The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  When Mendenhall had finished, the President looked at both and said, “You two did visit the same country, didn’t you?” Well, said Krulak, it was easy to explain; he had been out in the countryside among the troops where the war was taking place, while Mendenhall had been among the students and the intellectuals. Whereupon Nolting challenged Mendenhall: everyone knew that Mendenhall was against Diem, and had been for several years. As for the paralysis in government now, we had had paralysis in government before, in 1961, and we had overcome that. We could overcome the problems if we put our minds to it, Nolting said, if we didn’t get caught in the side issues.

  Well, said McGeorge Bundy (who had become increasingly disenchanted with the entire situation, the messiness and self-defeating quality of the regime, an American-supported government turning American weapons on its own population), in 1961 the fear and paralysis had been caused by the Vietcong and we had overcome it by strengthening the war against them; now it was the government itself which was causing the fear and the paralysis, and it was a little difficult to strengthen a war against a government.

  John Mecklin spoke next. As a correspondent in Indochina during the French war he had lived through it all; he had started out trying to sell Diem both to the Americans and to the Vietnamese, and now he could no longer even sell the regime to himself. It was all finished as it stood, he said. It was time for the United States to put pressure on the regime to change. Since this might bring on a civil war, he recommended the possibility of sending in U.S. combat troops to fight the Vietcong. If Kattenburg’s earlier suggestion about getting out had been voicing the unthinkable, so was the idea of combat troops—after all, this whole mess was a result of what had been arranged precisely in order to prevent the need of combat troops.

  Now it was Rufus Phillips’ turn, and his briefing was doubly important because it was the first informed frontal attack upon the military reporting, and also because it was given by a man who had a particularly good reputation in Vietnam, Lansdale’s own chosen legatee. If Lansdale had been the main figure of the Good Guy American philosophy in the fifties, Phillips was very much in his image. Recruited off the Yale campus by the CIA, he had been a part of the early Lansdale group, and had been in charge of having Vietnamese astrologers predict dark days for the Vietminh and happy days for Diem. In early 1963, as his people in the Delta reported the breakdown there of the strategic hamlet program, Phillips had responded to their warnings, had visited the areas himself, and was horrified. Now, coming before the President, he was admitting the failures of his own program, in itself a remarkable moment in the American bureaucracy, a moment of intellectual honesty. He had known Diem and Nhu for ten years, he said, and they had gradually lost touch with the population and with reality. The Vietnamese now felt that their government had to change, and he agreed. As for General Krulak’s earlier statement that the political problems had not yet touched the Vietnamese officers, it was simply not true; but American officers were under direct orders not to talk to their Vietnamese counterparts about politics, and the Vietnamese knew this. So the testimony of American officers in the field about Vietnamese politics was bound to be limited. At this point Krulak interrupted him: the Americans in the field might not know about politics, but they knew whether or not the war was being won, and they said it was going well.

  Now Phillips made his direct attack on the military reporting. Yes, the war was going reasonably well in the areas north of Saigon, where there was little action. But in the Delta, where most of the fighting was taking place, it was going very badly. The Vietcong were taking over the Delta without a struggle; in the last few weeks, fifty hamlets had been overrun. What made this even worse, he said, was that the Buddhist crisis had not even reached the Delta yet. And, said Phillips, this was not the view just of his people, many Army officers felt the same way. In fact, Phillips had brought with him a report from the provincial adviser in Long An province, one of the most populated areas in the country. Phillips had stumbled on the report by accident: Earl Young, a civilian who was Phillips’ man there, had been reporting for some time that the Vietcong controlled 80 percent of this populous province. Young had told Phillips he was not alone in his pessimism; the provincial adviser (in this case an American major detailed to advising the province chief) agreed with him completely, and had in fact been reporting precisely this to MACV but had gotten no response from his superiors. The major had therefore turned over his reports to Earl Young, who turned them over to Rufus Phillips, who had supplemented his own impressions with a small but impressive example of field reporting by the military.

