Tucker's Last Stand (6 page)

“Do you need any help with your baggage, Mr. Engaño?”

“No no, thank you. We have just this … one bag.”

They were shown the direction in which to go, and he fumbled with the key to Room 219. He closed the door behind her. She opened the suitcase and brought out a bottle of chilled wine, the cork unstopped. Then she turned off the overhead light. “I get glasses from the bathroom.” She emerged three minutes later, with two bathroom glasses filled with wine. She was nude.

5

April 15, 1964

The Oval Office

Washington, D.C.

Lyndon Johnson depressed the button and answered the operator with the phrase the White House operators had got used to any time between seven in the morning and ten at night: “Tell Valenti to come in.”

Jack Valenti was there within minutes, energetic as if it had been twelve hours earlier, attentive, devoted, formally dressed in a gray suit, with a tie of just the currently fashionable width.

And Valenti knew—always—which attitude would appropriately complement the President's disposition: indignant; defensive; aggressive; inquisitive; astonished.

“This morning, as I tol' you, Mac Bundy volunteers to go to Saigon as ambassador to replace Lodge. This afternoon Bob McNamara offers—himself. You know this, because I tol' you that too, an' I hope you didn't hear it from anyone else, or I'll have
that
asshole's ass. First, trade off National Security Adviser for Ambassador to South Vietnam, for Chrissake. Does that make sense to you? Maybe that's why Mac's advice hasn't exactly been—consistent on Vietnam, though McNamara isn't any better. Get that! He wants to give up Secretary of Defense for Ambassador to Vietnam! But
now
—”

The President stood up behind his big walnut desk in the Oval Office. “Look at this!”—he slid forward a sheet of paper. It was only a sentence or two. From Robert Kennedy. Offering to go to Vietnam as ambassador, replacing Henry Cabot Lodge.

LBJ was thundering. “What the shit's he want to do in Vietnam, run for President? Threaten to prosecute Ho Chi Minh? Bring Diem back from the grave he an'—” LBJ was careful to observe presidential protocol, whatever his fever; he paused slightly, “President Kennedy sent him to—you remember, Jack, I was agaiynst that coup—no more coup shit, I've said ever since, much good it does, whatever I say, the way those gooks go in for changin' government in Saigon. What does Kennedy 'spect to do? I tell you what he 'spects to do, he 'spects to make a big impression over there and cash in on it here. But how? Doing what? So I send him to Saigon. So he does what
I
tell him to do, period, end, over, out. There's talk—you've heard this, I've heard this, John-John's heard this—he's pullin' out of the Cabinet and runnin' for the Senate—from New York.” Lyndon Johnson put his hands before him, preacher-fashion, half-closed his eyes, and peered slightly up, in the general direction of heaven.

“We all know how Bobby is
reel
-ly a Noo Yorker, only accidentally raised in Boston, schooled in Rhode Island an' Boston an' Virginia, but he's
really
a Noo Yorker, down deep. ‘Deep in the heart of—
Nyew
York,' his favorite song. Whass he up to, sayin' he wants to go to Saigon as ambassador? Maybe I'll juss say yes. Yes.” Dramatic pause. “Yes, Bobby. That's a real good idea. Wish I'd of thought of that, Saigon is just where you belong; all your trainin' as Attorney General makes you juss
ahdeal
for ambassador in Vietnam. Where they're tryin' to skin our ass. Yes. Now, Bobby, what you think it's a good idea to do, once you get to Vietnam? Hunh?” He leaned over and grabbed Jack Valenti by the lapels, the President's large nose one inch away from his aide's. “Hunh?” the President began to shake him, demanding an answer.

