Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 (19 page)

It was clear to everyone in the administration, even the optimists, that it was time for a change. Frederick Nolting had to go. An aristocrat Virginian, Nolting sympathized with the Ngo family. But who would replace him? The new United States ambassador to South Vietnam needed Asian experience, but at the same time he had to be independent of the military. The inner circles at the White House discussed the matter at length during the summer of 1963, and Dean Rusk stunned everyone by suggesting Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. The mere mention of Lodge’s name was practically sacrilege. If the Kennedys bled Irish green, Lodge was the bluest of the blue bloods, a North Shore Yankee Republican of Massachusetts ancestry going back three hundred years. The Kennedys had long resented Boston Brahmins who disdained the famine-stricken Irish immigrants. Kennedy’s defeat of Lodge for the Senate seat in 1952 had been gratifying, and in 1960 Lodge was Richard Nixon’s running mate. On the night Lodge accepted the Republican vice-presidential nomination, Kennedy watched Nixon and Lodge raise their clenched hands on television. “That’s the last Nixon will see of Lodge,” he remarked to Kenny O’Donnell, his close friend and aide. “If Nixon ever tries to visit the Lodges at Beverly, they won’t let him in the door.”

The more Kennedy thought about Rusk’s suggestion, the more he liked it. Fluent in French, Lodge had a Harvard education and a lifetime of experience. As a three-time United States senator and former ambassador to the United Nations, Lodge would not kowtow to anyone. And his gilt-edged Republican credentials might deflect some of the right-wing criticism of the administration. There was one final, mean little twist to the Lodge appointment, summed up in O’Donnell’s later comment: “the idea of getting Lodge mixed up in such a hopeless mess as the one in Vietnam was irresistible.”

It took Lodge a few days in Saigon to realize what a hopeless mess it was. In a cable of August 28 to President Kennedy, Lodge said that the United States was “launched on a course from which there is no respectable turning back: the overthrow of the Diem government... There is no possibility that the war can be won under a Diem administration. The chance of bringing off a generals’ coup depends on them to some extent.... We should proceed to make an all-out effort to get the generals to move promptly.”

Kennedy wanted an independent assessment of how the war was going. On September 6 he asked Victor Krulak to take another look. He also sent Joseph Mendenhall, a career diplomat who had spent three years in Saigon. Both men made whirlwind trips, returning to the White House at about the same time on September 10. Krulak had met with Harkins and Lodge and a variety of MACV officials. Mendenhall spent his time with lower-echelon embassy officials and journalists. Krulak reported to Kennedy that the war was being won and that he could begin the promised withdrawal of 1,000 troops by the end of the year. Mendenhall announced that the Vietcong were getting stronger, that a religious civil war between Buddhists and Catholics was imminent, that the Diem regime had lost even the little credibility it once enjoyed, and that a communist victory was certain. Incredulous, Kennedy remarked at the end of their joint briefing, “You two did visit the same country, didn’t you?”

Two weeks later, Kennedy sent Maxwell Taylor and Robert McNamara to Saigon. By that time peasants were leaving the strategic hamlets in droves, and the Vietcong were cutting up the barbed wire and using it in mines. The Vietcong were now fielding more than 35,000 troops and another 65,000 people in support services. Taylor and McNamara listened to Harkins and came back with the great promise “that the military campaign has made great progress and continues to progress” in spite of “serious political tensions in Saigon.” By the end of 1965, they astonishingly said, “It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel.”

When he was in Saigon, Maxwell Taylor arranged a tennis match with General Duong Van Minh to feel him out about the possibilities of a coup. Taylor tried delicately to broach the issue, but a suspicious Minh kept his own counsel, preferring to talk only about forehands and backhands. But he had a view of the war, and it was glum: “more of the population on their side than has the GVN [Diem regime]” and the “heart of the Army is not in the war.” Lodge distanced himself from Diem and Nhu, and it did not take long for them to realize that the United States was seeking their removal. South Vietnamese military leaders were worried that a frustrated United States might cut off military aid. General Tran Van Don, ARVN chief of staff, was aware of Maxwell Taylor’s approach to Duong Van Minh, and he let Lucien Conein know that coup plans were under way. French-born but American-raised, Conein had spent World War II in France as an OSS agent. He was now a CIA agent in Saigon with powerful ARVN connections. He informed Tran Van Don that the United States wanted a new military government. The plotting started.

