The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  If he had warned about Soviet thrust into Europe, he had also been intimately concerned with the Marshall Plan as head of the Economic Cooperation Administration and later as director of Mutual Security, but he always thought of events within their own context. He sensed immediately that what motivated Asian Communists might be very different from what motivated European Communists; thus they might be very different people. So he entered the confrontation on Vietnam with enormous bureaucratic expertise and toughness, little expertise on Asia, but a great capacity to learn and a remarkably fresh mind.

  Within weeks of Harriman’s taking over at FE, some of his people were questioning the reporting and the optimism from Saigon. But it is crucial in retrospect to see the limits of the challenge. Then and in the months to follow, Harriman and his aides assaulted the accuracy of the military reports, of Nolting’s cables and of Diem’s viability, but they did not challenge the issue of dominoes upon which the commitment to South Vietnam was based, nor the broader role of America in the world. They were, in effect, asking the smaller questions in lieu of the larger ones. No one, least of all the President, wanted that kind of problem aired now. So it was a challenge within the limited pragmatism of the period: not whether we should be there or not, but whether we were winning, whether Diem, not South Vietnam, was viable. Harriman himself was still very much the anti-Communist in the broader sense, and he was an enthusiastic member of the counterinsurgency group (years later when a friend of his mildly mocked the faddishness and foolishness of the counterinsurgency period, he became very offended. Why, he answered, we did all kinds of good things throughout Latin America . . .). He was in effect challenging the absurdity of the surface, not the absurdity of the root. His job was to modernize the Dulles policies in Asia, but he and his aides were more disadvantaged in that job than they might have been a few months earlier, because the Kennedy Administration had just taken the very Dulles policies in Vietnam and escalated them. The commitment was greater and larger; there was one more American limb fastened to the Vietnamese tar baby.

  Chapter Eleven

  By sending its vast advisory and support group—which would eventually number some 18,000 men—the Administration had changed the commitment without changing the war, or the problems which had caused it. If it did not improve the war effort, the commitment did affect Washington; it deepened the Administration’s involvement in Vietnam, making it a more important country, moving it off the back burner of crisis quotient. It made the Administration dependent on the military reporting and estimates, for the military would dominate the reporting. The question was no longer one of Diem’s popularity or effectiveness (the answer to that question was that he was not popular, but he was respected); the real question now was the war, whether it was being won. And the answer was yes, it was being won, it was going very well, all the indices were very good. General Harkins was optimistic; he headed what was now a powerful institutional force for optimism. He had been told by his superior, Maxwell Taylor, to be optimistic, to downgrade pessimism, and he would do exactly that. He perceived his role as duty, duty to the President, and more important, to Max Taylor and the U.S. Army, and he did not question what he was doing. Joe Stilwell’s ear had been tuned to the field, but Paul Harkins’ ear was tuned to Washington and the Pentagon. Everything, he assured his superiors, was right on schedule; everyone was getting with the program. The war was being won. He saw victory shaping up within a year.

  The only thing wrong was that the war was not being won; it was, in fact, not even being fought. The ARVN was a replica of the past, was even more arrogant now than ever. All the old mistakes were being repeated in the field; the army still systematically enraged the population by running giant sweeps through peasant villages, with its soldiers stealing chickens and ducks. It still refused to run operations where the Vietcong were known to congregate. It still launched operations with carefully timed preattack artillery shelling so that the Vietcong, thus forewarned, could escape by carefully planned routes. Since Diem was afraid that if his army suffered losses he would lose face, he told his commanders not to risk casualties, so they joined battle as little as possible. They made up for the difference in results by falsifying after-action reports, creating statistics which were soon on their way to Washington bearing Harkins’ imprimatur.

  After a brief period in early 1962 when the arrival of the helicopters caught the Vietcong by surprise and there were a couple of quick government victories, the American booster shot failed. The Vietcong quickly learned that if helicopters appeared, it was better to stand and fight than run and be slaughtered. Thus they neutralized the new American-given mobility. Soon the only tangible result of the great American build-up was that the Vietcong were capturing better weapons. All the government optimism was being built on faked reports. That in itself was not surprising; what was surprising was that these lies now bore not just the stamp of the government of South Vietnam but that of the United States of America as well. MACV, Harkins’ command, accepted the ARVN battlefield reports without checking them out. The American military and propaganda machine uncritically passed on the lies of a dying regime.

  But in the field, things were different. There American officers began to respond to the deceit they encountered daily. It was one thing to sit in Saigon in an air-conditioned room and pass on fake reports; it was another to send young American advisers into combat, knowing that they were risking their lives for what was essentially a fraud. An inevitable confrontation of serious proportions took place.

