The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  Within the bureaucracy there were some inklings that a group was being formed which did not think the problem in Vietnam was primarily military (and thus could not be dealt with by military responses). Rusk remained somewhat on the sidelines, caught in his ambivalence between recurring doubts about the regime and its lack of reforms, as well as the dangers that sending troops might incur, and his conviction that the line against Asian Communism should be held and that the problem was the Chinese. If there was anyone whose job it was at this point to make the case against any military commitment, and make it forcefully, it was Rusk, but he tended to limit his dissent; he sensed that the use of a major advisory-support team was the least the President could get away with, so he acquiesced. The others at State were dubious. George Ball, of course, maintained that even sending advisers was the first step, and that the first step would fail and necessitate a second step. Averell Harriman, about to become Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, was not an expert on Vietnam, in fact he knew precious little about it; but when he heard that here was a government that lacked confidence and had a crisis of morale, he sensed that these were euphemisms for far more serious illnesses. And there was the President himself, reluctant to send combat troops and repeat the French experience, but at the same time afraid of being charged with losing a country and deserting a brave ally, and thus of the domestic implications of not giving greater aid, of not having tried.

  On November 11, three days after the McNamara recommendation to introduce combat forces, there was a new McNamara paper, done jointly with Rusk, which reflected the President’s position. It was a compromise with the bureaucracy, particularly the military, and a compromise with the unstated, unwritten pressures against losing a country. Kennedy would send American support units and American advisers, but not American combat troops. We would help the South Vietnamese help themselves. If there really was something to South Vietnam as a nation and it really wanted to remain free, as we in the West defined freedom, then we would support it. We would send our best young officers to advise down to battalion level, we would ferry the ARVN into battle against the elusive Vietcong, and we would, being good egalitarians, pressure Diem to reform and broaden the base of a creaky government and modernize his whole society.

  For McNamara to have switched on his recommendations was his normal procedure; his papers were always draft recommendations until the President made up his mind. Then they were tailored to the President’s decision so that there would be no record for history of any difference between the Secretary of Defense and the President. He was that loyal. And Kennedy, holding the line on combat troops, told the Joint Chiefs of Staff to go ahead with the planning for a combat commitment, which was a typical procedure: if you do not give them what they want, give them a chance to dream of it. After the Bay of Pigs he had told them to go ahead with the plans for an invasion of Cuba. A little something for everybody, a little nothing for everybody, and in this case the chance to plan would give the Chiefs more of a thrust forward on Vietnam, a chance to think of the future rather than the past. There was in the final Kennedy package a good deal of emphasis on nation-building and reform, and a belief that we could somehow trick Diem into coming round. We would do this by by-passing Diem’s government, creating strategic hamlets to protect the people from the Vietcong (on the assumption that they wanted to be protected). We would modernize the state not necessarily with Diem, but in spite of him.

  This emphasis on reform and liberalization of the South Vietnamese society was in sharp contrast to the Taylor cables, which were primarily military in their view of the problem, but this was not surprising; it was somehow natural for a liberal, anti-Communist Administration to see the world through the prism of its own attitudes, and it was comforting to think in terms of reform, that liberalism and governmental change implanted from the top (the Vietcong were implementing change from the bottom up) could revive a sick society. Not only was it comforting to the Administration itself, but it was comforting to its supporters as well. It seemed a logical extension of that anti-Communism which was also liberal; it was going to do good for the people as well as stop the Communists. (Nothing came of the reforms, however, and a year and a half later when Taylor, the architect of the policy in the public’s mind—the public, reading of the commitment, thought him more an architect of reform than of war, which was totally wrong—visited Vietnam, he was asked by reporter Stanley Karnow what had happened to the much discussed and much praised reforms, since there was no visible evidence of them. Taylor answered, with no small irritation, “I don’t know. I’m no theoretician.”)

  There was, of course, no publicity given to the fact that we had almost sent combat troops. The Administration’s public position was that Taylor had advised against the troops, and that he believed that the problem was primarily political and social, which, of course, enhanced his reputation in civilian circles, and again gave the impression that he was different and better than other generals. Yet once again a decision of great importance had almost slipped by the Administration. Very few people were called in to discuss it, there was no major intelligence survey on why the Vietcong were so successful and whether we could in fact halt their growth by military means. (In Saigon, Ambassador Nolting, hearing that a major military-assistance command was to be formed, was enraged and fought against it; the problem, he thought, was primarily political and he did not want to see a burgeoning American military commitment created. He thought seriously of resigning and he was disappointed that Rusk did not press his case more forcefully.)

  For many reasons the Taylor-Rostow report was far more decisive than anyone realized, not because Kennedy did what they recommended, but because in doing less than it called for, he felt he was being moderate, cautious. There was an illusion that he had held the line, whereas in reality he was steering us far deeper into the quagmire. He had not withdrawn when a contingent of 600 men there had failed, and now he wasescalating that commitment to 15,000, which meant that any future decision on withdrawal would be that much more difficult. And he was escalating not just the troop figure but changing a far more subtle thing as well. Whereas there had been a relatively low level of verbal commitment—speeches, press conferences, slogans, fine words—his Administration would now have to escalate the rhetoric considerably to justify the increased aid, and by the same token, he was guaranteeing that an even greater anti-Communist public relations campaign would be needed in Vietnam to justify the greater commitment. He was expanding the cycle of American interest and involvement in ways he did not know.

