The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  In late May 1963 John Mecklin, head of the United States Information Agency in Saigon and a member of the Country Team, sat talking with two reporters. Mecklin had been an experienced reporter for Time magazine himself before taking this job, which he had accepted because he felt challenged by the Kennedy inaugural. He had arrived in Saigon full of enthusiasm, almost immediately sponsoring a contest to give the Vietcong another name which would indicate that instead of being legitimate guerrillas, they were just outlaws—a typical American gesture which died in infancy. With the Buddhist crisis developing into a full-scale foreign policy crisis, his own doubts were growing, and he would ultimately be a major dissenter. But now, as he sat with the reporters who were much younger, he was drawing on his reportorial expertise to forecast the events ahead.

  The men to watch as the pressure of events grew, he said, were not Nolting and Harkins; they were already too committed, both by age, by generational outlook, by their public and private words on the regime. No, the interesting men were the two who were at the fulcrum, William Trueheart, the Deputy Chief of Mission, and Brigadier General Richard Stilwell, the new chief of staff to Harkins. They were, said Mecklin, in extremely difficult positions. They were both in their early forties and seemed to have brilliant careers ahead; yet the policy was clearly being challenged, indeed collapsing, and they might have to go against their superiors and perhaps their institutions as the pressures increased. Mecklin’s point had a certain validity, and at first glance Stilwell seemed the more likely candidate to switch. Whatever else, no one would ever accuse Paul Harkins of being brilliant, but Stilwell was preceded by a reputation for brilliance; he was one of that special group of Army intellectuals, smooth, poised, sophisticated, a former CIA man, a staff officer for General James Van Fleet when he was director of military aid to Greece. Stilwell was well read, dropped the names of books he had just read, of writers and reporters and publishers he knew well and had just lunched with. He was a skilled and subtle briefer, and did not talk mindlessly of dead bodies, but he knew the lexicon of insurgency well, almost too well. He knew backgrounds, forces, and so the word was passed quickly in Saigon: See Stilwell, Stilwell knows, a hot general going places, a breath of fresh air after Harkins, and great things were expected of him. They materialized in a way; he got his second and third stars, and his career blossomed but he never challenged the Harkins line—perhaps the pressure the military staff system puts on a subordinate to go along is too great, perhaps it is unthinkable to challenge your superior. He became the hatchet man for Harkins, the man who personally quashed the reporting of the dissenting colonels, who challenged all dissenting views, who, though he was not in the intelligence operation, went through the intelligence reports, tidying them up.

  Trueheart seemed, on the surface, a less likely candidate to break with the line than Stilwell. Not only had he faithfully followed the official line from the start but he was a Nolting man, brought to Saigon at the ambassador’s personal request; the two were old friends and had stayed in very close touch. Nolting was the godfather of both of Trueheart’s sons, and Trueheart seemed, if anything, more Nolting than Nolting, a little stiffer at first glance, a product of that same Virginia-gentleman school of the foreign service. An early memory of him in Saigon was his being asked to protest the expulsion of François Sully, a Newsweek correspondent. He had answered that it was not a great question; after all, Sully was a pied-noir (a term used to describe the French lower class in Algeria, like calling an American a redneck).

  But in late June 1963 an exhausted and dispirited Nolting went on a prolonged vacation, despite the mounting Buddhist crisis. Nolting chose to sail in the Aegean Sea, where it was difficult to reach him (this became an important point because he felt Trueheart did not try hard enough to reach him and therefore was disloyal; others felt that there had been efforts to reach him but that he had made himself particularly inaccessible). With the crisis continuing to grow, Trueheart followed the straight Nolting line, but after a while, as Diem refused to negotiate and meet any of the Buddhist demands, as the protest mounted and reached deeper and deeper into the society, as unrest mounted in the military and as the government continued to mislead the Americans regarding its intentions, Trueheart opened up the embassy reporting. Together with Mel Manful, the political officer, Trueheart began to talk to dissidents, to Buddhists, and as embassy officials reached more of the society, the reporting changed. It went from blind support to being skeptical, cool and iconoclastic in its appraisal. Doubts were raised, questions asked. The embassy began to doubt that Diem could handle the Buddhist crisis, and it reported that the Buddhists had become the focal point for all sorts of dissidence and that the government was totally isolated. It also cast doubt upon Nhu’s sanity, doubts which were accurate; Nhu was more and more on opium in his last years. The embassy saw Diem almost totally a prisoner of his family. The terrible thing, the embassy learned about the Diem regime in that crisis, was that all the clichés about it turned out to be true.

