The Best and the Brightest (58 page)

It went on like this for several days and finally they reached a province in the Delta where Rufus Phillips’ people had reported enormous Vietcong progress. A copy of the Phillips report had been made available to McNamara in the morning when the military briefing began. Taylor was standing there impressive, asking helpful leading questions: Major, we know what a good job you’re doing and that this situation is under control, and we wonder if you could tell us about it? . . . McNamara had tried to penetrate these briefings in the past without much success but this time he was prepared, he had read a pessimistic paper on this same province. So finally the entire civilian-military split seemed to have come down to one place, one war, two views of it. Had the major, McNamara asked, read the report of his civilian colleague in the Hamlet program? Yes, sir. Did the major agree with the civilian appraisal? Pause. Finally the officer said yes, he did. Why, then, asked McNamara, hadn’t he reported it himself? Because his civilian colleague reported it and because he himself had reported only the military situation as set by guidelines from MACV.

At this point General Taylor looked at the officer very coldly and said that it appeared he had been falsifying reports. No, sir, said the young officer, my report was accurate as far as it went. With that they moved on to the next stop, but McNamara’s attitude had changed for the first time; his own doubts had grown, he had penetrated the military reporting.

On the way back the two men, so different in their perceptions and loyalties, worked out their divergent views of Vietnam. Like much of what had come out in the past, and even more of what was to come in the future, two separate attitudes were contained in one report, badly bastardized. It reflected a trade between McNamara and Taylor on a number of things: McNamara accepted Lodge’s estimates that we could not succeed with Diem, and got major new doubts about the regime and major new pressures against it into the report (“It is very fortunate for the country to have a man of the breadth and scope of Bob McNamara as Secretary of Defense,” said Lodge the day after McNamara left, a big grin on his face, having just swallowed
that
canary). Taylor held the line on the military estimates and optimism, so that the opening line of the report stated that the military program “has made great progress and continues to progress.” The programs were going very well, the shooting war was fine, 1,000 Americans would be out by Christmas, and the whole American commitment would be finished by the end of 1965. The report also, given the ever-increasing noises about withdrawal from Vietnam, reiterated the intention of the Defense Department to stay there:

The security of South Vietnam remains vital to United States security. For this reason, we adhere to the overriding objective of denying this country to Communism and of suppressing the Vietcong insurgency as promptly as possible. (By suppressing the insurgency we mean reducing it to proportions manageable by the national security forces of the GVN [Government of (South) Vietnam], unassisted by the presence of U.S. military forces.) . . .

Taylor and McNamara went on to say that they had found the government increasingly unpopular, although the Vietnamese military were “more hostile to the Vietcong than to the government.” The report said in a rather revealing reference to American policy: “Our policy is to seek to bring about the abandonment of Diem’s repression because of its effect on the popular will to resist.” (Repression for repression’s sake was permissible, but repression which hurt the war effort was regrettable.) It recommended keeping the commodity aid shut off, besides holding back on a number of other aid projects, including CIA money for Diem and Nhu’s private palace guard unless it was used to fight the Vietcong. “Correct” relations between the United States and Diem should be maintained, along with the search for contacts for what was termed “alternative leadership,” something Lodge badly wanted and was already gearing up to do. The request was typical of the policy and the frustrations and divisions and dishonesty of it all; it said in effect that the United States should look elsewhere for leadership and away from Diem even though the war was being won, and that the war was the only important thing. It was an assessment that the civilians would live to regret, since it would later appear that they had switched governments and helped topple a government which was still winning the war. They knew that this judgment was false, but they had never challenged it, because of their own previous wishful thinking, because of their inability to control their own bureaucracy, and because, above all, of a belief that telling the truth to the American people was unimportant. They—both Kennedys, Rusk, Lodge, Harriman, Hilsman, Trueheart, Forrestal—knew the war was being lost, but they never got it down on paper or into their own statements, or into their briefings with congressional leaders. A lie had become a truth, and the policy makers were trapped in it; their policy was a failure, and they could not admit it.