  The aid did not come without American military bodies, and the military bodies did not come without journalistic bodies, so by expanding the number of Americans, Kennedy was in every way expanding the importance of Vietnam, making his own country more aware of it. From two full-time American correspondents, the number jumped to eight, including, most dangerous of all, American reporters with television cameras who roamed around discovering things that Diem did not want revealed. Diem’s political enemies, who were numerous, finding no outlet through the constitution of Vietnam nor through the American embassy, would for the first time find sympathetic listeners in American reporters, and thus the expansion of the American commitment also meant that there would be an inevitable rise in the pace of domestic Vietnamese turbulence (Diem, totally removed from reality, and almost psychotic at the end, believed that when the first Buddhist monk burned himself to death, it had been arranged for and paid by NBC, despite the fact that there were no television cameras on the scene). What was true, however, was that the presence of American reporters tended to open up an otherwise closed country; this was the price Diem paid for getting American aid. Similarly, as the American commitment tended to be stalemated on the ground, the Administration, which had a powerful tendency toward media manipulation, would immediately fall back on the public relations aspect of the policy to justify it. If things in Vietnam were not working well, then the answer was to have more people
make more speeches and thus get more positive coverage.

  The Kennedy commitment changed things in other ways as well. While the President had the illusion that he had held off the military, the reality was that he had let them in. They now began to dominate the official reporting, so that the dispatches which came into Washington were colored through their eyes. Now they were players, men who had a seat at the poker table; they would now, on any potential dovish move, have to be dealt with. He had activated them, and yet at the same time had given them so precious little that they could always tell their friends that they had never been allowed to do what they really wanted. Dealing with the military, once their foot was in the door, both Kennedy and Johnson would learn, was an awesome thing. The failure of their estimates along the way, point by point, meant nothing. It did not follow, as one might expect, that their credibility was diminished and that there was now less pressure from them, but the reverse. It meant that there would be an inexorable pressure for more—more men, more hardware, more targets—and that with the military, short of nuclear weapons, the due bills went only one way, civilian to military. Thus one of the lessons for civilians who thought they could run small wars with great control was that to harness the military, you had to harness them completely; that once in, even partially, everything began to work in their favor. Once activated, even in a small way at first, they would soon dominate the play. Their particular power with the Hill and with hawkish journalists, their stronger hold on patriotic-machismo arguments (in decision making they proposed the manhood positions, their opponents the softer, or sissy, positions), their particular certitude, made them far more powerful players than men raising doubts. The illusion would always be of civilian control; the reality would be of a relentlessly growing military domination of policy, intelligence, aims, objectives and means, with the civilians, the very ones who thought they could control the military (and who were often in private quite contemptuous of the military mind), conceding step by step, without even knowing they were losing.

  The immediate result of the Kennedy decision in December to send a major advisory and support team to Vietnam was the activation of a new player, a major military player, to run a major American command in Saigon. At first, when Kennedy took office, the pressure had come only from Diem; then, because of his policy to reassure Diem and make him the instrument of our policy, Kennedy had sent over Fritz Nolting, who would soon seem to many to be more Diem’s envoy to the United States than vice versa. Now, by appointing Lieutenant General Paul D. Harkins to a new command, Kennedy was sending one more potential player against him, a figure who would represent the primacy of Saigon and the war, as opposed to the primacy of the Kennedy Administration, thus one more major bureaucratic player who might not respond to the same pressures that Kennedy was responding to, thereby feeding a separate and potentially hostile bureaucratic organism.

  Harkins began by corrupting the intelligence reports coming in. Up until 1961 they had been reasonably accurate, clear, unclouded by bureaucratic ambition; they had reflected the ambivalence of the American commitment to Diem, and the Diem flaws had been apparent both in CIA and, to a slightly lesser degree, in State reporting. Nolting would change State’s reporting, and to that would now be added the military reporting, forceful, detailed and highly erroneous, representing the new commander’s belief that his orders were to make sure things looked well on the surface. In turn the Kennedy Administration would waste precious energies debating whether or not the war was being won, wasting time trying to determine the factual basis on which the decisions were being made, because in effect the Administration had created a situation where it lied to itself.

  The meeting seemed at the time like a footnote to Taylor’s trip. On his way back from Vietnam he had stopped off in Hawaii to visit his old friend Paul Harkins, a three-star general, then commander of the U.S. Army in the Pacific (in the marvelous jargon of the military, naturally, USAR-PAC). At that time the Army was considered somewhat weak in lieutenant generals, a level just below the great generals who had made it at the end of World War II and then come on even stronger in Korea. In fact, General Gavin had earlier urged Kennedy, in his search for his top military, to reach farther down in the ranks for younger men for high positions.

