And that is what I have come here to ask of you tonight.
He laid out his demands for a massive second round for the Great Society. “I recommend,” he said repeatedly, and rattled off the items like a machine gun: financing for the recently enacted health, education, and poverty programs; a “daring” foreign aid program to attack hunger, disease, and ignorance and to control population; the complete rebuilding of central and slum areas in the cities (to be called Model Cities); the cleanup of rivers and their basins; an attack on crime; the elimination of racial discrimination in jury selection, in the obstruction of efforts to secure civil rights, and in the sale and rental of housing; creation of a new Department of Transportation; increasing the term of members of the House to four years served concurrently with the President; a special set of programs for the rural poor; an increase in the minimum wage and an extension of coverage; the repeal of Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act; control of strikes which threaten the national interest; a new G.I. Bill of Rights for Vietnam veterans; a Teacher Corps; rent assistance; home rule for the District of Columbia; a highway safety law; the elimination of deception in lending and in the sale of drugs and cosmetics; a new supersonic transport plane; and full disclosure of political contributions. The plate would overflow for the second session of the 89th.
Now Vietnam. The Communists of the North had mounted an assault on the South. “We could leave,” he said, “abandoning South Vietnam to its attackers and to certain conquest, or we could stay and fight beside the people of South Vietnam. We stayed.” The U.S. was totally committed. “We will give our fighting men what they must have: every gun, and every dollar, and every decision—whatever the cost or whatever the challenge. … And let me be absolutely clear: The days may become months, and the months may become years, but we will stay as long as aggression commands us to battle.”
Despite this huge and open-ended commitment, the U.S. could wage this war and still finance the Great Society at virtually no cost. In part this was because the U.S. was extremely rich and its economy was growing at a rapid rate. “If you approve every program that I recommend tonight, our total budget deficit will be one of the lowest in many years. It will be only $1.8 billion next year.” On a cash basis it will “actually show a surplus.”
It was a magic show, all smoke and mirrors. Twenty-two years later Joe Califano, who was standing in the chamber, recalled the reaction of the Congress. Johnson, he said,
was really like a purring cat. … He had really wowed them. … I could feel guys—they were just stunned—that he could go forward with a program like this. And then you’d have guys come up to you and say, “Is he really serious? Are we really going to do this?” And then the bills started coming up. … I remember … [Congressman] Bill Barrett … on Model Cities. … He was saying, “Joe, you can’t be serious. How can you push this program? Where are we going to get the money?”
Despite the presidential purring, it was a bad speech, really a very bad speech. It reads as though it had been composed by a harried committee, which, of course, was the fact. It was too long, repetitious, disorganized, and impossible to believe. Far more serious, Johnson completely avoided the fundamental question Bill Barrett raised: “Where are we going to get the money?”
In this address Lyndon Johnson was speaking in the realm of fantasy; he refused to leave it for the painful world of reality. His motives were pure and noble. He desperately wanted to bring the poor, particularly blacks in poverty, into the mainstream of American society. Thus, he was eager to pour funds into the basic programs he had already launched—poverty, education, health—and to add new programs, especially model cities and an end of discrimination in housing. This would require an immense increase in the expenditure of public money. Even without Vietnam, he would have confronted formidable opposition. The war made it impossible.
The numbers Johnson used were false and intended to mislead. As will be pointed out in Chapter 14, he had ordered McNamara to cook the books. In its first year the war actually cost $20 billion. Thus, the deficit was not $1.8 billion, but $9 billion. As the conflict dragged on, the costs and the deficit rose. In the second half of 1965 the White House launched a massive and unsuccessful campaign to persuade corporations and unions not to raise prices and wages. On December 3, 1965, the Fed raised the discount rate from 4 to 4.5 percent and about that time both the Bureau of the Budget and the Council of Economic Advisers became convinced that a tax increase was necessary. The President, trying to preserve an image of the costless war, rejected the idea instantly. The Great Inflation took off. In the contest with the Great Society the Vietnam War was the certain victor.1
13
Vietnam: Sliding into the Quagmire
UNTIL 1964 few Americans recognized the name Vietnam or could locate it on a map. They were mainly adult males who had collected postage stamps as boys, and they knew it as French Indo-China. Daniel Ellsberg wrote, “There has never been an official of Deputy Assistant Secretary rank or higher (including myself) who could have passed in office a midterm freshman exam in modern Vietnamese history, if such a course existed in this country.”
