Imperial Stars 3-The Crash of Empire (14 page)

Memory has a way of proliferating; the spirit bloweth where it listeth. The point I was making to begin with was simply that I had forgotten the name of Phan Dinh Phung. And the point of my point, no doubt, was that this was the manner of our involvement in Vietnam. In a few short years, a moment on the scale of history, we went from total obsession to a sort of amnesia. The map of that country was once engraved in our minds, and most of us now can no longer remember whether Hué, the old imperial capital, is north or south of Danang. But of course we cannot leave it at that.

Soon after my arrival, I was shocked to discover that the Communists controlled most of the countryside, in some cases outright, in others functioning as a sort of shadow government alongside the nominal authorities; and they were growing increasingly bold in the cities, where the junta of generals who had overthrown Diem had been pushed aside by Nguyen Khanh, an inept and buffoonish fellow who had been helped to power by an inveterate plotter named Thao.

Under General Khanh the remains of the administration so carefully constructed by Diem and his brother (also murdered in the coup) were dismantled, and any notion that there might be a respectable civilian alternative was rudely put down, so that the Southerners began to suspect with astonishment and terror what was in fact the case: that they were now adrift, and that those who had destroyed Diem's government had done so without the faintest idea of what was to take its place—except, being military men already accustomed to receiving their equipment, munitions, and training from us, that the Americans would provide.

But the Americans, for the moment, had nothing but military assistance to provide. They were willing and at that stage apparently even impatient to wage war, but aside from mouthing platitudes about freedom and justice and winning hearts and minds, and a generous readiness to bear the expense, they had no clue about how to rebuild a South Vietnamese polity. They simply had not thought that far ahead, nor did they think it their business, even now, so that years would pass before a group of the more reasonable army officers—the most capable of whom was Nguyen Van Thieu—would be able to put something viable together.

Two incidents come back to focus the absurd disorder of that time. In the first I am walking down a broad boulevard with Howard Simpson, an embassy officer who (being slated for transfer) is bequeathing to me some of his functions and what little he can of his vast experience, having served several tours of duty in Vietnam, beginning with one in the early 50's. Suddenly down the road comes a column of tanks and armored trucks, with an odd-looking Vietnamese officer standing in the turret of the lead tank, and Simpson stops short at the sight of him.

"Thao, you old bastard," he yells. "What's up?"

The officer, who is wall-eyed, pudgy, and grinning, raises his hand, stops the column, and shouts back: "Howie! How you?"

"Never mind how me! What in hell are you doing?"

"Nothing special, Howie. I am making a coup!"

He pronounced the
p
in coup, presumably to make it clear to a benighted American. And then the column moved on. What happened to the coup I do not recall. Those first weeks in Saigon were hectic, this being the period when the Vietnamese seemed to be coming up with a new government with each new phase of the moon. But far from being considered an amiable lunatic, Thao—who came of a wealthy Southern Catholic family and had a brother high in the apparatus of the Lao Dong in Hanoi—had an extraordinary talent for ingratiating himself with every faction. And throughout all this Thao held important posts in the South Vietnamese government and remained close to certain elements of the American establishment, especially the CIA—until, after Khanh fell, he was identified as an enemy agent by officers of Thieu's military security, tracked down, and killed. Ten years later the new Communist masters of Saigon confirmed that he had been one of theirs and proclaimed him a national hero, although there are South Vietnamese nationalists, I've been told, who still believe that he was playing a double game: a Machiavellian romantic, they say, who had read too much André Malraux.

What the CIA concluded, if anything, I never found out, but there must have been many in the agency, as there were elsewhere in the American establishment in Saigon, who were not surprised at the rapid disintegration of the republic in 1964 and 1965. These were people—the most eminent being Ambassador Frederick Nolting and General Paul Harkins, the predecessors of Lodge and Westmoreland—who had warned that by intervening as we did, with no assurance that anything better would follow the removal of Diem, we were creating a huge vacuum and assuming a responsibility for which we were quite unprepared. And this of course is exactly what happened. In the confusion that resulted, phenomena like Thao and Khanh flourished briefly while the Vietcong all but completed their conquest of the countryside and began (but still prudently) to strengthen their urban networks.

