Tucker's Last Stand (16 page)

That was
three weeks ago
. Ho Chi Minh had not even
acknowledged
receipt of the message! In Hanoi, he had just nodded at the Canadian representative, and said nothing.

The President is not the most patient man in the world, and after two weeks he instructed the Canadians to
go back
to Ho and ask him to
reply
to the offer.

Do you know what Ho said?

The Director did not know what Ho said.

He said, “What offer?” Abe Fortas rang for another round of drinks.

The President believes that there is only one way to curb the appetite of the North Vietnamese, and that is to show them that it hurts
them
more than they can endure to pursue their present policies. But what he does not want—and Abe Fortas certainly saw his point of view, and he hoped the Director did too—what he does
not
want is a plain, all-out, Korean-style war. There are 17,000 U.S. troops and technicians in South Vietnam now. He doesn't want that number to grow to 170,000, let alone a quarter of a million. In order to exert force on the North but avoid triggering a formal, Korean-style encounter, Lyndon Johnson has to have
flexibility
. We all know how Truman got that: through a U.N. resolution that authorized a “police action”—Hah! Some
police action
: 33,000 killed, 103,000 wounded! But the fact of the matter was, Truman could do anything he wanted. He could send in fifty divisions or no divisions. He could have used the nuclear bomb if he had wanted to.

And then, of course, the Director knew of the more recent parallel?

“Quemoy, Matsu?”

“That was exactly what the President had in mind,” said Abe Fortas. When Quemoy and Matsu were threatened by mainland China, which, as we all remember, began to bomb the two little islands situated only a few miles from the Chinese coast—islands governed, however, by Taiwan—Eisenhower asked Congress, which readily granted it, permission to react as he thought “advisable” to “protect U.S. interests.”

The result? The threat to Quemoy and Matsu diminishes. There was a great deal of rhetoric spilled over the question when Jack Kennedy ran against Nixon. That was phony: Nixon knew and every student of the question knew that the congressional authority given to Eisenhower to react as he saw fit in his role as Commander in Chief would carry over to his successor, whether it was President Nixon or President Kennedy. But it was critically important that Eisenhower
had
that instrument.

“President Johnson wants something like it?”

“President Johnson wants something like it,” Abe Fortas confirmed. “
But
,” and here was a big
but
, “he doesn't want to step right up and go to Congress just like that and ask for it. Bill Bundy—and this I know you are aware of—drafted a resolution in the spring that he thought would be appropriate, and Walt Rostow worked on it, and for a while it looked as though the President was willing to go right to Congress and ask for it. But there is a lot of inertia out there, and with Goldwater screaming his head off about Vietnam, the President on the one hand wishes to distinguish between America under his leadership—cool, reflective, but strong and energetic—and America under the leadership of a senator who is pretty much of a fundamentalist in all his political reasoning. So what he needs is—”

“A
casus belli
?”

That, said Abe Fortas, was probably too strong a way to put it. A
casus belli
, a cause of war. “We don't want something to happen that simply requires war. But if the North Vietnamese were to”—Abe Fortas chose to be specific here—“if they were to attack one of our ships, say a unit of the Seventh Fleet, while that ship was cruising in international waters, that would be”—sure, the Director was free to call it a
casus belli
if he chose to do so. But it would
certainly
be a military provocation. With such a thing in hand the President could go to Congress and say: “Enough is enough! Not only do we have a nation engaged in a war of aggression against a southern neighbor, which neighbor we are, by codicil to the Geneva Accords, and SEATO, bound to assist, we face now a nation which has violated the freedom of the seas, and this is intolerable. Accordingly, I request of Congress a resolution that authorizes—enjoins me—instructs me …”

“We,” Mr. Fortas paused, “have cautioned against the President's using the word 'empower,' since we take the position that he
has
that power, as Commander in Chief, under the Constitution.” Anyway, with such a resolution, or even in anticipation of its passage, he could retaliate and give Ho Chi Minh a taste of grapeshot, Abe Fortas said with just a hint of apology at using a cliché in the presence of so discriminating a listener.

“God knows we have accumulated a pretty exact knowledge of exactly where the targets are along the coast,” said the Director. “The Navy would know exactly where to go, exactly where to drop the bombs. Take out months of Soviet mischief.”

