The Best and the Brightest (27 page)

“That’s an excellent point,” Acheson answered. “The French have been fighting that battle since World War II.” This was a reverse of his earlier position, which was that it was a stupid colonial war but there was no alternative to it. Thus the policies of the 1950s in Asia were poisoned.

Chapter Eight

The essence of good foreign policy is constant re-examination. The world changes, and both domestic perceptions of the world and domestic perceptions of national political possibilities change. It was one thing to base a policy in Southeast Asia on total anti-Communism in the early 1950s when the Korean War was being fought and when the French Indochina war was still at its height, when there was, on the surface at least, some evidence of a Communist monolith, and when the United States at home was becoming locked into the harshest of the McCarthy tensions. But it was another thing to accept these policies quite so casually in 1961 (although McCarthy was gone and the atmosphere in which the policies had been set had changed, the policies remained much the same), when both the world and the United States were very different. By 1961 the schism in the Communist world was clearly apparent: Khrushchev had removed his technicians and engineers from China.

It was seven years since the United States Senate had censured McCarthy. Not only was he gone but many of his colleagues of that era, Kem, Knowland, Jenner, McCarran—his fellow travelers all—were gone too, and the new Republicans who entered the Senate in the late fifties and early sixties would tend to be far more moderate and modern men. But the Kennedy Administration did not re-evaluate any of the Eisenhower conceptions in Asia (conceptions which Dulles had tailored carefully to the disposition of the McCarthy group in the Senate); if anything, the Kennedy people would set out to upgrade and modernize the means of carrying out those policies. Later, as their policies floundered in Vietnam, they would lash out in frustration at their own personnel there, at the reporters, at the incompetence of the client government. What they did not realize was that the problem was not just American personnel, which was often incompetent, nor the governmental reporting, which was highly dishonest, nor the client government, which was just as bad as its worst critics claimed—the real problem was the failure to re-examine the assumptions of the era, particularly in Southeast Asia. There was no real attempt, when the new Administration came in, to analyze Ho Chi Minh’s position in terms of the Vietnamese people and in terms of the larger Communist world, to establish what Diem represented, to determine whether the domino theory was in fact valid. Each time the question of the domino theory was sent to intelligence experts for evaluation, they would send back answers which reflected their doubts about its validity, but the highest level of government left the domino theory alone. It was as if, by questioning it, they might have revealed its emptiness, and would then have been forced to act on their new discovery. In fact, the President’s own public statements on Laos and on Vietnam, right through to the time of the assassination, reflected if not his endorsement of the domino theory, then his belief that he could not yet challenge it, and by his failure to challenge it, the necessity to go along with it.

So it was not surprising that the Administration’s attitude toward Southeast Asia in general and Vietnam in particular remained being activist, aggressive, hard-line anti-Communism. If the Eisenhower Administration followed an anti-Communism dependent on the nuclear threat and bombastic words, the Kennedy Administration—liberal, modern, lacking above all in self-doubt, with a high proportion of academics—would be pragmatic and assertive in its anti-Communism. At almost the same moment that the Kennedy Administration was coming into office, Khrushchev had given a major speech giving legitimacy to wars of national liberation. The Kennedy Administration immediately interpreted this as a challenge (years later very high Soviet officials would tell their counterparts in the Kennedy Administration that it was all a mistake, the speech had been aimed not at the Americans, but at the Chinese), and suddenly the stopping of guerrilla warfare became a great fad. High officials were inveighed to study Mao and Lin Piao. The President’s personal interest in fighting guerrillas was well publicized, and the reading and writing of books on antiguerrilla warfare was encouraged (“I urge all officers and men of the Marine Corps to read and digest this fine work . . .” he wrote in the introduction to a particularly mediocre collection of articles on the subject).