Jack Valenti drew his head back in very slow motion and said, “Yes, sir, it is certainly confusing, virtually our whole first team deciding they all want to volunteer as ambassador to Vietnam. I guess they think that is where the action is—is going to be. And your report, the one you showed me this morning from that agent, Oakes, on the Trail, seems to say that's what's coming down at us. But you're right, it doesn't make any sense, not for any of them, not Mac, not McNamara, not Bobby—”

“You know what!” Valenti's pacification program had not worked on LBJ. “They think I'm a great big”—he slowed his words to give them extra emphasis—“
asshole
. That is exakly what they think. Especially Bobby. He's still mad about my X-ing him out of the vice-presidential business. What do you think of this—”

He reached down and picked up a legal pad on which he had scrawled in pencil. Drawing the chair back with his left hand and sitting down on it, leaning, he began to read, aloud. “Dear Bobby: I have your communication in which you offer to serve the Administration as ambassador to South Vietnam. I'll certainly take your offer into consideration, on'y it would help me come to a conclusion if you tol' me what you think you could do when you got there. Like, settle the dispute between Khanh and Minh? Mebbe something on the village pacification problem that Genral Lansdale hasn't thought about? Give the CIA team hep on our Trail project? Come up with something that will keep the Russians an' China from stuffin' North Vietnam with weapons?” He looked up at his aide. His left eyebrow stretched up, a hint of tentativeness. “What do you think?”

Valenti knew that his reaction needed to come in stages. 1) “That would certainly take care of Bobby, Mr. President.” Pause. Then, 2) “Of course, there are other considerations.” Pause. 3) “There's the—uh, election coming up. You don't absolutely need Bobby, and half the Camelot crowd is already working for you. But on the other hand, I guess it doesn't make sense to have Bobby sulking all the way through the Atlantic City convention scene and until November.” Pause. 4) “Maybe you should think some more about it. But it is a hell of a letter, no doubt about that.”

Lyndon Johnson looked up at Valenti, and let his eyeglasses slip down toward the end of his nose. He depressed a buzzer by his desk. “Bring me a Sprite.” He looked up questioningly. Valenti nodded. “Two Sprites.”

“Whaddayathink I ought to say to him.”

“Well, sir, there's two ways to handle a gesture like the one he's just made. One way is what you did. Another way is to be sort of, you know—terribly pleased, honored, that kind of thing.”

“Lahk what?”

“Well, like, er, ‘Dear Bobby: I've always known you have a great capacity to give everything to your country. But I think your country needs you right here at home, and I would not want to miss your advice and counsel here in Washington.'—Something like that.”

The President looked down.

“Think there's enough piss in that?”

“I would think so. He'll see it.”

“I want him to
feel
it, not jes' see it.… Waal, go ahead. Draft your letter for me. I'll want it in the morning. An' I'll want to meet here, nine o'clock. McNamara, Bundy—both Bundys—Rusk an' Rostow. Tell them we'll discuss that paper came in from the CIA boys on the Trail.”

“Yes, sir.”

6

January 15, 1964

Hanoi, North Vietnam

Bui Tin was only thirty-eight but he was entirely relaxed in the presence of the maximum leader, President Ho Chi Minh. In part this ease of manner was owing to, first, his background. Bui Tin was the oldest son of an aristocratic family in Hué, the second-largest city in South Vietnam. The Bui clan had for generations lived well, very well, off their great tract of farmland. They had to pay taxes to the French, but Bui Tin's father was never apparently concerned about this: what he had always feared, he told his son in the late 1930s when Bui Tin was a teenager in the French-run Haute École, was the Japanese; and of course the Japanese had come and for four frightening years, beginning soon after the military strike against Singapore a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, life at Hué had been very hard. The father and mother had been moved to a peasants' cottage that sat on their own property, quickly confiscated in the name of the Japanese emperor. Tin had been permitted to continue to attend his school, run now by a harsh Japanese academic who doubled the work of the students and tripled the discipline. When Tin reached seventeen, he would be conscripted and used for the imperial purposes of the Co-Prosperity Sphere of the Japanese. His fluent French and schoolboy knowledge of English and Japanese suggested a clerical career, which never eventuated because a few months after his seventeenth birthday the Japanese surrendered. The fate of Hiroshima at the hands of something called
la bombe atomique
was the cause of much celebration in Hué, and by Christmas of 1945 the harshly aged father had begun the reconstitution of his properties and was again reporting to the very same French deputy who had escaped the scene just in time, and was lately sent back to Hué as overlord of what was to be, in turn, the reconstitution of the French Empire.

It had been a source of great dismay when, on Christmas Day, young Bui Tin announced to his father that he intended to go north to join the forces of Ho Chi Minh, consecrated to ending French colonialism in Indochina. He was eighteen years old when he first presented himself to Ho Chi Minh.

