The Best and the Brightest (36 page)

“Well, that may be true elsewhere in the world, Walt,” answered Ellsberg, “but there are very few countries in the world where the bright young officer class has the unique distinction of having fought against its own country’s independence and alongside the colonial army.”

To the demands by the Joint Chiefs had been added a new pressure for more troops, this time from the South Vietnamese, who had been growing ever more nervous by the fall of 1961, and who also sensed a chance to sink the hook of commitment deeper into the Americans. A year earlier Diem had not even deigned to recognize the Vietcong as a military force. They were bandits and outlaws (the same words Chiang Kai-shek had used to describe the Red Chinese armies, and for the same reasons of vanity and of wanting to have unchallenged legitimacy). As late as May 1961 he had told Johnson he did not want American troops, but by September, as the Vietcong muscle became more obvious, Diem had called in Ambassador Nolting and asked for a bilateral defense treaty, since he felt that SEATO was not an adequate umbrella; he doubted British and French willingness to come to his aid.

Although the question of Laos’ neutrality was still being discussed in Geneva, Diem was, significantly, already using it as a weapon against the Americans. He claimed that a neutral Laos would expose him to greater enemy infiltration (which was not really true; the enemy could infiltrate at will, and if anything was incapable of stopping infiltration, it was the Royal Laotian Army). The fact that American visitors had repeatedly been talking to Diem, pushing their own desires, which in this case was combat troops, was bound to have an effect on him, and he now saw an opportunity to tie the Americans more directly to his regime. Besides, he had distrusted American firmness for some time. By October the pressure increased: Nguyen Dinh Thuan, who was the Acting Defense Minister and probably, except for the Ngo family itself, the most important senior official in the government, called Nolting in to ask for combat troops. They would be “combat trainer units,” Nolting reported to Washington. There would be a symbolic U.S. strength near the 17th parallel, and U.S. troops also positioned at key provincial capitals in the Central Highlands. Time, Thuan had emphasized, was of the essence.

Despite all these warnings, the request for combat troops came as something of a surprise to the U.S. government. It was different from what Diem had been saying before, and there was some suspicion that perhaps it was a trial balloon on the part of Ngo Dinh Nhu. Nevertheless, when Taylor and Rostow went, they were specifically assigned the job of investigating the possibility of employment of combat troops. There were three specific strategies they were to look into. One was the use of up to three divisions of American troops to defeat the Vietcong. The second was fewer combat troops, not so much to engage in combat as for the purpose of making a symbolic gesture and getting an American foot in the door. And the third, a step short of combat troops, was an acceleration of U.S. assistance and support to the Vietnamese, more equipment, particularly helicopters and light aircraft, to make the ARVN more mobile.

The fact that Taylor had been instructed to investigate the possibility of combat troops was known in Washington; there had been increasing speculation and gossip in preceding weeks. Despite the pressure of the men around him, the President himself did not like the idea. He had a sense of being cornered. If it was clear that Taylor’s main concern was to determine whether combat troops should be sent or not, then it followed that in a few weeks, after Taylor’s return, it would be John F. Kennedy who either sent or did not send troops. The issue of combat troops had been deliberately clouded in the pre-trip briefings, and a
New York Times
story of the period, coming from high White House sources, stated that the military leaders were reluctant to send troops, which was not true, and that the idea of combat troops was at the bottom of the list of things which Taylor was to consider, which was equally untrue. What was true was that the President was uneasy with the pressure he was already feeling from the men around him.

After the fact-finding mission left Vietnam, they went to the Philippines, where Taylor worked on the central part of the report. What Taylor wrote is doubly important, not just because it reflected his feelings about action as early as 1961, but as an insight into his own attitudes about Vietnam as the crisis deepened. In 1954 Ridgway, Taylor’s predecessor in the Airborne club and as Chief of Staff, had struggled brilliantly to keep American troops out of Indochina. Kennedy had appointed Taylor partly because he wanted someone like Ridgway, but it would be apparent by this trip alone that Ridgway and Taylor were different men.

Because the Taylor-Rostow mission profoundly changed and escalated the American commitment to Vietnam, and because all news reports at the time said that Taylor had recommended against combat troops, it is easy to underestimate the report. The fact is that Taylor, the dominant figure of the trip—he wrote the crucial report to Kennedy himself—did recommend combat troops. He recommended that up to 8,000 be sent, that more be sent if necessary, and most important, that the job could not be done without them. The recommendations shocked Kennedy to such an extent that Taylor’s report was closely guarded and in some cases called back (even people as directly concerned with the decision making as Walter McConaughy, the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, did not know that Taylor had recommended troops). What was made public was part of the report, the recommendations for the advisory and support part of the mission, and the recommendations for reform and broadening of Diem’s government. In contrast, Taylor’s actual cables barely mentioned reform; they dealt primarily with military problems and were extremely conventional in attitude.

Taylor talked in his cables of a “crisis of confidence” because of the growing Vietcong military build-up and because of the U.S. neutralization of Laos. (At this point in the Cold War, one thing was made clear: for every step forward in beginning to contain it, there had to be at least one step backward. A soft Laos, a hard Vietnam. A few months before, Ben Cohen, the New Deal lawyer, and one of the first men in Washington to spot the danger of Vietnam, had taken his old friend Averell Harriman aside and said that what was going on in Vietnam was disastrous and exactly opposite to Harriman’s policy in Laos. Harriman, good loyal Administration member, protested that it was not. Five years later Harriman would take Cohen aside at a Georgetown party and say tartly, “You were right about Vietnam, Ben.”) Taylor spelled out clearly the mission of the U.S. troops: it would be a task force largely logistical in make-up whose presence would reassure Diem of the American readiness “to join him in a showdown with the Vietcong or Vietminh.” The Taylor cables also outlined the dangers: our strategic reserve was already weak and we would be engaging U.S. prestige. If the first increment failed, it would be difficult to “resist the pressure to reinforce,” and if the ultimate mission were the closing of the border and the cleaning up of the insurgents, “there is no limit to our possible commitment,” unless “we attacked the source in the North.” It might increase tensions “and risk escalation into a major war in Asia.”