And this brings me to my second epiphany—a sad little joke told by my old friend Bui Diem, who was later to serve as Vietnamese ambassador in Washington. In his memoirs, Bui Diem[
In the Jaws of History,
by Bui Diem with David Chanoff, Houghton Mifflin, 1987] confesses that he had supported the overthrow of Diem in the hope and expectation that it would be followed (at our insistence, if necessary) by the creation of a constitutional government to which, he believes, the great majority of the South Vietnamese would have rallied. Instead, he says, the amorphous junta drifted "from incompetence to incompetence" and the stage was set for "a firm hand at the helm" which Khanh, if only because he was willing to act at that moment, was simply assumed to be:

As a result, Khanh was treated from the start as a strongman who enjoyed America's staunch friendship. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was even sent to South Vietnam to stump the country with him, as a visible symbol that the United States stood beside the new leader. This kind of performance did not come naturally to McNamara. On one occasion he grasped Khanh's hand and declared,
"Vietnam muon nam!"
Unfortunately, whoever taught McNamara the Vietnamese phrase had neglected to also teach him the proper intonation. So instead of saying "Long Live Vietnam," what he actually said, to the vast amusement of his audience, was "Vietnam, lie down!"

In the face of all this, the failure of the Communists of the North and their Southern allies to win the "hearts and minds" of the city folk is surprising, to say the least. Perhaps it was simply a matter of time. But one reason, precisely, for the vast increase in the urban population that occurred in the early 60's was that the Saigon government, while progressively losing its grip on the countryside, was still able to afford some protection in the towns. From their sanctuaries along the borders, in Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam, the Communists could move forces in and out of the country to collect rice and recruits and to enlarge the "leopard spots" of "liberated territories" almost at will—so that, even if Saigon had a competent administration, the security problem could never be solved, only palliated, unless we did what Lyndon Johnson and Dean Rusk kept assuring the Communists that we would not do: go into the sanctuaries and "widen the war." Instead we relied on attrition to discourage an adversary who was willing and able to take a hundred casualties for every one of ours—and who in fact would sacrifice many hundreds of thousands of men in the coming decade and still field a force of twenty divisions for the final assault on Saigon.

Quite apart from the appeal of their ideology (always limited in the South) and the very real prestige they had acquired in defeating the French, the Communists of the North and their Southern allies were operating from positions of strength. It was the Soviet-Hanoi alliance that was the superpower in Southeast Asia; and the strength of the Communists on the ground was immeasurably bolstered by the sympathy of people everywhere who saw them as victims of imperialism heroically fighting for self-determination and freedom—and the United States in the role of a neocolonialist bully seeking to prop up a puppet regime. They were increasingly adept at generating and exploiting this perception, so deeply rooted in the guilt and self-doubt of the West, whereas the American leadership never learned to take it seriously or to factor it into its calculations. And yet, as we all know now, it was bound to be extremely important—perhaps decisive—in the end.

In short, everything favored the Communist enterprise, and this would have been a good time for us to heed the counsel of prudence and declare not victory, as Senator Aiken of Vermont was to suggest some years later, but defeat: to leave the squabbling Southern generals to their own devices and take our advisers and Green Berets and AID administrators home to ponder the complexities of "nation-building" in Southeast Asia. Such an outcome would have been an unhappy one for the Southerners, but not so devastating as what was to happen ten years later. And it would have spared us an infinite grief.

Nowadays all this is so dreadfully obvious,
connu et archi-connu
, that one tends to forget how out of the question it was in 1965. Lyndon Johnson would not hear of it. The young press corps in Saigon (including such future antiwar activists as David Halberstam of the New York
Times
) would not hear of it, either—these being the hawkish fellows who had roused John Kennedy against Diem on the grounds that he was incapable of winning a war for which they, at least, were ready to "bear any burden, pay any price." And at home the great majority in Congress would not hear of it—not in any case without setting off a great national debate about "Who lost Indochina?"