Exactly! said Abe Fortas; exactly. And with that hard pill to swallow, who knows? Before you know it, it will be Ho Chi Minh calling in the Canadian representative to the Control Commission, not the other way around. Everything would change. The whole balance of forces.

The Director smiled. “The correlation of forces.”

Ah, said Abe Fortas, the Director knew his Lenin. Yes indeed. To be sure, there was always the possibility that the North Vietnamese would simply decline to take any aggressive step against a unit of our fleet. Abe Fortas wanted to be reminded—just exactly how close had any unit of the Seventh Fleet ever come to North Vietnamese territory?

“Eight miles.”

And of course, Abe Fortas mused, we have always taken the position that three miles is all the distance we need to respect. So perhaps the best way of testing the North Vietnamese would be to instruct one of our naval units to edge right up there, right up to four miles. See if they will stomach that. Abe Fortas wanted to know whether the Director thought the North Vietnamese
would
strike out against a U.S. unit that came in that close.

The Director only the day before had the report. Oakes had filed it in the telegraphese in which he was so uncomfortable, but which he could manage in his sleep now, after thirteen years. The Director reached for his briefcase and pulled it out. “You'd better read it yourself, easier to understand.”

WENT 7/22 0600 WITH COMPANY FISH BOAT PROBE GOOK REACTION TO 4 REPEAT 4 MILE APPROACH. AT LAT 19-42 LONG 105-21 RADAR SPOTTED PATROL NVA GUNNING USWARD. FEIGNED FISHNET SNAFU ATTEMPT DISTRACTION. NO SOAP PATROL BOAT STEAMED IN LET FLY 3-INCHER AT APPROX 900 METERS. DROPPED NET HEADED S.E. AT MAX PLAUSIBLE VELOCITY, HIT RADIO WITH VN RAPID VOICE PROTEST, LOST VALUABLE FISHNET ACCT THREATS IN INTERNATIONAL WATERS. NO ACKNOWLEDGMENT BUT INTERCEPT RADIO NVA TO HQ REPORTING INCIDENT BUT EXAGGERATE OUR VESSEL PROXIMITY TO SHORE, SAID 2.8 MILES ACTUALLY 4.1. WILL STAY TUNED. OAKES.

When Abe Fortas finished reading, the Director gave an account of Blackford Oakes's probe the day before in relatively lyrical translation. And he summed up, “No way of telling, in a word. Our 34-A project has got the NVA mad as hell, we know from intelligence, as you can tell from Oakes's sortie.”

Abe Fortas agreed.

The thing to do was to get on with it, and the Joint Chiefs, who had been eager for months simply to bomb the hell out of North Vietnam, would be given the word that aggressive behavior against South Vietnamese fishing boats
requires
us to advance one of our destroyers or cruisers closer to the coastline, to be some kind of a
presence
there to affirm the freedom of the seas. At the Director's end, Abe Fortas said, the 34-A operation should be instructed to get the fishing boats in very close to the coast, beginning approximately on the day that U.S. naval forces dispatch their own vessel to come in closer to the coast, the idea being that the mere presence of the U.S. boat will provide protection to the fishing boats.

The Director said he would alert his unit in Danang. All he needed was to be informed of the day when the U.S. naval vessel would begin patrolling in close quarters.

Abe Fortas said that, after all, he was not an official member of the government, that all he was trying to do was to advance the situation in line with the thinking of the President. He was certain that the appropriate word could be got to the Chief of Naval Operations to act aggressively in defense of the freedom of the seas, but perhaps, under the circumstances, that word ought not to go out directly from the Oval Office—the Director surely would have no difficulty in getting this done? And after all, the Seventh Fleet had been patrolling the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin since the fifties, and our concern to defend the freedom of the seas was internationally acknowledged. Had the Director ever seen, anywhere, a lovelier combination—Abe Fortas pointed out the yacht's picture window—a lovelier combination of colors than those caused by the red descending on the white-marble profile of the City of Washington?

The Director said no, he had never seen a lovelier combination.

16

May, 1964

Saigon–Hué–Hanoi

Vietnam

Lao Dai performed a little ritual before leaving her apartment for the school. She pulled up the glass on her makeup table and slipped out a photograph of Le Duc Sy. She closed her eyes and brought the print to her lips, paused for a moment and then replaced it. It had been almost three months since she had seen him. Two months since she had had any word from him, but for this hardship she had been prepared. “It will be weeks. Maybe months, even. We have our duties to do. The revolution comes first.” She understood. And, of course, officially Le Duc Sy was—dead.

