The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  So it was not surprising that the Administration’s attitude toward Southeast Asia in general and Vietnam in particular remained being activist, aggressive, hard-line anti-Communism. If the Eisenhower Administration followed an anti-Communism dependent on the nuclear threat and bombastic words, the Kennedy Administration—liberal, modern, lacking above all in self-doubt, with a high proportion of academics—would be pragmatic and assertive in its anti-Communism. At almost the same moment that the Kennedy Administration was coming into office, Khrushchev had given a major speech giving legitimacy to wars of national liberation. The Kennedy Administration immediately interpreted this as a challenge (years later very high Soviet officials would tell their counterparts in the Kennedy Administration that it was all a mistake, the speech had been aimed not at the Americans, but at the Chinese), and suddenly the stopping of guerrilla warfare became a great fad. High officials were inveighed to study Mao and Lin Piao. The President’s personal interest in fighting guerrillas was well publicized, and the reading and writing of books on antiguerrilla warfare was encouraged (“I urge all officers and men of the Marine Corps to read and digest this fine work . . .” he wrote in the introduction to a particularly mediocre collection of articles on the subject).

  The fascination with guerrilla warfare reflected the men and the era: aggressive, self-confident men ready to play their role, believing in themselves, in their careers, in their right to make decisions here and overseas, supremely confident in what they represented in terms of excellence. The nation was still locked in an endless struggle with the Communists: Europe was stabilized, and there would be no border-crossing wars after Korea, so the new theater of activity would have to be guerrilla warfare. Everyone joined in. Robert Kennedy, afraid that America was growing soft, afraid that we did not have ideas that caught the imagination of the young of the world, was one of the leaders, but others were equally part of the faddism. General Maxwell Taylor, the President’s military adviser, was a regular member of the counterinsurgency meetings and was regarded with some awe whenever he spoke, having once parachuted into France. Roger Hilsman’s fighting behind the lines in Burma received no small amount of attention, and it was known that Kennedy had questioned him at length about his days as a guerrilla (both of them oblivious to the fact that Hilsman had been a commando, not a guerrilla. He had not been part of any indigenous political organization).

  A remarkable hubris permeated this entire time. Nine years earlier Denis Brogan had written: “Probably the only people who have the historical sense of inevitable victory are the Americans.” Never had that statement seemed more true; the Kennedy group regarded the Eisenhower people as having shrunk from the challenge set before them. Walt Rostow, Bundy’s deputy, thought the old Administration had overlooked the possibilities in the underdeveloped world, the rich potential for conflict and thus a rich potential for victory. It was not surprising, for the Eisenhower people were men of the past who had never been too strong on ideas; one could not imagine Sherman Adams inspiring the youth of Indonesia or even being concerned about it. But this new Administration understood ideas and understood the historic link-up between our traditions and those in the underdeveloped world; we too were heirs to a great revolution, we too had fought a colonial power. Were we much richer than they, and more technological? No problem, no gap in outlook, we would use our technology for them. Common cause with transistors (inherent in all this was the assumption that the more we gave them of our technology, the less they would notice the gap between their life style and ours). Rostow in particular was fascinated by the possibility of television sets in the thatch hutches of the world, believing that somehow this could be the breakthrough. This did not mean that we did not understand the hard poisonous core of the enemy, that we were too weak and democratic to combat it. “The scavengers of revolution” Rostow called those guerrilla leaders, like Ho and Che, whom he did not approve of.

  All of this helped send the Kennedy Administration into dizzying heights of antiguerrilla activity and discussion; instead of looking behind them, the Kennedy people were looking ahead, ready for a new and more subtle kind of conflict. The other side, Rostow’s scavengers of revolution, would soon be met by the new American breed, a romantic group indeed, the U.S. Army Special Forces. They were all uncommon men, extraordinary physical specimens and intellectual Ph.D.s swinging from trees, speaking Russian and Chinese, eating snake meat and other fauna at night, springing counterambushes on unwary Asian ambushers who had read Mao and Giap, but not Hilsman and Rostow. It was all going to be very exciting, and even better, great gains would be made at little cost.

  In October 1961 the entire White House press corps was transported to Fort Bragg to watch a special demonstration put on by Kennedy’s favored Special Forces (after his death the special warfare school would become the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School), and it turned into a real whiz-bang day. There were ambushes, counterambushes and demonstrations in snake-meat eating, all topped off by a Buck Rogers show: a soldier with a rocket on his back who flew over water to land on the other side. It was quite a show, and it was only as they were leaving Fort Bragg that Francis Lara, the Agence France-Presse correspondent who had covered the Indochina war, sidled over to his friend Tom Wicker of the New York Times. “All of this looks very impressive, doesn’t it?” he said. Wicker allowed as how it did. “Funny,” Lara said, “none of it worked for us when we tried it in 1951.”