  So the battle raged. Krulak immediately jumped Phillips. Phillips was putting his judgment ahead of General Harkins’, a senior military official, a man of seasoned judgment who had more people working for him, more information at his disposal, and who knew how to evaluate military reports. He, Krulak, would take General Harkins over Phillips any time (the implication in his voice was that Phillips was very young, thirty-three years old, at best a captain, and captains should not challenge generals). With Krulak going after Phillips, Harriman went after Krulak: Harriman said he was not surprised that Krulak was taking Harkins’ side—indeed he would be upset if he did not. Harriman said that he had known Krulak for several years and had always known him to be wrong, and was sorry to say it, but he considered Krulak a damn fool. When this storm had passed, Phillips finished: he wanted to say that despite what Krulak felt, the war was not being won militarily, and it was going badly. And anyway, he emphasized, you could not talk about it being won militarily, it was above all a political war.

  With that, with the government as badly split as before, the meeting broke up, but the military estimates had been seriously punctured. In addition, in the turning around of Phillips, a bench mark had been passed. It was a symbol of Lansdale turning as well; the people who had invented Diem were now leading the assault against him. Too, it was a sign that the Good Guys, the Americans who thought there was a right way, a middle way of dealing with Vietnam if we had the right programs and did the right things, and who believed that the Vietnamese wanted us there, were beginning to despair. If they failed, and they were failing fast, desperate now to find, eight years later, some last-minute substitute for Diem, then there was a chance that American policy in Vietnam would be directed by people who felt we ought to be there whether the Vietnamese wanted us or not, whether we helped them more than we hurt them, that the answer lay not in the right people handling the right programs, but simply in superior force.

  If the military had had their estimates punctured by Phillips at the National Security Council meeting, then the MACV officials made sure that those who did the puncturing would live to regret it. None other than General Richard Stilwell would lead a subsequent investigation, which was designed not to find out whether or not the Phillips charges were true, but instead to find out how Phillips and Young had got hold of the Long An report. For a time there was serious talk at the highest levels of MACV of charging Phillips and Young with security violations; however, that idea was dropped after Ambassador Lodge defended them. But the major who had written the report was reprimanded, given a bad efficiency report and immediately transferred out of Long An to the least attractive post available, which happened to be a National Guard slot. The stakes were getting higher and the game was getting rougher.

  In addition, the Army was beginning to function more and more like a separate organism, responding to its institutional needs, priorities, vanities and careerism. Challenged by outsiders, by civilians, it responded by protecting its own senior officers.

  In August this reporter did a major survey of the deteriorating military situation in the Mekong Delta. I had been called by two friends who were senior advisers to Vietnamese divisions and who were appalled by the collapse of the ARVN and the appearance of formidable new Vietcong battalions sweeping almost without opposition throughout the Mekong Delta. My story was published and told of big new beefed-up battalions of 60
0 and 1,000 men, very well armed with captured American weapons. The article suggested that the war was being lost and that the high-level optimism about the Delta was comparable to the French optimism that preceded their debacle at Dienbienphu. The story staggered the President, who was an avid newspaper reader, and who took journalists seriously. He asked the military to comment on it, and word was sent through channels from Taylor to General Krulak to General Harkins that this was particularly important, that it was bad enough to be taking heat because of the Buddhist crisis, but if the President thought the war was going poorly as well, the whole game might be over. (The story in the New York Times was so similar to the briefing then being given at the Pentagon by Lieutenant Colonel John Vann that though Vann had been out of Vietnam for several months and had not talked to me, serious thought was given to court-martialing him.) The assignment was given not to MACV’s intelligence section, but to its most gifted general, Dick Stilwell, who thereupon, without consulting his top advisers in the Delta, prepared a massive file, filled with charts, graphs and statistics, which took the newspaper account apart word by word; each word received at least a paragraph. The Stilwell account found the journalistic account inaccurate, indeed “the picture is precisely the opposite,” he reported. The only problem, as the Pentagon Papers would later note, was that the newspaper account was right and the Stilwell-Krulak account was wrong. Sound misreporting did not impede the careers of either Stilwell or Krulak (additional stars would come their way, and Krulak would just miss out on being Commandant of the Marine Corps), but it did offer a fascinating insight into the way the military worked. Loyalty was not to the President of the United States, to truth or integrity, or even to subordinate officers risking their lives; loyalty was to uniform, and more specifically, to immediate superior and career. It was an insight into why the military in Saigon, despite all the contrary evidence in the field, despite the arrival of as bright an officer as Dick Stilwell, managed to retain their optimism. The Americans in Vietnam, long frustrated by the ineptitude of their ARVN counterparts, and by the fact that ineptitude guaranteed career advancement, had come up with a slogan to describe the ARVN promotion system: “Fuck up and move up.” They did not realize that by now the slogan applied to their own Army as well.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Krulak-Mendenhall trip had not really settled anything; it had simply proved to the President that his government was still seriously divided. The return of Phillips had convinced him, however, that the war was not going well, and that the military reporting was not to be trusted. Kennedy was by this time very frustrated: he told aides that he could not believe a word that the military was telling him, that he had to read the newspapers to find out what was going on; at the same time, the more he read the more he was reminded of the depth of the division in his Administration and the failure of his policy in Vietnam, and he would, in turn, rant against the reporters in Vietnam. By mid-September he had decided that the problem was not so much the question of information, whether or not the war was being won, as a question of slowly shifting policy and still trying to hold his government together.