The French in 1887 had imposed military control over the Indochinese Union, the three territories that would become Vietnam—Cochin-China, Annam, and Tonkin—along with Cambodia; Laos would be added six years later. French rule was repressive and was based on economic exploitation. Indochina became an exclusive source of raw materials for French industry and a protected market for French goods. Monopolies over alcohol, salt, and opium financed the colonial government. Rice, which should have been consumed by the peasantry, was exported.
The Vietnamese, a proud and ancient people, resented this system and some became revolutionaries who dreamed of overthrowing colonialism. Among them was Nguyen Sinh Cung, born in 1890 in Nghe An province in central Vietnam. Over a long life he used many names, the one known to history being Ho Chi Minh. In 1911 in Saigon he signed on as a stoker and galley boy aboard a French freighter bound for Marseilles. It would be 30 years before he returned.
Ho traveled widely in Europe and North America, living for six years in Paris after World War I, where he became a Marxist. He wrote for left-wing newspapers, denouncing French colonialism. In Moscow he met the Soviet leaders and attended a school for oriental revolutionaries. He was in China for the struggle between the nationalists and the Communists and mobilized Vietnamese students. Then on to Paris, to Bangkok, a center for Vietnamese dissidents, to Hong Kong, and to London. In 1941–42 the Japanese swept through Southeast Asia—the U.S.-protected Philippines, British Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and French Indochina. The next year Ho slipped across the Chinese border into Vietnam and joined confederates in a cave in the north. The time had come, he told them, to act. He formed the Vietnam Independence League, the Vietminh, to fight both the Japanese and their French collaborators. During the war the movement grew in both size and guerilla capability. On August 16, 1945, as Japan was collapsing, Ho proclaimed the provisional government of Vietnam with himself as president.
But General Charles DeGaulle, who was in command in liberated France, determined to preserve the French empire, including Indochina, and he gained both British and American support. Ho was trapped. After prolonged negotiations, he agreed in 1946 to split the country, giving France the south and hopefully retaining the north. But the French did not abide by the agreement.
This led to the “first” Vietnam War, which lasted for the better part of a decade and bled France white. It reached a climax in 1954 in the great battle of Dienbienphu west of Hanoi with the victory of the Vietminh under the brilliant generalship of Vo Nguyen Giap. Ho thought he had driven the French out of Vietnam and had united his country, but it was not to be.
The Chinese dominated the Geneva conference of 1954. Zhou Enlai wanted to deny the U.S. a reason to intervene in Vietnam, which might threaten China; further, the Chinese and the Vietnamese had quarreled for 2000 years and he preferred a weak and divided Vietnam. Zh
ou told Ho that he must accept half the country and stay out of Cambodia and Laos. The Soviets supported Zhou and Vietnam was split at the 17th parallel. But the closing documents basically proclaimed a cease-fire and did not constitute a political settlement. The agreement between France and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, as the Vietminh now called itself, provided for a temporary division of the country. A nationwide election would be held in the summer of 1956 to create a united Vietnam. But, as events worked out, Ho had won the war and lost the peace.
The playboy Vietnamese emperor, Bao Dai, who resided in a chateau on the French Riviera, selected Ngo Dinh Diem, who came down from Paris, as prime minister of the new South Vietnam. Bao Dai made Diem swear to defend the country against both the Communists and the French. Diem arrived in Saigon on June 28, 1954. While patriotic, he could hardly have been less fitted to govern his restless country. He was almost totally indifferent to the realities of Vietnam and this was, Neil Sheehan wrote, “willful.” “He lived in a mental cocoon spun out of a nostalgic reverie for Vietnam’s imperial past.” Diem was a militant Catholic in a country that was overwhelmingly Buddhist. He distrusted everyone except his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, and the latter’s wife. They were even more paranoid than Diem and some considered them mad. Stanley Karnow thought them a cross between the Borgias and the Bourbons. Diem accepted endemic corruption as a national way of life.
