Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  Pentagon aide John McNaughton, though a passionate admirer of McNamara who followed his boss up the escalator, in the spring of 1964 experienced a stab of doubt and self-knowledge when he told his friend Michael Forrestal: ‘You always think we can turn this thing off. But I wonder. I think it gets harder every day, each day we lose a little control, each decision that we make wrong, or don’t make at all, makes the next decision a little harder, because if we haven’t stopped it today, then the reasons for not stopping it will still exist tomorrow, and we’ll be in even deeper.’ McNaughton was in no doubt about the selfishness of US purposes in Indochina, enumerating these a few months later: ‘70 per cent to avoid a humiliating defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor) – 20 per cent to keep South Vietnam (and the adjacent territory) from Chinese hands – 10 per cent to permit the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a better, freer way of life’.

  Scarcely anybody in Washington privately doubted that the Saigon government was rotten, that the war was languishing. Until 3 November, however, and Lyndon Johnson’s confirmation by the American people as their electoral choice of president, bad news was inadmissible: they must merely hang on in there. In March McNamara visited Vietnam with Max Taylor, and delivered a ringing endorsement of Gen. Khanh, the new capo. Brig. Gen. William DePuy wrote home from Saigon: ‘Soon all the people in Washington will be in Vietnam and there won’t be any room for Vietnamese. That perhaps is one way to win the war.’

  In the ARVN general staff building, Rufus Phillips passed a Vietnamese major whose desk was piled high with books. The visitor asked what he was doing. ‘I’m helping to write the constitution.’ Beside the officer lay books on the American and French constitutions and previous Vietnamese versions, such as those were. Gen. Khanh had assigned him this task, he said. A draft was passed to the US embassy, which conferred its seal of approval. Khanh informed his fellow-generals, some of them dissenting, that this was what the Americans wanted: thus, it was duly implemented. Then the new constitution provoked Buddhist and student protests. Max Taylor scolded Khanh for doing things all wrong. The Vietnamese was understandably indignant: had he not done exactly what his mentors demanded?

  Rufus Phillips fumed about the mindset this episode reflected: ‘We had carefully, painfully for nearly ten years tried to build up this very fragile new nation. Then we destroyed any kind of stability. And every time a general would run a coup during the “revolving door” period, all the previous guys were kicked out. We were getting people in power who just didn’t know the score at all. And the bigger our involvement became out there to compensate for the chaos, the more we displaced the Vietnamese leadership. We decided that we were going to win the war and then give the country back to the Vietnamese. That was the coup de grâce to Vietnamese nationalism … And this became the basic issue that the communists played on.’

  The defense secretary submitted to the president a report which, characteristically, McNamara had drafted before visiting Saigon, articulating his perception of US purposes: ‘We seek an independent non-Communist South Vietnam. Unless we can achieve this objective … almost all of Southeast Asia will probably fall under Communist dominance.’ This became the basis for the National Security Council’s NSAAM288, emphasising America’s commitment. Thereafter the administration proceeded on the assumption that its goals could be fulfilled by the application of military power, heedless of the attitudes of the Vietnamese people. The only virtue it deemed indispensable in a local ruler worthy of Washington’s endorsement was that he should forswear any parley with Hanoi.

  Behind closed doors, McNamara readily admitted that the situation in Vietnam was ‘a hell of a mess’, and that another Saigon coup could take place at any time. But both he and the president rejected absolutist counsel, both from those who favoured abandoning South Vietnam, and from those who sought a dramatic raise in the stakes. Johnson professed scepticism about whether bombing the North would achieve much. In the early election campaigning months of 1964, both men emphasised their commitment to the regime, but were unwilling to go beyond small incremental steps in managing the war, such as would not attract unwelcome notice from voters. When Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin had his first meeting with the president on 17 April, to his surprise Vietnam was scarcely mentioned.

