The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  Occasionally Harkins would mouth phrases about this being a political war, but he did not really believe them. The American military command thought this was like any other war: you searched out the enemy, fixed him, killed him and went home. The only measure of the war the Americans were interested in was quantitative; and quantitatively, given the immense American fire power, helicopters, fighter-bombers and artillery pieces, it went very well. That the body count might be a misleading indicator did not penetrate the command; large stacks of dead Vietcong were taken as signs of success. That the French statistics had also been very good right up until 1954, when they gave up, made no impression. The French had lost the war because of a lack of will (the French were known for that) and a lack of fire power; Americans lacked neither will nor fire power.

  At an early intergovernmental meeting on the importance of psychological warfare, one of Harkins’ key staffmen, Brigadier General Gerald Kelleher, quickly dismissed that theory. His job, he said, was to kill Vietcong. But the French, responded a political officer named Douglas Pike, had killed a lot of Vietcong and they had not won. “Didn’t kill enough Vietcong,” answered Kelleher. Such was the attitude of the American headquarters; despite all the faddishness of counterinsurgency it was all very conventional, with a dominating belief that more and more force was what was really needed. Besides, it was not a serious war or a serious enemy; as the French generals had been overconfident because the enemy did not register in terms they could visualize and understand, so now were the American generals overconfident. Who could be serious about an enemy who, having assaulted a village and captured it, did not stay around and defend its prize, but snuck off into the night?

  When Harkins first arrived in Saigon to head the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), he had told reporters that he was an optimist and that he was going to have optimists on his staff. He kept his word. From the very first, the reports he sent to Washington were titled “The Headway Report,” leaving no doubt that things were going to get better. Very quickly his command became a special, almost unreal place, both isolated and eventually insulated from reality: the enemy was small, yellow, did not wear traditional uniforms, never held terrain, never fought in the daytime, and was known to kill innocent schoolteachers. As a worthy enemy, it was clearly overrated. The Saigon command soon reflected Harkins’ views, with a flabby, foolish confidence; a staff can be no better than the man it serves, and Harkins was a pleasant, social-minded officer, a polo player. His intelligence was not without its limits (“He wasn’t worth a damn, so he was removed,” McNamara would say of him later; “you need intelligent people.” Of course McNamara failed to explain why Harkins had held his position for almost two and a half years). He was the direct opposite of the other kind of general officer, the brilliant individual man going against the system and triumphing in spite of it (the latter needs wartime to excel, the former needs peacetime to excel, because warfare with all its unpredictability demands excellence and a willingness to go against the grain; only a very unusual general, like Max Taylor, can excel during both peace and wartime).

  Rather than reflecting what was happening in the field, Harkins’ shop reflected his Washington orders, and the facts would be fitted to Washington’s hopes. Normally, for instance, G-2 (intelligence) is kept separate from G-3 (operations), but not in Harkins’ shop. There the intelligence reports were edited down by the operations people, and the Vietcong capability was always downgraded and reduced. Battalion-size attacks became company-size attacks, company attacks became platoon attacks; reports from lower headquarters about the Vietcong capacity to replenish its forces were consistently ignored, as were intelligence reports of growing Vietcong resources (all of which, if taken seriously, would have put Harkins in conflict with Diem, as Stilwell had been in conflict with Chiang, and would have caused problems for General Taylor in Washington). It was all part of the game. Harkins was very genial about it, very friendly, except of course if a subordinate insisted on providing bad news. A civilian intelligence officer later recalled trying to warn Harkins in 1962 about the growing Vietcong threat in the Mekong Delta.

  “Nonsense, I am going to crush them in the rainy season,” Harkins said (the rainy season, of course, favored the guerrilla, affording him better canal transportation and infinitely more hiding places than the dry season).

  When the intelligence officer insisted, saying that the situation was about to become irreversible, Harkins pushed him aside. This was not what his own intelligence shop was saying—why, Colonel Winterbottom was very optimistic.

