The March of Folly (56 page)

Foreign aid officers, too, voiced discouragement. Rufus Phillips, director of rural programs, reported the strategic hamlet program in “shambles,” and made the point that the war was not primarily military but a political conflict for the allegiance of the people, and that the Diem regime was losing it. John Macklin, director of the United States Information Service, who had taken leave of absence in 1962 as
Time
correspondent to try to help turn the Vietnamese people against the Viet-Cong, resigned after 21 months with his assignment ending “in despair.” The chief of the interdepartmental Working Group on Vietnam, Paul Kattenburg of State, startled a conference with Rusk, McNamara, Taylor, Bundy, Vice-President Johnson and others present by his recommendation that, given the certainty that Diem would not separate from his brother and would get less and less support from the people and go “steadily down hill,” it would be better for the United States to decide to get out now. No one present agreed, and the suggestion was firmly quelled by Rusk, who said that policy should proceed on the assumption that “We will not pull out until the war is won.” Subsequently, Kattenburg was eased out of the Working Group and transferred to another post, predicting as he left that the war could draw in 500,000 Americans and extend into a five- to ten-year conflict.

A Delphic voice spoke out at this moment: Charles de Gaulle proposed a neutralist solution. In one of his shrouded statements, delivered at a French Cabinet meeting but given an unusual authorization for publication verbatim, clearly intended for overseas ears, de Gaulle expressed the hope that the Vietnamese people would make a “national effort” to attain unity and “independence from exterior influences.” In spectral phrases about French concern for Vietnam, he said every effort made toward this end would find France ready to cooperate. His demarche was taken by diplomats, poring over his language, to mean a “neutralized” solution on the pattern of Laos, independent of both Communist China and the United States. “Authoritative sources” indicated that the North Vietnamese had been showing themselves receptive and that French officials had been passing on feelers from Hanoi in other capitals.

This could have been the opening to “jump at the chance” of a possible negotiated settlement, as Galbraith had once advised. De Gaulle was offering an out if Washington had been wise enough to want one.
“Wide annoyance,” however, was reported in the American government, a frequent reaction to de Gaulle’s pomposities. Yet, given political disintegration and military inadequacy and lack of any real progress in South Vietnam, and the hints from Hanoi, the American government could have used the opportunity of Diem’s coming collapse and de Gaulle’s implied good offices to say it had done all it could by way of support; it could not do more; the rest was up to the Vietnamese people to settle for themselves. This would have meant sooner or later a Communist take-over. With the future not foreseen, and with the confidence of 1963 in American power, that outcome was still unacceptable.

Matters proceeded on the chosen course toward coup d’état. That it violated a basic principle of foreign relations did not bother the realists of the Kennedy school. That it made nonsense of the reiterated American insistence that Vietnam’s conflict was “their” war does not seem to have been considered. “Their” war was a ceaseless refrain; Dulles said it, Eisenhower said it, Rusk said it, Maxwell Taylor said it, all the Ambassadors said it, Kennedy himself said it many times: “In the final analysis it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it.” If it was their war, it was also their government and their politics. For the defenders of democracy to conspire with plotters of a coup d’état, no matter how cogent the reasons, could not be hailed in the history books as the American way. It was a step in the folly of self-betrayal.

Troubled by his role and the smell of the swamp he was getting into, Kennedy resorted to another fact-finding mission, the now traditional Washington substitute for policy. A rapid but intensive four-day tour was made by General Victor Krulak, special adviser to Maxwell Taylor, who was now Chief of Staff and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Joseph Mendenhall of State, an old Vietnam hand with a large acquaintance among Vietnamese civilians. Their reports to the White House on return, one hearty and promising from military sources, the other caustic and gloomy, were so at variance as to evoke the President’s puzzled query “You two did visit the same country, didn’t you?” On their heels followed another mission at the highest level, General Taylor himself and Secretary McNamara with the assignment to find out how far the political chaos had affected the military effort. Their report on 2 October, while positive on military prospects, was full of political negatives that belied their hopes. All contradictions were muffled by McNamara’s public announcement, with the President’s approval, that 1000 men could be withdrawn by the end of the year and that “The major part of the United States military task can be completed by the
end of 1965.” The confusion and contradiction in fact-finding did nothing to clarify policy.

