The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  No one, it seemed, was eager to take real responsibility. The President had again used the Congress as a sounding board and had quickly sensed deep reservations. But as Dienbienphu still held, the pressure did not go away.

  Again, however, a key individual would help prevent the United States from stumbling into this war which no one wanted, but which the rhetoric seemed to necessitate. This time it was the Army Chief of Staff, General Matthew B. Ridgway. He was an imposing figure, Big Matt Ridgway, hard and flinty. Organizer of the first American airborne division, the 82nd, he led the first American airborne into Sicily, and then jumped again in Normandy, and was the first commander of the 8th Airborne Corps in 1945. When the end of the war was near, he had been chosen to lead all airborne troops in the scheduled invasion of Japan. He had thus ended the war as a general with an enormous reputation, yet his career still very much in bloom, the top commander of elite units. He had been brought to the Pentagon right before the Korean War and was considered a possible Chief of Staff, and when the Korean War broke out, he had been told to keep an eye on General Walton Walker’s Eighth Army and be ready to go if anything happened to Walker. When Walker was killed in an accident, he took over the Eighth Army. He made a point of being a dramatic figure, aware that the men were always watching. Even as commander of the Eighth Army in Korea, he wore his paratrooper’s jump harness, a reminder to a trooper that he had been airborne, and on that harness his ever-present two grenades. Almost the first thing he did when he took over the Korean command was symbolic: he stopped all troops from riding in closed jeeps because he felt it gave them a false sense of warmth and security and thus made them more vulnerable to the enemy and the cold. When Truman finally fired MacArthur, Ridgway replaced him, and had systematically pulled the U.S. forces back together, and made his reputation even more enviable, both to soldier and civilian. He was by 1954 the most prestigious American still in uniform, an old-fashioned, hard-nosed general of great simplicity and directness.

  When Ridgway left for Korea in December 1950, he had been Deputy Chief of Staff for over a year. During that period the State Department had on several occasions asked for increased military aid for the French, and each time Ridgway had bitterly opposed it. To him, it was like throwing money down a rathole, and a bad rathole at that. He did not have much sympathy for the French cause; after all, they had never sent their own draftees to Indochina—just mercenaries, as he called them. Part of his reasoning was very old-fashioned: he thought we were supposed to be an anticolonial power and this was a colonial war, absolutely contrary to the traditions we said we espoused. If Radford believed that politically we had to stop Red China from sweeping over the entire peninsula, then Ridgway was a man of different political convictions; he thought the region was important but not vital, and he believed in diversity; he did not think that the Communists could long hold control over such diverse peoples. They might try, he thought, but it would not work well. It could not be done. He was, in effect, a military extension of Kennan.

  Now, in April 1954, with the pressure mounting, and knowing that bombing would lead to ground troops, Ridgway was very uneasy. He knew Radford wanted in, and he suspected Dulles wanted to test the New Look. Ridgway had always thought the New Look both foolish and dangerous. Wars were settled on the ground, and on the ground the losses were always borne by his people, U.S. Army foot soldiers and Marines. It was his job to protect his own men. So he sent an Army survey team to Indochina to determine the requirements for fighting a ground war there. What he wanted was the basic needs and logistics of it. He sent signalmen, medical men, engineers, logistics experts. What were the port facilities, the rail facilities, the road facilities? What was the climate like, which were the endemic diseases? How many men were needed?

  The answers were chilling: minimal, five divisions and up to ten divisions if we wanted to clear out the enemy (as opposed to six divisions in Korea), plus fifty-five engineering battalions, between 500,000 and 1,000,000 men, plus enormous construction costs. The country had nothing in the way of port facilities, railroads and highways, telephone lines. We would have to start virtually from scratch, at a tremendous cost. The United States would have to demand greater mobilization than in Korea, draft calls of 100,000 a month. Nor would the war be as easy as Korea, where the South Koreans had been an asset to the troops in the rear guard. It was more than likely that in this political war the population would help the Vietminh (Ridgway was thus willing to make this crucial distinction that everyone glossed over in 1965). Instead of being like the Korean War it would really be more like a larger and more costly version of the Philippine insurrection, a prolonged guerrilla war, native against Caucasian, which lasted from 1899 to 1913 and which had been politically very messy. Nor did the Army permit the White House the luxury of thinking that we could get by only with air power. Radford’s plans for an air strike were contingent on seizure of China’s Hainan Island, which seemed to guard the Tonkin Gulf, because the Navy did not want to enter the gulf with its carriers and then have Chinese airbases right behind them. But if we captured Hainan, the Chinese would come across with everything they had; then it was not likely to remain a small war very long.

  Thus the Ridgway report, which no one had ordered the Chief of Staff to initiate, but Ridgway felt he owed it both to the men he commanded and to the country he served. His conclusion was not that the United States should not intervene, but he outlined very specifically the heavy price required. On April 26 the Geneva Conference opened. On May 7 Dienbienphu fell. On May 11 Ridgway briefed the Secretary of the Army and the Secretary of Defense on his survey team’s report. Shortly afterward he briefed the President. Eisenhower did not say much at the time, Ridgway recalled, just listened and asked a few questions. But the impact was formidable. Eisenhower was a professional soldier and an expert in logistics; the implications were obvious. “The idea of intervening,” Ridgway would write, “was abandoned.” Later Eisenhower himself wrote of his doubts of a Radford air strike; it would be an act of war which might easily fail and then leave the United States in a position of having intervened and failed.

