The Best and the Brightest (29 page)

So, after both men had been approved for their respective posts, Nolting for Saigon, Young for Bangkok, Bowles maneuvered to have them switched. He talked with Young about it and found him less than eager to accept the proposition because Young did not want to knock Nolting out of his assigned post, but more important, because of reservations he had about working with the Ngo family. He told Bowles he wanted to sleep on it.

Young thought long and hard that night about all the problems. Since the Vietnamese President was an old friend, Young knew a good deal about Diem’s abilities and liabilities, and he was also a reluctant authority on Mr. and Mrs. Nhu. He thought they were nothing less than poison, and that nothing could be accomplished in Vietnam as long as they were part of the government. They would have to be split and split quickly from Diem if there were to be any chance of success. One could not hope to be there and work against the Nhus if they were still in the country; each night they would destroy each day’s work. The new ambassador would have to establish a relationship of total frankness with Diem, a relationship based totally on mutual professional needs, and not marked by the personal ups and downs of the past. The next day Young went to Bowles and said that he was willing to give it a try. Soon there was a phone call from Lansdale representing Gilpatric saying that Young was to rush over to meetings of the Vietnam Task Force. Young was puzzled: Why was he needed? “Don’t you know?” Lansdale asked. “The President’s agreed for you to go to Saigon.” So it appeared to go through, and then once again it was stopped, the protocol problems were too complicated and in addition, Nolting had reacted badly, finding the switch insulting, which in a way it was. So Ken Young went to Thailand, where he performed very well under far less pressure than if he had been in Vietnam. From Bangkok he watched Saigon with mounting horror as it became clear from the start that all demands for reform would be dropped and the Nhus would become the dominant figures in the government. And Fritz Nolting in Saigon would find himself under such tension that it finally drove him not just from Vietnam but from the foreign service as well.

Nolting was, above all, a man of the surface. If Diem could have designed an ambassador for his country and his regime, he would have come up with Fritz Nolting. He was a fine example of the foreign service officer who commits himself only to the upper level of the host government and the society, not to the country itself. If you get along with the government and pass on its version of reality, then you are doing your job. It was not his job to ask questions; it was his job to get things done. There was no doubt that Nolting believed in what he was doing and saying. He had looked and listened, and had decided that Diem was the best anti-Communist around (there was, of course, no one else; Diem had systematically removed all other opposition—Communist, neutralist, anti-Communist). People who worried about the regime’s lack of appeal, of the growing isolation of the regime, were, in his words, taking their eyes off the ball. Stopping Communism was having your eyes on the ball. If civilians in Saigon discussed growing political resentment and repression he would assure all, including Washington, that he knew nothing of it, which was true, of course; no Vietnamese other than the family trusted him. He had forbidden members of the embassy staff to talk to any Vietnamese dissidents; if one did not hear it, it did not exist; if one did not see it, it never happened.

Duty instead of intelligence motivated Nolting. He was there to hold the line, not to question it. His policy was to build credit with Diem by agreeing to everything Diem wanted, hoping that one day he could cash in the due bills. It necessitated reassuring Diem constantly, by always giving in, always nodding affirmatively. There was a curious irony in this, because Americans always warned that Asians tended to tell you what you wanted to hear; now we had an American ambassador who told Asians what
they
wanted to hear. But the special significance of Fritz Nolting was that in the very choice of him, and his decision that yes, we could make it with Diem, we were binding ourselves into an old and dying commitment, without really coming to terms with what it meant.

The tightening of the bind of the commitment would continue shortly. In late April 1961 Kennedy, deciding against increasing the American mission substantially, thought he would boost Diem’s confidence by intangible instead of tangible aid. The means would be the Vice-President of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, then somewhat underemployed. Though Johnson was scheduled to visit a number of Asian countries, the key stop would be Vietnam. Curiously enough, it was not a stop that the Vice-President particularly wanted to make. Just as a year later he would balk when the President asked him to make a symbolic trip to Berlin—feeling somehow that he was being used, and that his career (and possibly his life) might be damaged—Johnson was so unenthusiastic about going to Saigon that Kennedy had to coax him into it. “Don’t worry, Lyndon,” he said. “If anything happens to you, Sam Rayburn and I will give you the biggest funeral Austin, Texas, ever saw.”

