Authors: Oliver Stone,L. Fletcher Prouty
As mentioned earlier, Diem had made it quite clear what his goals with the Strategic Hamlet program were. His position did not jibe with those who wanted to escalate the war in Indochina and who were not at all interested in the introduction of an ancient form of self-government into the battle-scarred countryside.
On top of this came Kennedy’s desire to get the United States out of Indochina by the end of 1965, as evidenced by his orchestration of a series of events such as the Krulak-Mendenhall visit to Vietnam in September 1963. By late summer, and certainly by the time of the McNamara-Taylor trip, closely held plans had progressed for the removal of the Diems from Saigon. President Kennedy had reached the decision that the United States should do all it could to train, equip, and finance the government of South Vietnam to fight its own war, but that this would be done for someone other than Ngo Dinh Diem.
On the same day that the President received this McNamara-Taylor report, Gen. Tran Van Don had his first “accidental” (it had been carefully planned) meeting with the CIA’s Lt. Col. Lucien Conein at Tan Son Nhut airport in Saigon. This was a meeting of great significance, and one that to this day has never been properly explained. General Don was the commander of the South Vietnamese army. He had been born and educated in France and had served in the French army during World War II. He and Conein were well acquainted.
Nearly twenty years later, in 1963, the CIA designated Conein, one of its most valuable agents in the Far East, to meet with his old friend of eighteen years, Gen. Tran Van Don, to arrange for the ouster of President Diem. Only ten years earlier, Gen. Edward G. Lansdale and Conein had worked hard to get Ngo Dinh Diem started as the newly assigned president of South Vietnam.
Conein’s task was to stay close enough to key Vietnamese to assure them that the United States would not interfere with their plan to move in as soon as President Diem had left Saigon, and to keep Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and Conein’s own CIA associates informed.
The plan prepared by the United States had been carefully drawn to leave Diem no alternative except to leave on this scheduled trip. There was much discussion and argument among members of the Kennedy administration, who knew of the President’s intention to oust Diem once he had left the country. With Madame Nhu and Archbishop Thuc already in Europe, Diem and his brother were to follow to attend a meeting of the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.
The evacuation plan, carefully orchestrated under Kennedy’s direction, broke down, and Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother were murdered. There have been many accounts of this coup d’état. They do not tell the role that Kennedy played in the story, and many were created to cover the real plan and to protect those Vietnamese who had worked closely with the administration.
I was on duty in the Joint Chiefs of Staff section of the Pentagon on the day of the coup d’état. My immediate boss, General Krulak, knew the full details of the plan to remove Diem from the scene by flying him and his brother out of Saigon. Krulak remained in contact with the White House as developments in Saigon were relayed. I can recall clearly the absolute shock in our offices when it was learned that Diem had not left on the proffered aircraft for Europe.
One of the most important narratives of this event was written by Edward G. Lansdale in his autobiography
In the Midst of Wars
. Few Americans, if any, knew Ngo Dinh Diem and the situation in Vietnam from 1954-68 better than Ed Lansdale. He wrote:
As the prisons filled up with political opponents, as the older nationalist parties went underground, with the body politics fractured, Communist political cadre became active throughout South Vietnam, recruiting followers for action against a government held together mainly by the Can Lao elite rather than by popular support. The reaped whirlwind finally arrived in November 1963, when the nationalist opposition erupted violently, imprisoning many of the Can Loa and killing Diem, Nhu, and others. It was heartbreaking to be an onlooker to this tragic bit of history.
It was some time before the news became known that Diem had fled to Cholon and been captured and killed there. This news was flashed around the world; this was the story that everyone heard. The public never heard of the planned flight to Europe that the Kennedy administration had arranged for him.
Thus it was that the file of routine cable traffic between Washington and Saigon eventually became known with the release and publication of the Pentagon Papers. This is how it happened that Howard Hunt was able to locate certain top-level messages to and from the White House and Ambassador Lodge in Saigon that contained information referring to “highest authority”—the cable traffic code for President Kennedy.
None of these messages contained any reference to a plot to kill President Diem and his brother or came even close to it. Concealed within these messages were carefully worded phrases that gave Ambassador Lodge the information he needed in order to direct all participants into action and to begin the careful removal of the two brothers to Europe by commercial aircraft.
According to information that came out during the Watergate hearings, those files that had been forged to smear President Kennedy were put in Hunt’s White House safe, where they remained until discovered by investigators later.
There is much about this episode that has become important upon review. There are those who have been so violently opposed to Jack Kennedy and all that he stood for that they have stooped to all kinds of sordid activities to smear him while he was alive, to attack his brother Bobby while he was still alive, and to hound Sen. Edward Kennedy to this day. Nixon’s gratuitous reference to Kennedy’s “complicity in the murder of Diem” after a decade of silence on that subject speaks for itself. The efforts of Howard Hunt and Chuck Colson (both employees of the White House at the time) to dig up old files in order to besmirch the memory of President Kennedy provide another example.
In an ominous way, the Pentagon Papers and Watergate episodes were cut from the same fabric, and most important, their exposure was a direct outgrowth of the nationwide dissatisfaction with the Vietnam War. Because the development of the war in Indochina had been spread out so long, since 1945, and because most of the events that brought about this terrible form of modern genocide in the name of “anticommunism” or “containment” were buried in deep secrecy or not even available in written records, Robert S. McNamara, then secretary of defense, directed, on June 17, 1967, that a task force be formed to collate and study the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam from World War II to the present.