  As the war effort began to fall apart in late 1962 and early 1963, the Military Assistance Command in Saigon set out to crush its own best officers in the field on behalf of its superiors in Washington. It was a major institutional crisis, but Washington civilians were unaware of it. It was not as if two different and conflicting kinds of military reporting were being sent to Washington, with the White House able to study the two and arbitrate the difference. The Saigon command systematically crushed all dissent from the field; the military channels did not brook dissent or negativism. If a colonel surfaced in a newspaper by name as a pessimist it was the end of his career (in 1963, as some of the dissenting colonels turned to the press in their frustration, editors in New York would cable their reporters in Saigon saying those pessimistic stories were all right, but couldn’t the reporters please use the names of some of the unhappy colonels?). Had there been some high Washington officials who had gone through the China experience and survived the aftermath, they would immediately have recognized it: the collapse of a feudal army confronted by a modern guerrilla army, with a high-level foreign general trying to cover up. But people in the Administration either did not know what had happened in China, or in a few cases, they knew but desperately wanted to avoid a repetition of it. What was happening was identifiable, except that no one was in any rush to identify it.

  The conflict between Harkins and his senior advisers in the Mekong Delta, his colonels and lieutenant colonels, was, however, very real. These officers were the fulcrum between the Saigon command, with its illusions about the war and its sense of responsibility to its superiors in the Pentagon, and the reality in the field where the junior officers, the captains and lieutenants, were discovering their ally did not want to fight and that the enemy was winning. At considerable risk to their own careers, the four key officers began to complain, in varying ways and in varying degrees. The four advisers were Colonel Wilbur Wilson, III Corps (the main area around Saigon, and west and north of it); Colonel Dan Porter, IV Corps (the rest of the Mekong Delta); Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann, 7th Division (the northern tier of the Delta); and Lieutenant Colonel Fred Ladd, 21st Division (the southern tier of the Delta). They were all combat veterans of other wars, men who had been specially selected for these slots. They were neither hawks nor doves (those terms did not exist at the time), but they wanted to win the war, and at that point they still thought it a possibility. They were in their late thirties and early forties, and they underst
ood at least some of the political forces the Vietcong represented. Finally, they were living where the war was taking place, and they thought it was a serious business, sending young men out to die, and if you were willing to do it, you also had to be willing to fight for their doubts and put your career on the line. To the Saigon command, then and later, Vietnam and the Vietnamese were never really a part of American thinking and plans; Vietnam was at best only an extension of America, of their own careers, their own institutional drives, their own self-image. To the men in the field it was a real war, not just a brief interruption in their careers, something to prevent damaging your career.

  Ladd was quickly put down for pessimistic reporting from his area. Vann was even worse; his reporting had caused some problems in the past. Now a major storm would center around him in January 1963 when the division he advised was badly defeated and performed with great cowardice at the battle of Ap Bac, which, being close to Saigon, was well covered journalistically. Harkins was furious, not at the Vietnamese or their commander, but at Vann for having called it a defeat and for having talked with American reporters. Harkins planned to fire Vann at the time but was talked out of it by staff members who argued that firing him would bring even more adverse publicity; they also warned that advisory morale was low enough as it was. Instead Harkins upbraided Vann, and Vann became a nonperson. Anything he wrote or said thereafter was simply disregarded, and important visitors to the country were steered away from his area.

  Porter, Vann’s immediate superior, was next. Before he went home after two long years, he had to turn in a final report, and it was brutally frank. Aides suggested that Porter sweeten it by putting in a few positive notes, but he refused. He was angry and bitter over the way his subordinates were being treated, and after consulting with Ladd, Vann and Wilson, he handed in the most pessimistic report on the war so far, on the nature of the peasant, the enemy and the ally. Harkins went into a rage over it; normally final reports of senior advisers were circulated for all other top advisers, but Harkins had Porter’s report collected. He told other officers that it would be sanitized and that if it contained anything of interest, he might then make it available. It was never seen again, which did not surprise Porter, but enough was enough, he was leaving the Army.

  One other man entered the struggle, a general officer named Robert York who had a distinguished record as a regimental commander in World War II. He was in Vietnam doing special evaluation on guerrilla warfare, which he knew something about, having been stationed as an attaché in Malaya during that guerrilla uprising. He quietly went around the countryside, not touring, the way Harkins did, in chief-of-state style, with the seventeen-course lunch at the province chief’s house. Instead York unpinned his general’s stars and dropped in on unsuspecting ARVN units. Thus he saw the war and the ally as they really were. Typically, while Harkins came in by helicopter to chew out Vann at the battle of Ap Bac, York was still in the field, pinned down by artillery fire from a province chief. In early 1963, though he had just received his first star, York decided to put his career on the line and handed in a detailed and pessimistic report on the war. But he never heard from Harkins about it; his commander’s only response was to scribble “Lies,” “More lies,” “Vann,” “Porter,” “Vann again,” “Porter again” in the margins. It was indicative of the differences between Saigon and the field; the viewpoints of the command were those of men who lived with peacetime attitudes and had a peacetime military integrity; the men in the field were men at war.

