A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (62 page)

The straw hat was a clue to the man. Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., was an anachronism in American public life by the 1960s—a man of character and lineage with independent political stature. He had modeled himself on the grandfather after whom he had been named, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Republican senator from Massachusetts for thirty-one years, closest friend and collaborator of Theodore Roosevelt, and one of the founders of the American empire. If any two men could claim
principal responsibility for the seizure of the Philippines and the transformation of the United States into a power abroad, the elder Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt would be those two men. Lodge’s grandfather had been at his most brilliant as an orator when he had been calling the country to its new destiny on the eve of the war with Spain that had started the imperial venture. The Senate galleries would fill to hear him speak. He had been the author of the famous description of the commencement: “It has been a splendid little war.” It was yet another irony of this war in Vietnam that sixty-five years after that beginning the grandson of one of the founders should be sent to Saigon to resolve a major crisis of the overseas order, a crisis that was eventually to challenge the American role in the world that the grandfather had initiated and the grandson had helped bring to maturity.

Halberstam and I and the other correspondents would have felt less beleaguered had we been privy to the secret debate in Washington. We did not realize that our dispatches had been arming Averell Harriman, who had moved up to become under secretary of state for political affairs, and Roger Hilsman, who had replaced Harriman in the Far Eastern affairs post at State, in their attempt to persuade Kennedy to authorize the overthrow of Diem and his family. We would have been still more encouraged had we known how much our reporting—and Vann’s view of the war as it was reflected in that reporting—had contributed to shaping the judgment of this man who was to take the power of the United States into his hands in Vietnam in the late summer and fall of 1963 and wield it as he saw fit.

Shortly after his arrival, Halberstam, Browne, and I were invited to have lunch, individually, with the new ambassador and his wife, Emily, a lady from the Boston merchant family of Sears, whose sprightliness and wit leavened the marriage. We were told that the lunches were to be private, that Mr. Lodge wanted our “advice.” When my turn came he questioned me about the regime, the Buddhist crisis, and the war for about an hour at the table and over coffee afterward in the drawing room of the embassy residence. He put the questions matter-of-factly. I watched his face to see what he thought of the answers, but his expression stayed blandly uncommunicative. I told him, in sum, that the Ngo Dinhs were so mad and hated that they were incapable of governing, that the Viet Cong were gaining rapidly in the countryside, and that if Diem and his family stayed in power the war was certain to be lost. If they were replaced by a military regime there was no guarantee that a junta of generals would do better, but there was hope that they might. With the Ngo Dinhs one could look forward only to defeat.

We had been warned that Lodge was to do the questioning, that we were not to attempt to pry anything out of him. I did not want to leave, however, without obtaining something. “And what’s your impression, Mr. Ambassador?” I asked as it was time to go.

He was sitting on the couch beside his wife, his legs crossed lazily and his arm extended behind her. He smiled. “About the same as yours,” he said.

I was skeptical of his proffered frankness. I wondered if this was more flattery, as inviting reporters in their twenties to give “advice” to Henry Cabot Lodge had been, regardless of how sincerely he might be seeking information.

In retrospect, I was wrong to be skeptical, and the other reporters and I soon ceased to be. Lodge’s public behavior and the secret cables in the Pentagon Papers disclose that he had virtually made up his mind before he arrived. “We are launched on a course from which there is no respectable turning back: the overthrow of the Diem government,” he told Kennedy in a top-secret cable just a week after he landed in the rain at Tan Son Nhut and prior to any luncheon interrogations. He gave the president the “fundamental” reason that the United States could not shrink from this intimidating business: “There is no possibility, in my view, that the war can be won under a Diem administration.”

