The Best and the Brightest (38 page)

For many reasons the Taylor-Rostow report was far more decisive than anyone realized, not because Kennedy did what they recommended, but because in doing less than it called for, he felt he was being moderate, cautious. There was an illusion that he had held the line, whereas in reality he was steering us far deeper into the quagmire. He had not withdrawn when a contingent of 600 men there had failed, and now he wasescalating that commitment to 15,000, which meant that any future decision on withdrawal would be that much more difficult. And he was escalating not just the troop figure but changing a far more subtle thing as well. Whereas there had been a relatively low level of verbal commitment—speeches, press conferences, slogans, fine words—his Administration would now have to escalate the rhetoric considerably to justify the increased aid, and by the same token, he was guaranteeing that an even greater anti-Communist public relations campaign would be needed in Vietnam to justify the greater commitment. He was expanding the cycle of American interest and involvement in ways he did not know.

The aid did not come without American military bodies, and the military bodies did not come without journalistic bodies, so by expanding the number of Americans, Kennedy was in every way expanding the importance of Vietnam, making his own country more aware of it. From two full-time American correspondents, the number jumped to eight, including, most dangerous of all, American reporters with television cameras who roamed around discovering things that Diem did not want revealed. Diem’s political enemies, who were numerous, finding no outlet through the constitution of Vietnam nor through the American embassy, would for the first time find sympathetic listeners in American reporters, and thus the expansion of the American commitment also meant that there would be an inevitable rise in the pace of domestic Vietnamese turbulence (Diem, totally removed from reality, and almost psychotic at the end, believed that when the first Buddhist monk burned himself to death, it had been arranged for and paid by NBC, despite the fact that there were no television cameras on the scene). What was true, however, was that the presence of American reporters tended to open up an otherwise closed country; this was the price Diem paid for getting American aid. Similarly, as the American commitment tended to be stalemated on the ground, the Administration, which had a powerful tendency toward media manipulation, would immediately fall back on the public relations aspect of the policy to justify it. If things in Vietnam were not working well, then the answer was to have more people make more speeches and thus get more positive coverage.

The Kennedy commitment changed things in other ways as well. While the President had the illusion that he had held off the military, the reality was that he had let them in. They now began to dominate the official reporting, so that the dispatches which came into Washington were colored through their eyes. Now they were players, men who had a seat at the poker table; they would now, on any potential dovish move, have to be dealt with. He had activated them, and yet at the same time had given them so precious little that they could always tell their friends that they had never been allowed to do what they really wanted. Dealing with the military, once their foot was in the door, both Kennedy and Johnson would learn, was an awesome thing. The failure of their estimates along the way, point by point, meant nothing. It did not follow, as one might expect, that their credibility was diminished and that there was now less pressure from them, but the reverse. It meant that there would be an inexorable pressure for more—more men, more hardware, more targets—and that with the military, short of nuclear weapons, the due bills went only one way, civilian to military. Thus one of the lessons for civilians who thought they could run small wars with great control was that to harness the military, you had to harness them completely; that once in, even partially, everything began to work in their favor. Once activated, even in a small way at first, they would soon dominate the play. Their particular power with the Hill and with hawkish journalists, their stronger hold on patriotic-
machismo
arguments (in decision making they proposed the manhood positions, their opponents the softer, or sissy, positions), their particular certitude, made them far more powerful players than men raising doubts. The illusion would always be of civilian control; the reality would be of a relentlessly growing military domination of policy, intelligence, aims, objectives and means, with the civilians, the very ones who thought they could control the military (and who were often in private quite contemptuous of the military mind), conceding step by step, without even knowing they were losing.