  Of these men it was Vann, the most intense and dedicated of them, who came to symbolize the struggle against Harkins and his superior, General Taylor. By the time Vann went home in June 1963, he was the most informed American in the country. A statistician by training, he had managed to come up with a new kind of statistic. In contrast to the MACV, whose figures reflected only the greater American fire power and the American willingness to accept inflated ARVN body counts at face value, Vann had managed to compile a different kind of statistical story. Thus he documented the ARVN failure to fight (of the 1,400 government deaths in his sector in one year, only 50 were ARVN). This did not mean that the ARVN was fighting well, as Harkins implied; it confirmed that they were not fighting at all, and that the burden of the war was being borne by ill-equipped local militia who more often than not (Vann proved this too) were being killed asleep in their defensive positions. He was able to prove that commanders got troops from Diem not on the basis of Vietcong pressure, but on the basis of personal ties and their ability to protect Diem against a coup.

  Vann went home a very angry man, to find that Saigon had ordered that he not be debriefed in Washington. So he began to give his briefing to friends at the Pentagon. It was a professional presentation indeed, and very different from the usual briefings which were coming in from Saigon. What made it striking was that it was not just impressionistic, it seemed to be based on very hard facts. Vann began to get higher and higher hearings in the Pentagon until finally General Barksdale Hamlett, the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army, heard the briefing, was impressed and arranged for Vann to meet with the Joint Chiefs. Vann was warned by several high officers that above all he must not appear to be critical of General Harkins, who was the personal choice of Maxwell Taylor (by this time Chairman of the Joint Chiefs), since Taylor seemed to be particularly sensitive and protective of Harkins and his reporting. He was also warned not to show his briefing until the last minute to General Krulak, who was the Secretary of Defense’s special adviser on guerrilla warfare, and a person who was already surfacing as a man with a vested interest in the optimism, having just returned from a tour of Saigon and reported to the Chiefs that the war was going very well, every bit as well as Harkins said.

  The Vann briefing was set for 2 p.m. on July 8, 1963. At 9:45 he sent a copy to General Krulak’s office. A little later Vann, eager, starched, finally getting his hearing, showed up outside the office of General Earle G. Wheeler, the Chief of Staff, to be on hand in case there were any new developments. He was sitting there when a phone call came in to one of Wheeler’s aides. “Who wants the item removed from the agenda?” the aide asked. The voice at the other end spoke for a few minutes. “Is this the Secretary of Defense’s or the Chairman’s office?” There was more talk. “Is that an order or a request?” Then more talk. “Let me get this right. The Chairman requests that the item be removed.” The aide turned to Vann. “Looks like you don’t brief today, buddy.” He went to Wheeler’s office, returned in a minute, picked up the phone and dialed a number and said, “The Chief agrees to remove the item from the agenda.”

  Thus a major dissenting view was blocked from a hearing at the highest level by Max Taylor, and thus the Army’s position on how well the war was going was protected (had Vann briefed, it would have been much harder for the high-level military to go into meetings with the President and claim that the war was going well). This charade was a microcosm of the way the high-level military destroyed dissenters, day after day in countless little ways, slanting the reporting lest the top level lose its antiseptic views, lest any germs of doubt reach the high level. It confirmed to many in the Pentagon that a good deal of the reason for the Harkins optimism and its harshness on doubters was not just Harkins’ doing. Rather, Harkins was a puppet controlled by Taylor and reflected Taylor’s decision that this should be the key to back-channel messages and the unofficial “word” which is so important in the Army, that the unofficial word for Harkins was coming from Taylor, and that the messenger between them was General Krulak.

  Since mid-1962 the American military had been turning to the handful of American journalists in Saigon, using them as an outlet for their complaints. It was not particularly deliberate; but it was also impossible to keep their skepticism hidden. The journalists kept showing up in the countryside, and it was only a matter of time before they saw how hollow the entire operation was, how many lies were being told, and how fraudulent the war was. It was only a matter of time before a vers
ion of the war and of the regime, far more pessimistic, began to surface in the American press. Both Washington and Saigon immediately chose to see this as a press controversy; in reality it was a reflection of a major bureaucratic struggle and of a dying policy. But since the policy now depended for its life on the public relations aspect, on the Administration’s attempt to sell a frail and failed policy both to itself and to Diem, the reporters became targets of the Administration, both at home and in Vietnam. They were the one element in Saigon that could not be controlled: Diem controlled his press, his military, his legislature; Harkins his reporting channels, and Nolting his. The only people who could be candid were the American reporters. “Get on the team,” Admiral Harry Felt told Malcolm Browne of the AP. “Stop looking for the hole in the doughnut,” Ambassador Nolting enjoined reporters. John Richardson, the head of the CIA in Saigon, spoke enviously to colleagues of how the Communists controlled their reporters. Nolting, increasingly angry with the journalistic accounts, ordered his press officer, John Mecklin, to write a major report for Washington saying that the policy “has been badly hampered by irresponsible, astigmatic and sensationalized reporting.” General Krulak, one of the shrewder political infighters, decided to assault the reporters by assaulting their manhood, and told favored journalistic friends that reporters in Saigon had burst into tears when they saw dead bodies. Favored journals such as Time or reporters such as Joseph Alsop and Marguerite Higgins were cranked up to write more positive stories, which they gladly did.