The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  Nothing would hold Dulles back; there was an absolute belief in our cause, our innocence and worthiness, also a belief that it was politically better to be in than to be out. It was mostly Dulles’ initiative. We would start in South Vietnam, Dulles decided, by sending a couple of hundred advisers there. The foreign aid bill at that time contained a provision which allowed the President to switch 10 percent from one aid program to another. This could be done without congressional approval, so at Dulles’ urging, Eisenhower took 10 percent of the money set aside for other countries and ticketed it to Vietnam. In addition, the decision to send advisers was made in late September, when Congress was out of session, but as a courtesy the President and the Secretary of State agreed that the congressional leaders should be notified.

  Thruston Morton was assigned to inform Senator Russell of the Armed Services Committee that the President would be sending an estimated 200 men to South Vietnam as well as funding the country. Russell answered that it was a mistake, it would not stay at 200, it would eventually go to 20,000 and perhaps one day even as high as 200,000.

  Morton answered that he doubted this, and that the President intended to go ahead; they were just advisers, anyway.

  “I think this is the greatest mistake this country’s ever made,” Russell said. “I could not be more opposed to it.”

  Morton again answered that the President and the Secretary were determined to go ahead.

  “I know,” said Russell, “he mentioned that he might do it. Tell him, then, that I think it is a terrible mistake but that if he does it I will never raise my voice.” Thus intervention in South Vietnam was sanctioned.

  Nothing, however, could have been more naÏve than Dulles’ statement that the United States would now enter Vietnam without a trace of colonialism, for the sides were already drawn. The Vietminh were supremely confident that they could gain ascendancy in the South either through elections or through subversion and guerrilla warfare. They were a modern force, and the one opposing them in the South was feudal. By now they were the heroes of their people: they had driven out the French and stirred the powerful feelings of nationalism in the country. During the war the Vietminh had done more than expel the French. They had taken Vietnamese society, which under colonial rule had been so fragmented and distrustful, where only loyalty to family counted, and given it a broader cause and meaning, until that which bound them together was more powerful than that which divided them. This, then, had made them a nation in the true sense.

  In the South the reverse was true. The men who formed the government in the South were men whom Westerners would deal with, men who were safe precisely because they had done nothing for their country during this war; they had either fought side by side with the French or profiteered on the war, or, as in the case of Ngo Dinh Diem, stayed outside the country, unable to choose between the two sides. In the South the old feudal order still existed, soon to be preserved by the conservative force of American aid; in the South that which divided the various political groups from one another was more powerful than that which bound them together. The tradition of the old Vietnam had been loyalty to family alone; symbolically the Ngo Dinh Diem government was a family government, and by the time of his downfall Diem trusted only his family. From the very start, one Vietnam lived in the past and the other in the present.

  This was reflected in the leadership. The North was led by a man who had expelled the foreigners, the South by a man who had been installed by foreigners. Ho Chi Minh had been in exile during the worst years of French colonialism because he could not speak openly and remain in Vietnam; Diem had gone into exile during the most passionate war of liberation because he did not approve of the Vietminh. Ho did not need foreign aid to hold power, his base had deep roots in the peasant society which had driven out foreigners. Diem could not have survived for a week without foreign aid; he was an American creation which fit American political needs and desires, not Vietnamese ones. By Vietnamese standards, there was little legitimacy; Diem was a Catholic in a Buddhist country, a Central Vietnamese in the South, but most important of all, he was a mandarin, a member of the feudal aristocracy in a country swept by revolution.

