The Best and the Brightest (20 page)

The very organization of the Department in those days was the basic problem for the Asian officers. Asia was not a separate area; instead the colonies were handled through the European nations, and concurrent jurisdiction was required for policy changes. That meant that on any serious question involving a territory supposedly emerging from colonialism, both the European and Asian divisions had to agree before the question could go to a higher official. Effectively this meant that the French people would concur with the French policy of returning to Indochina, the Asian people would oppose it vigorously and the question would go to the next level, where officials would bounce it back down, suggesting that everyone get together on this. The result, of course, was that this favored the status quo, and the European division. A neutral policy was no policy: the French would do as they pleased. They were important, Asians were not. France was weak, its pride hurt; it had to be coddled. American policy in Indochina would begin, rooted not so much in anti-Communism—that was secondary—as in indifference. John Carter Vincent, then Director of Far Eastern Affairs (comparable to the later Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs), would recall fighting for a different policy, warning what so indifferent an attitude would mean in the long run, and being told by George Kennan: “John Carter, your views on Asian policy are quite sound from the traditional U.S. standpoint, but the immediate problem is to maintain the morale of Europe and its will to resist the Communist challenge.”

The U.S. government knew what was going to happen in Vietnam, but committed to its European allies, it could not or would not use any leverage to change the course. The division in the government between its instincts for global power and its brain—a split which would haunt us right through 1965—was spelled out in June 1945 when Colonel Stimson asked the State Department to prepare a paper on the future of Asia. The paper clearly reflected the split between the European peoples and the Asian peoples (“The United States government may properly continue to state the political principle which it has frequently announced, that dependent peoples should be given the opportunity, if necessary after an adequate period of preparation, to achieve an increased measure of self-government, but it should avoid any course of action which would seriously impair the unity of the major United Nations . . .”). The paper then forecast quite accurately that Vietnamese political aspirations and consciousness, which had been increasing sharply in the nineteen-thirties and were more heightened than ever, would lead the Vietnamese to fight the French, and that the French would have “serious difficulty in overcoming this opposition and re-establishing French control.” Knowing this, the U.S. government did nothing; it already feared French weakness in Europe and it was not about to pressure a weak and proud ally.

The intelligence people at State were not the only ones who knew the French would have trouble. In Vietnam, General Jacques Philippe Leclerc, De Gaulle’s favorite general, landed to take charge of French forces. After a tour of the country he was fully aware of the political-military problems that lay ahead. Turning to his political adviser, Paul Mus, he said, “It would take five hundred thousand men to do it, and even then, it could not be done.”

In France no one listened to either Leclerc or Mus, and in Washington no one listened to the young American political officers warning of the coming struggle. The idea of Asian rebels standing up to a powerful Western army was preposterous at the time. No one had yet heard of political war, of Mao’s concept of fish swimming in the ocean of the people, of Asian guerrillas giving the European country the cities and strangling them by holding the countryside; of an army losing battle after battle but winning the people and thus the war. Instead the important thing in Washington was to strengthen France, and in Paris the important thing was to regain France’s tarnished greatness. One did not restore greatness by giving in to Asian bandits. One restored greatness by force. And so in 1945 and 1946 it became increasingly clear that negotiations between France and the Vietminh would fail; France was too proud to deal with these little yellow men. The Asian-oriented officers in the State Department desperately pleaded with their superiors to pressure France to have real negotiations, to give the Vietnamese some sort of independence, warning that war was on its way and that it would do no one any good, least of all France. These pleas evoked much condescension among the European experts, who scorned this emotionalism, this panic. When Moffatt warned of the rising tide of anger and resentment in Vietnam, of the willingness and capacity of the Vietminh to fight, he was told by his colleagues and superiors not to be so emotional. This talk about nationalism was all Japanese propaganda, he was told; they had heard it before, they knew what the Japanese had been up to out there, trying to stir up these people. It would all pass. The Vietnamese wanted it the old way, they knew their limitations. And when Moffatt and his aides continued to argue and fight, he was told that it might not be a bad idea for certain Americans who had spent a few weeks in Asia to spend a little time with some old-timers out there, some Frenchmen who had been there all their lives and
knew
these people. Charlton Ogburn, one of Moffatt’s field people, would also report on the growing pressure for independence, of the need to pressure the French to come to terms with it, and would be told by the French desk that he listened too much to the pitter-patter of naked little brown feet.