  On September 17 McNamara asked to go to Vietnam on another trip, but Lodge and some of the other State Department people were strongly opposed to it. In the past McNamara’s trips had not been glowing successes; they had tended to emphasize the dominance of the military over the civilians and to equate statistical results with reality. In addition, the civilians, who normally liked McNamara, had found him surprisingly inflexible on Vietnam. But Kennedy insisted that he be allowed to go; indeed, there were those in the White House who suspected that the idea for the trip had originated with Kennedy. After some protests against the trip by Lodge (resulting in an announcement that McNamara was going to Saigon at Lodge’s request), McNamara and General Taylor left on September 23 for Saigon. One of the things they were to investigate was the possibility of cutting down some of the U.S. aid projects as a symbol of disenchantment with the Ngo family. Inadvertently some of these programs had already been cut off, by a bureaucratic fluke. Though some of the civilians, including Lodge, had argued for it, Kennedy had held the line; he had not been prepared to take this first step until he was more sure that the Vietnamese military was at least one step ahead of him and was ready to replace Diem. But in early September at one high-level meeting the principals had been talking about whether or not to cut off commodity aid, when David Bell, who was head of AID and who was not regularly a high-level player, said rather casually that there was no point in talking about cutting off commodity aid, he had already cut it off.

  “You’ve done what?” said a startled President of the United States.

  “Cut off commodity aid,” Bell answered.

  “Who the hell told you to do that?” asked the President, since this was no small action; it could easily bring down a government.

  “No one,” said Bell. “It’s an automatic policy. We do it whenever we have differences with a client government.”

  And so the President sat there shaking his head, looking at Bell and saying, “My God, do you know what you’ve done?” (There were those in the government who suspected, however, that Bell would not have moved without approval or encouragement from some superior at State.)

  Almost literally from the moment he arrived, McNamara found a new Saigon command; instead of the old unified Harkins-Nolting view of the war, he found Lodge and Harkins barely speaking to each other. In fact, as McNamara was descending from his plane Lodge assigned two staff members to block the general so that Lodge could greet him first, leaving an angry Harkins pushing at the human barrier, shouting, “Please, gentlemen, please let me through to the Secretary.”

  It was a fascinating trip; the military controlled the itinerary, but Lodge had McNamara as his house guest. It was there that Lodge worked to change McNamara’s view of the war, at breakfast time rushing in people from the provinces who were armed with pessimistic statistics. Then Lodge’s time would be up, and McNamara would go off on the prescribed Harkins-Taylor tour, all the young officers geared up long in advance, charts and optimism at the ready: Yes, sir, all programs are go, sir; we’re getting with the program, sir. The young officers briefed Taylor and McNamara, Harkins standing a few feet behind them, the smile on his face, all the curves were up.