  The following month, a flare-up of fighting in Laos caused France, India, Cambodia and the USSR to call for a reconvening of the 1962 Geneva conference. The Americans rejected the proposal, lest neutralisation of Vietnam should also become an issue. Yet if they wanted out, such a forum might have opened a door. McNamara’s man Daniel Ellsberg, later famous as leaker of the Pentagon Papers, identified 1964 as ‘the last time in which a loyal bureaucrat could conceive of it being appropriate for the US just to cut its losses’. By the beginning of the following year America had suffered so many failures and humiliations, both military and political, that a withdrawal must inevitably be viewed by the world as a defeat, such as no administration could readily countenance. In the early summer of 1964, however, matters were not yet that bad.

  The defense secretary’s prevarication – as the Joint Chiefs viewed it – exasperated especially LeMay and Greene, who were convinced that mere persistence with existing policies would not suffice to turn a tide which, all parties agreed, was running strongly for the communists. They were also impatient with their chairman Taylor, who they felt was unwilling to tell the president and McNamara harsh truths they did not wish to hear. Through the spring the mood among the brass grew sourer. Johnson’s military aide Maj. Gen. Chester Clifton wrote on 27 March: ‘I sense a potentially difficult – and even dangerous – situation … The Chiefs are badly split.’ Greene wrote contemptuously on 18 May: ‘We see both McNamara and Taylor deliberately fishing for courses of action.’ The election seemed too far off to keep losing the war meanwhile, a view shared by such commentators as Hanson Baldwin, influential military editor of the New York Times, who now favoured bombing the North. Greene not merely despised the defense secretary, but also believed that the Chiefs were being prevented from fulfilling their proper role, as military advisers to the nation’s commander-in-chief. However, both he and LeMay at the time, and some historians afterwards, displayed naïveté in failing to recognise that in all countries at all times, frustration with political leaders is the default posture of professional warriors, who are themselves almost invariably blessed with less wisdom than they suppose.

  On 17 May the lean little WWII veteran and aspirant military intellectual Brig. Gen. William DePuy wrote to his wife Marj from Saigon: ‘I haven’t made up my mind whether we are gaining or losing ground. It is grave indeed. Whether the “will” exists I do not know.’ He added a week later: ‘It is awfully difficult to tell how all this turmoil will come out. Without a miracle it will drag us further down.’ By the end of that month, in Washington matters had moved on thus far, that McNamara discussed with the Chiefs the option of committing US ground troops, and also commissioned a study of bombing targets in North Vietnam, which produced a list of ninety-four. It was acknowledged that one or both of these courses would be adopted unless Hanoi backed off: reconnaissance flights indicated increased usage of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. There was a recognition that some legislative underpinning would become necessary if it was decided either to bomb or to send troops – what acting attorney-general Nicholas Katzenbach called the ‘functional equivalent of a declaration of war’. Late in May, State’s William Bundy produced a resolution empowering the president to commit US forces, but his draft was merely docketed: no need just yet to face the Senate’s awkward squad, headed by Mike Mansfield and Wayne Morse.

  In the presidential election campaign now engrossing the nation, far more rhetoric was addressed to Johnson’s promised Great Society than to Vietnam. ‘Kennedy had demanded sacrifice; Johnson promised happiness,’ wrote Theodore White, chronicler of presidential contests, in 1965. ‘Even the quaking globe seemed to settle down during spring and summer to permit Johnson to conduct his foreign aff
airs from what may be called an at-ease position. Vietnam was the only crisis, slowly worsening from week to week – but the president arranged temporarily to sterilize that politically.’

  The White House nonetheless decided that new blood was needed in Saigon: both the ambassador and MACV’s commander-in-chief were replaced. Lodge had run out of ideas, and was scarcely on speaking terms with Harkins. The names of Robert Kennedy, McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara were mooted as possible successors before the choice fell upon Max Taylor, the soldier most personally trusted by the president. Taylor was sent in July not to do diplomacy, but to run a smarter war. If the general had not been addicted to office, position, power, at sixty-two he would surely have declined to occupy such a bed of nails. It is hard to imagine how he could have supposed that assuming proconsular responsibility at such a time in such a place would enhance his reputation. Nonetheless, accept the embassy Taylor did, confirming the view of sceptics among his World War II comrades, who considered that the general’s vanity and penchant for backstairs politicking notably exceeded his talents and judgement. Taylor’s place as chairman of the JCS was taken by Gen. Earle Wheeler, a bureaucrat and military power-broker with little field experience, whom Gen. Harold Johnson succeeded as army chief. With Taylor in Saigon, it was never likely that Wheeler would have a dominant voice in Vietnam strategy-making, but the new chairman’s weakness of character soon became apparent.

