The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  Later, when the principals gathered in Washington, there were second thoughts among some of them, particularly as each learned that some of the others had misgivings (it was a stunning example of how the domino theory worked if not with nations in Southeast Asia, then certainly with high government officials who wanted to sense which way the wind was blowing and did not want to be caught alone going against it). Taylor in particular was unhappy about the way it had been maneuvered. He thought everyone else had agreed, but of course they had not, since they had been out of town. There began to be murmurings to friendly journalists that Hilsman had pulled something slick. He had become the Washington target for the more conservative members of the government and for conservative journalists. Harriman was certainly no target; and one did not take on the President lightly; Forrestal was a quiet figure bearing a great Cold War name; but Hilsman, Hilsman was talkative, ebullient, almost outrageous, a lovely lightning rod. The President was furious with the cable mix-up; he was already fed up with the division within his government and the resulting newspaper coverage from Washington and Saigon which emphasized the split in his government. It was particularly strong from Saigon, where the entire mission had come apart (“This shit must stop,” he told an aide after one particular journalistic reflection of governmental dissension).

  Now when some of his closest officials began reneging on a cable he thought they had agreed on, Kennedy blew up. He was furious at some of them for waffling, and furious at Hilsman and Forrestal for having been so sloppy as to leave an emergency exit for dissent, knowing that moving a bureaucracy toward a given objective was a difficult process, and when done, it should be done. Kennedy lashed out at Hilsman and Forrestal for incompetence, a rare and very real burst of presidential anger (“The lesson,” said the cool McGeorge Bundy, a bystander to all of the debate, “is never do business on the weekend”). But if Kennedy was annoyed at Hilsman and Forrestal, he was even more annoyed at the men who were now backtracking (showing their doubts not so much to him as elsewhere). So the next time they were gathered he looked at them and said, the voice very cold, very distant, that there had been some doubt about the cable, that it might have been precipitous. Fortunately it was not too late to change. Do you, Mr. Rusk, wish to change? No. Do you, Mr. McNamara, wish to change the cable? No. Do you, General Taylor, wish to change the cable? No. Do you, Mr. McCone, wish to change . . .

  The United States was making it very clear to the Saigon military that it was ready for a coup. On August 29 Lodge cabled Rusk:

  We are launched on a course from which there is no respectable turning back: the overthrow of the Diem government. There is no turning back in part because U.S. prestige is already publicly committed to this end in large measure and will become more so as the facts leak out. In a more fundamental sense there is no turning back because there is no possibility, in my view, that the war can be won under a Diem administration . . .

  There was a flood of cables back and forth between Saigon and Washington, arrangements made about the possibility of a coup, which Vietnamese general to talk to, how to go about it, the extent to which the United States could be involved. Even the CIA station chief, John Richardson, who until recently had been so close to Nhu, was a surprising advocate of a coup, and a prophet that the coup would come and come quickly (“If the Ngo family wins now, they and Vietnam will stagger on to final defeat at the hands of their own people and the Vietcong . . . If this attempt by the generals does not take place or if it fails, we believe it no exaggeration to say that Vietnam runs serious risk of being lost over the course of time”).

  But the generals, who met covertly with the Americans, did not move. The Nhus had caught them off balance with their strike against the pagodas, and tightened control on forces around Saigon; the Americans, who had long told the generals that only Diem would receive support, had now switched, but so quickly that they caught the generals unprepared. They wondered if the Americans really meant it. When General Harkins contacted the Vietnamese generals to imply that a coup was all right, wasn’t he still an agent of Diem? When the CIA people talked about logistics, didn’t it mean that Richardson was feeding all this back to Nhu (Nhu was telling people that it did)? Saigon, always filled with rumors, seethed with intrigue. And the generals did not move. Why hadn’t they? State cabled Lodge. “Perhaps they are like the rest of us, and are afraid to die,” Lodge told a friend.