The fascination with guerrilla warfare reflected the men and the era: aggressive, self-confident men ready to play their role, believing in themselves, in their careers, in their right to make decisions here and overseas, supremely confident in what they represented in terms of excellence. The nation was still locked in an endless struggle with the Communists: Europe was stabilized, and there would be no border-crossing wars after Korea, so the new theater of activity would have to be guerrilla warfare. Everyone joined in. Robert Kennedy, afraid that America was growing soft, afraid that we did not have ideas that caught the imagination of the young of the world, was one of the leaders, but others were equally part of the faddism. General Maxwell Taylor, the President’s military adviser, was a regular member of the counterinsurgency meetings and was regarded with some awe whenever he spoke, having once parachuted into France. Roger Hilsman’s fighting behind the lines in Burma received no small amount of attention, and it was known that Kennedy had questioned him at length about his days as a guerrilla (both of them oblivious to the fact that Hilsman had been a commando, not a guerrilla. He had not been part of any indigenous political organization).

A remarkable hubris permeated this entire time. Nine years earlier Denis Brogan had written: “Probably the only people who have the historical sense of inevitable victory are the Americans.” Never had that statement seemed more true; the Kennedy group regarded the Eisenhower people as having shrunk from the challenge set before them. Walt Rostow, Bundy’s deputy, thought the old Administration had overlooked the possibilities in the underdeveloped world, the rich potential for conflict and thus a rich potential for victory. It was not surprising, for the Eisenhower people were men of the past who had never been too strong on ideas; one could not imagine Sherman Adams inspiring the youth of Indonesia or even being concerned about it. But this new Administration understood ideas and understood the historic link-up between our traditions and those in the underdeveloped world; we too were heirs to a great revolution, we too had fought a colonial power. Were we much richer than they, and more technological? No problem, no gap in outlook, we would use our technology
for
them. Common cause with transistors (inherent in all this was the assumption that the more we gave them of our technology, the less they would notice the gap between their life style and ours). Rostow in particular was fascinated by the possibility of television sets in the thatch hutches of the world, believing that somehow this could be the breakthrough. This did not mean that we did not understand the hard poisonous core of the enemy, that we were too weak and democratic to combat it. “The scavengers of revolution” Rostow called those guerrilla leaders, like Ho and Che, whom he did not approve of.

All of this helped send the Kennedy Administration into dizzying heights of antiguerrilla activity and discussion; instead of looking behind them, the Kennedy people were looking ahead, ready for a new and more subtle kind of conflict. The other side, Rostow’s scavengers of revolution, would soon be met by the new American breed, a romantic group indeed, the U.S. Army Special Forces. They were all uncommon men, extraordinary physical specimens and intellectual Ph.D.s swinging from trees, speaking Russian and Chinese, eating snake meat and other fauna at night, springing counterambushes on unwary Asian ambushers who had read Mao and Giap, but not Hilsman and Rostow. It was all going to be very exciting, and even better, great gains would be made at little cost.

In October 1961 the entire White House press corps was transported to Fort Bragg to watch a special demonstration put on by Kennedy’s favored Special Forces (after his death the special warfare school would become the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School), and it turned into a real whiz-bang day. There were ambushes, counterambushes and demonstrations in snake-meat eating, all topped off by a Buck Rogers show: a soldier with a rocket on his back who flew over water to land on the other side. It was quite a show, and it was only as they were leaving Fort Bragg that Francis Lara, the Agence France-Presse correspondent who had covered the Indochina war, sidled over to his friend Tom Wicker of the
New York Times.
“All of this looks very impressive, doesn’t it?” he said. Wicker allowed as how it did. “Funny,” Lara said, “none of it worked for us when we tried it in 1951.”