Yet for all these drawbacks, Taylor reported, nothing would be so reassuring to the government and the people of South Vietnam as the introduction of U.S. troops (a crucial departure, the American assumption here, that the government and the people of South Vietnam were as one, that what Diem wanted was what “the people” wanted; a quick assumption which haunted American policy makers throughout the crisis). It would not have to be a large force, but it must be more than a token. It must be significant. It would help morale because it would show resistance to a Communist takeover. It would conduct operations in support of flood relief (given the instinct for tricks and subterfuge of that era, it is not surprising that there was a good deal of thought given to the introduction of the U.S. units as flood-relief crews, to help combat current flooding in the Mekong Delta. Much humanitarian public relations benefit was foreseen). These troops would not be used to clear the jungles and forests of Vietnam, a task still left to ARVN, but they could fight to protect themselves and the areas in which they lived, and they would give CINCPAC an advance party for SEATO planning (something in there for everybody). As part of the general reserve, they could be employed against main-force VC units, so in effect their use would depend on how eager the other side was to contest our presence.

Thus Taylor was recommending something that would also be a constant in Vietnam, a gesture, a move on our part that would open-end the war, leaving the other side to decide how wide to make the war. This attitude was based on an underestimation of the seriousness and intent of the other side, and on the assumption that if we showed our determination, Hanoi would not contest us. (We made this last mistake repeatedly, from the Taylor mission right through to the incursion in 1969 in Cambodia and in 1971 in Laos, and we were always wrong; the enemy was always more serious about his own country than we were about it.) Now the suggestion for a show of firmness appeared for the first time in the Taylor cables, and it was coming from the man the Kennedy Administration believed its foremost strategic planner; a cautious man who would understand wars like this. Taylor’s idea was based on the fallacy that in the end the enemy would be less fanatical about the struggle in his own country, which had at that point been going on in various forms for more than two decades. But General Vo Nguyen Giap, the most important military figure in Hanoi and thus Taylor’s opposite number, would not, after all, have to worry about Berlin access, or disarmament, or the level of strength in NATO, or getting the missiles out of Cuba: General Giap would continue to do the same thing after General Taylor left
his
country that he had been devoting himself to for the last twenty years—the unification of Vietnam under a Communist regime.

Taylor acknowledged that the risks of backing into a major Asian war were present but (in words that would live longer than he might have wanted) “not impressive.” North Vietnam “is extremely vulnerable to conventional bombing, a weakness which should be exploited diplomatically in convincing Hanoi to lay off South Vietnam” (a vulnerability which, if it existed, Hanoi was less aware of than both Taylor and Rostow). Both Hanoi and Peking, he cabled, faced “severe logistical difficulties in trying to maintain strong forces in the field in Southeast Asia, difficulties which we share, but by no means to the same degree.” The starvation conditions in China, he found, would keep the Chinese from being militarily venturesome. As for the key question of how American troops would fare, Taylor found South Vietnam “not an excessively difficult or unpleasant place to operate.” In perhaps the most significant passage of all, he thought it was comparable to Korea, “where U.S. troops learned to live and work without too much effort. In the High Plateau and in the coastal plain where U.S. troops would probably be stationed, these jungle forest conditions do not exist to any great extent. The most unpleasant feature in the coastal areas would be the heat, and in the Delta, the mud left behind by the flood. The High Plateau offers no particular obstacle to the stationing of U.S. troops.”

This part of the Taylor cables is perhaps the most revealing insight into the way the American military—even the best of the American military—regarded Vietnam and the war. This was the time when unconventional warfare was a great fad in Washington, and here was Taylor, who was supposed to be an expert on it, making a comparison with Korea: we had the same problems there, and we overcame them. In searching for the parallel war, Taylor singled out Korea but mentioned only the comparable quality of the terrain (actually, Korea is far more open and has, from a military point of view, a much easier terrain, where tanks and air power can be used to great advantage), without considering the crucial difference between Korea and Vietnam: the very nature of the war. The former was a conventional war with a traditional border crossing by a uniformed enemy massing his troops; the latter was a political war conducted by guerrillas and feeding on subversion. There was no uniformed, massed enemy to use power against; the enemy was first and foremost political, which meant that the support of the population made the guerrillas’ way possible. The very presence of Caucasian troops was likely to turn quickly into a political disadvantage, more than canceling out any military benefits. There was a parallel war: the French Indochina war or the Philippine insurrection. But Taylor made the comparison with Korea, and if this general, who was so widely respected, a man who was an intellectual and quoted Thucydides, did not see this crucial nuance, who else would?

In his summing up on November 3, Taylor said that the advantages of sending American troops outweighed the disadvantages, and that this was imperative to the success of saving South Vietnam (“I do not believe that our program to save South Vietnam will succeed without it,” he reported). Then he asked the same question which Kennedy had posed earlier, whether the suggested program, minus the U.S. combat task force, could stop further deterioration in the South. He answered that it was very doubtful, that there was no substitute for a military presence to raise morale and to convince the other side of the seriousness of our intent, “to sober the enemy and to discourage escalation . . .”

Taylor then raised the question of when to get the troops out. There were many answers. One was: after obtaining a quick military victory. But a quick victory was unlikely; the Americans would probably have to stay and hold the line while the South Vietnamese built up their forces. For planning purposes, this date could be set at the end of 1962, by which time Diem’s army would comprise 200,000 men.