Diem and Nhu got wind of the plan and hatched a scheme of their own. Known as Operation Bravo, it involved staging a fake revolt in Saigon, complete with demonstrations, assassinations of prominent politicians—including Minh, Tran, Conein, and Lodge—orchestrated “revolutionary broadcasts” over Saigon radio, and the flight of Diem and Nhu to secret headquarters in the countryside. Once the chaos seemed at its peak, they would reenter Saigon with a column of ARVN troops commanded by their trusted military adviser General Ton That Dinh. They would then crush the “rebellion” and “save” South Vietnam. What they did not know was that Ton That Dinh was part of the conspiracy. On November 1, 1963, the two brothers realized that Operation Bravo was not to be, and they fled to Cholon. The brothers talked with several supporters and decided to give in. Diem telephoned staff headquarters and said that he was ready to surrender with “military honors.” The surrender, the rebel leaders informed him, would be unconditional, but they promised him safety.

Minh dispatched two jeeps and an armored personnel carrier. Among the men on the mission was Minh’s bodyguard, Captain Nhung, a professional assassin who notched his pistol after each killing. As the convoy set off, Minh gave Nhung a prearranged signal. In office or out, Diem and Nhu were powerful men whose craftiness and base of support commanded respect and honest fear. Such men, several rebels agreed, were best dead. “To kill weeds,” one of them said, “you must pull them out by their roots.” And Captain Nhung was an expert at this sort of gardening. Diem and Nhu surrendered, and rebels put them in the personnel carrier. Both men’s hands were tied. The convoy then headed for the rebel headquarters. Captain Nhung rode with the brothers. When the vehicles arrived at Joint General Staff headquarters, Diem and Nhu were dead. Both had been shot. Nhu had also been stabbed several times, Nhung told Minh. Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc fled to Rome. Ngo Dinh Can was arrested in Hue and executed in Saigon. Madame Nhu escaped the bloodbath only because she was in the United States. When news of the assassinations became public, celebrations erupted in the streets of Saigon.

Although Lodge had not planned on the assassinations, they did not disturb him. The rebels told him that Nhu and Diem had died of “accidental suicide.” To David Halberstam, Lodge remarked: “What would we have done with them had they lived? Every Colonel Blimp in the world would have made use of them.” Minh was of like mind. “Diem could not be allowed to live because he was too much respected among simple, gullible people in the countryside, especially the Catholics and the refugees. We had to kill Nhu because he was so widely feared—and he had created organizations that were arms of his personal power.”

When Kennedy got the news, he was profoundly disappointed. During his administration the United States had spent nearly $1 billion in South Vietnam, increased the number of American military advisers to more than 16,000, and had 108 United States soldiers killed there. But the Vietcong were stronger than ever. “Two weeks after the coup, Kennedy instructed Michael Forrestal to begin a “complete and very profound review of how we got into this country, what we thought we were doing, and what we now think we can do.… I even want to think about whether or not we should be there.” Kennedy never got a chance to see the report. On November 22, 1963, he was assassinated in Dallas. Lyndon Johnson became president. A few days after the funeral, Johnson sent a memo to all State Department officials: “Before you go to bed at night I want you to do one thing for me: ask yourself this one question … what have I done for Vietnam today?”

Up to this point, almost the whole of the serious discussion of Vietnam had been within the administration. Few Americans had any idea of what their country was doing. In movies and television, combat was set in World War II: 12
O’Clock High
, a tale of an Army Air Corps bomber group in England;
The Wackiest
Ship in the Army
, a comedy in a Pacific setting;
Combat
, which tells the story of a World War II army platoon;
Convoy
, which portrays the navy during the battle of the Atlantic;
Mr.
Roberts
, featuring a naval officer;
McHale’s Navy
, a slapstick comedy set in the South Pacific;
Hogan’s Heroes
, a comedy set in a German prisoner-of-war camp. All of these, even the comedies, were extremely promilitary. The screwups of
McHale’s Navy
and
Hogan’s Heroes
can still outfight and outthink the enemy, even if in some highly unorthodox ways. When popular culture in the form of comic books did take note of Vietnam, it was even less helpful. In July 1962 Dell Publishing Company began producing its
Jungle War Stories
. Communist forces, inspired by the Soviet Union and Red China, are undermining the government of South Vietnam as part of a global conspiracy to conquer the world. The Vietcong are bloodthirsty sadists who torture and kill the innocent civilians of South Vietnam. The Green Berets are men of military prowess, humanitarianism, and leadership who help the South Vietnamese defend themselves against the communist juggernaut.