The first warning on Vietnam had been sounded in January 1961, by one of the most unusual members of the United States government. It was as if Brigadier General Edward Lansdale had been invented with the Kennedy Administration in mind. He was a former advertising man, a former Air Force officer, a CIA agent now, a man deeply interested in doing things in Asia the right way, the modern way. He had risen to fame within the government as an antibureaucratic figure of no small dimension, and State, Defense and the CIA were well stocked with his enemies. In the early fifties he had helped Ramón Magsaysay defeat the Huk rebellion in the Philippines, and had become the prototype of the Good American overseas as opposed to the Bad American; he was against big bumbling U.S. government programs run by insensitive, boastful, bureaucratic, materialistic racists, and for small indigenous programs run by folksy, modest American country boys who knew the local mores, culture and language. He was the Good American because in part his own experience had convinced him that Americans were, in fact, good, and that the American experience and American ideals were valid elsewhere. He would write of the early Philippine experience:

One day, while driving on a back road in Pampanga province, I came upon a political meeting in a town plaza. A Huk political officer was haranguing the crowd, enumerating their troubles with crops, debts, and share in life, blaming all ills on “American imperialism.” Impetuously, I got out of the jeep from where I had parked it at the edge of the crowd, climbed up on its hood, and when the speaker had paused for breath I shouted, “What’s the matter? Didn’t you ever have an American friend?” The startled crowd turned around and saw an American in uniform standing up on his jeep. I had a flash of sobering second thoughts. I kicked myself mentally for giving in to such an impulse among hundreds of people living in hostile territory. But the people immediately put me at ease, they grinned and called hello. The speaker and many of the townspeople clustered around me, naming Americans they had known and liked and asking if I was acquainted with them. I teased them with the reminder that these folks they had known were the “American imperialists” they had been denouncing. They assured me that not a single one of them was. It was a long time before I could get away from the gossipy friendliness.

The Philippine experiment had worked and a national best seller had been written about him called
The Ugly American;
Colonel Lansdale was thinly disguised as Colonel Hillandale. (If his role in
The Ugly American
was to show how to be a Good American, some people thought he starred involuntarily in another and far more chilling book of the era, Graham Greene’s
The Quiet American,
in which this new Good American, a nice idealistic young man anxious to do good in an older society to save that society from Communism in spite of itself, is a well-intentioned but singularly dangerous man.) Lansdale was the classic Good Guy, modern, just what Kennedy was looking for. He had, what better mark of merit, been languishing out of the action during the latter years of the Eisenhower Administration. He was the median man who understood the new kind of war, and had helped defeat the Communists in a similar (if far different and simpler and far more embryonic) insurgency in the Philippines. He embodied what America had turned into more than anyone realized: the corrosion of the traditional anticolonial instinct had become hard-line anti-Communism. He was the Cold War version of the Good Guy, the American who did understand the local ambience and the local nationalism. For he was a CIA agent, and not just an intelligence officer, he was an operational functional man, a man of programs and a man who was there to manipulate. The real question for men like Lansdale, who allegedly knew and loved Asians, was no longer the pure question of what was good for the local people, but what was good for the United States of America and perhaps acceptable locally. The Asians could have nationalism, but nationalism on
our
terms: nationalism without revolution, or revolution which we would run for them—revolution, it turned out, without revolution.

His view of the recent history of Vietnam was comforting, and managed to minimize the role of the Vietminh and the effect of a prolonged war of independence. The Vietminh had less popular support than they imagined; the population had stayed away from both sides, and the French at the end were pictured as fighting for Vietnamese independence:

Vietnamese told me of their history. In brief, these high-spirited people had been under Chinese rule for a thousand years and under French rule for a hundred years, with nearly every one of those years marked by struggles for independence. At the end of World War II, the Vietnamese had declared their independence from the feeble hold of Vichy French administrators. The Communists under Ho Chi Minh were participants and set about eliminating their political rivals in a bloodbath which the survivors never forgot nor forgave, even though the world at large remained ignorant of it. The Communists held the power when the French Army returned in 1946. Fighting broke out between the Vietnamese and the French, and Ho took his forces to the hills to enter into “protracted conflict” with the French, who captured and held the cities and towns.