This project, which produced thousands of documents of all kinds from many sources, was the primary source of that group of more than four thousand documents that were surreptitiously released to various news media and called the Pentagon Papers. Almost four years later, on June 13, 1971, the
New York Times
, the
Washington Post
, and the
Boston Globe
, among others, started the serialization of the Pentagon Papers.
Few people have been more articulate on the subject than the then senator from Alaska, Mike Gravel:
The Pentagon Papers reveal the inner workings of a government bureaucracy set up to defend this country, but now out of control, managing an international empire by garrisoning American troops around the world. It created an artificial client state in South Vietnam, lamented its unpopularity among its own people, eventually encouraged the overthrow of that government, and then supported a series of military dictators who served their own ends, and at times our government’s ends, but never the cause of their own people.
In his brilliant introduction the senator included an extract from the works of the English novelist and historian, H. G. Wells, who once wrote:
The true strength of rulers and empires lies not in armies or emotions, but in the belief of men that they are inflexibly open and truthful and legal. As soon as a government departs from that standard, it ceases to be anything more than “the gang in possession” and its days are numbered.
The publication of the Pentagon Papers became an event unique in American history. One day after their publication had begun in the
New York Times,
I received a call from the British Broadcasting Corporation requesting that I travel to London to participate in a series of programs, live on prime-time TV, with Daniel Ellsberg. I did travel to London and did take part in a daily series on the subject, but Ellsberg did not participate in the broadcasts, because his lawyer advised him not to leave the country at that time.
In this book, I have used various editions of the Pentagon Papers as reference material. They are useful and they are quite accurate as far as individual documents go, but they are dangerous in the hands of those who do not have the experience or the other sources required to validate and balance their content. This is because their true source was only marginally the Pentagon and because the clever selection of those documents by the compilers removed many important papers. This neglect of key documents served to reduce the value of those that remained to tell the story of the Vietnam War. From the beginning, the Pentagon Papers were a compilation of documents designed to paint President John F. Kennedy as the villain of the story, and to shield the role of the CIA.
This vast stack of papers has been labeled the Pentagon Papers, but that is a misnomer. It is quite true that most of them were found in certain highly classified files in the Pentagon, but they were functionally limited files. For example, despite their volume—nearly four thousand documents—there are remarkably few that actually bear the signature of military officers. In fact, many of those that carry the signature of a military officer, or that refer to military officers, make reference to such men as Edward G. Lansdale, who actually worked for the CIA while serving in a cover assignment with the military. When such papers are removed from the “military” or “Pentagon” categorization, what remains is a nonmilitary and non-Pentagon collection. For the serious and honest historian, this becomes an important distinction. To be truly “Pentagon” Papers, the majority of them, at least, ought to have been written there.
In a letter to the then secretary of defense, Clark Clifford, dated January 15, 1969, Leslie H. Gelb, director of the Study Task Force that assembled the Pentagon Papers, said: “In the beginning, Mr. McNamara gave the task force full access to OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] files, and the task force received access to CIA materials, and some use of State Department cables and memoranda. We had no access to the White House files.”
Despite this disclaimer, there are many White House files in the Pentagon Papers—and it was this group of documents, in fact, that was the source of the anti-Kennedy forgeries.
The files from which most of these papers were obtained were in that section of the Office of the Secretary of Defense called International Security Affairs. Although this office was in the Pentagon, it was lightly staffed with military officers, and most of its activities concerned other government departments and agencies, such as the CIA, the Department of State, and the White House. That is why its files consisted of papers that originated outside the Pentagon, giving the Pentagon Papers production an entirely nonmilitary slant.
Another reason for caution regarding the utilization of the Pentagon Papers as history is that, as Gelb said, “These outstanding people [those who worked on the task force] came from everywhere—the military services, State, OSD, and the ‘think tanks.’ Some came for a month, for three months, for six months. . . in all, we had thirty-six professionals working on these studies, with an average of four months per man.”
That says it all! They had become experts in four months!
John Foster Dulles, formerly secretary of state, once declared that one of the most complicated periods in this nation’s history began in Indochina on September 2, 1945. There is no way that this group, averaging “four months per man” in its studies in 1967, and 1968, was going to be qualified to present a true and accurate account of that war by the compilation of a scattering of papers that contained bits and pieces of the story.
This reveals one of my greatest misgivings concerning the accuracy of the study. There are altogether too many important papers that did not get included in this study, too many that were absolutely crucial to an understanding of the origins of, and reasons for, this war.
This has been a complaint of historians who have attempted to teach the facts of this war. They have found that the history book accounts of it have been written by writers who were not there, who had little or nothing to do with it—or, conversely, that they have been written by those who were there, but who were there for a one-year tour of duty, usually in the post-1965 period. Few of these writers have had the comprehensive experience that is a prerequisite to understanding that type of contemporary history.
Regarding the Pentagon Papers themselves, Senator Gravel wrote:
The Papers do not support our good intentions. The Papers prove that, from the beginning, the war has been an American war, serving to perpetuate American military power in Asia. Peace has never been on the American agenda for Southeast Asia. Neither we nor the South Vietnamese have been masters of our Southeast Asian policy; we have been its victims, as the leaders of America sought to preserve their reputation for toughness and determination.