  Gen. William Westmoreland, who on 20 June 1964 took over MACV, said: ‘I inherited this political chaos … It was almost like trying to push spaghetti.’ Harkins was permitted to retire with honour, though his failure had been egregious and his misjudgements apparent. His successor was junior to Taylor, while directly answerable to the navy’s C-in-C Pacific. Before Westmoreland was appointed, questions were asked about whether he was sufficiently big, bright or tough. It is alleged that the Chiefs instead wanted Harold Johnson, Creighton Abrams or Bruce Palmer in command; that Taylor was deceitful when he informed the president and McNamara that ‘Westy’ was the JCS choice.

  Westmoreland has often since been derided as ‘the most impressive regimental commander the US Army ever produced’, and it is hard to make a plausible case that in Vietnam he showed himself one of history’s great captains. One of his staff, a Marine, wrote home: ‘He has a good grasp of the whole picture, a quick ear for the trouble spots but he lets his imagination run away with him. Some of his projects are crazy.’ It seems nonetheless unlikely that Sherman, Patton or even Ridgway would have done better. Soldiers observe wryly that the unique selling point of their profession is that they kill people. It is too much to ask of most that they should resolve political and social challenges beyond their intellect, experience, conditioning and resources.

  Westmoreland said later: ‘Very much ringing in my ears and the ears of all officers at that time was Mr Kennedy’s very emotional and stirring inaugural address: “We’ll bear any burden and meet any hardships, support any friend, oppose any foe, to ensure the survival and success of liberty.” … We felt pretty good about going to Vietnam to fight for such an idealistic principle.’ If such an assertion sounds trite to a cynical twenty-first-century listener, it seems mistaken to question the sincerity of the general’s fervour when he took up his post in 1964. Like almost all military professionals, he was imbued to excess with the spirit of ‘can do’.

  The price of such an attitude, however, was that on Westmoreland’s watch realism was banished, as surely as it had been under Harkins. Old Indochina hand Howard Simpson was reassigned to the US Saigon embassy at this time. In transit he attended a Honolulu strategy summit at which the cast was headed by McNamara, Rusk, Taylor, Westmoreland and CIA director John McCone. Simpson noted with dismay that no one present had real knowledge of Vietnam, and his spirits sank further as he followed the ebb and flow of discussion: ‘I soon learned that the lessons of recent history were not on the agenda. The French had lost. We were going to win … I could have shut my eyes and imagined myself sitting through a briefing at the French high command in 1953.’

  Simpson did not himself dare speak out, but listened in disbelief as plans and projects were explained that he knew no Vietnamese would implement. Worse, indeed: Saigon’s soldiers and officials would adopt their familiar tactic of agreeing to everything, while intending to do nothing. ‘The Vietnamese were being cast as the little men who weren’t there. To all intents and purposes they appeared to have become outsiders in the struggle for their country.’ This was profoundly true, profoundly important. The Americans, so proud of their own anti-colonialist heritage and mindset, were bent upon conducting a war in exactly the style of colonialist governments through the ages. Frank Scotton defined the average American’s attitude to the Vietnamese as ‘callous disregard. Americans of all grades joked about Vietnamese technology being defined by picking up one thing with two sticks or carrying two things with one stick … We were allies who understood very little of each other.’

  In South Vietnam, force quite often sufficed to inflict tactical defeats on the communists. Yet such sensitive Americans as Scotton, Simpson, Vann and Ramsey understood that battlefield successes could contribute astonishingly little. Perhaps the foremost irony of the war, especially for those who perished, was that fighting was the least important part of it, as against the social and cultural contest between Hanoi and Saigon. By delegating the central role in the American mission to Max Taylor, the administration mandated an electrician to address a lethal gas leak, though Taylor himself used a different figure of speech: ‘My task was that of the Dutch boy with the leaking dyke, sticking in his thumb to plug the thing up.’ William DePuy wrote to his family as Westmoreland took over: ‘We can’t win, but we can perhaps keep from losing.’