  “General Harkins,” the civilian interrupted, “your intelligence chief doesn’t understand the threat at all. He’s an Air Force officer and his specialty is SAC reconnaissance and I’m sure he’s very good at picking nuclear targets, but he doesn’t understand this war and he’s not going to give you any feel for it.”

  But Harkins was no longer so genial or so pleasant, nor such a good listener, the civilian found. Harkins assured the visitor that his intelligence chief was an officer and a good one and a professional, the best they had in Washington, and he, General Harkins, did not need anyone in civilian clothes to tell him how to run a war. And so it went. Harkins was comforted by his staff and his statistics, and he comforted his staff as well; those who comforted him and gave him what he was looking for had their careers accelerated.

  He had no problems, Harkins told Secretary McNamara in July 1962. No problems? Well, just one problem, he admitted, the American press. All along he steadfastly brushed aside the growing problems and warnings from the field in 1962. One particular incident comes to mind. Harkins had gone to Bac Lieu, in the heart of the Mekong Delta, on one of his field inspections and the briefing went very well. The Vietnamese officers may have been slow to learn how to fight the Vietcong, but they were quick to master the art of what pleased the Americans, not the least of which was the art of briefing. They were, in fact, great briefers, and this summary had been particularly good, Fort Bragg­perfect, made even more poignant by the commander’s accent—a reminder that we had exported the art of briefing.

  They had, said the Vietnamese commander, planned only X number of strategic hamlets, but the population so desperately wanted to be part of this new national revolution that they insisted on coming in. Thus they had already built 3X hamlets. Harkins was very pleased. Proud is a better word, and the smile grew on his face (no mention of the fact that the more hamlets built, the more rake-off for the province chief and the division commander). With a paternal glow, he congratulated the commander for such a fine presentation. In an aside to an aide he said that this was the best thing about getting out in the countryside, away from Saigon with all its intrigues and gossip; out there, where the war really took place and where the people understood the enemy and the threat, there were fewer problems. It was all healthier. The aide nodded. This was the real Vietnam.

  A few minutes later Lieutenant Colonel Fred Ladd, the division adviser, asked to see Harkins for a minute. Ladd was typical of the best of the American officers in Vietnam, picked men, get your ticket punched for Vietnam, the only war we have; a West Pointer, son of a West Pointer, an intelligent, humane, sophisticated officer of whom it was said, get to know Ladd, a hot officer on the way to his first star. Ladd took Harkins aside and somewhat apologetically said he did not mean to upset the general, but the figures for the strategic hamlet program were flagrantly exaggerated, and the real total was about one third of that given by the Vietnamese commander. And then, rather than getting a wink from Harkins, a we-all-know-the-rules-of-the-game smile, the American commander in Vietnam turned on Ladd and upbraided him for challenging the word of a Vietnamese officer. Of course the Vietnamese figures were accurate. Ladd looked at him for a long time and said simply, “I thought we were talking American to American.”

  Harkins left, but Ladd had seen very clearly that day that there was a collision course ahead, that the marching orders, which had been implied in that conversation, we
re very clear: Do not make waves. He knew that it was going to be very difficult for him and that it might hurt his chances of becoming General Ladd, and he was right, there was a collision and he did not become General Ladd.

  In late October 1961 Kennedy, wanting to hold the line on Vietnam, had approved the new major American military commitment. Ironically, just a month later he took a step which would have profound consequences on that very commitment. As part of a major shake-up of the State Department which became known as the Thanksgiving Day Massacre (in which, among other things, Chester Bowles was removed from his post as Undersecretary), he named Averell Harriman Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (or FE, as it was known at State). By putting Harriman there, Kennedy was in effect starting a chain of events which would lead Harriman onto a collision course with the new military commitment he had just authorized. In Saigon, Nolting and Harkins were committed to a policy of the past; now, in Washington, Harriman was under orders to modernize the Administration’s Asian policies and personnel. The result was an inevitable conflict and the most ferocious governmental struggle of the Vietnam war, which left both sides almost totally depleted.