  The change in Trueheart was crucial. His reporting was not so much anti-Diem (as opponents charged later) as it was analytical and detached, no longer blindly pro-Diem; it let loose a floodgate of doubts. For the first time, American reporting in Saigon resembled the American diplomatic reporting from China. Five months earlier only American journalists had been pessimistic about the war and the future; now the State Department people in Saigon were pessimistic, the CIA was pessimistic, the hamlet people were pessimistic, along with the journalists. Only the military held devotedly to the line of optimism. These doubts and divisions of Saigon were reflected in Washington, where Kennedy faced a divided bureaucracy. Earlier in the year he had seemed to be encouraging the Harriman group in its dissent; if not exactly siding with it, at least moving the play in their direction but doing it slowly, trying to prevent an open schism within his Administration, trying to keep from driving the military to the side of the right wing in Congress.

  By mid-1963 Kennedy was a very different President with a very different sense of his own confidence and competence, more sure of himself, more dubious about the institutional wisdom of force in many areas of the world. He had been through the Cuban missile crisis, and that had restored all the credentials lost so early in the Bay of Pigs; he had handled himself coolly, had faced down the Russians, and though some, like Dean Acheson, did not think he had been forceful enough, the country had rallied to him. As he and his staff considered these his finest hours, so did most of the country, with the exception of the radical left, which thought too much had been risked for too little, and the radical right, which thought that too little had been risked for too much. Now newer, milder, more rational approaches were possible; the Cuban missile crisis had produced such a real vision of nuclear death, it had taken both the United States and the Soviet Union so close to so much of the reality of their propaganda and their threats that it also produced a possibility for a genuine thaw, and this he was now pursuing. Speeches and ideas that had not been possible in 1961 as he searched for his balance and confidence were now possible. On June 10 he gave perhaps the best speech of his Administration at the American University commencement. Here was an American President not just calling for a lessening of tensions, a greater attempt to control and limit the weapons of destruction, but also, and more important, calling upon Americans to redefine some of their attitudes toward the Soviet Union and toward Communism.

  This was a landmark speech, coming after some seventeen years in which the American government had espoused the line that it was Soviet attitudes and only Soviet attitudes and actions which had brought on the Cold War, that the United States had been an innocent auxiliary to it all. It was, some thought, the beginning of the second part of the Kennedy Administration, the first part having ended after the Cuban missile crisis. It was as if he were liberated from the insecurities of his first two years with that one act, and now, more confident of himself, more confident of the nation’s response to him; he was the President.
The country now trusted him, the spurs were won; he could begin (slowly of course) to challenge some of the ideas and attitudes which had frozen so long in the government. The second part of his Administration, they felt, was marked by the search for a test-ban treaty with the Soviet Union, a milder and more tolerant tone in his speeches about the Cold War, increasing doubts on Vietnam, and a general, growing awareness that one historic era was coming to a close, and by a desire to ride the changes without being destroyed, either by moving too fast on them, anticipating them too much, or by being too slow in recognizing the changes. For he had a feeling, which he passed on to some aides, that the country was ahead of Washington, Washington was living more in the Cold War than the nation. The country did not want war and did not want a constant nuclear tension with the Soviet Union. Kennedy was beginning to sense this and he would in his last major trip into the country find, not to his great surprise, that it was true. So by mid-1963 he was pushing for a test-ban treaty, and he was looking for a lessening of tensions. He was being plagued more and more by the question of the back-burner issue. Berlin, ironically, was on the back-burner now. The problem of Vietnam was proving very troublesome and now, as he had suspected, it refused to go away.

  Faced with a divided bureaucracy, Kennedy gave the men around him an indication that he was uneasy with the use of force and dubious about reports of success. But he also felt uneasy about the question of change, of dumping Diem. He seemed to move with the doubters; the White House staff people, who had become increasingly pessimistic and were searching for alternate policies, found themselves encouraged by him. Encouraged, but not too encouraged. It was all still run carefully and cautiously; he wanted, they felt, to move the bureaucracy along, and the key man in this was apparently Robert McNamara. McNamara was still going on those trips to Vietnam, more and more often now, and coming back relentlessly optimistic. It was beginning to be known as McNamara’s war, which at the time did not bother him. Some people in the government objected to his trips. When Roger Hilsman (who had been promoted to Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, to replace Harriman, who was on his way up as Undersecretary) complained to the President about the fact that each time McNamara went out there, it resulted in a great amount of publicity which stirred the public interest in the war and brought out the fact that the United States was committed there (this was before the days when the major networks had resident correspondents, and thus the McNamara trips, bringing as they did major television teams, escalated the press coverage), Kennedy would answer yes, he knew it was a problem but he was having troubles there and the only way he could keep the Chiefs on board was to keep McNamara on board, and the only way he could keep McNamara on board was to let him make those trips.

  One sign of the presidential distaste and disillusion with Vietnam was the change and the rise of Hilsman. He was, if anything, a talisman of the Kennedy years both in strengths and contradictions. He had started by being an enthusiast on counterinsurgency and thus the commitment to Vietnam. Yet at the same time, with Bowles gone, and Stevenson ineffectual, he was the government’s leading advocate of a change in the nation’s China policy. He still held to his enthusiasm for antiguerrilla warfare, but as the sour news came in from Saigon he began to wonder if the Diem regime was capable of waging any kind of political-military war, and he had grave doubts about both the policy and the use of greater force.