  Yet if he did not meet Vietnamese demands, in 1954 Diem clearly met American needs. He was a devout anti-Communist, yet he was also anti-French and thus technically a nationalist, and he often gave speeches about social reform which soothed American liberal consciences. If the acts of his regime were basically authoritarian, his speeches were not, and in conversations he seemed difficult but not unreasonable. His behavior was proper, correct; a relentless Christian, he did not chase after women the way Sukarno did. Where a true Asian radical or nationalist might have been rude or condescending to American envoys or, worse, to visiting congressmen, Diem was quite the opposite, solicitous, serious, responsible. To an America still in the midst of the McCarthy period he was the ideal representative for a foreign establishment, rigidly and vehemently anti-Communist for the conservatives, yet apparently concerned about social welfare for the liberals, who, on the defensive about the loss of China and about McCarthy’s attacks, could rally round Diem without offending their consciences. The perfect coalition candidate. “The kind of Asian we can live with,” William O. Douglas, one of Diem’s early liberal sponsors, had said when he recommended Diem to Senator Mike Mansfield, who would also become an early supporter.

  Diem was a complicated figure, deeply religious, a monk really, who believed completely in his own rectitude; thus if he was correct in his attitudes, it was the obligation of the population to honor and obey him. He was a man of the past, neither Asian nor Western, better than the dying order he was chosen to protect, isolated, rigidly moral, unable to come to terms with a world which had passed him by.

  Only a few Americans believed in him from the beginning. Indeed the entire commitment to South Vietnam was almost offhand: there was nothing else to be done there, so why not try it. But from the very start his failings, the righteousness, the rigidity, the dependence on his family were already self-evident. The first American ambassador to Vietnam, J. Lawton Collins, thought him totally incapable, and Edgar Faure, the French premier, told the French National Assembly that “Diem is not only incapable, but mad.” Only Lansdale really fought for Diem (“Most of those with whom I talked felt that Diem was a great patriot, probably the best of all the nationalists still living, with an outstanding record as a wise and able administrator; some even asserted that he was far better known among his countrymen than was Ho Chi Minh,” Lansdale would later write, in describing how he first heard of Diem). It was Lansdale who sold Diem to his CIA boss, Allen Dulles, and thus to John Foster Dulles, and it was Lansdale who helped guide Diem through early struggles against the religious sects, which solidified Washington’s support.

  It was a shaky basis on which to found a policy, but it did not seem like a major decision at the time, nor a major policy. The attitude was essentially that there was little to lose, a certain small investment in American money, virtually no investment in American lives. In the beginning there was little illusion about the legitimacy of the government, or the state, or its chances for survival. That illusion would come gradually, later on, for a commitment is a subtle thing, with a life of its own and a rhythm of its own. It may, as in the case of South Vietnam, begin as something desperately frail, when the chances for survival are negligible. For a while, oxygen is breathed in, mouth-to-mouth, at great effort but little cost, and then the very people who have been administering the oxygen, desperate to keep the commitment alive (not because they believe in any hopeful prognosis, but because they do not want to be charged with failing to try and give first aid), look up one day and find that there is indeed a faint pulse, that the patient is more alive than dead. But at this point they are not relieved of their responsibility; instead, for the first time the commitment really begins, and now they are charged with keeping it alive. It is a responsibility, it is real. Its death would mean genuine political repercussion
s.

  In 1954, right after Geneva, no one really believed there was such a thing as South Vietnam. But Diem made it through the next few years largely because Hanoi did not pose a challenge and was busy securing its own base. Despite French and British protestations, Dulles encouraged Diem in his instinct not to hold the requisite elections, and slowly the idea of viability began to grow. Like water turning into ice, the illusion crystallized and became a reality, not because that which existed in South Vietnam was real, but because it became real in powerful men’s minds. Thus, what had never truly existed and was so terribly frail became firm, hard. A real country with a real constitution. An army dressed in fine, tight-fitting uniforms, and officers with lots of medals. A supreme court. A courageous President. Articles were written. “The Tough Miracle Man of Vietnam,” Life called him. “The bright spot in Asia,” the Saturday Evening Post said (“Two years ago at Geneva,” read the blurb for the latter, “South Vietnam was virtually sold down the river to the Communists. Today the spunky little Asian country is back on its feet thanks to a 'mandarin in a sharkskin suit who’s upsetting the Red timetable’ ”). A lobby for Diem began to emerge. Speeches were made in his honor. In 1956, in the modest words of Walter Robertson, Dulles’ Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs: “Among the factors that explain the remarkable rise of Free Vietnam from the shambles created by eight years of murderous civil and international war, the division of the country at Geneva, and the continuing menace of predatory Communism, there is in the first place the dedication, courage and resourcefulness of President Diem himself.” In all this there is a subtle change; the client state does not really come to life but the illusion does; as such, the proprietor state begins to live slightly at the mercy of the client state.

