The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  Harriman had been the perfect figure for the Democratic party in foreign affairs in the Roosevelt-Truman years, a full-blown true-blue capitalist who had the allegiance of his class and yet was a party partisan on domestic issues as well. He was the party’s most legitimate capitalist, and foreign governments, including the Soviet, knew that he spoke not just for an Administration but for the power structure as well. (When Khrushchev came to America in 1959, he asked Harriman to round up the real power structure of America for him, not the paper power structure. Harriman did just that, thus confirming to Khrushchev that his own view of who held power in America, as opposed to that of those who thought they held power in America, was correct, which it probably was.)

  As governor of New York he was a singularly poor politician, stiff and proud and unbending to the public, and totally compromising in private. What made him so bad in domestic politics was that he was working for himself and thus was ruthless in the pursuit of his own ambition, whereas in Washington his ambition was still great but somehow tempered by a sense of country, thus evoking the best in him, wisdom, patience and a sense of perspective. Yet not only was he a poor governor, and beaten badly by Rockefeller in 1958, but he almost destroyed the Democratic party of New York, as pointed out by Theodore White, one of his admirers, in The Making of the President, 1960. After emphasizing that no American had helped exercise his nation’s power throughout the world as Harriman had in the previous two decades, White wrote:

  Yet brought face to face with the domestic system of American power, no man proved more incapable of understanding; and his performance in 1958 in directing the Democratic Party in New York not only destroyed the pride and honor of both machine and citizen elements of that Party but probably rendered the Party incapable of governing New York again for years.

  That was written in 1960, and in 1972 Rockefeller is still governor, there is a Republican senator, and a Conservative senator, and the last two Democratic candidates for mayor of New York City have been defeated.

  He had started the Kennedy years at the bottom rung. He had not realized the Kennedy electoral force early enough, and was prejudiced against the candidate not on grounds of religion, but on grounds of heredity, disliking old Joe Kennedy for many reasons. The early indices of his future with the Administration were not good. He was sent on a preinaugural fact-finding tour of Africa, a place far from the center of the action, and when he showed up at Kennedy’s Georgetown house to give his report, he was allowed the grand total of five minutes with the President-elect, then was quickly shuttled off to lunch with an aide named Tom Farmer, delegated to hear the entire story of Africa and Harriman. He was given the job of roving ambassador, and the Administration thought that that would be both the beginning and the end of it. But he had moved up quickly, gaining the President’s admiration for his handling of the Laotian problem. Later he would tell friends that it was the easiest set of presidential instructions he ever had, a five-minute phone call during which Kennedy said, “A military solution isn’t possible. I want a political solution.” He was what Kennedy had been looking for all along, a man both of the Establishment and of the Democratic party with a transferable personal loyalty. He got things done; he did not make a good target for enemies; he was not soft. He had of course entered the Administration fully operative, unlike many of the men in the Administration for whom it was their first time in office. And he had diagnosed the Kennedy Administration very ably; he had sensed that they needed him, that there would be a role to play, and now it was coming true. With Rusk vulnerable, there would have to be a new Secretary of State, and only George Ball at State was a potential rival for the job (Bundy was a Republican and too valuable at the White House, and McNamara was good at Defense and not wise or political enough for State). So he began to move into the vacuum at State that Rusk had created.

  In late 1962 and 1963 he clearly emerged as a figure in the Department openly challenging Rusk for leadership, obviously a candidate for Secretary of State, a job which he, a man so private about his own feelings, would once admit wistfully was the only job he had ever wanted; the Presidency thing had not been real, but State, that was his ambition. Although he had not been a particular fan of Rusk’s from the start, he had begun by being extremely correct with him. But Rusk’s style soon irritated him, and those who were around him detected a very subtle patronizing of the Secretary. (It showed at one staff meeting of high-level State officials: Rusk, Ball, Harriman, the Assistant Secretaries. Rusk addressed his team, saying that Harold Wilson was in town and that it looked as if he was going to win the election and become Prime Minister, and perhaps they had better do something for him. Did anyone know where he was staying? No one knew, so Rusk dispatched Ball to call the British embassy and find out. Ball left, came back white-faced a few minutes later, and whispered to Rusk, “He’s Averell’s house guest.” Harriman, sitting there, never moved a muscle.) One incident during the Geneva negotiations had particularly enraged Harriman. He had asked Rusk for permission to see the Chinese delegates in Geneva, and Rusk had refused, leaving Harriman furious.

  He began to by-pass Rusk more and more, and encouraged others, such as Hilsman, to do the same; he had, he felt, deferred to the Secretary, but if the Secretary was not going to fight, then the time for deference was past. He became more open in his lack of respect for Rusk, finally turning to friends, saying how could you deal with someone like Rusk who was spending all his time protecting his private parts, and at that point Harriman, usually so correct and proper, bent over and imitated his own description.

