The Best and the Brightest (54 page)

But now events were out of control, no one could do anything. If people, Nolting said, would only keep their eye on the ball, if they would only stop being distracted by all this political activity. All of this was a side issue. The job was to win the war. Yet he was shaken. A television team that came to do an interview in his office saw him take down a portrait of Jefferson and replace it with one of Washington, explaining that Washington was less controversial. Finally it was all over, and on August 15 Nolting, a rather lonely figure at the airport, talked about the mutual traditions of the two countries “of humility and tolerance, respect for others and a deep sense of social justice.” The next day another monk burned himself to death, and within a week Diem and Nhu had crushed the Buddhists with a bloody midnight raid on their pagodas, disguising their private security army in uniforms of regular soldiers in order to put the onus on the army (and thus have the society put the blame on the army and turn more against it, in what was of course a political war).

The embassy had been caught unaware by the strike on the pagodas, including John Richardson, the CIA station chief, who was in a state of shock, with many Vietnamese thinking that since it was Nhu who had engineered the crackdown and since Richardson was deeply involved with Nhu, the raid had CIA approval. But the cover story soon faded. It fooled the embassy and Washington for about forty-eight hours, but American journalists had called it right from the moment it happened. It ended an era and a policy, and later, describing those events, John Mecklin wrote: “Thus the Diem regime’s final gesture to Fritz Nolting, flagrant abrogation of its solemn last word to this fine man who had staked his career on the regime’s defense.”

In Washington the Harriman people had been pushing for months for a policy which would separate the Americans from the Ngo family; they still thought victory in a political war against the Vietcong possible, but felt it would not work with a government which unified all the population against its very dictates. Week after week in July and August, events had proved them right and the pro-Diem faction wrong: the regime had been unbending, had been unwilling to broaden its base, and above all, unable to deal with its own population. This last was crucial—the question was not so much whether the Buddhists were totally legitimate, but whether the government had the ability to deal with them (“We will throw them the banana peels for them to slip on,” said one young Buddhist priest, accurately describing Buddhist plans and government reactions). Now any chance for a settlement had been destroyed with the crackdown which had also shattered the illusion of people like Nolting that the United States had influence with Diem. In contrast to Nolting’s optimism, the Harriman group had predicted that the Ngo family would crush the monks. Thus within the bureaucracy its estimates and prophecies had been largely accurate, while the predictions of Taylor and Nolting had been increasingly inaccurate.

In America, the Buddhist crisis had been a growing embarrassment for the young Catholic President. The photographs of soldiers bringing their billy clubs down on Buddhist monks had been montaged on front pages with stories of the loss of life of young American officers. If in the past Kennedy had worried about right-wing opposition to the loss of part of the free world, now he was worrying about liberal reaction to American blood being spent for a petty family dictatorship. So when Lodge arrived in Vietnam (his mind already made up about the Ngo family before the attack on the pagodas, and inwardly enraged by this gesture aimed as much against him as anyone, presenting him with a
fait accompli
) he was already determined to broaden American policy, to move it, at the very least, away from the Nhus, and failing that, away from Diem himself.

With the Vietnamese military pressuring the Americans to absolve the army from responsibility for the crackdown, the Voice of America soon began broadcasting honest assessments, placing the blame on the Nhus. In addition, Lodge received a cable from Washington saying that the Nhus must go, that alternative leadership possibilities be investigated, that the Vietnamese military be told that the United States would no longer support a government which included the Nhus. It was, in effect, the go-ahead signal for a coup (no one in Washington or Saigon thought Diem would ever drop the Nhus; if it had been unlikely before the crackdown, it was even more improbable now).

The cable had been drafted by Harriman, Forrestal, Hilsman and George Ball on Saturday, August 24, at the President’s suggestion. Though Rusk was out of town, he was consulted regularly, and he was helpful. He even strengthened the cable, inserting provisions for supplying the generals with matériel should they be cut off during a breakdown (it was, significantly, a military suggestion on the part of Rusk; the old CBI planner still lived). McNamara and John McCone, Director of CIA, were on vacation, and Taylor was out of reach, having dinner at a restaurant. With McNamara out of town, Gilpatric was in charge at Defense, and he said the cable sounded fine, acceptable, he had no objections. At CIA, Richard Helms, whose doubts on Vietnam had always been considerable (reflecting the pure intelligence estimates rather than the operational end), told them that it was about time they moved this way, what had taken them so long in the first place? Forrestal dealt with Krulak, whose job it was to get clearance from General Taylor, which he did, though technically after the cable had gone out (Taylor did not know that the cable had already left, but he disagreed with nothing in it).

Later, when the principals gathered in Washington, there were second thoughts among some of them, particularly as each learned that some of the others had misgivings (it was a stunning example of how the domino theory worked if not with nations in Southeast Asia, then certainly with high government officials who wanted to sense which way the wind was blowing and did not want to be caught alone going against it). Taylor in particular was unhappy about the way it had been maneuvered. He thought everyone else had agreed, but of course they had not, since they had been out of town. There began to be murmurings to friendly journalists that Hilsman had pulled something slick. He had become the Washington target for the more conservative members of the government and for conservative journalists. Harriman was certainly no target; and one did not take on the President lightly; Forrestal was a quiet figure bearing a great Cold War name; but Hilsman, Hilsman was talkative, ebullient, almost outrageous, a lovely lightning rod. The President was furious with the cable mix-up; he was already fed up with the division within his government and the resulting newspaper coverage from Washington and Saigon which emphasized the split in his government. It was particularly strong from Saigon, where the entire mission had come apart (“This shit must stop,” he told an aide after one particular journalistic reflection of governmental dissension).