Our reporting and Vann’s investment in it might have been wasted on most of the other important figures in the U.S. government. The effort had not been wasted on Lodge. The explanation was not that he had spent most of his twenties as a reporter and editorial writer, first for the
Boston Transcript
and then for the
New York Herald Tribune
. The explanation was in the peculiar mix of the man—the self-containment of the aristocrat, the sensitivity of the politician to human factors, and a perspective on the military leaders of the 1960s that reached back into the pre-World War II era. Unlike Kennedy, McNamara, and Rusk, he did not think that these generals were necessarily more competent to judge wars than he was. Taylor and Harkins, an old military acquaintance of Lodge’s as another Bostonian, had been his contemporaries in the Army. He had followed the martial tradition of his family by joining the Cavalry Reserve in Boston in 1923, had gone on maneuvers every summer, and had progressed with the Army of the ’20s and ’30s from horses to the tanks of Patton’s new 2nd Armored Division in the maneuvers of 1941. He had been in the first tank fighting of the war to involve Americans in mid-1942 when Marshall and Eisenhower had arranged for him to lead an exploratory mission to the British Eighth Army in Libya and Rommel had unexpectedly attacked. Henry Stimson,
the secretary of war, had managed to keep Lodge in the Senate as the Army’s unofficial representative there until the beginning of 1944. With the battle for Europe coming, Lodge had been unable to resist any longer. He had resigned his seat to serve as a lieutenant colonel, the first senator to do so since the Civil War. After World War II he had maintained his interest in military affairs and in 1963 was a major general in the active reserve.

Lodge had been assured in briefings at the Pentagon and at Admiral Felt’s headquarters in Honolulu that the reporters were contriving stories about flaws in the Saigon forces and Viet Cong gains. He had thought it unlikely that reporters as a group would consistently invent such information. He had also decided that a regime as grotesque as Diem’s in its political behavior could not be expected to win a war. He had known that his invitations to lunch would flatter. He went out of his way in his dealings with all of the reporters to gain as good a press as possible for himself. He had also been interrogating us to take our measure and to see if we had anything of further use to him in the enterprise he had begun.

He was two months bringing his task to fruition. Publicly, he isolated Diem and his family and made them vulnerable to a coup by implying repeatedly in word and gesture that the United States, in the person of Henry Cabot Lodge, would like nothing better than to see them overthrown. On his first morning in Saigon he insulted the Ngo Dinhs by ostentatiously driving to the AID headquarters next to the Xa Loi Pagoda where the two monks were sheltering, telling them they were welcome, and ordering fresh vegetables bought daily for the vegetarian diet to which Buddhist monks adhere. When the chief Buddhist leader, Tri Quang, and the two other monks who had slipped out of Xa Loi and into hiding with him ahead of the raids ran into the embassy lobby a couple of days later and asked for asylum, Lodge granted it to them and gave them a new conference room as temporary living quarters.

Secretly, Lodge put Lou Conein to work as his liaison to three dissident ARVN generals. To remove the Ngo Dinhs, Lodge utilized some of the same senior ARVN officers whom Conein had worked with at Lansdale’s direction in 1955 to install Diem as America’s man in Saigon. They had been colonels then, and Diem had made them generals for coming over to his side. He and his family had later alienated them. They were all members of the small Franco-Vietnamese elite the colonial system had created and had been French citizens until 1955. They would have left with the French Expeditionary Corps had they not been encouraged by American power and money and its representatives like
Lansdale and Conein to stay and attempt to preserve in the South the colonial society in which they had been reared.

The leader of the plot was the second-ranking general in the ARVN, Maj. Gen. Duong Van Minh, forty-seven, “Big Minn” as he was called for his six-foot build. He was from a well-to-do Southern family, born at My Tho, and had attended the best French lycée in Saigon as a youth, Jean Jacques Rousseau, the same school where Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia had been educated. Prior to 1945 he had belonged to the exclusive group of fifty Vietnamese who held a commission in the French Army. Minn’s height and broad shoulders were not the only reason for his unusual appearance. His two upper front teeth had been broken by the interrogators of the Kempeitai, the dreaded Japanese military police, when the Imperial Army suddenly disarmed the Vichy French forces in Indochina in 1945. He refused to have the teeth replaced. In early 1955, during the street fighting with the Binh Xuyen and the maneuvering of the pro-Bao Dai officers to oust Lansdale’s man, Minh had been able to help Diem as commanding officer of the Saigon garrison. Later he had been put in charge of destroying the army of the Hoa Hao sect in the Delta. By 1963, Diem had sidetracked him into the fictitious post of military advisor to the president. (“Since Diem accepts no advice, Minh has lots of time to scheme,” Colonel Dong remarked.)

