on behalf of the French—only American intervention could keep the French in. President Eisenhower decided against it, saying in effect that Vietnam was not worth the military commitment. The creation of South Vietnam, a fragile country in which few had any real hopes, followed Geneva, more as an afterthought than anything else.

  Four years of American aid, half a billion dollars a year, had had little effect on the war. It raised the level of violence, and for a time it raised the hopes of the French military, at precisely the same time that French popular support was dwindling. It had once been a centrist political war in France, but by 1954 both extremes, the left and the right, were gaining in the National Assembly. After eight years it was a dying cause; moral views of the struggle began to follow battlefield failure. The pressure from the French for overt American military aid had been growing in 1953, and it soon became more intense. The French command, frustrated by the hit-and-run engagements with an adversary who was all-too-often invisible, had in early 1954 devised a trap which it intended to spring on an unsuspecting enemy. Since the Vietnamese, as General Marcel Le Carpentier had said, did not have colonels and generals and would not understand a sophisticated war, it would be easy to fool them. The idea was to use a French garrison as bait at an outpost in the highlands, have the Vietminh seize on it for a set-piece battle and mass their forces around it. Then when the Vietminh forces were massed, the French would strike, crush the enemy who had so long eluded them, and gain a major political and psychological victory, just as peace talks were starting in Geneva. The name of the post where the trap was to be sprung was Dienbienphu.

  With the kind of arrogance that Western generals could still retain after eight years of fighting a great infantry like the Vietminh, the French built their positions in the valley and left the high ground to the Vietminh, a move which violated the first cardinal rule of warfare: always take the high ground. An American officer who visited the site just before the battle noticed this and asked what would happen if the Vietminh had artillery. Ah, he was assured by a French officer, they had no artillery, and even if they did, they would not know how to use it. But they did have artillery and they did know how to use it. On the first night of the battle the French artillery commander, shouting “It is all my fault, it is all my fault,” committed suicide by throwing himself on a grenade. Westerners always learned the hard way in Indochina; respect for the enemy always came when it was too late.

  French domestic support had been ebbing daily and this finished it; the garrison, however, was trapped, and day by day as the Vietminh pounded the French defenders, pressure grew for the Americans to enter the war and save the gallant French. Significantly, as was to happen eleven years later, the original idea was only partial intervention, not really to take over the French war and supplant the French on the ground, but simply to rescue the garrison. Use a little air power. Bombing alone would do it. The rationale was made as limited as possible, and again, as would happen later, it was given under crisis-panic conditions. Naturally, the French found allies in the American government anxious to involve this country in their war, a war which over the last three years was no longer seen in the United States as a colonial war, but now, more conveniently, as part of a global struggle against Communism.

  In the high levels of the American government there were at least two people who wanted to go and bomb the Vietminh and rescue the garrison. The first was Admiral Arthur W. Radford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had become a zealot of air power. Radford was one of the architects, perhaps the chief architect, of the Eisenhower Administration’s New Look policies: the bigger bang for the buck, and a belief that air power, and carrier-based air power with nuclear weapons or perhaps simply the threat of nuclear weapons, would determine the global balance. A new and glistening and yet inexpensive Pax Americana—what could be better? The other Chiefs thought that it had all come about when Eisenhower made his famed campaign promise to go to Korea. He and Dulles had picked up Radford in Honolulu, where the admiral made the case for the new policies which would bring air power to its zenith at a cut-rate price and which would spare American lives; the kind of dirty war that was being fought in Korea would never have to be fought again, particularly in Asia, where the hordes and hordes of yellow people made a good old-fashioned land war untenable. Under the New Look the budget would be cut, but we would be as powerful, perhaps more powerful than ever. Dulles was of course enthusiastic, it fit in with his view of the U.S. role in the world, particularly of playing a greater role in Asia.

  So the New Look became policy; much to the chagrin of the United States Army, West Point’s most illustrious graduate was cutting back the Army’s roles and missions. Radford, a man of force, conviction and forthrightness, was then a Chief whose military policies had become Administration political policies; they were, some thought, more theoretical than realistic. Now with the garrison trapped at Dienbienphu, Radford was ready; it was his first chance to test the New Look, and he was eager to go. One good solid air strike at the attackers, and that would do it. There was, in his presentation, very little emphasis on what would happen if the air strikes did not work. Like many high Air Force supporters and converts, he believed in the invincibility of his weapon; Army officers were rarely so convinced.

  The second figure who ostensibly wanted to go in was Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. The word “ostensibly” is used here because while there was no doubt about Radford’s real desire, there is some doubt about Dulles’; the public and the private Dulleses were not always the same thing. He was a moralist, if anything even more Wilsonian than Acheson, a true hard-liner. Despite all the campaign oratory of Democratic failures, he believed that Acheson had succeeded in Europe but that he had failed in two areas: holding the line in Asia and dealing with the Congress. In order to seek an accommodation with the Congress he would, in fact, appease it by opening the doors of his Department to the security people, offering his Asian experts to them, small concessions really, firing John Paton Davies as a minor human sacrifice, though he knew that Davies was above reproach.

  Eager to mold history to his whims, Dulles was quick to talk about the evils of Communism, particularly Asian Communism, particularly the evil Chinese Communists. Bedell Smith, his Undersecretary, would tell friends, “Dulles is still dreaming his fancy about reactivating the civil war in China.” Yet there was sometimes a degree of flexibility to him in private which contrasted with the soaring arrogant morali
sm of his public statements (questioned about this, he would smile and tell friends that he had not been the highest paid corporation counsel in New York for nothing; he knew how and when to deal). Just how much he wanted to go into Indochina is still in doubt; perhaps he was more interested in making the case for going in, and thus put the burden for the failure to intervene on allies and the Congress. This would be a division of responsibility (as Acheson had not shared responsibility on China). They did, after all, have to live up to their rhetoric.

  Eisenhower himself was more than ambivalent. He had been elected as a peace candidate, for one thing, and he was particularly reluctant to get into a land war in Asia; he had been elected in large part because of national fatigue with just such an enterprise. While considerable evidence exists that some members of his Administration wanted to go in, there is very little evidence that Eisenhower shared their view and used the full force of his personality and the weight of his office to convince legislative and bureaucratic doubters. If anything, the reverse is true: he activated all those around him, let them make their case (their case being destructive to the idea of intervention), and sat like a judge.