2. THE VIETNAM QUANDARY
Nothing was tougher at the moment than the situation in South Vietnam, where the abrupt collapse of the hopes of 1962 had provided the unpleasant surprise of 1963.
Our policy in 1962 had been dominated by those who saw Vietnam as primarily a military problem and who believed that its solution required unconditional support of Diem. The reports rendered by Ambassador Frederick Nolting and General Paul Harkins to Washington conveyed the picture of a regime led by an unquestionably difficult but statesmanlike and, in any case, irreplaceable figure making steady progress in winning over the peasants, pacifying the countryside and restoring the stability of government. The local opposition, in this view, consisted of intellectuals, neutralists and agents of the Viet Cong, concerned more with their own petty grievances and ambitions than with winning the war. The only way to improve things, they believed in all sincerity, was to reassure Diem about the constancy of American support.
Through most of 1962 this policy appeared to be producing results. The Saigon government, so near collapse at the end of 1961, had recovered much of its authority. The strategic hamlet program, in the considered judgment of the Departments of State and Defense, was bringing the countryside into firm alliance with the regime. The Viet Cong were presumably making little progress. Indeed, in the spring of 1963 Alexis Johnson claimed that 30,000 casualties had been inflicted on the guerrillas in 1962—a figure twice as large as the estimated size of the Viet Cong forces at the beginning of the year. In the same month Secretary McNamara authorized the Defense Department to announce “we have turned the corner in Vietnam,” and General Harkins predicted that the war would be won “within a year.” The communists themselves acknowledged 1962 as “Diem’s year.” The American advisers and the helicopter war had increased the cost of guerrilla action, and the Viet Cong almost reached the point of giving up in the Mekong delta and withdrawing to the mountains.* Kennedy, beset by the missile crisis, congressional elections, Skybolt, de Gaulle, Latin America, the test ban negotiations and the civil rights fight, had little time to focus on Southeast Asia. His confidence in McNamara, so wholly justified in so many areas, led the President to go along with the optimists on Vietnam.
Not everyone shared this optimism, and dissent arose first among the American newspapermen in Vietnam.* The reporters were bright, inquisitive, passionate young men in their late twenties or early thirties with careers to make—Malcolm Browne of the Associated Press, Cornelius Sheehan of the United Press International, David Halberstam of the New York Times, Charles Mohr of Time, François Sully of Newsweek. They saw Diem not as a selfless national leader but as an oriental despot, hypnotized by his own monologues and contemptuous of democracy and the west. They detested the Nhus. They considered the strategic hamlet program a fake and a failure; and their visit to dismal stockades where peasants had been herded, sometimes at bayonet point, to engage in forced labor confirmed their worst misgivings. They did not believe Diem’s communiqués; and, when Harkins and Nolting insisted they were true, they stopped believing Harkins and Nolting. They had too often heard American advisers in the field sing a bitter little song to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”:
We are winning, this we know.
General Harkins tells us so.
In the delta, things are rough.
In the mountains, mighty tough.
But we’re winning, this we know.
General Harkins tells us so.
If you doubt this is true,
McNamara says so too.
In time the disagreement between the officials and the newspapermen hardened into deep antagonism. Nolting, a conscientious Foreign Service officer, honestly saw no alternative to working with Diem. Diem, who supposed that the American press was as controlled as his own, believed, or pretended to believe, that the newspaper stories were expressing the secret views of the United States government and used his fury over lost face as one more excuse for resisting American advice. The reporters, as Nolting and Harkins saw it, were therefore damaging the war effort; instead of making carping criticisms, they ought, as patriotic Americans, to help the Embassy build up Diem and strengthen his national control and international reputation. In their reports to Washington the officials even gave the astonishing impression that there would be no trouble in Vietnam if only the newspaper fellows would follow the line.
As for the newspapermen, they resented the view that their duty was to write stories in support of official policy. They could never get over Admiral Felt’s reproach to Malcolm Browne: “Why don’t you get on the team?” They angrily refused to become, as they thought, myth-makers and invoked with solemn indignation the traditions of a free press. “The U. S. Embassy,” David Halberstam wrote in a characteristic outburst, “turned into the adjunct of a dictatorship. In trying to protect Diem from criticism, the Ambassador became Diem’s agent. But we reporters didn’t have to become the adjuncts of a tyranny. We are representatives of a free society, and we weren’t going to surrender our principles to the narrow notions of a closed society.” One encounter after another made the newspapermen more certain that the Embassy was deliberately lying to them. They did not recognize the deeper pathos, which was that the officials really believed their own reports. They were deceiving not only the American government and people but themselves.