As yet, critics of the war had been few. A. J. Muste, one of the nation’s veteran pacifists, headed the Fellowship of Reconciliation during the 1950s and early 1960s. Established in 1914 during World War I, FOR had long been the most influential pacifist group in Great Britain and the United States. Late in 1962 Muste began warning Americans about the war. The War Resisters League was even more active. Founded in 1923 as a secular pacifist organization, the WRL had opposed American involvement in World War II and the Korean War. By early 1963, under the leadership of David Dellinger, the WRL focused its protests on the expanding American military advisement effort in Vietnam. Except for these isolated voices, the Kennedy administration’s Vietnam policy was virtually unopposed. Johnson was not to be so fortunate.

5

Planning a Tragedy, 1963–1965

It is fashionable in some quarters to say that the problems in Southeast Asia are primarily political and economic rather than military. I do not agree. The essence of the problem is military.

—General Earle G. Wheeler, 1962

Lyndon Baines Johnson was the Lon Chaney of American politics. Just as Chaney, the man with a thousand faces, could play any film role, Johnson could play any political role. He could be all things to all people. Always friendly, always ready to smile and flatter, never afraid to show affection or to express his love, Johnson was almost irresistible. He believed that the intellectuals who criticized him simply did not understand him. He said they

never take the time to think about what really goes on in these one-to-one sessions because they’ve never been involved in persuading anyone to do anything. They’re just like a pack of nuns who’ve convinced themselves that sex is dirty and ugly and low-downed and forced because
they
never have it. And because they never have it, they see it all as rape instead of seduction and they miss the elaborate preparation that goes on before the act is finally done.

But who was the real Lyndon Johnson? Was he the conservative oil-and-gas man? Certainly other conservative oil-and-gas men believed that Lyndon was their boy in Washington, and they provided the dollars that fueled his political career. Or was he a good Texas populist as his father had been? Or perhaps he was a New Deal liberal Democrat. Perhaps he himself was not sure who he was. All his life he seemed bent on creating a past for himself. He lied about his birth, his parents, his grandparents, his education, and his loves. He claimed that his great-greatgrandfather had died defending the Alamo. When a reporter pointed out to him that none of his relatives had fought at the Alamo, Johnson exclaimed: “God damn it, why must all those journalists be such sticklers for detail? Why, they'd hold you to an accurate description of the first time you ever made love, expecting you to remember the color of the room and the shape of the windows. . . . The fact is that my great-greatgrandfather died at the Battle of San Jacinto, not the Alamo.” But that ancestor—the one who had not died at the Alamo—had also not died at San Jacinto. Johnson advised correspondents to burn his letters. He arranged to have information about his college years cut out of hundreds of copies of the Southwest State Teachers College yearbooks. As his biographer Robert A. Caro writes, “In a sense, Lyndon Johnson not only attempted to create, and leave for history, his own legend, but to ensure that it could never be disproven.” So the real Lyndon Johnson is a riddle.

Johnson was born in 1908 in the Texas Hill Country, a hot, impoverished section of the state. His family was poor, but his mother came from a once-prosperous family that had been financially ruined by a bad investment. In her mind, at least, she remained above the world of dirty men and coarse women who populated the Hill Country. And she told Lyndon that he too was meant for better things, that unlike his father—who was very much at home among the unlettered folk of the Pedernales—he had culture in his blood. He grew up torn between the world of his mother and that of his father. His father cussed and talked politics; his mother read and dreamed of a better life. Lyndon embraced his father’s world. He mastered the crude Texas metaphors, drank, trafficked in power politics, and expressed distrust of ideas, books, and lofty education if not outright contempt for them.

