The immediate result of the Kennedy decision in December to send a major advisory and support team to Vietnam was the activation of a new player, a major military player, to run a major American command in Saigon. At first, when Kennedy took office, the pressure had come only from Diem; then, because of his policy to reassure Diem and make him the instrument of our policy, Kennedy had sent over Fritz Nolting, who would soon seem to many to be more Diem’s envoy to the United States than vice versa. Now, by appointing Lieutenant General Paul D. Harkins to a new command, Kennedy was sending one more potential player against him, a figure who would represent the primacy of Saigon and the war, as opposed to the primacy of the Kennedy Administration, thus one more major bureaucratic player who might not respond to the same pressures that Kennedy was responding to, thereby feeding a separate and potentially hostile bureaucratic organism.
Harkins began by corrupting the intelligence reports coming in. Up until 1961 they had been reasonably accurate, clear, unclouded by bureaucratic ambition; they had reflected the ambivalence of the American commitment to Diem, and the Diem flaws had been apparent both in CIA and, to a slightly lesser degree, in State reporting. Nolting would change State’s reporting, and to that would now be added the military reporting, forceful, detailed and highly erroneous, representing the new commander’s belief that his orders were to make sure things looked well on the surface. In turn the Kennedy Administration would waste precious energies debating whether or not the war was being won, wasting time trying to determine the factual basis on which the decisions were being made, because in effect the Administration had created a situation where it lied to itself.
The meeting seemed at the time like a footnote to Taylor’s trip. On his way back from Vietnam he had stopped off in Hawaii to visit his old friend Paul Harkins, a three-star general, then commander of the U.S. Army in the Pacific (in the marvelous jargon of the military, naturally, USAR-PAC). At that time the Army was considered somewhat weak in lieutenant generals, a level just below the great generals who had made it at the end of World War II and then come on even stronger in Korea. In fact, General Gavin had earlier urged Kennedy, in his search for his top military, to reach farther down in the ranks for younger men for high positions.
How bad is it out there? Harkins asked, and Taylor replied that it was bad, very bad; Harkins had better get ready to put his finger in the dike. A few weeks later, as is their wont in Army circles, Mrs. Taylor chatted on the phone with her friend Mrs. Harkins and suggested ever so casually that they not plan on staying in Hawaii very much longer. And on January 1 the call came through. Harkins would head the new U.S. command in Saigon, the command which was to be different and unconventional. No one, of course, could have been more conventional than Harkins. He knew nothing about guerrilla warfare, in fact he knew remarkably little about basic infantry tactics (if you knew something about small-unit infantry tactics you could at least learn about the war, because you could put yourself in the infantryman’s place). He was a cavalry man in the old days, a great polo player, a dashing social figure in the old Army, and then a tanker, a staffman at that. His career was distinguished because he was, in Army terms, diplomatic. He had been a staff officer for George Patton, and softened some of Patton’s verbal blows. He was considered very good on logistical planning. Harkins was, in addition to being a protégé of Patton’s, a trusted friend of Taylor’s. They had known each other well from the days at West Point and had kept in touch. When Max Taylor was Superintendent of the Point, it was not surprising that Paul Harkins turned up as Commandant of Cadets, and later when Max Taylor had the U.S. Eighth Army in Korea, it was not surprising that Paul Harkins was his chief of staff.
Others in the Army and in the bureaucracy were pushing for an officer with a sense of unconventional warfare, like Major General William Yarborough, then heading the Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, or Colonel Ray Peers, who had served with the OSS during the war. But Taylor did not want an unconventional man. He had a very conventional view of the fighting and what he wanted was his own man, someone who was, above all, loyal to him. So he produced Harkins, a man with no real reputation of his own. His two main distinctions during his years of service in Vietnam would be, first, that his reporting consistently misled the President of the United States, and second, that it brought him to a point of struggle with a vast number of his field officers who tried to file realistic (hence pessimistic) reports. But even here the fault was not necessarily Harkins’. In all those years he felt that he was only doing what Max Taylor wanted, and there was considerable evidence that this was true, that his optimism reflected back-channel directives from Taylor. But it was one more insight into the era, all that talk about unconventional warfare, and then picking the most conventional officer. Even Kennedy knew it; after he met Harkins in Palm Beach, where the President was resting, Kennedy was asked what he thought of the new commander for Vietnam. He answered, somewhat less than enthusiastically, “Well, that’s what they’re offering me.”
