The Best and the Brightest (39 page)

If this failure to change the political balance was not realized in Washington, it was understood by many in Saigon, particularly among the Vietnamese military, and it was certainly understood in Hanoi. There Bernard Fall, the French historian, was visiting in early 1962 on a rare visa. He was granted an interview with Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, and instead of finding Dong upset by the newest infusion of American aid, Fall saw that he was rather amused by it all. Poor Diem, Dong was saying, he is unpopular. And because he is unpopular, the Americans must give him aid. And because the Americans must give him aid, he is even less popular, and because he is even less popular, the Americans must give him even more aid . . . At which point Fall said he thought it sounded like a vicious circle. “Not a vicious circle,” Dong said, “a downward spiral.”

What the new major American involvement affected was not Vietnam, but the United States; its function would be based upon the perceptions, attitudes and judgments not of the President who initiated it, John F. Kennedy, but of the President who reluctantly accepted it, Ngo Dinh Diem. The American policy was to trust Diem and not to cross him; thus the American military mission saw its job as getting along with Diem, so his reporting became our reporting, his statistics our statistics, finally his lies our lies. What we did now was, on a large scale, accept his view of the war, and of the society. Also, because we had gotten in so much deeper, we wanted to see commensurate results to justify the commitment. Since nothing changed, which meant there was little in the way of results, the American Administration would have to justify the decision it had made by manipulating the facts, by press agentry, by trying to manage the news and events, and finally, when that failed, by constant assaults on reporters in Vietnam who continued to report pessimistically. What could not be affected on the ground against the enemy the Administration tried to affect by public relations, with only slightly greater success.

The nature of our new commitment dictated that we could not be any better than our ally. Nolting could not be better than Diem, and Harkins could not be any better than those political hacks whom Diem had appointed as generals solely because they were loyal—which, if nothing else, gave them a certain kinship to Harkins. Loyalty was why he held his position.

General Paul Donal Harkins, fifty-seven, was a man of compelling mediocrity. He had mastered one thing, which was how to play the Army game, how to get along, how not to make a superior uncomfortable. It would be hard to think of a man who had fewer credentials for running a guerrilla war in which Asian political injustices were at stake. To understand best what Harkins was like, it is important to understand what he was
not.
He was not, above all, a Joe Stilwell. Twenty years earlier, Stilwell had been in almost exactly the same position. He was tough, blunt and candid, almost joyously abrasive, delighting in getting along with the simplest private and causing problems for the highest civilian, preferably the President of the United States. Defeated by the Japanese, he walked out of Burma in 1942, and interviewed by reporters, said that he and his men had just taken a hell of a beating and had better go back and even things up (the idea of a contemporary American general ever admitting that he had taken a hell of a beating is inconceivable; there would be a battalion of $20,000-a-year government press spokesmen and public affairs officials descending to correct his statement, assuring reporters and the public that the general’s words had been taken out of context; he had meant to say that this was certainly a difficult and complex war, that the enemy, while certain to be defeated in the long run, was surprisingly well led, but that the most important thing was how well his own American troops had fought, proving that Americans could fight under difficult Asian conditions). Stilwell loved to be with the grunts, eating at their mess, never cutting in on a chow line, basking in the knowledge that the boys liked feisty old Vinegar Joe. He was one of the boys, sharing every hardship and every heartache. Classically the commander, leading by being there and sharing the worst kind of front-line hardship, contemptuous of staff officers, perfumed dandies in the rear echelon, glorying in getting mud on his boots. (When Harkins first arrived in Saigon he was asked by an AP photographer named Horst Faas when he was going out in the field because the AP wanted some photos of him in fatigues and boots, walking through the paddies. “Forget that kind of picture,” Harkins told him, “I’m not that kind of general.”) Back in China, Stilwell wanted above all to be well informed, to know his own men’s and the enemy’s capabilities, and he knew that anything less than the blunt truth and blunt intelligence about the enemy might cost him lives, his boys. So he not only debriefed his own military people carefully, but plucked from the embassy staff in Chungking the brightest young political officers, like John Paton Davies, John Stewart Service and Raymond Ludden, because he wanted the best. It did not matter whether the news was good or bad; the worse the news, the more you needed it. If things were going well you did not need a good intelligence system quite as much, events took care of themselves.

If Stilwell was classically the commander and the old-fashioned kind of officer, then Harkins was just as much the other kind of general, the staffman who responded to superiors rather than to the field, and who was a good new modern man, there to soothe things over, to get along, not to make ripples but to iron out the wrinkles. (If the American public failed at first to acknowledge the dynamism in Harkins, it was no fault of
Time
magazine, which in May 1962, anxious to drum up support for the war in Vietnam, found Harkins “tall, trim, with grey hair, steely blue eyes and a strong nose and chin . . . looks every inch the professional soldier.”
Time
even made comparisons with General George Patton, with whom Harkins had once served. “Outwardly the two were totally different: Patton, a shootin’ cussin’ swashbuckler; Harkins, quiet, firm, invariably polite. But a fellow officer says, 'I really think that inside, he and Patton were the same.’ The same, certainly, in their drive for victory.”)

Like almost all Americans who arrived in Vietnam, Harkins was ignorant of the past, and ignorant of the special kind of war he was fighting. To him, like so many Americans, the war had begun the moment he arrived; the past had never happened and need not be taken seriously. If the French had lost a war, they had fought it poorly; besides, they had made the mistake of being in a colonial war, fighting in order to stay, while we were fighting in order to go home. This was clear in our minds and it should be clear to the Vietnamese.