Le Duc Sy never denied it. He just had been born a hot-blooded human being. He had been a hot-blooded boy, in point of fact. During all those years at the Lycée in Hué where he and Bui Tin had been best friends during the years of the Japanese occupation he had been unruly. Le Duc Sy was fifteen years old, impudent, engaging, lithe, when the Japanese arrived, and when the Japanese headmaster came in to replace the French headmaster he found Sy recalcitrant beyond the point of toleration. The boy mimicked him, answered before the question was asked, refused to obey simple orders. He was sent home to his father, who thrashed him soundly. The Japanese authorities at the school quite naturally assumed that Sy was expressing a precocious resentment against the foreign occupation. In fact, although Le Duc Sy resented the Japanese authorities, he had acted not very differently before they came. He had often been punished by his father, at the specific recommendation of the French schoolmaster and, before that, of the nuns at the little Catholic primary school.

But those who knew Le Duc Sy—and most of the members of the aristocratic Vietnamese enclave did know him—tended to be indulgent of the ungovernable son of Le Duc Ton. For one thing, he was wonderfully attractive. Handsome, smart, a star athlete, a wonderful mimic who had only to listen to the radio in order to duplicate exactly the voice of the person he had heard speak, whether it was General Tojo addressing his troops in Japanese or Tokyo Rose speaking her voluptuous subversions to the Americans in her Sunday-suited English. Le Duc Sy would at the least urging become General Tojo, or Tokyo Rose or, for that matter, his headmaster, his father, or his classmate Bui Tin. On one occasion he managed to deepen his soprano voice sufficiently to persuade a local merchant who dealt frequently with his father that it was Le Duc Ton himself on the phone, and that he desired not one, but two of the Swiss movie cameras displayed in the window. That got him another thrashing, but Le Duc Ton was secretly amused, and told all his friends about the Great Imposture.

Surely he would grow out of it, they all said, and become, like his father, the exemplary citizen: worldly, affluent, a man of commerce and civic-mindedness who had maintained perfect relations with the French, managed to endure the humiliations and the privations imposed on him and his family by the Japanese with forbearance, knowing that the nightmare would someday end. When that happened, surely Le Duc Sy would grow up, stop getting into scrapes, stop provoking his teachers. In any event, if liberation did not come sooner, he would need to be tamed before reaching the age of seventeen, when the Japanese would conscript him for military duty—which day never came.

The Vietnamese-French community quickly changed their opinion of Le Duc Sy when he announced one day that he would depart for the North to join his friend Bui Tin and the forces of Ho Chi Minh to fight the French. This time his father closed the door on his son, indeed would not let him into the house even to bid his mother and two sisters goodbye. Loud enough for Le Duc Sy to hear through the closed door, Le Duc Ton said that he was finally convinced that Le Duc Sy's teachers had been right, that he was a disorganized, disrespectful, disloyal boy—indeed, no longer a boy but, at age eighteen, a young man; that he could leave and do what he wished in the way of treachery to old and benevolent gentlefolk like the French, who had brought peace and industry to Indochina; that he was ungrateful for everything he, Le Duc Ton, his father, had done for him, ungrateful to his mother who had cared for him, to his sisters who had been loyal to him during his delinquent youth; that he could reenter the family home only after he had renounced treason and gone to church and confessed his sin. Until that moment, Le Duc Ton hoped not to hear uttered in his presence the name of Le Duc Sy.

Like his friend Bui Tin, Sy fought hard for Ho Chi Minh. But unlike the calm, measured, reflective Bui Tin, Sy was always his own unruly self. This resulted in bizarre acts of bravery. He thought nothing of taking on French patrols that overwhelmingly outnumbered the platoon he was in charge of. He was several times wounded, several times reprimanded, several times rewarded for bravery, and never—because of his eccentricity—seriously promoted; so that after Dien Bien Phu and the temporary halt in the fighting, it hadn't been known exactly what to do with him. Given his background and qualities and quirks, and of course his continued friendship with Bui Tin, the matter of his future was brought before Ho Chi Minh himself.