He flouted the Geneva accords by assuming that South Vietnam was already a permanent nation. He refused to allow elections in 1956 and he demanded American support. The Eisenhower administration, while dismayed by Diem personally, found no alternative but to back his war against Ho. About $30 million a year of U.S. money propped up his regime and American experts created and trained the South Vietnamese armed forces.
Determined to unite the country, Ho had no option but to resume the war. He gradually built up an underground revolutionary cadre in the South, the Vietcong, but it made slow progress. In 1959 he began converting the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which ran from North Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia to South Vietnam, into a military highway to infiltrate the South.
In the late fifties South Vietnam was ravaged by civil war. As the U.S. supplied Diem, the Soviet Union and China looked after Ho. There was a rough equilibrium: the government more or less controlled the cities and the Vietcong dominated most of the countryside. Neither was winning and it appeared that the war would go on for many years.
Eisenhower’s top advisers urged him to break the deadlock by sending in U.S. combat forces, but he refused. He simply passed the problem on to Kennedy in 1961.
The new President was baffled, enraged, and scarred by Vietnam. Accustomed to making decisions on a reasonable approximation of the facts, he could make no sense of the conflicting flow of information into the White House. He sent a stream of representatives to Vietnam, who brought back reports that piled up the confusion. In December 1962 the President sent out his dear friend, Mike Mansfield, an authority on Asia. His report was realistic and extremely gloomy. On reading it, Kennedy became so depressed that he spoke unkindly to Mansfield. He later told Kenny O’Don-nell, “I got angry with Mike for disagreeing with our policy so completely, and I got angry with myself because I felt myself agreeing with him.” In September 1963 Marine General Victor H. Krulack and Joseph A. Mendenhall, director of the State Department’s Far East Planning Office, went on a four-day inspection. Krulack reported that Diem’s problems had no effect upon military operations and that we were winning the war. Mendenhall said the civilian government was collapsing and that there was danger of a religious war or a major defection to the Vietcong. “Were you two gentlemen,” Kennedy asked icily, “in the same country?”
While the American public was kept almost totally in the dark, a deep and bitter struggle between hawks and doves was already evident under Kennedy. The big raptors were the armed forces speaking through the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the civilian leaders of the Department of Defense, Secretary McNamara and his top aides, John McNaughton and William Bundy. In the State Department, Secretary Rusk, though reluctant to express his views openly, was a hawk, and many in the department shared his outlook. McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow in the White House were also cold warriors. The doves were less numerous and less influential—Averell Harriman, George Ball, Roger Hilsman, and Paul Kattenburg at State, Arthur Schlesinger in the White House, J. K. Galbraith, the ambassador to India, and Mansfield and Wayne Morse in the Senate.
A similar division also arose in Saigon, but not within the government. Rather it was between the U.S. military command and the embassy, both unrelentingly hawkish, and the dovish press. At this time there were few reporters in Vietnam, a handful from the large dailies, the newsmagazines, and the press associations. But they included some exceptionally gifted newsmen—David Halberstam of the New York Times, Stanley Karnow of the Washington Post, Neil Sheehan of United Press International, and Malcolm Browne of the Associated Press,
Pierre Salinger noted that Kennedy (and Johnson later) “pushed hard … to tighten the rules under which correspondents could observe field operations.” But neither dared to impose censorship. Diem was also restrained from throwing the reporters out for fear of an outcry in Congress. But there were other methods. The Saigon police and the Surêté plain-clothesmen cornered Peter Arnett of the AP, Halberstam, Browne, and Sheehan in a narrow alley in Saigon. The Surete men threw Arnett to the ground and were about to attack his kidneys with their pointy-toed shoes when Halberstam, a very large man, charged with fists ready, and shouted, “Get back, get back, you sons of bitches, or I’ll beat the shit out of you.” They backed away. Kennedy tried to pressure Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the new publisher of the Times, to transfer Halberstam out of Saigon, to no avail.