  Hilsman had risen quickly in the bureaucracy; Kennedy liked him particularly because he was unafraid to challenge the military. One challenge was particularly memorable. At one of the first crisis meetings on Laos, General Lyman Lemnitzer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had shown up at the White House in order to brief the President, and suffered a mild humiliation at the White House gate. Since the police there were not prepared for him and his staff, his aides were not allowed to enter, so Lem had to struggle through carrying his charts and cases all by himself. A greater humiliation lay ahead. Lemnitzer began his briefing, charts ready, pointer poised. First the big picture: This is the Mekong Valley. Pointer tip hit the map. Hilsman, watching, noticed something, the point tip was not on the Mekong Valley, it was on the Yangtze Valley. Hilsman rose, went to the board, took the pointer. “General,” he said, “you’re mistaken, the Mekong Valley is right here.” A switch of the pointer. But Lem’s humiliation was not over. Hilsman did not sit down but continued the briefing, pointing out the key features of the Valley until finally the President said, “Mr. Hilsman, would you mind letting us hear the military briefing from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff . . .” Later, when Hilsman was teased about this by friends, he protested, “But he was pointing at the wrong river . . .”

  It was this very audaciousness which delighted Kennedy, the willingness to take on the military; in fact, when Hilsman had been moved up to Director of Intelligence and Research at State, he was told by Rusk that he was specifically not to challenge the military view. When he got back to his office, he received a White House phone call. A very high official congratulated him on his promotion and noted that by now he had probably been told by the Secretary not to push the military, but he was to disregard that last bit of advice; he had been promoted precisely because he did take on the military and he was to continue to challenge them. So he did, first at INR and then as Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, his rise and Harriman’s rise seeming to coincide with Kennedy’s doubts. Kennedy used to call Hilsman in the morning to complain about the military’s repeated attempts to give their own optimistic assessments of the war (the Kennedy public relations program was backfiring) until finally Hilsman, on Kennedy’s orders, drafted a national security paper forbidding any general officer to go to Vietnam without the written approval of the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs.

  The struggle in the bureaucracy during the summer of 1963 centered mainly around intelligence and interpretation of the war. There was no essential challenge to goals, although there were increasing interior doubts in the minds of some civilians about them. The basic controversy was on a more primitive level; after all, why challenge your goals if you are attaining them? If the military were right, if the war was being won, then the problems being reported by the civilians were exaggerated, minor squabbles among Vietnamese intellectuals blown up out of proportion by jittery civilians. So in the summer Hilsman, still at INR, began to challenge the military’s estimates with great regularity, an assault as much as anything on McNamara, who still held to the military’s figures. It was convenient for McNamara to stick to these statistics, since they were not only the thing he knew best, but more important, by holding to them he did not get into a fight with his generals over the failure of the existing policy, and thus perhaps have to confront the pressure for a new, expanded policy. He simply froze his attitude: it was all going well, the statistics were there to prove it, and he was not interested in trying to find out why there were two different sets of information, and what lay behind the difference. Civilians traveling around with him to Saigon in those days found him surprisingly rigid; they tried to discuss their doubts with him but he would not really listen. When they said the Diem government was losing popularity with the peasants because of the Buddhist crisis, McNamara asked, well, what percentage was dropping off, what percentage did the government have and what percentage was it losing? He asked for facts, some statistics, something he could run through the data bank, not just this poetry they were spouting. And as far as charges that his data bank was corrupt and unbalanced, reflecting only the vested-interest optimism of the government and of MACV—why, their data bank was just as corrupt. They now factored in only people who had doubts, they did not listen to anyone who was optimistic.

  This was a very revealing insight into McNamara. Both at Ford and at the Pentagon he had always loved statistics and facts, particularly those which confirmed what he wanted to prove, and now he was making the same accusation against bureaucratic opponents that others had made against him. He did not seriously i
nvestigate the negative claims because he did not choose to go that path; however, years later, once he had switched sides, he could be very good at finding dissenting statistics. Then he consciously used the CIA instead of his own Defense Intelligence Agency (which he had invented) to respond to his dovish questions, and when a particular CIA agent showed signs of pessimism himself, McNamara would turn out to have lots of time to listen. But in 1963 he systematically fought off any challenge to the military estimates, and he and Hilsman in particular had some fierce confrontations: as the Buddhist crisis continued, Hilsman seized on it as one more means of showing that the government was ineffective, that the crisis was bound to affect the war effort, since, though the ARVN officers were Catholics, the NCOs and privates were Buddhists. When Hilsman made these claims, McNamara would flash back: Where are your figures? Where is your research?