  The bureaucracy Harriman had entered tended to be about ten years behind in their view of current events, but he felt that the Administration, more politically sensitive to changes at home and overseas, should react more rapidly. If so, the bureaucracy and its reporting did not serve the President well and should be challenged by younger and bureaucratically unencumbered men. Then the President would have a choice, otherwise the top people would get together and agree among themselves what was the wise and safe, and tailor the reporting to it. Which of course was exactly what was happening. Harriman’s feelings about Vietnam were hardly the result of his ideological bias, and unlike Bowles, he did not bring a grand design to foreign affairs. He was a man who was totally divorced from his own class’s political viewpoints and prejudices; more important and far more remarkable, he was able to divorce himself from the prejudices of his own political past, from the years of tension with the Soviet Union. No one had been more a part of the Marshall Plan confrontation than Harriman, yet for him Vietnam would never be Germany, Laos never Italy, and SEATO never NATO. In an era when too many of the key figures seemed overly conscious of their own immediate part in the Marshall Plan—those lessons learned being the only lessons learned; having stopped the Communists in Europe, anxious to apply once more the lessons of containment. Harriman was markedly different, yet no one could have had a greater stake in that era. As ambassador to Russia at the end of the war Harriman had, with Kennan, been among the very first to warn of the difficult years ahead. He had also played a crucial role in influencing James Forrestal, who subsequently geared up the Washington machinery for the American half of the Cold War. The entry in the Forrestal Diaries for April 20, 1945, reads:

  I saw Averell Harriman, the American Ambassador to Russia, last night. He stated his strong apprehensions as to the future of our relations with Russia unless our entire attitude toward them became characterized by much greater firmness. He said that, using the fear of Germany as a stalking horse, they would continue their program of setting up states around their borders which would follow the same ideology as the Russians. He said the outward thrust of Communism was not dead and that we might well have to face an ideological warfare just as vigorous and dangerous as Fascism or Nazism.

  If he had warned about Soviet thrust into Europe, he had also been intimately concerned with the Marshall Plan as head of the Economic Cooperation Administration and later as director of Mutu
al Security, but he always thought of events within their own context. He sensed immediately that what motivated Asian Communists might be very different from what motivated European Communists; thus they might be very different people. So he entered the confrontation on Vietnam with enormous bureaucratic expertise and toughness, little expertise on Asia, but a great capacity to learn and a remarkably fresh mind.

  Within weeks of Harriman’s taking over at FE, some of his people were questioning the reporting and the optimism from Saigon. But it is crucial in retrospect to see the limits of the challenge. Then and in the months to follow, Harriman and his aides assaulted the accuracy of the military reports, of Nolting’s cables and of Diem’s viability, but they did not challenge the issue of dominoes upon which the commitment to South Vietnam was based, nor the broader role of America in the world. They were, in effect, asking the smaller questions in lieu of the larger ones. No one, least of all the President, wanted that kind of problem aired now. So it was a challenge within the limited pragmatism of the period: not whether we should be there or not, but whether we were winning, whether Diem, not South Vietnam, was viable. Harriman himself was still very much the anti-Communist in the broader sense, and he was an enthusiastic member of the counterinsurgency group (years later when a friend of his mildly mocked the faddishness and foolishness of the counterinsurgency period, he became very offended. Why, he answered, we did all kinds of good things throughout Latin America . . .). He was in effect challenging the absurdity of the surface, not the absurdity of the root. His job was to modernize the Dulles policies in Asia, but he and his aides were more disadvantaged in that job than they might have been a few months earlier, because the Kennedy Administration had just taken the very Dulles policies in Vietnam and escalated them. The commitment was greater and larger; there was one more American limb fastened to the Vietnamese tar baby.

  Chapter Eleven

  By sending its vast advisory and support group—which would eventually number some 18,000 men—the Administration had changed the commitment without changing the war, or the problems which had caused it. If it did not improve the war effort, the commitment did affect Washington; it deepened the Administration’s involvement in Vietnam, making it a more important country, moving it off the back burner of crisis quotient. It made the Administration dependent on the military reporting and estimates, for the military would dominate the reporting. The question was no longer one of Diem’s popularity or effectiveness (the answer to that question was that he was not popular, but he was respected); the real question now was the war, whether it was being won. And the answer was yes, it was being won, it was going very well, all the indices were very good. General Harkins was optimistic; he headed what was now a powerful institutional force for optimism. He had been told by his superior, Maxwell Taylor, to be optimistic, to downgrade pessimism, and he would do exactly that. He perceived his role as duty, duty to the President, and more important, to Max Taylor and the U.S. Army, and he did not question what he was doing. Joe Stilwell’s ear had been tuned to the field, but Paul Harkins’ ear was tuned to Washington and the Pentagon. Everything, he assured his superiors, was right on schedule; everyone was getting with the program. The war was being won. He saw victory shaping up within a year.