Again and again it was the same thing, and men like Moffatt and Ogburn were told that they had to be serious about these things. First things first. They had to see the world in perspective and not become emotional. And so their efforts had precious little effect. Occasionally a cable would go out to Paris calling for the American ambassador to pressure the French to do something about negotiations, but even then they knew it was toned down by Ambassador Caffery. It was all becoming hopeless, they thought, as 1946 passed and the tensions mounted on both sides. While traveling in Indochina in December, Moffatt sensed the desperation of the Vietnamese, saw that no one was talking to anyone any more and that war was imminent. He cabled Washington, describing the explosive feeling in Vietnam and offering his good offices as a negotiator to serve between the French and the Vietminh. The French immediately turned down the offer. Before the week was out, fighting started. The war was on, and though the Americans began by standing on the sidelines, neutral but somewhat sympathetic to the Vietminh but being realistic about Europe, they would soon find themselves slowly drawn into the conflict, first to support the French, eventually to replace them. But the policy began in indifference, and even in the early years Lauriston Sharpe, a Cornell anthropologist who had served in the area during the war and who remained to work for the State Department, would complain bitterly about the lack of American leadership, about the vacuum which the United States had helped create. One telegram from the United States, he told Ogburn, and it could all have been avoided, all this bloodshed. If in March 1946, when the French had signed a preliminary accord with the Vietminh recognizing them as a legitimate authority—an agreement from which they quickly reneged—if then the United States had been wise enough to send a telegram congratulating Paris on its forward-looking leadership and announcing that the United States was sending a minister to Hanoi, all this could have been avoided, all the heartache erased. Perhaps that was too strong, one telegram would have meant little, but the truth was that during the crucial months and years, the U.S. policy, despite all its commitments to freedom, independence and anticolonialism, had permitted an ally to start a bitter and foolish colonial war. Without raising a finger or sending any real telegrams.

Chapter Six

In Asia, the first confrontation would take place over Laos. Even before Kennedy took office he had met with President Eisenhower, whose proudest boast for his term of office would be that no shooting war had started during his two-term Presidency; and that man of peace had shocked Kennedy by saying that it looked like we might have to go to war over Laos. It was the day before the Kennedy inauguration, and each man had been surrounded by members of his team, Kennedy guided through the rituals by Clark Clifford, the skilled Democratic link to the past who had handled Kennedy’s part of the transition period. It was a somber meeting. The great crisis, Eisenhower said, was in Southeast Asia, Laos was the key to it. If we let Laos fall, we have to write off the whole area. We must not, Eisenhower said with considerable emotion, permit a Communist takeover. We should get the South-East Asia Treaty Organization or perhaps the International Control Commission for Laos to help us defend the freedom of the country. We should get allies, perhaps the British, but failing that, we must do it unilaterally, a last desperate measure if necessary, he said. Both his outgoing secretaries, Christian Herter at State and Thomas Gates at Defense, supported this intervention. Kennedy asked quietly how long it would take to get troops into Laos. Gates said twelve to seventeen days, less time if they were already in the Pacific. It was not an encouraging answer. Kennedy left the meeting profoundly shaken; the old President, who had come to symbolize peace, was now offering his young successor a war in Southeast Asia over Laos, and was of course offering his support from the farm in Gettysburg. But go to war over Laos? This from Eisenhower, the fumbling, placid man whose lack of will and lack of national purpose the Democrats and Kennedy had just finished decrying.