  Even after Dienbienphu fell there would be other efforts by Dulles to arrange for American intervention. But the high point of it had passed, the emotional pitch had been reached when there were white men trapped in that garrison, about to be overrun by yellow men. The pressure thereafter would be more abstract. Dulles still talked of going in, and there were even letters from Eisenhower to the British suggesting that common cause be made. The British, more realistic about their resources, wanted no part of it. These subsequent attempts to go in were sincere, and to what degree they represented an attempt to share responsibility for not going is difficult to determine. But Eisenhower was in no mood for unilateral action, and in 1954 his manner of decision making contrasted sharply with that of Lyndon Johnson some eleven years later. Whereas Eisenhower genuinely consulted the Congress, Johnson paid lip service to real consultation and manipulated the Congress. Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff had made a tough-minded, detailed estimate of what the cost of the war would be; eleven years later an all-out effort was made by almost everyone concerned to avoid determining and forecasting what the reality of intervention meant. In 1954 the advice of allies was genuinely sought; in 1965 the United States felt itself so powerful that it did not need allies, except as a means of showing more flags and gaining moral legitimacy for the U.S. cause. Eisenhower took the projected costs of a land war to his budget people with startling results; Johnson and McNamara would carefully shield accurate troop projections not only from the press and the Congress but from their own budgetary experts. The illusion of air-power advocates and their political allies that bombing could be separated from combat troops, which was allowed to exist in 1965, was demolished in 1954 by both Ridgway and Eisenhower.

  Thanks to Eisenhower and Ridgway, a war that no one wanted was allowed to slip by; responsibility was very pleasantly divided among the Administration, the military, the Congre
ss and the allies. Eisenhower himself deserved the credit, but Ridgway made it easier by giving the President a base of expertise and old-fashioned integrity, a general less than eager for a bad war. Later Ridgway would write that of all the things he had done in his career—the battles fought, units commanded, medals won, honors accorded—there was nothing he was prouder of than helping to keep us from intervening in Indochina. The country was very lucky in having him there; it would not always be so lucky. Eleven years later he watched with mounting horror how we were doing all the things he had managed to prevent. In 1965 he would serve as a source for doubters like columnist Walter Lippmann and Senator Fulbright, but repeated efforts to make him go public with his reservations failed. He did not feel he could go against the men like Westmoreland he had once led.

  If Ridgway was not consulted by President Johnson in 1965, perhaps it was because his views were already known. But in February 1968, when the great controversy raged over whether to limit intervention, he was called in by the President to discuss the war. And there was one moment which reflected the simplicity and toughness of mind which he and others had exhibited in 1954, and the fuzziness of the 1965 decision making. Ridgway was sitting talking with Johnson and Vice-President Humphrey when the phone rang. When Johnson picked it up, Ridgway turned to Humphrey and said there was one thing about the war which puzzled him.

  “What’s that?” Humphrey asked.

  “I have never known what the mission for General Westmoreland was,” Ridgway said.

  “That’s a good question,” said Humphrey. “Ask the President.”

  But when Johnson returned, he immediately got into one of his long monologues about his problems, pressures from every side, and the question was never asked.

  But not going into French Indochina in 1954 was not the same thing as getting out. We decided that we would stay and supplant the French after the Geneva Agreements had been signed in July, calling for a division of the country. Ho Chi Minh established himself in the North, so Dulles decided that the rest of the country, below the 17th parallel, would be a Western bastion against the Communists—exactly, we thought, what the South Vietnamese would want: our protection, our freedoms. There was arrogance, idealism and naÏveté to it. We assumed that as Western Europe had welcomed our presence there, the South Vietnamese would want us in their country, despite the fact that we had been on the wrong side of a long and bitter colonial war. We had assumed that we could sit on the sidelines without helping the nationalists in their fight for freedom; we could help the colonial power and somehow not pay a heavy price. Yet this illusion existed; we were different, we were not a colonial power. Dienbienphu, Dulles said at the time, “is a blessing in disguise. Now we enter Vietnam without the taint of colonialism.”

  Nothing would hold Dulles back; there was an absolute belief in our cause, our innocence and worthiness, also a belief that it was politically better to be in than to be out. It was mostly Dulles’ initiative. We would start in South Vietnam, Dulles decided, by sending a couple of hundred advisers there. The foreign aid bill at that time contained a provision which allowed the President to switch 10 percent from one aid program to another. This could be done without congressional approval, so at Dulles’ urging, Eisenhower took 10 percent of the money set aside for other countries and ticketed it to Vietnam. In addition, the decision to send advisers was made in late September, when Congress was out of session, but as a courtesy the President and the Secretary of State agreed that the congressional leaders should be notified.