Occasionally Harkins would mouth phrases about this being a political war, but he did not really believe them. The American military command thought this was like any other war: you searched out the enemy, fixed him, killed him and went home. The only measure of the war the Americans were interested in was quantitative; and quantitatively, given the immense American fire power, helicopters, fighter-bombers and artillery pieces, it went very well. That the body count might be a misleading indicator did not penetrate the command; large stacks of dead Vietcong were taken as signs of success. That the French statistics had also been very good right up until 1954, when they gave up, made no impression. The French had lost the war because of a lack of will (the French were known for that) and a lack of fire power; Americans lacked neither will nor fire power.

At an early intergovernmental meeting on the importance of psychological warfare, one of Harkins’ key staffmen, Brigadier General Gerald Kelleher, quickly dismissed that theory. His job, he said, was to kill Vietcong. But the French, responded a political officer named Douglas Pike, had killed a lot of Vietcong and they had not won. “Didn’t kill enough Vietcong,” answered Kelleher. Such was the attitude of the American headquarters; despite all the faddishness of counterinsurgency it was all very conventional, with a dominating belief that more and more force was what was really needed. Besides, it was not a serious war or a serious enemy; as the French generals had been overconfident because the enemy did not register in terms they could visualize and understand, so now were the American generals overconfident. Who could be serious about an enemy who, having assaulted a village and captured it, did not stay around and defend its prize, but snuck off into the night?

When Harkins first arrived in Saigon to head the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), he had told reporters that he was an optimist and that he was going to have optimists on his staff. He kept his word. From the very first, the reports he sent to Washington were titled “The Headway Report,” leaving no doubt that things were going to get better. Very quickly his command became a special, almost unreal place, both isolated and eventually insulated from reality: the enemy was small, yellow, did not wear traditional uniforms, never held terrain, never fought in the daytime, and was known to kill innocent schoolteachers. As a worthy enemy, it was clearly overrated. The Saigon command soon reflected Harkins’ views, with a flabby, foolish confidence; a staff can be no better than the man it serves, and Harkins was a pleasant, social-minded officer, a polo player. His intelligence was not without its limits (“He wasn’t worth a damn, so he was removed,” McNamara would say of him later; “you need intelligent people.” Of course McNamara failed to explain why Harkins had held his position for almost two and a half years). He was the direct opposite of the other kind of general officer, the brilliant individual man going against the system and triumphing in spite of it (the latter needs wartime to excel, the former needs peacetime to excel, because warfare with all its unpredictability demands excellence and a willingness to go against the grain; only a very unusual general, like Max Taylor, can excel during both peace and wartime).

Rather than reflecting what was happening in the field, Harkins’ shop reflected his Washington orders, and the facts would be fitted to Washington’s hopes. Normally, for instance, G-2 (intelligence) is kept separate from G-3 (operations), but not in Harkins’ shop. There the intelligence reports were edited down by the operations people, and the Vietcong capability was always downgraded and reduced. Battalion-size attacks became company-size attacks, company attacks became platoon attacks; reports from lower headquarters about the Vietcong capacity to replenish its forces were consistently ignored, as were intelligence reports of growing Vietcong resources (all of which, if taken seriously, would have put Harkins in conflict with Diem, as Stilwell had been in conflict with Chiang, and would have caused problems for General Taylor in Washington). It was all part of the game. Harkins was very genial about it, very friendly, except of course if a subordinate insisted on providing bad news. A civilian intelligence officer later recalled trying to warn Harkins in 1962 about the growing Vietcong threat in the Mekong Delta.

“Nonsense, I am going to crush them in the rainy season,” Harkins said (the rainy season, of course, favored the guerrilla, affording him better canal transportation and infinitely more hiding places than the dry season).

When the intelligence officer insisted, saying that the situation was about to become irreversible, Harkins pushed him aside. This was not what his own intelligence shop was saying—why, Colonel Winterbottom was very optimistic.

“General Harkins,” the civilian interrupted, “your intelligence chief doesn’t understand the threat at all. He’s an Air Force officer and his specialty is SAC reconnaissance and I’m sure he’s very good at picking nuclear targets, but he doesn’t understand this war and he’s not going to give you any feel for it.”

But Harkins was no longer so genial or so pleasant, nor such a good listener, the civilian found. Harkins assured the visitor that his intelligence chief was an officer and a good one and a professional, the best they had in Washington, and he, General Harkins, did not need anyone in civilian clothes to tell him how to run a war. And so it went. Harkins was comforted by his staff and his statistics, and he comforted his staff as well; those who comforted him and gave him what he was looking for had their careers accelerated.

He had no problems, Harkins told Secretary McNamara in July 1962. No problems? Well, just one problem, he admitted, the American press. All along he steadfastly brushed aside the growing problems and warnings from the field in 1962. One particular incident comes to mind. Harkins had gone to Bac Lieu, in the heart of the Mekong Delta, on one of his field inspections and the briefing went very well. The Vietnamese officers may have been slow to learn how to fight the Vietcong, but they were quick to master the art of what pleased the Americans, not the least of which was the art of briefing. They were, in fact, great briefers, and this summary had been particularly good, Fort Braggperfect, made even more poignant by the commander’s accent—a reminder that we had exported the art of briefing.

They had, said the Vietnamese commander, planned only X number of strategic hamlets, but the population so desperately wanted to be part of this new national revolution that they insisted on coming in. Thus they had already built 3X hamlets. Harkins was very pleased. Proud is a better word, and the smile grew on his face (no mention of the fact that the more hamlets built, the more rake-off for the province chief and the division commander). With a paternal glow, he congratulated the commander for such a fine presentation. In an aside to an aide he said that this was the best thing about getting out in the countryside, away from Saigon with all its intrigues and gossip; out there, where the war really took place and where the people understood the enemy and the threat, there were fewer problems. It was all healthier. The aide nodded. This was the real Vietnam.