  The first warning on Vietnam had been sounded in January 1961, by one of the most unusual members of the United States government. It was as if Brigadier General Edward Lansdale had been invented with the Kennedy Administration in mind. He was a former advertising man, a former Air Force officer, a CIA agent now, a man deeply interested in doing things in Asia the right way, the modern way. He had risen to fame within the government as an antibureaucratic figure of no small dimension, and State, Defense and the CIA were well stocked with his enemies. In the early fifties he had helped Ramón Magsaysay defeat the Huk rebellion in the Philippines, and had become the prototype of the Good American overseas as opposed to the Bad American; he was against big bumbling U.S. government programs run by insensitive, boastful, bureaucratic, materialistic racists, and for small indigenous programs run by folksy, modest American country boys who knew the local mores, culture and language. He was the Good American because in part his own experience had convinced him that Americans were, in fact, good, and that the American experience and American ideals were valid elsewhere. He would write of the early Philippine experience:

  One day, while driving on a back road in Pampanga province, I came upon a political meeting in a town plaza. A Huk political officer was haranguing the crowd, enumerating their troubles with crops, debts, and share in life, blaming all ills on “American imperialism.” Impetuously, I got out of the jeep from where I had parked it at the edge of the crowd, climbed up on its hood, and when the speaker had paused for breath I shouted, “What’s the matter? Didn’t you ever have an American friend?” The startled crowd turned around and saw an American in uniform standing up on his jeep. I had a flash of sobering second thoughts. I kicked myself mentally for giving in to such an impulse among hundreds of people living in hostile territory. But the people immediately put me at ease, they grinned and called hello. The speaker and many of the townspeople clustered around me, naming Americans they had known and liked and asking if I was acquainted with them. I teased them with the reminder that these folks they had known were the “American imperialists” they had been denouncing. They assured me that not a single one of them was. It was a long time before I could get away from the gossipy friendliness.

  The Philippine experiment had worked and a national best seller had been written about him called The Ugly American; Colonel Lansdale was thinly disguised as Colonel Hillandale. (If his role in The Ugly American was to show how to be a Good American, some people thought he starred involuntarily in another and far more chilling book of the era, Graham Greene’s The Quiet
American, in which this new Good American, a nice idealistic young man anxious to do good in an older society to save that society from Communism in spite of itself, is a well-intentioned but singularly dangerous man.) Lansdale was the classic Good Guy, modern, just what Kennedy was looking for. He had, what better mark of merit, been languishing out of the action during the latter years of the Eisenhower Administration. He was the median man who understood the new kind of war, and had helped defeat the Communists in a similar (if far different and simpler and far more embryonic) insurgency in the Philippines. He embodied what America had turned into more than anyone realized: the corrosion of the traditional anticolonial instinct had become hard-line anti-Communism. He was the Cold War version of the Good Guy, the American who did understand the local ambience and the local nationalism. For he was a CIA agent, and not just an intelligence officer, he was an operational functional man, a man of programs and a man who was there to manipulate. The real question for men like Lansdale, who allegedly knew and loved Asians, was no longer the pure question of what was good for the local people, but what was good for the United States of America and perhaps acceptable locally. The Asians could have nationalism, but nationalism on our terms: nationalism without revolution, or revolution which we would run for them—revolution, it turned out, without revolution.

  His view of the recent history of Vietnam was comforting, and managed to minimize the role of the Vietminh and the effect of a prolonged war of independence. The Vietminh had less popular support than they imagined; the population had stayed away from both sides, and the French at the end were pictured as fighting for Vietnamese independence:

  Vietnamese told me of their history. In brief, these high-spirited people had been under Chinese rule for a thousand years and under French rule for a hundred years, with nearly every one of those years marked by struggles for independence. At the end of World War II, the Vietnamese had declared their independence from the feeble hold of Vichy French administrators. The Communists under Ho Chi Minh were participants and set about eliminating their political rivals in a bloodbath which the survivors never forgot nor forgave, even though the world at large remained ignorant of it. The Communists held the power when the French Army returned in 1946. Fighting broke out between the Vietnamese and the French, and Ho took his forces to the hills to enter into “protracted conflict” with the French, who captured and held the cities and towns.

  The majority of the Vietnamese, still hungering for independence, had no side to join. They were opposed to both the Communist Vietminh and the French. As the war raged around their families and homes, they gave lip service to whichever side was locally dominant, in order to stay alive. When French Union forces ravaged the countryside trying to destroy the Vietminh guerrillas, the resentful people joined the Vietminh to get revenge. Later, when the French increased measures of Vietnamese self-rule and promised an independent Vietnam, nationalists started joining the fight against the Vietminh in ever-mounting numbers. By the time I visited Vietnam in 1953, millions of Vietnamese had taken a definite stand against the Vietminh.