At that point Laos seemed a dubious proposition; if ever anything was an invention of the Cold War and its crisis psychology, it was the illusion of Laos. It was a landlocked country, a part of the Indochina nation, and the Laotians, a peaceful people living on the China border, had managed to participate as little as possible in the French Indochina war. Of the Indochinese peoples it was the Vietnamese and particularly the North Vietnamese who were considered warriors, but Dulles had decided to turn Laos into what he called “a bastion of the free world.” It was the least likely bastion imaginable; it seemed like a country created by Peter Ustinov for one of his plays. The best writing about its military and political turmoil was found not on the front pages of the great newspapers, but rather in the satire of Russell Baker and Art Buchwald. Its people were sleepy, unwarlike, uninterested in the great issues of ideology; yet unlikely or not, it bore the imprimatur of American foreign policy of that era: the search for an Asian leader who told us what we wanted to hear, the creation of an army in our image, the injection of Cold War competition rather than an attempt to reduce tension and concentrate on legitimate local grievances or an attempt to identify with nationalist stirrings, no matter how faint. Since there was neither a hot nor a cold war in Laos, the problem fell between State and Defense—the very small war, semi-covert—and thus it was a CIA show, the country perilously close to being a CIA colony (in the sense that the local airline was run by the CIA, and a good many of the bureaucratic jobs were financed by the CIA).

Our man there, so to speak, was a general named Phoumi Nosavan, a right-wing strong man, to use the phrase of that era, but more of a comic-strip figure. Meeting him in Washington for the first time, Kennedy said, “If that’s our strong man, we’re in trouble.” On a more practical level, he found Phoumi so small that he, assuming that generals are bigger than privates, called for an immediate check on weapons carried by Laotians, knowing instantly that the basic American infantry weapon, the M-1, was too large for them. Since 1958, Phoumi had lived well off the Cold War, like many a strong man, but there were additional benefits to being a Laotian military leader: he was also in the opium trade, from which he profited considerably. He had an army handsomely paid, but worthless in battle. “Your chief of staff couldn’t lead a platoon around a corner to buy a newspaper,” the American ambassador, Winthrop Brown, once told him. “I know,” Phoumi answered, “but he’s loyal.” When once, by mistake and by lack of opposition, his troops captured Vientiane, the Laotian capital, Phoumi refused to go there for the swearing in of his government because his soothsayer had warned that he would die a violent death.

While American policy might have worked to diminish international tensions, and indeed the very importance of Laos, it had done quite the opposite. During the Dulles years, when neutralism was considered somewhat sinful, the Americans had deliberately sabotaged indigenous Laotian attempts, led by their ruler, Prince Souvanna Phouma, at neutralism and a coalition government between the various factions. Graham Parsons, ambassador to Laos during the latter Dulles years, when American ambassadors in Asia were particularly rigid in their anti-Communism, later testified before a congressional committee: “I struggled for sixteen months to prevent a coalition.” With our money, our CIA men and our control of the Royal Laotian Army, we had in fact systematically destroyed the neutralist government of Souvanna, eventually forcing the neutralists to the side of the Communist Pathet Lao (though in 1962 we would spend millions and millions of dollars to re-create the very neutralist government we had toppled). One month before Kennedy entered office in 1961 Souvanna had fled to Thailand, and Kong Le, the military leader of the neutralist forces who wanted above all to be left alone, had joined the Pathet Lao to fight against General Phoumi’s army. In the next two months, skirmishes took place (the Laotian civil war, which flared up periodically, was distinguished by considerable journalistic coverage, troops moving through on sweeps, maps on the front pages of American newspapers, and the fact that there were almost never any casualties). When the two sides finally met in early February on the strategically important Plain of Jars, General Phoumi’s army, better equipped, better paid, predictably broke and ran. As they ran, the Kennedy Administration had its first Asian crisis.