  The only thing wrong was that the war was not being won; it was, in fact, not even being fought. The ARVN was a replica of the past, was even more arrogant now than ever. All the old mistakes were being repeated in the field; the army still systematically enraged the population by running giant sweeps through peasant villages, with its soldiers stealing chickens and ducks. It still refused to run operations where the Vietcong were known to congregate. It still launched operations with carefully timed preattack artillery shelling so that the Vietcong, thus forewarned, could escape by carefully planned routes. Since Diem was afraid that if his army suffered losses he would lose face, he told his commanders not to risk casualties, so they joined battle as little as possible. They made up for the difference in results by falsifying after-action reports, creating statistics which were soon on their way to Washington bearing Harkins’ imprimatur.

  After a brief period in early 1962 when the arrival of the helicopters caught the Vietcong by surprise and there were a couple of quick government victories, the American booster shot failed. The Vietcong quickly learned that if helicopters appeared, it was better to stand and fight than run and be slaughtered. Thus they neutralized the new American-given mobility. Soon the only tangible result of the great American build-up was that the Vietcong were capturing better weapons. All the government optimism was being built on faked reports. That in itself was not surprising; what was surprising was that these lies now bore not just the stamp of the government of South Vietnam but that of the United States of America as well. MACV, Harkins’ command, accepted the ARVN battlefield reports without checking them out. The American military and propaganda machine uncritically passed on the lies of a dying regime.

  But in the field, things were different. There American officers began to respond to the deceit they encountered daily. It was one thing to sit in Saigon in an air-conditioned room and pass on fake reports; it was another to send young American advisers into combat, knowing that they were risking their lives for what was essentially a fraud. An inevitable confrontation of serious proportions took place.

  As the war effort began to fall apart in late 1962 and early 1963, the Military Assistance Command in Saigon set out to crush its own best officers in the field on behalf of its superiors in Washington. It was a major institutional crisis, but Washington civilians were unaware of it. It was not as if two different and conflicting kinds of military reporting were being sent to Washington, with the White House able to study the two and arbitrate the difference. The Saigon command systematically crushed all dissent from the field; the military channels did not brook dissent or negativism. If a colonel surfaced in a newspaper by name as a pessimist it was the end of his career (in 1963, as some of the dissenting colonels turned to the press in their frustration, editors in New York would cable their reporters in Saigon saying those pessimistic stories were all right, but couldn’t the reporters please use the names of some of the unhappy colonels?). Had there been some high Washington officials who had gone through the China experience and survived the aftermath, they would immediately have recognized it: the collapse of a feudal army confronted by a modern guerrilla army, with a high-level foreign general trying to cover up. But people in the Administration either did not know what had happened in China, or in a few cases, they knew but desperately wanted to avoid a repetition of it. What was happening was identifiable, except that no one was in any rush to identify it.

  The conflict between Harkins and his senior advisers in the Mekong Delta, his colonels and lieutenant colonels, was, however, very real. These officers were the fulcrum between the Saigon command, with its illusions about the war and its sense of responsibility to its superiors in the Pentagon, and the reality in the field where the junior officers, the captains and lieutenants, were discovering their ally did not want to fight and that the enemy was winning. At considerable risk to their own careers, the four key officers began to complain, in varying ways and in varying degrees. The four advisers were Colonel Wilbur Wilson, III Corps (the main area around Saigon, and west and north of it); Colonel Dan Porter, IV Corps (the rest of the Mekong Delta); Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann, 7th Division (the northern tier of the Delta); and Lieutenant Colonel Fred Ladd, 21st Division (the southern tier of the Delta). They were all combat veterans of other wars, men who had been specially selected for these slots. They were neither hawks nor doves (those terms did not exist at the time), but they wanted to win the war, and at that point they still thought it a possibility. They were in their late thirties and early forties, and they understood at least some of the political forces the Vietcong represented. Finally, they were living where the war was taking place, and they thought it was a serious business, sending young men out to die, and if you
were willing to do it, you also had to be willing to fight for their doubts and put your career on the line. To the Saigon command, then and later, Vietnam and the Vietnamese were never really a part of American thinking and plans; Vietnam was at best only an extension of America, of their own careers, their own institutional drives, their own self-image. To the men in the field it was a real war, not just a brief interruption in their careers, something to prevent damaging your career.

  Ladd was quickly put down for pessimistic reporting from his area. Vann was even worse; his reporting had caused some problems in the past. Now a major storm would center around him in January 1963 when the division he advised was badly defeated and performed with great cowardice at the battle of Ap Bac, which, being close to Saigon, was well covered journalistically. Harkins was furious, not at the Vietnamese or their commander, but at Vann for having called it a defeat and for having talked with American reporters. Harkins planned to fire Vann at the time but was talked out of it by staff members who argued that firing him would bring even more adverse publicity; they also warned that advisory morale was low enough as it was. Instead Harkins upbraided Vann, and Vann became a nonperson. Anything he wrote or said thereafter was simply disregarded, and important visitors to the country were steered away from his area.