So we sent in our troops and helped the generals sort themselves out and by dint of enormous sacrifices over the next five years created, or more exactly recreated, the situation half-jokingly described by Senator Aiken. By the early 70's, when we were withdrawing the last of our ground forces, the republic had a reasonably competent government and a credible army; and it had been largely freed—after the bloody paroxysm of Tet in 1968 and the joint U.S.-South Vietnamese operation in Cambodia in 1970—from the threat of internal subversion. Thus it was possible for the first time to issue weapons to village self-defense forces in areas once controlled by the Vietcong.

The North had not given up, of course, nor would it in the foreseeable future. But it could be contained as long as the South was willing to fight and we were prepared to supply the means required to maintain the military balance, including the occasional intervention of our naval and air forces.

So this was the upshot of what the Vietnamese think of as the "American war"—from 1965 to 1971. The South lived—dependent upon us, to be sure, but hardly more so than the North was dependent on Moscow. We could therefore now do as the good Senator suggested: declare victory, and go home.

Needless to say, this is not what we did—not quite, and therefore not at all. It is a complicated story, and
The Palace File
tells it well. Richard Nixon withdrew our armed forces as efficiently and rapidly as they had been inserted by Lyndon Johnson, and with the same sort of consultation with our allies, i.e., none, and meanwhile sent Henry Kissinger to conduct secret diplomacy with Le Duc Tho, which had the effect (however unintended) of assuring the Northerners that the prize would be theirs if they only persisted, and of suggesting to the Southerners that something sinister was afoot. At the end of the so-called peace process we persuaded, indeed forced, South Vietnam to put its head in a noose, the Paris Peace Accords of January 1973, while solemnly swearing that if the trap were sprung we would be there to cut the rope and chastise the villains.

All this was not only explicitly stated in Nixon's letters to Thieu but reinforced by military planning, e.g., inviting the South Vietnamese corps commanders to our air-force headquarters in Thailand to show them how precisely we were planning to target our attacks if the Communists violated the cease-fire. And then, of course, the trap was sprung, in full view of the world, and lo! we were not there.

In our entire history, Hung and Schecter maintain, there is no precedent for such a betrayal. But they immediately mitigate the condemnation by raising, if not settling, some obvious questions. How valid were the commitments of Nixon and Ford? Why were they never made public? Did Nixon and Kissinger cynically betray our allies in the hope of achieving a "decent interval"?

To these questions Kissinger replies, correctly, that it was not the practice in those days to make presidential letters public, and that in any case there was nothing secret about Nixon's determination to enforce the Paris agreement by military action if necessary. Both he and Nixon also indignantly deny that they were being cynical or merely looking for a "decent interval." On the contrary, Kissinger was, and remains, convinced that if not for Watergate, Nixon, with the same willingness that he had shown to take the political heat during the Christmas bombing of 1972, would have responded with air strikes to North Vietnamese violations.

I have no difficulty in believing this: it makes sense and follows logically from Nixon's public commitment to achieve a "peace with honor." But finally, of course, would it have made any difference? Even if we had intervened this time, wasn't Hanoi's victory inevitable in the end? Or would the changing foreign policy of China have brought a new factor into play on the side of an independent South Vietnam?

Etc., ad infinitum—interminable, tiresome, tantalizing questions, begetting more questions, and meanwhile, as Kissinger keeps reminding us in his memoirs, you are obliged to act, whether you have satisfactory answers or not.

Or not to act, which is what it came down to in March 1975. You are Gerald Ford, say, and the North Vietnamese, in open violation of the agreement that Kissinger had spent four years negotiating, are coming straight down over the central highlands to the coast and the highway to Saigon, The Soviets, in contemplation of realizing a return—at last—on a very old investment, have built them a pipeline through Laos and Cambodia, emerging at Loc Ninh, a couple of hours from the coast. But now the United States Congress, led by Jack Kennedy's younger brother and Lowell Weicker and Bella Abzug, has informed the notoriously "authoritarian" and "corrupt" Thieu regime (over your veto) that they will get no more help from us. Not a bullet. The South Vietnamese army is demoralized and crumbling, like the French and British in the face of Nazi Germany in June 1940. In a few days our ambassador and his staff will have to run for it, ignominiously, with at best a handful of our Vietnamese friends.