The trip came nonetheless at an opportune time for Johnson, who was at the lowest point in his career, being neither a Kennedy political insider nor a Kennedy intellectual. To intimates he would occasionally talk about how his chauffeur had advised him not to leave the Senate to become Vice-President, muttering that he wished he had had that chauffeur with him in Los Angeles when Kennedy made the offer. With others, of course, he went to great pains to show that he was deeply involved in the inner decisions of the Administration, that he was the real insider. One day in early 1961 Russell Baker, then a Hill reporter for the
New York Times,
who knew Johnson well, had been coming out of the Senate when he was literally grabbed by Johnson (
“You,
I’ve been looking for
you”
) and pulled into his office. Baker then listened to an hour-and-a-half harangue about Washington, about how busy Lyndon Johnson was, how well things were going. There were these rumors going around that he wasn’t on the inside; well, Jackie had said to him just the other night at dinner as she put her hand on his, “Lyndon, you won’t desert us, will you?” They wanted him. It was pure Johnson, rich and larger than life, made more wonderful by the fact that if Baker did not believe it all, at least for the moment Johnson did. And in the middle of it, after some forty minutes, Baker noticed Johnson scribble something on a piece of paper; then he pushed a buzzer. A secretary came in, took the paper, disappeared and returned a few minutes later, handing the paper back to Johnson. He looked at it and crumpled it. Then the harangue continued for another fifty minutes. Finally, exhausted by this performance, Baker left and on the way he passed a friend named David Barnett, also a journalist. They nodded and went their separate ways, and the next day when Barnett ran into Baker, he asked whether Baker knew what Johnson had written on that slip of paper. No, Baker admitted, he did not know. “ 'Who is this I’m talking to?’ ” said Barnett.

Now, on the trip all that energy with which he had overwhelmed Washington in his earlier capacity as Senate Majority Leader, the most influential Democrat in Washington, burst loose. He was away from Washington, he had something to do, barnstorming, finding that all people were alike, that he could reach out by being with them, hunkering down with them, discovering what goals they had in common (eradication of disease, food for all, access to electric power). There he was, campaigning among the villagers, the more rural the better, riding in bullock carts, inviting a Pakistani camel driver to the United States. Johnson loved it all (“There is no doubt the villagers liked it,” wrote John Kenneth Galbraith, recently appointed ambassador to India, “and their smiles will show in the photographs”).

As a gesture of the President’s concern, Johnson had brought with him Kennedy’s sister and brother-in-law, Jean and Stephen Smith. Being a good campaigner, Lyndon did not neglect to show their symbolic value of traditional American concern for Asians. At every stop they were introduced, their importance heralded, their own positions magnified with typical Johnsonian exaggeration: Jean Smith, who started out being “the President’s lovely little sister” soon became his “tiny little baby sister,” and then his “itsy-bitsy little baby sister.” And Steve Smith, perhaps the only member of the family who was
not
in the government, was introduced as “the President’s brother-in-law, one of the closest members of his family,” then as “a State Department official,” then as “an important State Department official,” and finally as “a man who held one of the most important and most sensitive jobs in the State Department.”

Johnson had been told to inquire in Vietnam whether Diem wanted troops, but it was not a particularly meaningful query; neither State nor Defense had given much thought to the question of sending troops to Vietnam other than as a symbol, the way American troops stood in West Berlin as a symbol of American intent; these would, if they were accepted, be troops to stand and be seen rather than fight. By their presence they would show the Communists that America was determined to resist; this would give the Communists something to think about. If that did not work there would be other gestures, gestures as much to the American people as to the Communists. Johnson met with Diem and found that Diem was in no rush to have Caucasian troops on his soil. Diem knew, first, that his people would resent seeing any successor to the French there and that it might be counterproductive, and second, that it would be a sign of
personal
weakness as far as the population was concerned if he accepted American troops too readily. He was already too dependent on the Americans as it was.