Tin knew, as indeed everyone in Vietnam knew and, increasingly, the whole world knew, that Ho Chi Minh was a man of commanding presence. He was the supreme ascetic, and dozens of interviewers went to him to behold the man who had undertaken to outwit, militarily and psychologically, the mighty French. Asked about his genius in mobilizing an effective army from peasants who had needed to break from their long docility first to the French, then to the Japanese, Ho had merely given his benign smile and answered that he had learned the principle of the class struggle from his reading of Marx and Lenin, but that all other impulses were the result of his immersion in poetry. Poetry, he had announced (“Ho closed his eyes when he spoke these words,” the French reporter had written in
Le Monde
), was his daily bread, and nothing was more beautiful than the alignment of poetry and the class struggle designed to eliminate the base instincts of man, corrupted under the bourgeois order. His pointed features and wispy beard, Tin thought when first he was presented to him, might have been modeled by a great artist molding the face of a Spartan poet pained by the sounds of war, warmed by the peals of beauty that rang out of men's verbal inventions. But Tin had no reason to doubt that Ho was also a highly organized commander in chief—and Ho did not hesitate in deciding what to do with his latest volunteer.

Ho told Tin to go out to the field where his partisans were engaging the French, to learn guerrilla warfare. Tin was stationed in Saigon, close to French headquarters, and before long Ho Chi Minh grew to rely on the young, resourceful patrician to undertake intricate assignments. After the fall of Dien Bien Phu and the division of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh made it known, quite simply, that the war against colonialism would continue; that the so-called government of South Vietnam was in fact an ad hoc aggregation of lackeys of foreign imperialists, primarily American this time around; and that the struggle for the people's communism would go on until accomplished. Bui Tin never gave Ho reason to doubt that he would stay with him until that struggle had ended and all of Indochina was liberated.

It was in 1963 that Ho Chi Minh reasoned that his South Vietnamese partisans would never alone achieve the strength necessary to overthrow the southern republic, backed by the Americans. The only means of supplying Vietcong allies in South Vietnam was through the great Trail of which he would soon become the eponym. Bui Tin, thirty-six years old, small like most of his countrymen, tough, sinewy, innovative, single-minded, had been put in charge of an exploratory group whose job would be to go down the Trail and determine what would be needed to make it a more effective conveyor belt for Northern supplies and personnel sent to benefit Southern allies.

Tin worked his way down that complex of hot jungle paths and ice-cold mountain streams, the ancient route that passed through the habitations of aboriginal tribes, where tigers and elephants had been hunted down, making way for migrants who brought gold and spice from China to the cities of Southeast Asia. He spent more than five months fighting leeches and mosquitoes and hunger, living mostly from food deposits laid down at stipulated points by the Vietcong cadre. And he had come back to make his report.

It was, in brief, that the Trail was useless unless a gargantuan effort was made to make it possible for substantial traffic to move down to effect the infiltration of South Vietnam. Bui Tin had informed Ho and his generals that, relying only on partisans in the South, they would need to wait until the end of the century before the Vietcong movement succeeded in overthrowing the South Vietnamese government. The revolutionary action would need to be staffed and supplied from North Vietnam, and in order to do this, it would be necessary, first, to tame the Trail.

After much consultation and the exploration of alternatives, Ho and General Giap concluded that Tin was correct, and what then began was the Vietnamese equivalent of building the Chinese wall.

They were meeting, this afternoon, several months after the critical decision had been made to modernize the Trail, in the old French colonial courthouse used by Ho as his headquarters. They needed to confront the implications of two developments. The first, the discovery by the South Vietnamese military of their Grand Plan for the Trail.

This had happened when, a week earlier, a detachment of North Vietnamese construction workers were ambushed by the enemy. Most of them had got away, fading into the jungle they had come to know so well. But not the chief engineer, and he was carrying in his satchel the blueprints, so to speak, for the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Late on the evening of the ambush two of the unit's military guards had worked their way back to the site. They had had no difficulty in finding their engineer and identifying him, even though his head had been severed from the body. But what they were after—the satchel—was gone. And now Ho Chi Minh and General Giap and Bui Tin were thumbing through other copies of the seventy-two-page document that had been assembled by Colonel Dong Si Nguyen, the large, weatherbeaten architect of the great Trail, who had been named minister in charge of constructing it.