Chapter Ten
In Vietnam, the influx of American aid recommended under the Taylor-Rostow report changed nothing. The American intelligence reports of the last few years had repeatedly warned that war waged by the Vietcong was basically political, that the Diem regime was sick, perhaps terminally sick. The American agreement to commit support and advisory elements also called for a broad range of social and political changes and reforms, to which Diem had agreed with considerable reluctance. If anything, he regarded the American insistence on reform as an affront to him personally; the Communists were the enemy, not he and his family. What were the Americans doing, involving themselves in Vietnamese domestic affairs, pressuring him to accept into his government people who were unreliable, criticizing his family both directly and indirectly?
Almost as soon as the Americans decided to increase their commitment, the Ngo regime began to renege on the promised reforms; the Americans, as they had systematically since 1954 in dealing with Diem, quickly acquiesced. Ambassador Nolting had the job of bringing Diem the news that the United States would not be sending combat troops to Vietnam. Diem had not been happy, Nolting reported, but he “took our proposals rather better than I expected.” Two days later, however, Nolting reported that he had found out, through high-level channels, that Diem was sulking and was very upset; at the same time there were virulent attacks in the Nhu-controlled press claiming that the Americans, rather than helping the country in an hour of need, were interfering in Vietnamese affairs, and that they were naÏve about reforms and about Communism. It was very clear what was happening; exactly as Ken Young and others had predicted, the Nhus were dominating Diem, warning him against the Americans, against their threat to his regime, and Diem, of course, was responding to his family. So, inevitably, on December 7, 1961, less than a month after the decision to make a far greater commitment based in large part on social reform, Washington was sending its embassy new recommendations, softening the demands for political reform. It was one more in a long series of decisions to go it alone with Diem on his terms, to treat the war as primarily a military problem, and to back off from using American leverage for any kind of social or political reform. Reform, given the nature of the regime, was of course impossible; reform meant getting rid of Mr. and Mrs. Nhu, and Diem was unwilling to do this. Washington had backed down again, and the key figure in this was Nolting, who had recommended that we not pressure Diem, that we trust him. We should accept his word and not demand his deeds. At a cocktail party shortly after the Americans backed down on reform, Ngo Dinh Nhu took an American reporter aside and praised Nolting lavishly. “Your ambassador,” he said, “is the first one who has ever understood us.” To Nolting, viability in South Vietnam meant getting along with the government at the top level in Saigon, not pressuring the government to do something about desperate conditions in the countryside. Washington accepted this; it showed that once more, despite all the talk of guerrilla warfare and political reform, the Americans were ready
to be content with the status quo and to downgrade the political side.
Thus the real problems in Vietnam remained unaffected. The problems were political, but the response was military. The most important rural innovation, the strategic hamlet program, designed to give peasants protection and win their allegiance to the government, was given to Nhu to run, whereupon he, predictably, tried to make it his own personal fief and power base. Of course Nhu did not trust the Americans and the Americans did not trust Nhu; indeed the new allies were always uneasy with each other, and whether they had a genuine mutuality of trust and interest was dubious. (In 1961 one of the American experts sent over to help the Saigon government was a specialist in lie detectors; he authored an elaborate program to rid the government of one of its largest problems, high-level officials who were actually Vietcong agents. It looked like an excellent program until it was blocked by the Saigon CIA, whose officials realized that Saigon might also use the lie detectors to find out which government officials were also secretly on the CIA payroll.) But the important thing was the overall impact of the American aid; it was not finally a booster shot which would liberalize the government, but instead a shot of formaldehyde. The Americans were not modernizing Vietnamese society as Rostow had hoped; they were in fact making it more authoritarian and less responsive than ever. It did not change the balance in the countryside; if anything it simply meant that the Vietcong would now capture newer, better American weapons instead of old, used French weapons (“Ngo Dinh Diem will be our supply sergeant,” said one highly accurate Vietcong paper of the period).
If this failure to change the political balance was not realized in Washington, it was understood by many in Saigon, particularly among the Vietnamese military, and it was certainly understood in Hanoi. There Bernard Fall, the French historian, was visiting in early 1962 on a rare visa. He was granted an interview with Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, and instead of finding Dong upset by the newest infusion of American aid, Fall saw that he was rather amused by it all. Poor Diem, Dong was saying, he is unpopular. And because he is unpopular, the Americans must give him aid. And because the Americans must give him aid, he is even less popular, and because he is even less popular, the Americans must give him even more aid . . . At which point Fall said he thought it sounded like a vicious circle. “Not a vicious circle,” Dong said, “a downward spiral.”