Not everyone in Washington, however, was deceived. Averell Harriman as Assistant Secretary for the Far East had long felt, as by the pricking in his thumbs, that we were on the wrong course. Roger Hilsman, as head of the State Department Office of Intelligence and Research, also doubted whether things were really as splendid as they appeared in Embassy dispatches. In the White House Michael Forrestal shared this skepticism. And, as 1962 gave way to 1963, it seemed increasingly evident that, despite the communiqués and the statistics and the dispatches, the Viet Cong were as omnipresent and the Saigon government as ineffectual as ever. The point was made with some vividness on January 2, 1963, at Ap Bac, fifty miles from Saigon, when a considerable force of Diem’s regulars encircled a Viet Cong battalion one-tenth its size, declined to close with them and finally permitted the Viet Cong to escape in the night after they had knocked down five American helicopters and killed three American advisers. A senior American adviser present later surmised that the Vietnamese commander was “reluctant to attack for fear he would take casualties, incur the displeasure of political leaders in Saigon and ruin his military career.” Though General Harkins tried to claim Ap Bac as a Vietnamese victory, the newspapermen at the scene reported otherwise, and their reports were not implausible.
Those in Saigon and Washington who saw Vietnam as primarily a military problem thought that the answer to Ap Bac was an intensified military effort—more advisers, more helicopters, more mortars, more defoliation spray, more napalm bombs, more three-star generals in Saigon, more visitations by VIPs. After all, the American presence was still negligible—11,000 troops in all and, in the last two years, a total of thirty-two killed in battle and eighty wounded. But the Harriman group now questioned the exclusively military strategy more insistently than ever. “Fighting a guerrilla war in an underdeveloped nation,” Hilsman, the veteran of jungle warfare in Burma, had argued the previous September, “requires as much political and civic action as it does military action.” There was danger, they thought, in what Hilsman called the “overmilitarization” and “over-Americanization” of the war. The Army, after all, had never cared much for counter-insurgency; at one point, of twenty-seven American generals in Saigon, not one had attended the school at Fort Bragg. The more elaborate the American military establishment, the doubters feared, the more it would be overwhelmed by brass, channels and paperwork, the more it would rely on conventional tactics and the more it would compromise the Vietnamese nationalism of Diem’s cause. Worse, the growth of the military commitment would confirm the policy of trying to win a political war by military means.
What was lacking, the Harriman group felt, was any co
nsuming motive to lead the South Vietnamese to fight for Saigon. Why, for example, should peasants die for a government which, when it recovered territory from the Viet Cong, helped the local landowners collect their back rent? General Edward Lansdale, whose experience in guerrilla warfare made him suspect in orthodox military circles, did his best to argue the point in Washington. “The great lesson [of Malaya and the Philippines],” he wrote, “was that there must be a heartfelt cause to which the legitimate government is pledged, a cause which makes a stronger appeal to the people than the Communist cause. . . . When the right cause is identified and used correctly, the anti-Communist fight becomes a pro-people fight.”
3. THE BUDDHISTS
This was a minority view. The Secretary of State was well satisfied with military predominance in the formation of United States policy toward Vietnam. As late as April 22, 1963, in a speech in New York, Rusk discerned a “steady movement [in South Vietnam] toward a constitutional system resting upon popular consent,” declared that “the ‘strategic hamlet’ program is producing excellent results,” added that “morale in the countryside has begun to rise,” assured his listeners that “to the Vietnamese peasant” the Viet Cong “look less and less like winners” and concluded, “The Vietnamese are on their way to success” (meaning presumably the South Vietnamese). So too Alexis Johnson, speaking for right-thinking officials, cited the strategic hamlet program as “the most important reason for guarded optimism.” “Perhaps the most important result,” Johnson declared, “is the intangible knitting together of Government and people.”
Intangible the knitting together certainly was. Exactly a month after this piece of official wisdom and a fortnight after Rusk’s assurances a group of Buddhists gathered in Hue to protest a Diem order forbidding them to display their flags on Buddha’s 2587th birthday. Diem’s troops fired indiscriminately into the crowd, leaving a moaning mass of dead and wounded. Indignation spread through the towns of South Vietnam; and, when Diem proved unyielding and unrepentant, the anger took appalling forms, culminating in the spectacle of Buddhist bonzes dousing themselves in gasoline and burning themselves to death.
Though the Buddhists had suffered legal discrimination in South Vietnam, they had not been actively persecuted. The upheaval, while religious in pretext, was social in its origins and quickly became political in its objectives. It went beyond bonzes and students to militant young army officers exasperated by the caprice and confusion of Diem’s direction of the war. As the protests spread, the Buddhist revolt threatened to become the vehicle by which all those opposed to the regime, including, no doubt, fellow travelers of the Viet Cong, might hope to bring it down. It was at bottom an uprising, wholly unanticipated by American diplomats, against the hierarchical structure of traditional Vietnamese society—against the older generation of Vietnamese nationalists who, like Diem and Nhu, were upper-class, Catholic, French-speaking, in favor of a new nationalist generation, drawn largely from the middle and lower classes, anti-western, radical, impassioned: it was, in effect, the angry young men massing to throw out the mandarins.