  But if there was not a coup, it marked the end of our total belief that Diem and Diem alone could be the instrument of American policy, a blind commitment to one irrational family. In the struggle within the American government it seemed that for the moment the civilian forces were dominant, though there were varying degrees of doubt among the civilians about whether a coup could be staged at all. Some, like Forrestal and to an increasing degree Robert Kennedy, were more and more dubious about the whole thing, while Rusk and Lodge, for instance, viewed an overthrow of the Diem regime as advantageous, as a way of winning the war.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The failure of the Vietnamese generals to act had not by any means ended the debate within the Administration; what it did essentially was move it back to the point where it had existed before the crackdown on the pagodas, which had accelerated doubts and shifted positions. It had changed Rusk, McNamara and Taylor slightly and temporarily. Now that the generals had failed to move, all three wanted to get back to a position of business as usual, get on with the war. Thus, just a week after they had all agreed on the necessity for a change, they signed off again. At a high-level meeting on August 31, McNamara emphasized that the most important thing was to reopen channels of communication with the Diem government; Rusk talked again of the need to regird the anti-Communist forces, to get rid of the Nhus, and to prevent Diem from striking against his top military officers. At the meeting the burden of the case against the regime was borne by Paul Kattenburg, the young State Department officer who had worked in Vietnam for many years in the fifties. He was at this point chairman of the Interdepartmental Working Group on Vietnam and more than anyone in Washington knowledgeable about the country. The Vietnamese people loomed large in his assessments, and he had a real feeling for the fabric of the society there. He had once believed there was a right way to make our policy work; now he felt Diem was hopeless and had begun to doubt that it could be done at all. When Rusk suggested that there was no chance of the coup now, Kattenburg was not so sure, he thought it was almost too soon after one very inflexible policy, and that more time and more gestures were needed. He quoted Lodge as saying that if the Americans tried to live with the Diem regime, with what Lodge termed its sense of false promises, its bayonets on the streetcorners, then the United States would be forced out in six months. Then Kattenburg summed up; he had known Diem for ten years and the story had always been the same, one disappointment after another, always Diem had failed to live up to promises, he had relentlessly turned inward and away from reality. Diem, he affirmed, would not change; rather, this hope had been one of the oldest American illusions. Nor would he part with Nhu; instead the support for him would continue to dwindle, as it had in the past. In this case, Kattenburg said, the wise thing would be to get out of the country honorably. It was an important moment—the first time at a high-level meeting anyone had really said the unthinkable, coming significantly from the man who knew the most about the fabric of the society and the limits of it.

  Kattenburg was quickly challenged by Max Taylor. What did Kattenburg mean by “forced out of Vietnam in six months”? He answered that in six months, as it became more and more obvious that the Western side was losing the war, more and more Vietnamese would go over to the Vietcong (by the rules of the game set by McNamara, he was not allowed to say what he really thought, which was that the war was probably lost already, that the military’s optimistic estimates were illusory, that it was far later than anyone thought; State could not challenge Defense estimates).

  Nolting took issue with Kattenburg. Although he allowe
d as how Kattenburg knew the cities, and yes, this political protest was taking place in the cities, and Diem was slipping in the cities among the intelligentsia, but out in the countryside, where the war was being fought, it had little effect, out there the people faced reality, and out there we were winning the war. At which point Rusk added that what Kattenburg had said was speculative, and anyway, one thing was clear, we would not leave Vietnam until the war was over and won, and the United States would not support a coup. To this McNamara agreed.

  It was again a key moment; here was Rusk, whose job essentially was to forecast political events and weigh political subtleties and political limits, saying that come hell or high water the job would be done, putting down his own subordinate (years later, after publication of the Pentagon Papers, he told interviewers that he had erred in underestimating the strength of the enemy). So there was in the meeting a sense of business as usual. The time for a coup had come and gone; the policy in the past had always been to stand in Washington and paper things over in Saigon, and that was the trend now. Whatever the problems, we could live with them, get on with it; the problem now, as they would soon learn, was that there was precious little left to paper over.

  Though Nolting had participated in the debate, he was almost finished as a player; he was no longer ambassador and he had little post-tour credibility as a witness. What credibility he did have was systematically destroyed by Harriman, who was brutally trying to remove the last remnants of Nolting’s legitimacy. When Nolting criticized Kattenburg, Harriman had moved in with a ferocity which startled the others in the room. “We do not,” he said angrily, unable to contain himself, “particularly value what you say since you were on vacation and unavailable for two months, and it is because of your reports, the weakness of them, that we have this very problem of information.” The attack was so fierce that Kennedy had to restrain Harriman, to make him stop, saying that he, the President of the United States, wanted Nolting to finish. But Nolting had left that meeting white-faced and shaken, and his last months in government were bitter ones. He was an outsider, using a small office at CIA, watching the policy disintegrate, finally leaving the government to become an international representative of the Morgan Bank (and to write various newspapers a commemorative letter on the annual occasion of Diem’s death, a date which in the country Nolting professed to love had become a national holiday). Yet if Nolting was finished as a player, there was still a great debate left on what to do, and that debate would focus on intelligence estimates, whether the war was being won or not.

  It was at this point in a bitterly divided bureaucracy that Maxwell Taylor was in the central position, and his behavior in the divisive months of the summer of 1963 would shed a good deal of light on how he would react in future struggles over Vietnam. As before, the pressures on him reflected two very powerful and conflicting loyalties, one to the President and one to his uniform. He was a divided man, and this would become more and more apparent as Vietnam continued to disintegrate. As the limited commitment he had helped author was becoming increasingly untenable, so was his own position.