  It was a subtle genesis, and it was not matched by real political changes in South Vietnam, which was still a feudal society. Diem was supposed to be an anti-Communist nationalist, and there was, in fact, no such thing. His political base, always narrow, became over the years narrower than ever. Faced by great political problems, and possessing few political resources, he turned inward. Morbidly suspicious, he alienated his few allies in the government and turned more to his scheming, neurotic family, to his police force and to growing U.S. aid. He became more rigid, more isolated than ever, while ironically, the United States was becoming more committed to him. But at the same time year by year the U.S. sense of the futility of the whole enterprise diminished. By 1961 the Americans believed firmly in Diem, believed in his legitimacy; they saw South Vietnam as a real country, with a real flag. Having invented him and his country, we no longer saw our own role; our fingerprints had disappeared. In 1961 Kennedy could ruefully tell White House aides, “I can’t afford a 1954 kind of defeat now.”

  The trouble was that after seven years, none of the American rhetoric, none of the gestures that the Americans were making to reassure Diem, had had any effect on the most important people in South Vietnam, the peasants. Quickly, night after night, the Vietcong, the heirs and linear descendants of the Vietminh, were practicing the same kind of skilled guerrilla warfare and rural recruitment that the Vietminh had used during the French war, growing ever stronger, exploiting the multitude of local grievances against the government. In the field nothing had changed; the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, its commanders all former French officers and noncoms, resembled the French troops which had gone through the countryside in the daytime, using far too much fire power, and stealing and looting from the peasants; at night when the ARVN troops were gone, the Vietcong re-entered the villages and spread their skilled political propaganda, against which Diem was particularly impotent. (For a long time he had even refused to concede that a major insurgency was going on, since the very admission would have shown that his government was not perfect. Since he believed in his own rectitude, there could not be an insurgency against him.)

  Not surprisingly, though the pressure came from the South Vietnamese, and rural ones at that, Diem turned to white foreigners for help, for more aid, for air power, for a new treaty with the Americans. The idea of Ho Chi Minh needing help or reassurance from the Russians or the Chinese is inconceivable; the idea of Diem being able to understand the needs of the peasants and respond to them in kind is equally inconceivable.

  Throughout much of 1961, despite the pessimistic assessments of independent reporters and people like Lansdale, the American mission remained reasonably optimistic. Diem was doing better, went the line, and the ARVN was fighting better. Others, not in the chain of command, were more dubious. Theodore White, visiting Vietnam on his own in August, wrote to the White House of Vietcong control in the lower Mekong Delta, and of the fact that no American wanted to drive outside of Saigon even during the day without military convoy. Remembering what had happened in China, White sensed history about to repeat itself. In September the Vietcong began to use some of the muscle they had accumulated. They tripled the number of incidents, and after seizing a provincial capital fifty-five miles from Saigon, they publicly beheaded the provincial chief. The latter act had a profound effect in Saigon, where issues of morale and confidence were taken very seriously.