On 1 November the generals’ coup took place successfully. It included, to the appalled discomfort of the Americans, the unexpected assassinations of Diem and Nhu. Less than a month later, President Kennedy too was in his grave.

From the moment he took over the presidency, according to one who knew him well, Lyndon Johnson made up his mind that he was not going to “lose” South Vietnam. Given his forward-march proposals as Vice-President in 1961, this attitude could have been expected, and while stemming from cold war credos it had even more to do with the demands of his own self-image—as became overt at once. Within 48 hours of Kennedy’s death, Ambassador Lodge, who had come home to report on post-Diem developments, met with Johnson to brief him on the discouraging situation. Political prospects under Diem’s successor, he reported, held no promise of improvement but more likely of further strife; militarily, the army was shaky and in danger of being overwhelmed. Unless the United States took a much more active role in the fighting the South might be lost. Hard decisions, Lodge told the President squarely, had to be faced. Johnson’s reaction was instant and personal: “I am not going to be the first President of the United States to lose a war,” alternatively reported as “I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way that China went.”

In the nervous tension of his sudden accession, Johnson felt he had to be “strong,” to show himself in command, especially to overshadow the aura of the Kennedys, both the dead and the living. He did not feel a comparable impulse to be wise; to examine options before he spoke. He lacked Kennedy’s ambivalence, born of a certain historical sense and at least some capacity for reflective thinking. Forceful and domineering, a man infatuated with himself, Johnson was affected in his conduct of Vietnam policy by three elements in his character: an ego that was insatiable and never secure; a bottomless capacity to use and impose the powers of office without inhibition; a profound aversion, once fixed upon a course of action, to any contra-indications.

Speculations about a neutralist solution were floating in South Vietnam after Diem’s assassination, and it is possible that Saigon
might have come to terms with the insurgents at this point but for the American presence. A broadcast by the clandestine Viet-Cong radio was heard suggesting negotiations for a cease-fire. A second broadcast suggesting accommodation with the new President in Saigon, General Duong Van Minh, leader of the coup against Diem, if he were to detach himself from the United States was picked up and reported in Washington by the Foreign Broadcasting Intelligence Service. These were not hard offers and probably intended merely to probe Saigon’s political chaos. Saigon was listening if Washington was not. The six-foot President, General “Big” Minh, a former Buddhist peasant, who though well-meaning and popular had no control over a nest of rivals, was rumored to be considering contact with the Viet-Cong. After three months in office he in turn became the victim of a coup. The same rumor clung to successors who followed each other through coups and ousters during the next months. American opposition to any such feelers was actively exerted by the Embassy and its agents.

During this time U Thant, the Burmese Secretary General of the UN, was testing receptivity to a neutralist coalition government. Though coalition between fundamental enemies is an illusion, it can be used for temporary settlement. It did not interest Washington. Nor did Senator Mansfield’s rather desperate proposal in January to open the way for American withdrawal by dividing South Vietnam itself between Saigon and the Viet-Cong. Although Johnson was demanding “solutions” from his advisers, these compromises with Communism were not what he had in mind.

The hard decisions were already forming. On return from a fact-finding mission in December, McNamara reported that unless current trends were reversed within “the next two or three months,” they would “lead to neutralization at best and more likely to a Communist-controlled state.” The stakes in preserving a non-Communist South were so high, he told the President, “that in my judgment we must go on bending every effort to win.”