Now when some of his closest officials began reneging on a cable he thought they had agreed on, Kennedy blew up. He was furious at some of them for waffling, and furious at Hilsman and Forrestal for having been so sloppy as to leave an emergency exit for dissent, knowing that moving a bureaucracy toward a given objective was a difficult process, and when done, it should be done. Kennedy lashed out at Hilsman and Forrestal for incompetence, a rare and very real burst of presidential anger (“The lesson,” said the cool McGeorge Bundy, a bystander to all of the debate, “is never do business on the weekend”). But if Kennedy was annoyed at Hilsman and Forrestal, he was even more annoyed at the men who were now backtracking (showing their doubts not so much to him as elsewhere). So the next time they were gathered he looked at them and said, the voice very cold, very distant, that there had been some doubt about the cable, that it might have been precipitous. Fortunately it was not too late to change. Do you, Mr. Rusk, wish to change? No. Do you, Mr. McNamara, wish to change the cable? No. Do you, General Taylor, wish to change the cable? No. Do you, Mr. McCone, wish to change . . .

The United States was making it very clear to the Saigon military that it was ready for a coup. On August 29 Lodge cabled Rusk:

We are launched on a course from which there is no respectable turning back: the overthrow of the Diem government. There is no turning back in part because U.S. prestige is already publicly committed to this end in large measure and will become more so as the facts leak out. In a more fundamental sense there is no turning back because there is no possibility, in my view, that the war can be won under a Diem administration . . .

There was a flood of cables back and forth between Saigon and Washington, arrangements made about the possibility of a coup, which Vietnamese general to talk to, how to go about it, the extent to which the United States could be involved. Even the CIA station chief, John Richardson, who until recently had been so close to Nhu, was a surprising advocate of a coup, and a prophet that the coup would come and come quickly (“If the Ngo family wins now, they and Vietnam will stagger on to final defeat at the hands of their own people and the Vietcong . . . If this attempt by the generals does not take place or if it fails, we believe it no exaggeration to say that Vietnam runs serious risk of being lost over the course of time”).

But the generals, who met covertly with the Americans, did not move. The Nhus had caught them off balance with their strike against the pagodas, and tightened control on forces around Saigon; the Americans, who had long told the generals that only Diem would receive support, had now switched, but so quickly that they caught the generals unprepared. They wondered if the Americans really meant it. When General Harkins contacted the Vietnamese generals to imply that a coup was all right, wasn’t he still an agent of Diem? When the CIA people talked about logistics, didn’t it mean that Richardson was feeding all this back to Nhu (Nhu was telling people that it did)? Saigon, always filled with rumors, seethed with intrigue. And the generals did not move. Why hadn’t they? State cabled Lodge. “Perhaps they are like the rest of us, and are afraid to die,” Lodge told a friend.

But if there was not a coup, it marked the end of our total belief that Diem and Diem alone could be the instrument of American policy, a blind commitment to one irrational family. In the struggle within the American government it seemed that for the moment the civilian forces were dominant, though there were varying degrees of doubt among the civilians about whether a coup could be staged at all. Some, like Forrestal and to an increasing degree Robert Kennedy, were more and more dubious about the whole thing, while Rusk and Lodge, for instance, viewed an overthrow of the Diem regime as advantageous, as a way of winning the war.

Chapter Fourteen

The failure of the Vietnamese generals to act had not by any means ended the debate within the Administration; what it did essentially was move it back to the point where it had existed before the crackdown on the pagodas, which had accelerated doubts and shifted positions. It had changed Rusk, McNamara and Taylor slightly and temporarily. Now that the generals had failed to move, all three wanted to get back to a position of business as usual, get on with the war. Thus, just a week after they had all agreed on the necessity for a change, they signed off again. At a high-level meeting on August 31, McNamara emphasized that the most important thing was to reopen channels of communication with the Diem government; Rusk talked again of the need to regird the anti-Communist forces, to get rid of the Nhus, and to prevent Diem from striking against his top military officers. At the meeting the burden of the case against the regime was borne by Paul Kattenburg, the young State Department officer who had worked in Vietnam for many years in the fifties. He was at this point chairman of the Interdepartmental Working Group on Vietnam and more than anyone in Washington knowledgeable about the country. The Vietnamese people loomed large in his assessments, and he had a real feeling for the fabric of the society there. He had once believed there was a right way to make our policy work; now he felt Diem was hopeless and had begun to doubt that it could be done at all. When Rusk suggested that there was no chance of the coup now, Kattenburg was not so sure, he thought it was almost too soon after one very inflexible policy, and that more time and more gestures were needed. He quoted Lodge as saying that if the Americans tried to live with the Diem regime, with what Lodge termed its sense of false promises, its bayonets on the streetcorners, then the United States would be forced out in six months. Then Kattenburg summed up; he had known Diem for ten years and the story had always been the same, one disappointment after another, always Diem had failed to live up to promises, he had relentlessly turned inward and away from reality. Diem, he affirmed, would not change; rather, this hope had been one of the oldest American illusions. Nor would he part with Nhu; instead the support for him would continue to dwindle, as it had in the past. In this case, Kattenburg said, the wise thing would be to get out of the country honorably. It was an important moment—the first time at a high-level meeting anyone had really said the unthinkable, coming significantly from the man who knew the most about the fabric of the society and the limits of it.

Kattenburg was quickly challenged by Max Taylor. What did Kattenburg mean by “forced out of Vietnam in six months”? He answered that in six months, as it became more and more obvious that the Western side was losing the war, more and more Vietnamese would go over to the Vietcong (by the rules of the game set by McNamara, he was not allowed to say what he really thought, which was that the war was probably lost already, that the military’s optimistic estimates were illusory, that it was far later than anyone thought; State could not challenge Defense estimates).