The immediate result of the Kennedy decision in December to send a major advisory and support team to Vietnam was the activation of a new player, a major military player, to run a major American command in Saigon. At first, when Kennedy took office, the pressure had come only from Diem; then, because of his policy to reassure Diem and make him the instrument of our policy, Kennedy had sent over Fritz Nolting, who would soon seem to many to be more Diem’s envoy to the United States than vice versa. Now, by appointing Lieutenant General Paul D. Harkins to a new command, Kennedy was sending one more potential player against him, a figure who would represent the primacy of Saigon and the war, as opposed to the primacy of the Kennedy Administration, thus one more major bureaucratic player who might not respond to the same pressures that Kennedy was responding to, thereby feeding a separate and potentially hostile bureaucratic organism.

Harkins began by corrupting the intelligence reports coming in. Up until 1961 they had been reasonably accurate, clear, unclouded by bureaucratic ambition; they had reflected the ambivalence of the American commitment to Diem, and the Diem flaws had been apparent both in CIA and, to a slightly lesser degree, in State reporting. Nolting would change State’s reporting, and to that would now be added the military reporting, forceful, detailed and highly erroneous, representing the new commander’s belief that his orders were to make sure things looked well on the surface. In turn the Kennedy Administration would waste precious energies debating whether or not the war was being won, wasting time trying to determine the factual basis on which the decisions were being made, because in effect the Administration had created a situation where it lied to itself.

The meeting seemed at the time like a footnote to Taylor’s trip. On his way back from Vietnam he had stopped off in Hawaii to visit his old friend Paul Harkins, a three-star general, then commander of the U.S. Army in the Pacific (in the marvelous jargon of the military, naturally, USAR-PAC). At that time the Army was considered somewhat weak in lieutenant generals, a level just below the great generals who had made it at the end of World War II and then come on even stronger in Korea. In fact, General Gavin had earlier urged Kennedy, in his search for his top military, to reach farther down in the ranks for younger men for high positions.

How bad is it out there? Harkins asked, and Taylor replied that it was bad, very bad; Harkins had better get ready to put his finger in the dike. A few weeks later, as is their wont in Army circles, Mrs. Taylor chatted on the phone with her friend Mrs. Harkins and suggested ever so casually that they not plan on staying in Hawaii very much longer. And on January 1 the call came through. Harkins would head the new U.S. command in Saigon, the command which was to be different and unconventional. No one, of course, could have been more conventional than Harkins. He knew nothing about guerrilla warfare, in fact he knew remarkably little about basic infantry tactics (if you knew something about small-unit infantry tactics you could at least learn about the war, because you could put yourself in the infantryman’s place). He was a cavalry man in the old days, a great polo player, a dashing social figure in the old Army, and then a tanker, a staffman at that. His career was distinguished because he was, in Army terms, diplomatic. He had been a staff officer for George Patton, and softened some of Patton’s verbal blows. He was considered very good on logistical planning. Harkins was, in addition to being a protégé of Patton’s, a trusted friend of Taylor’s. They had known each other well from the days at West Point and had kept in touch. When Max Taylor was Superintendent of the Point, it was not surprising that Paul Harkins turned up as Commandant of Cadets, and later when Max Taylor had the U.S. Eighth Army in Korea, it was not surprising that Paul Harkins was his chief of staff.

Others in the Army and in the bureaucracy were pushing for an officer with a sense of unconventional warfare, like Major General William Yarborough, then heading the Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, or Colonel Ray Peers, who had served with the OSS during the war. But Taylor did not want an unconventional man. He had a very conventional view of the fighting and what he wanted was his own man, someone who was, above all, loyal to him. So he produced Harkins, a man with no real reputation of his own. His two main distinctions during his years of service in Vietnam would be, first, that his reporting consistently misled the President of the United States, and second, that it brought him to a point of struggle with a vast number of his field officers who tried to file realistic (hence pessimistic) reports. But even here the fault was not necessarily Harkins’. In all those years he felt that he was only doing what Max Taylor wanted, and there was considerable evidence that this was true, that his optimism reflected back-channel directives from Taylor. But it was one more insight into the era, all that talk about unconventional warfare, and then picking the most conventional officer. Even Kennedy knew it; after he met Harkins in Palm Beach, where the President was resting, Kennedy was asked what he thought of the new commander for Vietnam. He answered, somewhat less than enthusiastically, “Well, that’s what they’re offering me.”