  In 1954, in the last dying days of the French presence in Indochina, the Lansdale group had run around Hanoi putting sugar in the gas tanks of Vietminh trucks, a gesture of no small amount of mindlessness. The war was over, an Asian nationalist army had just defeated a powerful Western nation for its independence, and here was the top American expert on guerrilla war employing the pettiest kind of sabotage—mosquito bites, they were, at a historic moment. In Saigon, Lansdale helped sponsor Ngo Dinh Diem in his search for a Vietnamese Magsaysay, and played a key role in convincing a very dubious U.S. government that Diem was worth the risk. He taught Diem some lessons in modern leadership, lessons to which Diem always carefully and faithfully paid lip service. He taught Diem how to campaign against Bao Dai, and Diem, ever the worthy student, insisted upon receiving 98 percent of the vote. Lansdale also sponsored other little gestures which seemed somehow to belong more to the past than the present: hiring soothsayers—symbols of the suspicious feudal Vietnamese past—to predict bad years ahead for Ho Chi Minh, and good years for Ngo Dinh Diem.

  Lansdale would become in effect an antirevolutionary figure in Vietnam. There was to be much talk of revolution and of land reform, but the American presence effectively stopped any kind of social change. None of this affected Lansdale’s reputation in his own somewhat uncritical country; the legend of him as a semi-underground figure continued to grow, the unconventional man for the unconventional war. He himself stayed in the background, and the legend seemed to thrive on his lack of visibility. In person he sometimes appeared to be a curiously disappointing, almost simplistic man, especially in contrast to the flashing verbalism of others of the Kennedy era. He was a man who talked vague platitudes just one step away from the chamber of commerce. You had to get with the folks, he would say, it was better to let the baby learn to walk on its own rather than try and teach him too much. Part of it was his natural style, part of it was his belief that it did not help to seem too bright. His intimates could watch him speak in private with considerable insight, and then, with the arrival of an outsider, switch to his low-key, folksy approach. Friends thought part of his success (such as it was) in the Philippines and in Vietnam came about because he had always been careful not to try and overpower the Asians he was dealing with; he was the rarest of Americans overseas, a listener.

  At the tail end of the Eisenhower years he returned to Vietnam. Having angered powerful figures at Defense, he had experienced trouble in finding a sponsor, but he had finally found a friend in the government who let him make the trip. He found to his dismay, as reporters there were also discovering in 1960, that the new version of the Vietminh, named the Vietcong, were near victory by fighting guerrilla style in the countryside while the American military mission continued to train the Vietnamese army for a Korean-style invasion. President Diem was almost totally isolated from his former friends and allies, and increasingly dependent on his egomaniacal brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu; Diem and the American ambassador, Elbridge Durbrow, virtually did not speak to each other.

  Lansdale wrote a lengthy and very pessimistic report critical of both the Americans and of Diem, but particularly of the former. This was important, because Lansdale was one of the men who had invented Diem, and you do not knock your own invention, but more significant, it was indicative of the Lansdale approach and that of other Good Americans, those sympathetic to Asians. They did not feel that it was deeply rooted historic forces pitted against us which were causing the problems, but rather a failure to supply the right people and the right techniques. Implicit in the Lansdale position was the belief that if the right Americans influenced Diem in the right way, Diem would respond. It was a form of limited can-doism. He recommended a new antibureaucratic team in the Lansdale mold: “Our U.S. Team in Vietnam should have a hard core of experienced Americans who know and really like Asians, dedicated people who are willing to risk their lives for the ideals of freedom, and who will try to influence and guide the Vietnamese towards U.S. policy objectives with the warm friendship and affection which our close alliance deserves. We should break the rules of personnel assignment, if necessary, to get such U.S. military and civilians to Vietnam.” What Lansdale was recommending was, of course, Lansdale.

  The Lansdale report was picked up by a friend, who read it in the final days of the Eisenhower Administration and passed it on to the new Administration. Within days it landed with Rostow, who had been looking for something precisely like this. (Lansdale’s effect on Rostow is interesting: in 1954 Lansdale had gone around pouring sugar in the Vietminh gas tanks; in 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, when the clock was ticking off the minutes and seconds of a massive immediate confrontation, Rostow was going around Washington talking about sabotage against the Cubans, putting sugar in their oil refineries, which would halt their production and transportation . . .) Rostow urged Kennedy to read it, but the President seemed reluctant, he always had too
little time. Was it really that important? he asked. Rostow insisted. Kennedy flipped through the pages. “Walt, this is going to be the worst one yet,” Rostow recalled him saying, and then adding, “Get to work on this.” Which Rostow quickly did.

  As for Lansdale, he had made a favorable impression on the President; this was the kind of man Kennedy needed. Shortly afterward Lansdale found himself awakened by a presidential call on a Sunday morning and hastily summoned to a special breakfast meeting at the White House. As he walked in, Kennedy greeted him graciously and said somewhat casually, pointing to Rusk, “Has the Secretary here mentioned that I wanted you to be ambassador to Vietnam?” Lansdale, caught by surprise, mumbled that it was a great honor and a marvelous opportunity. He was deeply touched, and even more surprised, for it was the first he heard of the idea, and also, as it happened, the last. The appointment never came through; Lansdale later thought he had been blocked by Rusk, though he also realized that Defense was less than anxious to have him in Vietnam. He would not return for five more years, and by then antiguerrilla warfare was a thing of the past. Lansdale seemed a particularly futile and failed figure; the author of how to fight guerrilla wars the right way being part of a huge American mission which used massive bombing and artillery fire against Vietnamese villages.