  At the time Harriman took over FE, it was the most conservative branch of the State Department. More than any other bureau it had been damaged by the McCarthy period, and had therefore held to the policies of the Dulles years. Just a few months earlier James Thomson, Chester Bowles’s young staff aide, had been assigned the job of clearing a major speech that Bowles planned to give on Asia. He went to the appropriate official, the public affairs officer for FE, who, after looking at the speech, pointed to a particular passage and said that it had to go. This was a reference to the great troubles that China had suffered from 1849 to 1949 at the hands of foreigners, and Bowles wanted to express regret for whatever role the United States had played in what the Chinese viewed as a painful and humiliating period.

  Thomson, a China expert himself and later a professor of Asian history at Harvard, wondered why it would have to be cut.

  “Because it’s the Communist line,” said the official.

  “It’s the Chiang Kai-shek line too,” said Thomson, and began the awkward business of negotiating the speech through. Bowles would be allowed to keep the offending passage if he referred to the Chinese capital as Peiping, which was the Chinese Nationalist preference, instead of Peking, which was the Chinese government’s preference, and thus normally State Department preference as well; eventually the speech was cleared.

  The incident was not surprising to Bowles or Thomson because they were by then accustomed to it. The men who might have served at FE, John Davies, Jack Service, Edmund Clubb, had all been destroyed by the McCarthy investigations, and their successors had been men willing to serve in Asia under the terms dictated by Dulles, terms of the most rigid anti-Communism, where viewpoint and rhetoric often had very little to do with the facts. Dulles had wanted to appease the conservative Republicans on the Hill, and he had done it, but the price had been the integrity of the China desk and the Asian bureau. Neutralism was frowned on at FE; neutralists might come to power and be more sympathetic to the Communist side than to the Western side. At FE, loyalty came before intelligence.

  “A wasteland,” Harriman said. When he took over, he looked around his office, talked to the people, read the cables, and was absolutely appalled by what he found. “It’s a disaster area filled with human wreckage,” he confided to friends. “Perhaps a few can be saved. Some of them are so beaten down, they can’t be saved. Some of those you would want to save are just finished. They try and write a report and nothing comes out. It’s a terrible thing.”

  As Undersecretary of State, Bowles had begun the process of trying to change FE, but Rusk had held the line by putting his old friend Walter McConaughy there, which struck the Bowles people as too much in the Dulles tradition. Bowles had enjoyed more success with ambassadorial appointments in Africa than in Asia (because Asia was considered a more serious continent, with more at stake, where fewer risks could be taken). He had won one notable battle with the older foreign service people in Asia when he wanted Edwin O. Reischauer, the distinguished Harvard professor, to be ambassador to Japan. The traditionalists in the foreign service lobbied for Graham Parsons, the outgoing Assistant Secretary, and had in fact lined up the right wing of the Japanese Foreign Ministry to claim that it would be embarrassing for the Japanese to have Reischauer there, since his wife was Japanese. Even more striking in the Reischauer case, old FBI reports showed up claiming that Reischauer was a security risk because he was linked with John K. Fairbank, another Harvard professor, who according to the FBI reports had been called “a conscious agent” of the Stalin camp by Senator McCarran. At that point Bowles blew up and told the security people, “If you want someone close to Fairbank, why the hell don’t you look over at the White House where he has a brother-in-law working?” (at that time Fairbank and Schlesinger were married to sisters). Reischauer eventually got the Japanese post, but it had not been easy.