  It went on like this for several days and finally they reached a province in the Delta where Rufus Phillips’ people had reported enormous Vietcong progress. A copy of the Phillips report had been made available to McNamara in the morning when the military briefing began. Taylor was standing there impressive, asking helpful leading questions: Major, we know what a good job you’re doing and that this situation is under control, and we wonder if you could tell us about it? . . . McNamara had tried to penetrate these briefings in the past without much success but this time he was prepared, he had read a pessimistic paper on this same province. So finally the entire civilian-military split seemed to have come down to one place, one war, two views of it. Had the major, McNamara asked, read the report of his civilian colleague in the Hamlet program? Yes, sir. Did the major agree with the civilian appraisal? Pause. Finally the officer said yes, he did. Why, then, asked McNamara, hadn’t he reported it himself? Because his civilian colleague reported it and because he himself had reported only the military situation as set by guidelines from MACV.

  At this point General Taylor looked at the officer very coldly and said that it appeared he had been falsifying reports. No, sir, said the young officer, my report was accurate as far as it went. With that they moved on to the next stop, but McNamara’s attitude had changed for the first time; his own doubts had grown, he had penetrated the military reporting.

  On the way back the two men, so different in their perceptions and loyalties, worked out their divergent views of Vietnam. Like much of what had come out in the past, and even more of what was to come in the future, two separate attitudes were contained in one report, badly bastardized. It reflected a trade between Mc
Namara and Taylor on a number of things: McNamara accepted Lodge’s estimates that we could not succeed with Diem, and got major new doubts about the regime and major new pressures against it into the report (“It is very fortunate for the country to have a man of the breadth and scope of Bob McNamara as Secretary of Defense,” said Lodge the day after McNamara left, a big grin on his face, having just swallowed that canary). Taylor held the line on the military estimates and optimism, so that the opening line of the report stated that the military program “has made great progress and continues to progress.” The programs were going very well, the shooting war was fine, 1,000 Americans would be out by Christmas, and the whole American commitment would be finished by the end of 1965. The report also, given the ever-increasing noises about withdrawal from Vietnam, reiterated the intention of the Defense Department to stay there:

  The security of South Vietnam remains vital to United States security. For this reason, we adhere to the overriding objective of denying this country to Communism and of suppressing the Vietcong insurgency as promptly as possible. (By suppressing the insurgency we mean reducing it to proportions manageable by the national security forces of the GVN [Government of (South) Vietnam], unassisted by the presence of U.S. military forces.) . . .

  Taylor and McNamara went on to say that they had found the government increasingly unpopular, although the Vietnamese military were “more hostile to the Vietcong than to the government.” The report said in a rather revealing reference to American policy: “Our policy is to seek to bring about the abandonment of Diem’s repression because of its effect on the popular will to resist.” (Repression for repression’s sake was permissible, but repression which hurt the war effort was regrettable.) It recommended keeping the commodity aid shut off, besides holding back on a number of other aid projects, including CIA money for Diem and Nhu’s private palace guard unless it was used to fight the Vietcong. “Correct” relations between the United States and Diem should be maintained, along with the search for contacts for what was termed “alternative leadership,” something Lodge badly wanted and was already gearing up to do. The request was typical of the policy and the frustrations and divisions and dishonesty of it all; it said in effect that the United States should look elsewhere for leadership and away from Diem even though the war was being won, and that the war was the only important thing. It was an assessment that the civilians would live to regret, since it would later appear that they had switched governments and helped topple a government which was still winning the war. They knew that this judgment was false, but they had never challenged it, because of their own previous wishful thinking, because of their inability to control their own bureaucracy, and because, above all, of a belief that telling the truth to the American people was unimportant. They—both Kennedys, Rusk, Lodge, Harriman, Hilsman, Trueheart, Forrestal—knew the war was being lost, but they never got it down on paper or into their own statements, or into their briefings with congressional leaders. A lie had become a truth, and the policy makers were trapped in it; their policy was a failure, and they could not admit it.