Johnson was impressed by Diem; yet the entire episode became an example of the gamesmanship of the period. In his final report to the President, Johnson wrote that Diem “is a complex figure beset by many problems. He has admirable qualities, but he is remote from the people, is surrounded by persons less admirable than he . . .” All in all it was a reasonably fair analysis, particularly for that time, when no one tied the problems Diem faced to the problems created by the French Indochina war. But if that was Johnson’s private view (which was not much different from what American reporters were writing at the time), what he was saying in public was quite different. In public Diem was hailed as “the Winston Churchill of Southeast Asia.” It was a comparison which boggled the mind of everyone except members of the Ngo family, who found it only fitting and proper. On the next leg of the trip Stan Karnow, who was then working for the
Saturday Evening Post,
asked Johnson if he really believed that about Diem. “Shit, man,” Johnson answered, “he’s the only boy we got out there.” (Later there would be some criticism in the Eastern press of his flamboyance in general and his lauding of Diem in particular, the impression that once again the Texas cowboy had overdone it in his exuberance, that he had, unlike the Kennedys, no subtlety, that he did not know foreign affairs. Privately Johnson was quite bitter about that, feeling that he had acted and spouted off under orders, and he would tell aides that he was angry about the charges that he had cut the cards. “Hell,” he said, explaining that he was under orders, “they don’t even know I took a marked deck out there with me.”)

Johnson reported to the President that Communism must be and could be stopped in Southeast Asia (“The battle against Communism must be joined in Southeast Asia with strength and determination to achieve success there”) and that even Vietnam could be saved (“if we move quickly and wisely. We must have a coordination of purpose in our country team, diplomatic and military. The most important thing is imaginative, creative American management of our military aid program”). It was a fine example of the hardening American view of the time, looking at Vietnam through the prism of American experience, American needs and American capacities. American purpose with
Americans
doing the right things could affect the destinies of these people. The Vietnamese were secondary, a small and unimportant people waiting to be told what to do by wiser, more subtle foreigners. If it was one more example of the can-do syndrome, it was similarly to stand as an example of the dangers of the game of commitment. Kennedy had sent Johnson to Vietnam as a sign of good will, as a means of reassuring a weak and unsatisfactory government of his commitment; the lasting effect, however, was not on the client state but on the proprietor, and in this case, most importantly, on the messenger himself, Lyndon Johnson;
he
had given
our
word. It not only committed the Kennedy Administration more deeply to Diem and Vietnam, attached Washington a little more firmly to the tar baby of Saigon, escalated the rhetoric, but it committed the person of Lyndon Johnson. To him, a man’s word was important. He himself was now committed both to the war and to Diem personally.

There was a special irony to the game of commitment as it was played with South Vietnam, great verbal reassurance in lieu of real military support, for that was exactly how South Vietnam had been created, an attempt to strengthen a military-political position on the cheap. Instead of intervening directly in the French Indochina war, the United States had decided that the benefits were not worth the risks; then, later, after the Geneva Agreement in 1954, the United States had tried to get the same end result, an anti-Communist nation on the border of Asian Communism, again with others doing the real work for us.

The Americans who were wary of the French colonial war had seen their reservations pushed aside by the fall of China in 1949 and the coming of increased domestic political pressures against any similar signs of weakness. Gradually the war had in our eyes gone from being a colonial war, to a war fought by the West against international Communism. At the same time the Americans began to underwrite it financially in 1950. But this brought little change. The Vietminh were scarcely affected by Washington’s will and dollars, and by 1954 the Americans were more committed to the cause in Indochina than an exhausted France. At that time the question arose of whether to intervene on behalf of the French—only American intervention could keep the French in. President Eisenhower decided against it, saying in effect that Vietnam was not worth the military commitment. The creation of South Vietnam, a fragile country in which few had any real hopes, followed Geneva, more as an afterthought than anything else.