What the new major American involvement affected was not Vietnam, but the United States; its function would be based upon the perceptions, attitudes and judgments not of the President who initiated it, John F. Kennedy, but of the President who reluctantly accepted it, Ngo Dinh Diem. The American policy was to trust Diem and not to cross him; thus the American military mission saw its job as getting along with Diem, so his reporting became our reporting, his statistics our statistics, finally his lies our lies. What we did now was, on a large scale, accept his view of the war, and of the society. Also, because we had gotten in so much deeper, we wanted to see commensurate results to justify the commitment. Since nothing changed, which meant there was little in the way of results, the American Administration would have to justify the decision it had made by manipulating the facts, by press agentry, by trying to manage the news and events, and finally, when that failed, by constant assaults on reporters in Vietnam who continued to report pessimistically. What could not be affected on the ground against the enemy the Administration tried to affect by public relations, with only slightly greater success.
The nature of our new commitment dictated that we could not be any better than our ally. Nolting could not be better than Diem, and Harkins could not be any better than those political hacks whom Diem had appointed as generals solely because they were loyal—which, if nothing else, gave them a certain kinship to Harkins. Loyalty was why he held his position.
General Paul Donal Harkins, fifty-seven, was a man of compelling mediocrity. He had mastered one thing, which was how to play the Army game, how to get along, how not to make a superior uncomfortable. It would be hard to think of a man who had fewer credentials for running a guerrilla war in which Asian political injustices were at stake. To understand best what Harkins was like, it is important to understand what he was not. He was not, above all, a Joe Stilwell. Twenty years earlier, Stilwell had been in almost exactly the same position. He was tough, blunt and candid, almost joyously abrasive, delighting in getting along with the simplest private and causing problems for the highest civilian, preferably the President of the United States. Defeated by the Japanese, he walked out of Burma in 1942, and interviewed by reporters, said that he and his men had just taken a hell of a beating and had better go back and even things up (the idea of a contemporary American general ever admitting that he had taken a hell of a beating is inconceivable; there would be a battalion of $20,000-a-year government press spokesmen and public affairs officials descending to correct his statement, assuring reporters and the public that the general’s words had been taken out of context; he had meant to say that this was certainly a difficult and complex war, that the enemy, while certain to be defeated in the long run, was surprisingly well led, but that the most important thing was how well his own American troops had fought, proving that Americans could fight under difficult Asian conditions). Stilwell loved to be with the grunts, eating at their mess, never cutting in on a chow line, basking in the knowledge that the boys liked feisty old Vinegar Joe. He was one of the boys, sharing every hardship and every heartache. Classically the commander, leading by being there and sharing the worst kind of front-line hardship, contemptuous of staff officers, perfumed dandies in the rear echelon, glorying in getting mud on his boots. (When Harkins first arrived in Saigon he was asked by an AP photographer named Horst Faas when he was going out in the field because the AP wanted some photos of him in fatigues and boots, walking through the paddies. “Forget that kind of picture,” Harkins told him, “I’m not that kind of general.”) Back in China, Stilwell wanted above all to be well informed, to know his own men’s and the enemy’s capabilities, and he knew that anything less than the blunt truth and blunt intelligence about the enemy might cost him lives, his boys. So he not only debriefed his own military people carefully, but plucked from the embassy staff in Chungking the brightest young political officers, like John Paton Davies, John Stewart Service and Raymond Ludden, because he wanted the best. It did not matter whether the news was good or bad; the worse the news, the more you needed it. If things were going well you did not need a good intelligence system quite as much, events took care of themselves.
If Stilwell was classically the commander and the old-fashioned kind of officer, then Harkins was just as much the other kind of general, the staffman who responded to superiors rather than to the field, and who was a good new modern man, there to soothe things over, to get along, not to make ripples but to iron out the wrinkles. (If the American public failed at first to acknowledge the dynamism in Harkins, it was no fault of Time magazine, which in May 1962, anxious to drum up support for the war in Vietnam, found Harkins “tall, trim, with grey hair, steely blue eyes and a strong nose and chin . . . looks every inch the professional soldier.” Time even made comparisons with General George Patton, with whom Harkins had once served. “Outwardly the two were totally different: Patton, a shootin’ cussin’ swashbuckler; Harkins, quiet, firm, invariably polite. But a fellow officer says, 'I really think that inside, he and Patton were the same.’ The same, certainly, in their drive for victory.”)
Like almost all Americans who arrived in Vietnam, Harkins was ignorant of the past, and ignorant of the special kind of war he was fighting. To him, like so many Americans, the war had begun the moment he arrived; the past had never happened and need not be taken seriously. If the French had lost a war, they had fought it poorly; besides, they had made the mistake of being in a colonial war, fighting in order to stay, while we were fighting in order to go home. This was clear in our minds and it should be clear to the Vietnamese.
The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library) Page 30