  He had held strongly to certain basic military policies—based on the need to fight brush-fire wars—during the Eisenhower Administration, and he had been out of step with the Administration then. If he had not resigned, then he had at least resisted the temptation to sign on (succumbing, thought some friends, would have brought him the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs, but would have cost him dearly in terms of loyalty to the Army). So he had walked the tightrope, satisfying neither the Eisenhower Administration, which viewed him as being on the edge of disloyalty (unannounced dissent), nor satisfying the young colonels on his staff who wanted larger and more modern roles for the Army (they did not realize that Max Taylor did not like to fight when other people owned the battlefield). During his four years as Chief of Staff of the Army he had been undercutting as subtly as he could the Eisenhower policies of massive retaliation, with testimony on the Hill, with subtle leaks to the right journalists. Since he had always been against what he considered a futile policy, he had never become Chairman.

  It was with this image of being both a restrained and moderate general that he had arrived back in Washington, his book just published, The Uncertain Trumpet (“We have the ability to wage total war. We can trigger near total destruction. But can we defend Berlin—South Korea—Vietnam—Iran—Thailand—America?” said the dust jacket). He had been a convenient figure for Kennedy, as Kennedy was a convenient figure for him, each serving the other’s purpose. Kennedy, too, wanted to get away from the doctrine of massive retaliation. Kennedy wanted to rebuild the Joint Chiefs with younger men who were, if not directly loyal to him, at least cut more in his mold; Taylor was willing to do the same thing. (Taylor and McNamara were pushing for younger officers, switching the criterion for promotion, leaving busted careers in their wake. Men who one day had been too young for their next assignment would wake up and find themselves too old for it.) But now that he had made it back, Taylor faced the delicate job of balancing his loyalties to both the Administration and the uniform, a task for a man with a good political sense, which Taylor had. He was the kind of general that civilians liked, felt at ease with, felt they could trust. Civilians, looking at other generals, felt all they understood was their own problems; Taylor saw a wider periphery of interests, he understood what civilians wanted and why, and his career would be furthered by them. He was not blindly attached to his uniform; he was reasonable and above all civilized about things. Civilians, looking for allies, always liked him.

  Now he faced two interests which were by no means compatible: the Kennedy people, young, ambitious, aggressive, talked boldly about their anti-Communism. But that anti-Communism was not imbedded in them as a lifeblood, it was not their mission. They were willing to ride it out from time to time, but they were men essentially committed to a rational order. The military, in contrast, particularly the senior military, were very different. The Cold War was their mission, defense against the aggressor enemy; since they had to be prepared to die for their mission, they also had to believe in it. Since the Communists were the aggressor enemy, anti-Communism was the textbook of their life, and their political center was far to the right of the Kennedy political center. Success in the Kennedy Administration meant reading subtle changes in the world and the Administration’s reaction to them; bureaucratic success in the military meant getting along with your superiors and understanding their whims, and their whims were deep in the lifeblood of the Cold War. (Occasionally, however, a general like David Shoup would bemoan the extent to which anti-Communism had become part of American military doctrine—too much hating—and the attempt to create a countering ideology. Shoup did not like that, he did not believe in demonology. The job of the Marines, he said, was not to be anti-Communist, it was to wait until the President said “Saddle up and go,” and then to saddle up and go.) And then, of course, Taylor had to contend with an instinct (particularly among the Air Force and Navy people) to use force in any situation, and failing in the first dose of force, to use more force, then more force.

  At times these different pressures posed no problem. On the Bay of Pigs, Taylor had been a good critic of that particular disaster, and on the Kennedy attempts to limit nuclear testing and harness the arms race he was completely loyal to the Administration. He believed nuclear war was an irrational solution, and the sooner the nuclear race was turned around the better. But that had always been the Army’s position. Now, with the problems of failure on Vietnam closing in, the urgency of what to do next, he would be in a different spot. Vietnam was a reflection of his military strategy (however incomplete) at this point; it was an experiment in a new kind of limited war. But if the Taylor-Rostow strategy failed, then what? Other generals would take over who were not so civilized, not so committed to the Administration, not so appalled by the specter of nuclear weapons. The Air Force, for instance, believed its weapons, its bombs, its nukes could do it all, and it was always re
ady to go. Thus the Air Force by itself, and with its friends on the Hill (since, of the three services, the Air Force required the most hardware, the biggest contracts, the closest links with industry, it had the most connections on the Hill), moved the center of the debate over a few notches to the right, which led generals like Taylor to believe that when they gave in a little on the use of force, the important thing was not so much that they were acquiescing, but that they were holding the line against something worse, protecting us from the Air Force with its nukes and missiles.

  So if Vietnam collapsed, it would pose this particular problem of what to do next. If limited force had failed, would there be more pressure for greater force? Taylor had been able to try out his own concept of the limited commitment to stop the brush-fire war by putting Paul Harkins there, not because Harkins was the ablest general around, but because, far more important, he was Taylor’s man and Taylor could control him. Now, in the middle of the crisis, with the State people despairing about Diem and about the conduct of the war, Taylor wanted to hold the line, to keep up the appearances, to keep from failing at what they were trying. As the struggle continued he kept Krulak in line, he kept Harkins in line, and he slowed McNamara’s own tendency to swing over.