  How bad is it out there? Harkins asked, and Taylor replied that it was bad, very bad; Harkins had better get ready to put his finger in the dike. A few weeks later, as is their wont in Army circles, Mrs. Taylor chatted on the phone with her friend Mrs. Harkins and suggested ever so casually that they not plan on staying in Hawaii very much longer. And on January 1 the call came through. Harkins would head the new U.S. command in Saigon, the command which was to be different and unconventional. No one, of course, could have been more conventional than Harkins. He knew nothing about guerrilla warfare, in fact he knew remarkably little about basic infantry tactics (if you knew something about small-unit infantry tactics you could at least learn about the war, because you could put yourself in the infantryman’s place). He was a cavalry man in the old days, a great polo player, a dashing social figure in the old Army, and then a tanker, a staffman at that. His career was distinguished because he was, in Army terms, diplomatic. He had been a staff officer for George Patton, and softened some of Patton’s verbal blows. He was considered very good on logistical planning. Harkins was, in addition to being a protégé of Patton’s, a trusted friend of Taylor’s. They had known each other well from the days at West Point and had kept in touch. When Max Taylor was Superintendent of the Point, it was not surprising that Paul Harkins turned up as Commandant of Cadets, and later when Max Taylor had the U.S. Eighth Army in Korea, it was not surprising that Paul Harkins was his chief of staff.

  Others in the Army and in the bureaucracy were pushing for an officer with a sense of unconventional warfare, like Major General William Yarborough, then heading the Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, or Colonel Ray Peers, who had served with the OSS during the war. But Taylor did not want an unconventional man. He had a very conventional view of the fighting and what he wanted was his own man, someone who was, above all, loyal to him. So he produced Harkins, a man with no real reputation of his own. His two main distinctions during his years of service in Vietnam would be, first, that his reporting consistently misled the President of the United States, and second, that it brought him to a point of struggle with a vast number of his field officers who tried to file realistic (hence pessimistic) reports. But even here the fault was not necessarily Harkins’. In all those years he felt that he was only doing what Max Taylor wanted, and there was considerable evidence that this was true, that his optimism reflected back-channel directives from Taylor. But it was one more insight into the era, all that talk about unconventional warfare, and then picking the most conventional officer. Even Kennedy knew it; after he met Harkins in Palm Beach, where the President was resting, Kennedy was asked what he thought of the new commander for Vietnam. He answered, somewhat less than enthusiastically, “Well, that’s what they’re offering me.”

  Chapter Ten

  In Vietnam, the influx of American aid recommended under the Taylor-Rostow report changed nothing. The American intelligence reports of the last few years had repeatedly warned that war waged by the Vietcong was basically political, that the Diem regime was sick, perhaps terminally sick. The American agreement to commit support and advisory elements also called for a broad range of social and political changes and reforms, to which Diem had agreed with considerable reluctance. If anything, he regarded the American insistence on reform as an affront to him personally; the Communists were the enemy, not he and his family. What were the Americans doing, involving themselves in Vietnamese domestic affairs, pressuring him to accept into his government people who were unreliable, criticizing his family both directly and indirectly?

  Almost as soon as the Americans decided to increase their commitment, the Ngo regime began to renege on the promised reforms; the Americans, as they had systematically since 1954 in dealing wi
th Diem, quickly acquiesced. Ambassador Nolting had the job of bringing Diem the news that the United States would not be sending combat troops to Vietnam. Diem had not been happy, Nolting reported, but he “took our proposals rather better than I expected.” Two days later, however, Nolting reported that he had found out, through high-level channels, that Diem was sulking and was very upset; at the same time there were virulent attacks in the Nhu-controlled press claiming that the Americans, rather than helping the country in an hour of need, were interfering in Vietnamese affairs, and that they were naÏve about reforms and about Communism. It was very clear what was happening; exactly as Ken Young and others had predicted, the Nhus were dominating Diem, warning him against the Americans, against their threat to his regime, and Diem, of course, was responding to his family. So, inevitably, on December 7, 1961, less than a month after the decision to make a far greater commitment based in large part on social reform, Washington was sending its embassy new recommendations, softening the demands for political reform. It was one more in a long series of decisions to go it alone with Diem on his terms, to treat the war as primarily a military problem, and to back off from using American leverage for any kind of social or political reform. Reform, given the nature of the regime, was of course impossible; reform meant getting rid of Mr. and Mrs. Nhu, and Diem was unwilling to do this. Washington had backed down again, and the key figure in this was Nolting, who had recommended that we not pressure Diem, that we trust him. We should accept his word and not demand his deeds. At a cocktail party shortly after the Americans backed down on reform, Ngo Dinh Nhu took an American reporter aside and praised Nolting lavishly. “Your ambassador,” he said, “is the first one who has ever understood us.” To Nolting, viability in South Vietnam meant getting along with the government at the top level in Saigon, not pressuring the government to do something about desperate conditions in the countryside. Washington accepted this; it showed that once more, despite all the talk of guerrilla warfare and political reform, the Americans were ready to be content with the status quo and to downgrade the political side.