  So FE had remained much the same during the first year of the Kennedy Administration; now Harriman immediately set out to change it. He was the eldest member of the Kennedy group in the State Department, but he soon became the man that most young people in the Department began to turn to for leadership and freshness—for that element which had been so desperately needed at State for so long—an honest airing of new thoughts. All his career he had specialized in reaching out to young people, and he began to do this now. There was, for example, Michael Forrestal, the son of James Forrestal who had virtually been adopted by the Harrimans after the suicide of the father. Michael Forrestal had been brought down from Wall Street by Kennedy at Harriman’s request, placed on the White House staff to work on Vietnam, and given these instructions by the President: “You will be my personal envoy to that special sovereignty known as Averell Harriman.” And there was Roger Hilsman, the Director of Intelligence and Research, a Bowles man who seemed to be somewhere between Bowles and Rostow in his view of the underdeveloped world (aggressive on counterinsurgency, he believed his own experiences in Burma were more politically meaningful than they were, but he was against bombing and combat troops in Asia and for a more modern view of China). Harriman assigned Michael Forrestal and Jim Thomson to look for former FE men who still had some ability left, and see if they could be rehabilitated—and if they wanted to come back to dealing with Asia. Ed Rice, an older China hand who seemed to deviate from the accepted Chiang line, was summoned from Policy Planning. (Rice had earlier caught the eye of Bowles by sending over a paper from Policy Planning which showed a surprising degree of flexibility on China. Bowles was pleased by the freshness of the outlook and sent his specialist on China to meet with Rice. Jim Thomson was impressed that someone with Rice’s background—he had served in China during the worst and most sensitive period of the forties—had managed to survive without being crushed in the Republican purges of the fifties. The answer was simple, Rice explained; for some reason which he did not understand, Patrick Hurley, the leader of much of the witch hunt, had placed a letter of commendation in his file long before China had become sensitive, and this had scared off the head hunters.) Paul Kattenburg, one of the best of the old Indochina hands, was brought back to the Vietnam working group, where he began to have immediate impact. Bob Barnett, another exiled China hand, was transferred to Harriman’s office. Allen Whiting, a China expert, came to INR from Rand and had particularly good credentials because he had written with great insight about the Chinese entry into Korea. But Whiting warned Roger Hilsman that he wanted no part of Vietnam because, as he put it, if the policy was (in the words of Homer Bigart) “Sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem,” then we were going to sink.

  Harriman wanted, above all, men who spoke freely and who did not automatically produce the existing mythology of the recent past. He drove those around him relentlessly, he did his homework (when he heard that Whiting’s book on China crossing the Yalu was good, he did not ask som
e young officer to brief him on it; he read it himself and then summoned Whiting to spend an entire Sunday going over it). He was single-minded, wildly ambitious, often thoughtless, sometimes savage, always combative (at one of the tough sessions on Vietnam he called Major General Victor Krulak, the JCS special representative who was spouting the Taylor-Harkins line of pure optimism, “a goddamn fool”). He became one of the foremost figures in the bureaucracy, a restless, bruising figure who never quit.

  He was seventy at the time. “Averell looks terrific,” a friend told Marie Harriman that year. “You’d look terrific too,” she answered, “if you did nothing but play polo until you were forty years old.” He was unique in many ways; he brought with him so much history, so many ties to great figures of the past that the young men who had taken office could not imagine that he would be able to function at their level and speed. They soon learned that it was they who were hard pressed to function at his level and speed and intensity. Six years later Robert Kennedy, admitting defeat (he had once doubted Harriman’s vitality), would give a surprise birthday party at Hickory Hill for Harriman. The main feature came at the last minute when the curtains were drawn back to show an illuminated porch with huge blowups of figures from Harriman’s past: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. There was a special touch of historic irony here: Joe Kennedy’s boy, the boy Joe thought most like him, giving a party in honor of Harriman, the man whom Roosevelt had sent to England at the beginning of the war almost to counteract the pessimistic impressions and appraisals of Joe as ambassador. Harriman, the special envoy, who had stood beside Churchill again and again in public as a visible and tangible evidence of American commitment and presence, who in the dark days of North Africa had hand-carried messages from Winston to General Wavell which said that Harriman had Winston’s complete confidence, was most intimate with Roosevelt and Hopkins, and “no one can do more for you . . .”