Chapter Ten

In Vietnam, the influx of American aid recommended under the Taylor-Rostow report changed nothing. The American intelligence reports of the last few years had repeatedly warned that war waged by the Vietcong was basically political, that the Diem regime was sick, perhaps terminally sick. The American agreement to commit support and advisory elements also called for a broad range of social and political changes and reforms, to which Diem had agreed with considerable reluctance. If anything, he regarded the American insistence on reform as an affront to him personally; the Communists were the enemy, not he and his family. What were the Americans doing, involving themselves in Vietnamese domestic affairs, pressuring him to accept into his government people who were unreliable, criticizing his family both directly and indirectly?

Almost as soon as the Americans decided to increase their commitment, the Ngo regime began to renege on the promised reforms; the Americans, as they had systematically since 1954 in dealing with Diem, quickly acquiesced. Ambassador Nolting had the job of bringing Diem the news that the United States would not be sending combat troops to Vietnam. Diem had not been happy, Nolting reported, but he “took our proposals rather better than I expected.” Two days later, however, Nolting reported that he had found out, through high-level channels, that Diem was sulking and was very upset; at the same time there were virulent attacks in the Nhu-controlled press claiming that the Americans, rather than helping the country in an hour of need, were interfering in Vietnamese affairs, and that they were naÏve about reforms and about Communism. It was very clear what was happening; exactly as Ken Young and others had predicted, the Nhus were dominating Diem, warning him against the Americans, against their threat to his regime, and Diem, of course, was responding to his family. So, inevitably, on December 7, 1961, less than a month after the decision to make a far greater commitment based in large part on social reform, Washington was sending its embassy new recommendations, softening the demands for political reform. It was one more in a long series of decisions to go it alone with Diem on his terms, to treat the war as primarily a military problem, and to back off from using American leverage for any kind of social or political reform. Reform, given the nature of the regime, was of course impossible; reform meant getting rid of Mr. and Mrs. Nhu, and Diem was unwilling to do this. Washington had backed down again, and the key figure in this was Nolting, who had recommended that we not pressure Diem, that we trust him. We should accept his word and not demand his deeds. At a cocktail party shortly after the Americans backed down on reform, Ngo Dinh Nhu took an American reporter aside and praised Nolting lavishly. “Your ambassador,” he said, “is the first one who has ever understood us.” To Nolting, viability in South Vietnam meant getting along with the government at the top level in Saigon, not pressuring the government to do something about desperate conditions in the countryside. Washington accepted this; it showed that once more, despite all the talk of guerrilla warfare and political reform, the Americans were ready to be content with the status quo and to downgrade the political side.

Thus the real problems in Vietnam remained unaffected. The problems were political, but the response was military. The most important rural innovation, the strategic hamlet program, designed to give peasants protection and win their allegiance to the government, was given to Nhu to run, whereupon he, predictably, tried to make it his own personal fief and power base. Of course Nhu did not trust the Americans and the Americans did not trust Nhu; indeed the new allies were always uneasy with each other, and whether they had a genuine mutuality of trust and interest was dubious. (In 1961 one of the American experts sent over to help the Saigon government was a specialist in lie detectors; he authored an elaborate program to rid the government of one of its largest problems, high-level officials who were actually Vietcong agents. It looked like an excellent program until it was blocked by the Saigon CIA, whose officials realized that Saigon might also use the lie detectors to find out which government officials were also secretly on the CIA payroll.) But the important thing was the overall impact of the American aid; it was not finally a booster shot which would liberalize the government, but instead a shot of formaldehyde. The Americans were not modernizing Vietnamese society as Rostow had hoped; they were in fact making it more authoritarian and less responsive than ever. It did not change the balance in the countryside; if anything it simply meant that the Vietcong would now capture newer, better American weapons instead of old, used French weapons (“Ngo Dinh Diem will be our supply sergeant,” said one highly accurate Vietcong paper of the period).