Enormity of the stakes was the new self-hypnosis. To let North Vietnam win would give incalculable encouragement to Communism everywhere, erode confidence everywhere in the United States and arouse the right at home to political slaughter. The
New York Times
affirmed it in an editorial of fearful portent: the roll of Southeast Asian nations, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, would be endangered if South Vietnam fell; the “entire Allied position in the Western Pacific would be in severe jeopardy”; India would be “outflanked,” Red China’s drive for hegemony “enormously enhanced”; doubts of United States ability to defend other nations against Communist
pressure would spread around the world; the impact on revolutionary movements would be profound; neutralism would spread and with it a sense that Communism might be the wave of the future. As of 1983, Vietnam has, unhappily, been under Communist control for eight years and except for Laos and Cambodia, none of these terrors has been realized.

By 1964, ten years had passed since America undertook to save South Vietnam after Geneva. Circumstances had changed. The Soviet Union had been faced down in the Berlin and Cuban missile crises; Soviet influence over the European Communist parties was much less; NATO was firmly established. Why then were stakes still considered so high in remote unimportant Vietnam? Communism had made European advances without engendering the hysteria that seemed to infect us out of Asia. If Communist advance anywhere was so to be feared, why did we fling a harebrained strike at Cuba and make our stand in Vietnam? Perhaps, perversely, because it
was
Asia, where Americans took it for granted they could impose their will and the might of their resources on what a United States Senator, Thomas Dodd of Connecticut, referred to in his wisdom as “a few thousand primitive guerrillas.” To be frustrated in Asia seemed unacceptable. The stake had become America’s exercise of power and its manifestation called “credibility.” Despite old counsel that a land war in Asia was unwinnable, despite disillusioning experience in China and Korea, despite French experience on the very spot where Americans now stood, this perception of what was at stake was overriding.

Reminiscent of British visions of ruin if they lost the American colonies, prophecies of exaggerated catastrophe if we lost Vietnam served to increase the stakes. Johnson voiced this over-reaction in his initial scenario of pulling back to San Francisco; Rusk voiced it in 1965 in his advice to the President that withdrawal “would lead to our ruin and almost certainly to catastrophic war,” and again in 1967 when he drew a picture at a press conference of “a billion Chinese armed with nuclear weapons.” The
New York Times’
military correspondent, Hanson Baldwin, voiced it in 1966, writing that withdrawal from Vietnam would result in “political, psychological and military catastrophe” and would mean that the United States “had decided to abdicate as a great power” and be “reconciled to withdrawal from Asia and the Western Pacific.” Fear too conjured visions: “I am scared to death,” said Senator Joseph Clark in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that “we are on our way to nuclear World War Three.”

•    •    •

North Vietnam was now sending units of its regular army across the line to exploit the disintegration of the South. To prevent collapse of America’s client, President Johnson and his circle of advisers and the Joint Chiefs came to the conclusion that the moment had come when they must enter upon coercive war. It would be war from the air though it was understood that this would inevitably draw in ground forces. Civilian and military agencies began drawing operational plans, but though Saigon’s situation was growing daily more precarious, action could not be initiated yet because Johnson faced the presidential election of 1964. Since his opponent was the bellicose Senator Barry Goldwater, he had to appear as the peace candidate. He took up the chant about “their” war: “We are going … to try to get them to save their own freedom with their own men.” “We are not going to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” “We don’t want our American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys.” When, six months later, American boys were sent into combat with no dramatic change of circumstances, these phrases were easily recalled, beginning the erosion of Johnson’s own credibility. Long accustomed to normal political lying, he forgot that his office made a difference, and that when lies came to light, as under the greater spotlight on the White House they were bound to, it was the presidency and public faith that suffered.

Public response to the campaign of Goldwater the hawk denouncing a “no win” policy versus Johnson the peacemaker flowed steadily one way. After World War II and Korea, and in the shadow of the atomic bomb, Americans, however anti-Communist, wanted no war. Women especially were to vote disproportionately for Johnson, testifying to the reservoir of antiwar sentiment. The Administration might have taken heed but did not, because it never stopped believing its troubles would come from the right.