Back in Washington, McNamara and Taylor went to the White House to read the report. Some of the civilians were uneasy with the optimism still contained in it (Bill Sullivan, Harriman’s man, had argued against it on the plane ride back), particularly against pulling out of troops. Mac Bundy, at the urging of some of his staff, questioned it. “Is this wise?” he asked. “Aren’t we setting a trap for ourselves?” But they would find no flexibility. Someone questioning Bill Bundy, still at the Defense Department, about the wording and the dangers inherent in it, got a shrug. “I’m under orders,” he said. Taylor, he told others, wanted the reference to the troop withdrawals left in as a means of pushing the Vietnamese. Hilsman, asking McNamara about the wording, found him brusque, almost rude, and later, Hilsman said, when McNamara read the statement publicly, it was as if he were reading an ultimatum. The President himself was unhappy about it, but was fatalistic; he could have leaned on them and pushed for more, but he had a sense of the delicacy of the whole thing, that he had moved one key player, McNamara, considerably with this one mission, and McNamara had in a limited sense moved Taylor (though without truly changing him or opening him up; it was as if McNamara had dragged a reluctant Taylor a few gradations on the calibration of attitude). So Kennedy knew that if he were having troubles with his bureaucracy in moving them a notch or two at a time, they in turn were having troubles with their bureaucracy.

As everything about Vietnam was compromised, so too was this report by McNamara and Taylor, but Kennedy was not that worried. He knew Vietnam was bad and getting worse, that he was on his way to a first-class foreign policy problem, but he had a sense of being able to handle it, of having time, that time was somehow on his side. He could afford to move his people slowly; too forceful a shove would bring a counter shove. It was late 1963, and since 1964 was an election year, any delay on major decisions was healthy; if the Vietnamese could hold out a little longer, so could he. Besides, other things were beginning to come together. He had signed a limited nuclear test-ban treaty with the Soviets, the civil rights march on Washington had come and passed, and had not hurt his Administration; rather, by its dignity and grandeur and passion, it had reflected the aspirations of have-not Americans with a sense of majesty that probably had helped his Administration. Kennedy felt that the country’s doubts about him and his Presidency were ebbing, that his real popularity, not the visual popularity, but a deeper thing, was beginning to form, that the idea of him as President was beginning to crystallize. So he did not want to rush too quickly, to split his Administration unnecessarily. There was always time. The date of the McNamara-Taylor report was October 2, 1963.

At almost the same time General Duong Van Minh, the most respected military figure in the South, a man close to the Lansdale group since the early days when he had helped fight the banditlike Binh Xuyen sect, contacted Lou Conein, an old friend of his, and asked if they could talk. Conein had been in Vietnam for eighteen years, mostly with the CIA; he had been one of the first Americans parachuted in at the end of World War II. He knew the non-Communist Vietnamese military well, since they had been his recruits, as he liked to say. Shrewd, irreverent, colorful, he seemed an American version of the audacious French paratrooper, someone sprung to life from a pulp adventure thriller. He knew the country, and the people, and he flirted with danger, it was danger that made life more exciting. Two fingers were missing from one hand, and stories were told all over Saigon as to how those fingers had disappeared, in what noble or ignoble cause; reporters who knew Conein well and liked him and whose phones were always tapped referred to him in their own code as “Three-Finger Brown” after a baseball pitcher named Mordecai Brown. The American command in Saigon despised him; he had, they suspected, been there too long, gone too native; he was erratic, untrustworthy, playing the game of adventurer—the most dangerous kind. He was also one of the very few Americans who had any credibility with the Vietnamese military, who despised Harkins and regarded Harkins as an extension of Nhu (later, as dealings with the Vietnamese generals became more involved, the White House cabled Lodge suggesting that it would be nice if someone more respectable than Conein could be found, and Lodge answered yes, he agreed, but there was no suitable substitute, and General Tran Van Don had “expressed extreme reluctance to deal with anyone else”).