  Thruston Morton was assigned to inform Senator Russell of the Armed Services Committee that the President would be sending an estimated 200 men to South Vietnam as well as funding the country. Russell answered that it was a mistake, it would not stay at 200, it would eventually go to 20,000 and perhaps one day even as high as 200,000.

  Morton answered that he doubted this, and that the President intended to go ahead; they were just advisers, anyway.

  “I think this is the greatest mistake this country’s ever made,” Russell said. “I could not be more opposed to it.”

  Morton again answered that the President and the Secretary were determined to go ahead.

  “I know,” said Russell, “he mentioned that he might do it. Tell him, then, that I think it is a terrible mistake but that if he does it I will never raise my voice.” Thus intervention in South Vietnam was sanctioned.

  Nothing, however, could have been more naÏve than Dulles’ statement that the United States would now enter Vietnam without a trace of colonialism, for the sides were already drawn. The Vietminh were supremely confident that they could gain ascendancy in the South either through elections or through subversion and guerrilla warfare. They were a modern force, and the one opposing them in the South was feudal. By now they were the heroes of their people: they had driven out the French and stirred the powerful feelings of nationalism in the country. During the war the Vietminh had done more than expel the French. They had taken Vietnamese society, which under colonial rule had been so fragmented and distrustful, where only loyalty to family counted, and given it a broader cause and meaning, until that which bound them together was more powerful than that which divided them. This, then, had made them a nation in the true sense.

  In the South the reverse was true. The men who formed the government in the South were men whom Westerners would deal with, men who were safe precisely because they had done nothing for their country during this war; they had either fought side by side with the French or profiteered on the war, or, as in the case of Ngo Dinh Diem, stayed outside the country, unable to choose between the two sides. In the South the old feudal order still existed, soon to be preserved by the conservative force of American aid; in the South that which divided the various political groups from one another was more powerful than that which bound them together. The tradition of the old Vietnam had been loyalty to family alone; symbolically the Ngo Dinh Diem government was a family government, and by the time of his downfall Diem trusted only his family. From the very start, one Vietnam lived in the past and the other in the present.

  This was reflected in the leadership. The North was led by a man who had expelled the foreigners, the South by a man who had been installed by foreigners. Ho Chi Minh had been in exile during the worst years of French colonialism because he could not speak openly and remain in Vietnam; Diem had gone into exile during the most passionate war of liberation because he did not approve of the Vietminh. Ho did not need foreign aid to hold power, his base had deep roots in the peasant society which had driven out foreigners. Diem could not have survived for a week without foreign aid; he was an American creation which fit American political needs and desires, not Vietnamese ones. By Vietnamese standards, there was little legitimacy; Diem was a Catholic in a Buddhist country, a Central Vietnamese in the South, but most important of all, he was a mandarin, a member of the feudal aristocracy in a country swept by revolution.

  Yet if he did not meet Vietnamese demands, in 1954 Diem clearly met American needs. He was a devout anti-Communist, yet he was also anti-French and thus technically a nationalist, and he often gave speeches about social reform which soothed American liberal consciences. If the acts of his regime were basically authoritarian, his speeches were not, and in conversations he seemed difficult but not unreasonable. His behavior was proper, correct; a relentless Christian, he did not chase after women the way Sukarno did. Where a true Asian radical or nationalist might have been rude or condescending to American envoys or, worse, to visiting congressmen, Diem was quite the opposite, solicitous, serious, responsible. To an America still in the midst of the McCarthy period he was the ideal representative for a foreign establishment, rigidly and vehemently anti-Communist for the conservatives, yet apparently concerned about social welfare for the liberals, who, on the defensive about the loss of China and about McCarthy’s attacks, could rally round Diem without offending their consciences. The perfect coalition candidate. “The kind of Asian we can live with,” Wil
liam O. Douglas, one of Diem’s early liberal sponsors, had said when he recommended Diem to Senator Mike Mansfield, who would also become an early supporter.

  Diem was a complicated figure, deeply religious, a monk really, who believed completely in his own rectitude; thus if he was correct in his attitudes, it was the obligation of the population to honor and obey him. He was a man of the past, neither Asian nor Western, better than the dying order he was chosen to protect, isolated, rigidly moral, unable to come to terms with a world which had passed him by.

  Only a few Americans believed in him from the beginning. Indeed the entire commitment to South Vietnam was almost offhand: there was nothing else to be done there, so why not try it. But from the very start his failings, the righteousness, the rigidity, the dependence on his family were already self-evident. The first American ambassador to Vietnam, J. Lawton Collins, thought him totally incapable, and Edgar Faure, the French premier, told the French National Assembly that “Diem is not only incapable, but mad.” Only Lansdale really fought for Diem (“Most of those with whom I talked felt that Diem was a great patriot, probably the best of all the nationalists still living, with an outstanding record as a wise and able administrator; some even asserted that he was far better known among his countrymen than was Ho Chi Minh,” Lansdale would later write, in describing how he first heard of Diem). It was Lansdale who sold Diem to his CIA boss, Allen Dulles, and thus to John Foster Dulles, and it was Lansdale who helped guide Diem through early struggles against the religious sects, which solidified Washington’s support.