The Buddhists, with their fiery adventures in self-immolation, engaged the sympathy of the American newspapermen and through them of many people in the United States. Diem helped this process by refusing gestures of contrition or conciliation lest, as usual, he lose face. Washington now instructed the Embassy to bring pressure on him to compose the Buddhist quarrel, warning that, if the situation grew worse, the United States might have to disavow his Buddhist policy publicly. In Saigon, Nolting, to Kennedy’s irritation, had departed on a long-planned holiday cruise in the Aegean. His absence, however, permitted his able Deputy Chief of Mission, William Trueheart, to state the American position more bluntly than Diem had ever heard it before.
In response, Diem began to make a few nominal concessions, if with visible resentment. The Nhus, who wanted him to crush the uprising altogether, were even more resentful. In the steaming Saigon summer the incipient hysteria in the presidential palace boiled over. Diem and the Nhus saw plots everywhere: the Buddhists were Viet Cong agents; the American reporters were communists or agents of the CIA; the CIA was even collaborating with the Viet Cong. Madame Nhu said gaily that she clapped her hands whenever more bonzes “barbecued” themselves and only wished that David Halberstam would follow their example. Nhu told Morris West, the Australian novelist, that the Americans should get out and that he was in touch with some fine nationalist communists in Hanoi. About this time John Mecklin, the USIA chief, had a nightmare about an American diplomatic mission which gradually discovered it was dealing with a government of madmen, whose words meant nothing, where nothing that was supposed to have happened had actually happened; yet there seemed no escape from dealing with the madmen forever.
The paranoia in Saigon strengthened the Harriman position in Washington. Kennedy himself, who had been doubting the official optimism for some time, used to say dourly that the political thing there was more important than the military, and no one seemed to be thinking of that. When Mecklin visited Washington in the spring, the President asked him why there was so much trouble with the reporters and, after hearing the explanation, personally instructed the Saigon Embassy to change its attitude and start taking American newspapermen into its confidence. Now he began to conclude that the new situation required a new ambassador. Six months before, Nolting had asked, for personal reasons, to be relieved; and, after the Buddhist outburst, the President decided (with some reluctance: like F.D.R. he hated to fire people; moreover, he like Nolting) that the time had come.
I have the impression that he wanted to send next to Saigon Edmund Gullion, from whom he had first learned about Indochina a dozen years before and who had performed with such distinction in the Congo; Gullion was certainly the candidate of at least some at the White House. But Dean Rusk, in a rare moment of selfassertion, determined to make this appointment himself. He did not want Gullion, and his candidate, to the astonishment or dismay of the White House staff, turned out to be Henry Cabot Lodge.
This was not a wholly irrelevant idea. Lodge, who had been a liaison officer with the French Army during the Second World War, spoke fluent French. In his capacity as reserve officer, he had written a paper on Vietnam in the spring of 1962 and had wanted to take his tour of duty in Vietnam. He was a public-spirited man who felt unhappy out of government and who made clear to Rusk and others his interest in serving in a hardship post. Yet as Ambassador to the United Nations in the Eisenhower years he had displayed no great understanding of the third world and no great talent in dealing with the representatives of new nations. The White House staff feared that once in Saigon he would instinctively side with General Harkins and Diem. But the President was attracted by the idea, not only because he considered Lodge an able man but, because the thought of appointing the man whom he had beaten for the Senate in 1952 and who had run on the opposing ticket for Vice-President in 1960 appealed to his instinct for magnanimity, and also no doubt because the thought of implicating a leading Republican in the Vietnam mess appealed to his instinct for politics. So the appointment was made late in June.
Since Lodge could not leave until late August, it was decided to send back Nolting, who had finally arrived in Washington from his holiday, for one last try of the pro-Diem policy. Nolting, angered by Trueheart’s forthright representations to Diem in his absence, felt when he got back to Saigon on July 11, that his labor of two years lay in ruins. Nor had the recent troubles altered in the slightest his estimate of the situation. He considered the Buddhists unappeasable, believing their goal to be the overthrow of the regime. He felt American pressure on their behalf, especially any public disavowal of Diem’s anti-Buddhist actions, would only incite Diem to more stringent repression or his opponents to a coup. Any effort to divorce Diem from the Nhus would be useless: “trying to separate the members of that family would be like separating Siamese twins.” The best course remained unconditional support of Diem. In order to repair relations with Die
m, he now even went to the point of defending the regime’s record on religious matters.
In Washington, meanwhile, Kennedy sought to put Saigon’s problems in perspective by reminding a press conference that Vietnam after all had been at war for twenty years. “Before we render too harsh a judgment on the people, we should realize that they are going through a harder time than we have had to go through.” Our goal, he continued, was “a stable government there, carrying on a struggle to maintain its national independence. We believe strongly in that. . . . In my opinion, for us to withdraw from that effort would mean a collapse not only of South Vietnam but Southeast Asia. So we are going to stay there.” He then expressed the hope that the regime and the Buddhists could “reach an agreement on the civil disturbances and also in respect for the rights of others.” (In Saigon this last sentence was killed by the censorship.)
A Thousand Days Page 117