  That summer, as throughout the war, days of relative tranquillity in Saigon promoted spasms of optimism in Washington that big decisions might be deferred. Westmoreland, with Lodge’s support, told the Honolulu strategy conference that ‘the situation had bottomed out, was levelling off, and would start slowly uphill … There would be no collapse in SVN unless there was some unusual violent occurrence such as a coup or assassination.’ McNamara and the CIA’s McCone urged a bleaker view, but Westmoreland and the outgoing ambassador stuck to their guns.

  The general excelled at the part of his role which demanded managerial skill. One officer described his staff as ‘the crème de la crème’. Dick Stilwell, the chief of staff, and punchy, pint-sized DePuy as operations officer were workaholics like their boss. The administration of a fast-expanding US presence was conducted with notable efficiency, albeit at brutal cost to the social and natural environment. The fighting part, however, went less well. On 28 July DePuy wrote home: ‘There is a great collection of brass in this area. Frankly the poor little Vietnamese are overwhelmed and bewildered, and I am not sure they are not slightly frightened by it all … visibly weary of the war and apparently unwilling to contemplate another ten years of grinding, tedious but bloody pacification. I am sure they would like to have us attack North Vietnam for them.’ He added in August: ‘It’s hard to see how we can win if the leaders of the country don’t think they can win.’

  In Washington, the mood became slowly, secretly but relentlessly more hawkish. McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk and John McCone favoured committing ground troops after the election, though Rusk at the Honolulu meeting stressed ‘the unpreparedness of the US public to absorb increased military action’. McNamara remained wary of sending an army, but now favoured bombing the North. Intelligence produced a new thesis: precisely because Hanoi owned so little industry and infrastructure, it would be especially sensitive about seeing these obliterated. Assistant secretary John McNaughton, a long, lanky, fluent young lawyer, proposed an Orientally subtle bombing strategy based on raising the level of pain one cut of a thousand at a time: ‘We should strike to hurt but not to destroy.’ When the Chiefs met at the White House on 31 July, Wallace Greene restated his conviction that the US must carry the war to North Vietnam
to have any hope of achieving a tolerable outcome in the South. Present policy, said the stiff Marine, was a ‘violation of a fundamental military principle, i.e., letting the enemy dictate the ground on which battle would be joined’. The president said bizarrely that in many ways South Vietnam’s problem was much like America’s: ‘recovering from the assassination’ – of Diem, as of Kennedy. Although he told the brass there would be no political hesitation about doing anything militarily urgent, nobody present believed him: everything, absolutely everything, would be subordinated to achieving victory in the presidential election, now less than a hundred days away.

  9

  Into the Gulf

  1 LIES

  It will always be a matter of dispute whether Lyndon Johnson sought an opportunity to showcase his virility before the American people voted in November 1964, or whether crisis was thrust upon him. In August, two weeks before the Democratic Convention, the struggle in South-East Asia took a new turn. Since January the Americans had been running into North Vietnam covert missions with the umbrella designation OPLAN34-A. These were designed to destabilise Hanoi through agent-dropping and commando raids. Whatever alternative judgements are possible on the wider war, OPLAN34-A sacrificed the lives or liberties of some hundreds of Vietnamese, to no purpose whatever. Since 1961, communist intelligence had been playing ‘radio games’ with American paramilitary operations chiefs, using ‘turned’ operators from captured agent groups. This, combined with double-agent penetration in the South, ensured that each capture paved the way for the next. In 1963 eighty groups entered the North by parachute or small boat. The CIA’s Gilbert Layton said: ‘In my shop … you assumed [the South Vietnamese] were penetrated … When I started recruiting these people, somebody said, “Aren’t you afraid there might be some Vietcong in there that you’re hiring?” I said, “We figure on about 10 per cent, but then we outnumber them nine to one.”’