  By the end of the month there were strong demands in Washington for new military moves. Walt Rostow, ever enthusiastic and ready to use force (and not particularly knowledgeable about the rural realities), recommended that 25,000 SEATO troops be stationed on the border between the demilitarized zone and Cambodia in order to stop infiltration. (The insurgency, intelligence experts were noting, was almost entirely taking place within the South; all Vietcong troops were Southerners; the weapons were captured from government posts. Some Southerners, however, were cadre-trained in the North and then repatriated to the South. It was a small part of the war; 80 to 90 percent of the Vietcong were locally recruited, the National Intelligence Estimate said on October 5, 1961.) The Rostow proposal gave military men studying it a chill. It showed so little understanding of the rugged terrain; the 25,000 men would be completely swallowed up and ineffectual. The choice would be left to the enemy to either by-pass this thin line of men or systematically to eradicate it. Instead, on October 9 the Joint Chiefs of Staff responded to the Rostow proposal with a counterproposal, a commitment of American troops (around 20,000, but it would grow larger) to Vietnam. But the JCS wanted the troops in the Central Highlands and warned that under the Rostow proposal the SEATO troops would quickly be chewed up. Two days later the JCS reported at a National Security Council meeting that it would take only 40,000 American combat troops to clean up the Vietcong; in case the North Vietnamese and the Chinese Communists intervened, then an additional 128,000 troops would be needed.

  At almost the same time, as if it were all orchestrated, Diem sent a cable asking for more fighter-bombers, civilian pilots for helicopters, more transport planes, and U.S. combat units for “combat-training” missions near the DMZ. He also asked that the Americans consider a request for a division of Chiang Kai-shek’s troops to support his own army. Ambassador Nolting recommended “serious and prompt” attention to all requests. Kennedy would soon have to make his first move on Vietnam.

  Thus the pressures were building on Kennedy all the time. He and his people had come to power ready to assert American power and they would find ample tests of it, ample pressures on them. Not just pressures from the Communists, but parallel political pressures at home. Even as he was about to make his first major move in response to the mounting urgency in Vietnam, he was similarly making another crucial appointment at the very top of his government, an appointment which reflected not so much his control of the government, his sureness of step, but his lack of control and his loss of balance. All of these major responses of the Kennedy Administration in the first year were based on two major premises: first, that the Communists were indeed a harsh and formidable enemy (if it was not a monolith, it was still treated as one) and that relaxation of tensions could only come once the Administration had proven its toughness, and second, that Kennedy’s po
litical problems at home were primarily from the right and the center, that the left could be handled, indeed that it had nowhere else to go, and that it must accept the Administration’s private statements of good will and bide its time for the good liberal things which might one day come. The latter attitude, the belief in the essential political weakness of the liberal-left, encouraged the Administration in some of its harder-line activities and limited its inclination to look for diversity within the Communist world. If there were changes within the Communist world, Washington believed they were certainly not changes immediately apparent to most Americans, and this was politically crucial to the Administration. The Administration still felt itself under pressure to prove its own worth to centrists and conservative Americans, and it believed that liberal-left Americans would simply have to accept the Kennedy proposition that the Administration was by far the best they could hope for. Most of the key moves by Kennedy in 1961 reflected this attitude, including not just the decisions which followed the forthcoming Taylor and Rostow trip to Vietnam, but indeed the very decision to send Taylor and Rostow instead of, say, Schlesinger and Bowles. (He knew Rostow was aggressive on the subject of the war and that Taylor was committed to the idea of counterinsurgency. Thus in effect he was likely to get something along the lines of the report he received. Had he chosen representatives more dubious about the use of force, he would have a different kind of estimate. In fact, shortly after Taylor and Rostow arrived in Saigon, Kennedy dispatched his new ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith, to stop by and give him a personal report. Galbraith did, and in the very first of what was to be a series of trenchant, prophetic estimates on Vietnam, reported almost the opposite of Taylor and Rostow; he noted the decaying quality of the Diem and American operation there and saw enormous danger that the Americans might replace the French. Above all, he pushed for political rather than military solutions to the problem. But people like Galbraith were still on the outer periphery of the Kennedy Administration, there as much for window dressing as anything else, and his reports probably stirred doubts in the President’s mind, but that and little else.) That Kennedy still felt that the right was his problem, that he coveted respectable Establishment support as a form of protection from the right and that he felt more comfortable with the traditionalists was evidenced in another crucial appointment which he made.