The crisis Washington had dreaded began on May 8, 1963. The Buddhists in Hué gathered to celebrate the 2,527th birthday of the Buddha. The Catholic provincial officer forbade them to display their flag. The Buddhists, outraged by another act of discrimination, gathered at the radio station. Two armored cars from Nhu’s special forces opened fire, killing nine and wounding fourteen. In the following weeks there were Buddhist demonstrations in many towns, often suppressed brutally. On June 11 an elderly bonze sat down on the pavement at a busy Saigon intersection and was doused with gasoline and set afire. Browne, tipped off in advance, carried a camera. His photograph of the immolation appeared the next day on the front pages of many of the world’s newspapers. This grisly spectacle was repeated. Despite strong U.S. criticism, the Nhus admitted no responsibility and blamed the demonstrations on the Vietcong.
On June 27, 1963, Kennedy named his old political rival, Henry Cabot Lodge, his ambassador to Saigon. He had been in Vietnam and was fluent in French. More important, he held Diem in low regard and was tough. Kennedy must also have thought that, if South Vietnam collapsed, it would be politically convenient to have a Republican to share the blame.
During the fall of 1963 the South Vietnamese generals in Saigon and the U.S. government in Washington began to talk separately about a coup to overthrow Diem. While both were eager to get rid of him and his family, neither wanted to take responsibility. The only one who was firm was Lodge, who pressed Washington for authorization to proceed.
On October 5 General Duong Van (“Big”) Minh, the leading plotter, told Lieut-Col. Lucien Conein, the CIA agent, that, while Minh’s group expected American support, they needed “assurances” that the U.S. would “not attempt to thwart this plan.” Lodge urged Kennedy to give the assurances. On October 5 he received a cable from Washington with this language:
While we do not wish to stimulate coup, we also do not wish to leave impression that U.S. would thwart a change of government or deny economic and military assistance to a new regime if it appeared capable of increasing effectiveness of military effort, ensuring popular support to win war and improve working relations with U.S.
Conein on October 10 conveyed this assurance to Minh.
But the plotters hardly le
apt at the news. The Vietnamese, though they lived in the tropics, moved at glacial speed. As Lodge put it, “The U.S. is trying to bring this medieval country into the 20th century.”
They did move on the afternoon of November 1, when their troops captured the presidential palace, police headquarters, and the radio station in Saigon. Diem and Nhu fled to the air-conditioned cellar of the palace. Diem learned that the officers upon whom he had counted had deserted. Lodge offered the brothers a safe conduct out of the country. Diem did not respond. Then the mutineers made the same proposal and he rejected it. During the evening the brothers drove to Cholon, the Chinese section, and entered a safe house. The following morning Diem informed the plotters that they were at St. Francis Xavier, a French church.
Minh sent an armored personnel carrier and four jeeps. He signaled the officer in charge by raising two fingers of his right hand, that is, to murder both brothers. At the church the officer put them in the carrier and climbed into the gun turret. At a railroad crossing he shot them with an automatic weapon and stabbed them with a knife. President Kennedy was in a meeting when the grisly news arrived. General Maxwell Taylor said that he “rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face.” Schlesinger, who saw him shortly, wrote that he was “somber and shaken. I had not seen him so depressed since the Bay of Pigs.”
Kennedy had tried to construct a policy for Vietnam: the preservation of the South as a non-Communist haven in Southeast Asia, hopefully, along with the North, neutralized. As Theodore Sorensen put it, he sought “both to raise our commitment and to keep it limited.” In 1961 he had been urged to send in combat troops and to increase the number of advisers. He rejected troops but increased the advisers to 15,500 by the end of 1963. He hoped to democratize the country, but found Diem impossible to deal with. The attack on the Buddhists deeply offended Kennedy. At the United Nations General Assembly on September 20, 1963, he said that essential human rights were not respected “when a Buddhist priest is driven from his pagoda.”
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