Minn’s most important associate in the plot was another officer who had rallied to Diem’s support at Lansdale’s and Conein’s behest in the spring of 1955 and who had been more adept at holding some of Diem’s trust in the intervening years—Maj. Gen. Tran Van Don, forty-six, chief of staff of the ARVN in 1963. Don was the unusually handsome son of an aristocratic family; he had been born in France, near Bordeaux, and had attended the Hautes Etudes Commerciales in Paris before World War II and the French Army.

Don’s brother-in-law, Brig. Gen. Le Van Kim, forty-five, was the third plotter. Kim had been a general without an assignment for nearly three years by 1963, having been fired as head of the Military Academy by Diem on suspicion of complicity in the abortive 1960 paratrooper coup. He had studied mathematics and philosophy in Marseilles, joined the French Army in 1939, fought against the Germans, and then been commissioned after the war. His bookish manner had given Kim a reputation as the intellectual of the ARVN.

Lodge had a talent for selecting subordinates with the credentials to perform a particular task for him. In Conein he had the perfect liaison to the plotters. These men trusted Conein as they would not have trusted another CIA agent. He was an old comrade, and his French birth fortified
the relationship. When he was with them he saw that his French side came out, because he lived in both cultures in spirit and he knew that it put them at ease. Conein had been bored for the last several years with his job as pacification advisor to the Ministry of the Interior, and from his vantage point the stakes were far higher this time than in 1955. Few secret agents are ever given an opportunity to scale the professional summit by arranging the overthrow of a government. Conein was transmitting the power of the United States to influence these generals to do its bidding. The clandestine meetings, the passing back and forth of messages between Lodge and the plotters, the coaxing along of the generals, all had the emotional lift of a strong amphetamine. Lives were being risked, including Conein’s, and, he believed, the destinies of two nations were in the balance.

Harkins was opposed to a coup. He did not want to disrupt the war he thought he was winning. He regarded Diem as a satisfactory local ruler and viewed the Buddhist crisis as a passing intrigue. The raids on the pagodas were an unfortunate loss of temper. The Nhus were to blame for the raids, and Diem might be coaxed into parting with them in time. Harkins had other allies in Washington besides Taylor. Mc-Namara and Rusk also saw the situation essentially as he did.

Lodge knew that he would lose if he confronted Harkins and the system, despite the additional weight with Kennedy that his independent political stature gave him. He therefore handled Harkins by indirection, and Harkins, who thought himself a master bureaucrat, was outwitted at his game. Lodge was always polite in his personal dealings with Harkins, and when he had to refer to him in a cable he called him “a splendid general and an old friend of mine.” He then hid from Harkins his cables to Washington about Conein’s meetings with the generals (sent for greater security through the CIA’s separate communications system) until it was too late for Harkins to interfere effectively. Minh and Don helped Lodge by confusing Harkins even then as to whether there was a plot. Because they were afraid that he would betray them to Diem, they lied and told the general they were not planning a coup. Lodge also undercut Harkins’s judgment on the war. He sent Kennedy independent assessments (again without copies to the general) that contradicted Harkins’s optimism. Once more Lodge was careful not to confront. He did not assert baldly that the war was being lost. He said this by filling his reports with the bad news that Harkins was suppressing and by letting others say it for him. The plotters were of help here too. These Saigon generals knew they were losing the war, which was another reason they were so eager to overthrow the Ngo Dinhs. On September
19, Lodge sent a top-secret cable marked “for President only” giving Minn’s view that