With Lodge’s approval, Conein met General Minh on October 5 and they talked for more than an hour. General Minh said that the war was being lost, that the senior Vietnamese officers (himself, Tran Van Don and Tran Van Kim, all respected and none of them commanding troops because they had followings of their own, and were thus considered dangerous by Nhu) felt that a change had to be made. He wanted to know what the American attitude toward this was; he did not want American assistance, but neither did he want the Americans to thwart them. They had to move and move quickly, he said, because regimental and battalion commanders were now too restless and were pushing for a coup (which confirmed a Hilsman-Sarris estimate made a month earlier that the generals would not move immediately unless pushed from below by junior officers). Conein said that he could not answer them until he had talked to his superiors; Minh said he understood. He mentioned three possible ways of removing the regime: assassination of both Diem and Nhu, a military encirclement of Saigon, or open fighting between loyal and disloyal units. Conein said that the United States would not advise on which plan was best. Minh also wanted to know whether U.S. aid would continue if the generals were running the government. Ambassador Lodge immediately answered that the United States would not thwart a coup, would review Vietnamese plans, other than assassination plans, and would assure the generals that U.S. aid would be continued to another anti-Communist government.

With this the end was in sight for the Diem regime. Lodge, the dominant player in Saigon, shrewd, forceful and tough, did not believe anything the government said, nor much of what the U.S. military said. He cut Harkins out of much of the cable traffic, believing the general was a problem both in Washington and in Saigon, where he might leak information to the Ngo family. Ironically, Harkins was an old family friend from Boston, which made Lodge wary of being openly critical of the general’s reporting, so he tried simply to by-pass him (“The Ambassador and I are certainly in touch with each other but whether the communications between us are effective is something else. I will say Cabot’s methods of operations are entirely different from Amb. Nolting’s . . .” Harkins said in an angry cable to Taylor on October 30). Before he went to Saigon, Lodge had prepared himself fully in Washington, including long talks with Madame Nhu’s parents, who were highly critical of their daughter’s politics (her father, Tran Van Chuong, was ambassador to the United States and had resigned, along with the embassy staff, after the crackdown on the pagodas). Lodge felt that all the charges against the Ngo family were true, that Nhu could not be separated from Diem, that the war was being lost, that since there was going to be a coup anyway, the U.S. position should be to neither encourage it (except perhaps slightly; that is, by not discouraging it) nor thwart it. He predicted, accurately, to Washington, that Diem would make a request for U.S. help, and that the U.S. attitude should be that its capacities were far less than Diem’s.

By mid-October Lodge had convinced the White House, which was in a receptive mood, that a coup was going to take place, led by the generals, unless the Americans openly betrayed them. He thought that it was all for the better, that the chances of a new government being far more effective than the old were at least even. In that he was right; in Saigon at least three major plots were still brewing, plus a counterplot by Ngo Dinh Nhu; it was no longer a question of a coup, but of which coup. By October 6 Kennedy had wired Lodge telling him that although the United States did not wish to stimulate a coup, it did not wish to thwart one either, that Lodge should keep in touch with the generals and find out what their plans were. However, the U.S. role should be covert and deniable; indeed, Lodge should pass on Kennedy’s instructions verbally to the acting CIA chief (John Richardson had been sent home at Lodge’s request because he was too much of a symbol of the direct U.S. relationship with Nhu), so that no one else would know of the contents.

The weeks of October passed with coup fever building in Saigon. Diem and Nhu had won the first round with the pagoda strike, but it soon became evident that it was a temporary move, that while it had left the opposition disorganized at first, in the long run it was galvanizing the opposition, making it virtually total. A form of madness seemed to take over in Saigon. Having crushed the Buddhists, the government had moved against college students, and having crushed them, moved against high school students, and after they were crushed, and finding rebellion in elementary schools, it cracked down on them, closing those schools too. In hundreds of homes of government officers, brothers and sisters had been arrested. In Saigon, a journalist for Catholic magazines and until then a vehemently loyal supporter of the family, took American journalists aside to tell them of past Ngo injustices against the Catholic Church, a means of separating the Church from the accelerating insanity of the family.