At Southwest Texas State Teachers College, Johnson showed that to achieve power he was willing, even eager, to work tirelessly at the most thankless task. Quick to recognize who had power, he attached himself to the powerful, shamelessly flattered them, made himself indispensable to them. It was a formula that Johnson was to repeat endlessly during his life. At San Marcos, he sought out the school’s president, Cecil Evans. Within a year he was determining who got campus jobs, the life-blood of many poor students. Control of campus jobs translated into power. And Johnson used the power to control campus politics. Nicknamed “Bull” (short for “Bullshit”) Johnson because he told so many lies, Lyndon nevertheless made the tiny school his fiefdom. The acquisition of power, he would often say, was necessary before he could do “good works.” Perhaps his ends were noble, but so often it seemed that Johnson’s only end was more power.

After a brief stint in teaching, Johnson went to Washington as a secretary to Congressman Richard Kleberg. It was 1931, a bleak year in the capital, but Johnson was euphoric. He moved into the Dodge Hotel, where seventy-five other legislative secretaries lived, and studied the conduits of power. He roamed the halls asking questions. He haunted the bathroom seeking knowledge. On his first night at the hotel he took four separate showers because he wanted to meet and talk to the other secretaries. The next morning he walked to the bathroom five times at ten-minute intervals so that he could meet more people. He extracted from each conversation knowledge about the workings of Washington that he mentally cataloged and filed away for future reference. He read the Washington newspapers as well as the
New York Times
and the
Wall Street Journal.
He talked with elevator operators, cooks, and janitors. And he courted the legislators. He was deferential, full of “Yes, sir” and “No, sir,” and his flattery knew no bounds. One acquaintance called Johnson a “professional son.” No father could wish for more respect and consideration and love from a son than Johnson seemed to give.

Johnson courted several power brokers on Capitol Hill. Most important is that he snuggled in close to Sam Rayburn, whose sharp eyes seemed to see through everyone. Rayburn liked Lyndon—perhaps even understood him—and became an unmatched patron. He helped Johnson get appointed as the Texas director of the National Youth Administration. He also aided Johnson’s successful bid for a vacant congressional seat in 1937. No constituency was better served by an elected official. Johnson wrestled free the federal money needed to build great dams that produced electricity. Because of Johnson, electric light replaced candles and prosperity overcame poverty in the Hill Country.

Politically, Johnson kept rising. As a member of a three-man committee sent by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to observe the progress of the war in the Pacific, he received a Silver Star from General Douglas MacArthur, himself very much a politician, after a plane carrying the congressman came under a Japanese attack. Losing his first bid for the Senate, he won a seat in his second try in 1948. In 1951 he became the Democratic whip of the Senate; in 1953, the Senate minority leader; in 1955, the majority leader. Each new position meant more power and new challenges. Each Johnson mastered with the skill of a political artist. Nobody did it better. And, of course, Johnson loved the power that came with success. One night in 1958, a bit tight and in a good mood, he put an arm around two Texas congressmen and boasted, “I’m one powerful sonofabitch.” It was an understatement. Johnson was the powerful sonofabitch, and everything he did demonstrated that power. This was true even to the smallest detail. The telephone, for example, had replaced the sword and the pen as the symbol of power, and Johnson made sure he was often photographed using the telephone. “No gunman,” remarks one historian, “ever held a Colt.44 so easily” as Johnson handled a telephone.

Of his staff and cabinet Johnson demanded loyalty above honesty, sincerity, and good advice. Johnson once declared: “I don’t want loyalty. I want
loyalty.
I want him to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses. I want his pecker in my pocket.” For the sake of debate Johnson was willing to listen to the other side, but he listened with open ears and a closed mind. After the discussion ended, he expected everyone to agree with his previously formulated ideas. Whoever did not succumb to his flattery and reasoning and listening got exiled.

Raised in a region just emerging from frontier conditions, Johnson had a macho view of life. There were strong men and weak men. To show weakness was worse than cowardly—it was unmanly. Johnson said of the Kennedys that they vacationed at that “female island”—Martha’s Vineyard—and spoke with affected accents. No country could afford to be unmanly, especially in the face of a bully. Remembering Munich—and considering its “lesson” as a universal truth—Johnson remarked, “If you let a bully come into your front yard one day, the next day he will be up on your porch and the day after that he will rape your wife in your own bed.” The statement is pure Johnson, concrete and packed with sexual metaphor. It breathes an obsession with honor and bravery, the need to defend home and family. On a personal level Johnson was warm, friendly, humorous, and very hard to resist. Before a large group or a television camera, he lost his charm. His manner and language stiffened; his sense of humor fled.

Johnson the consummate politician considered foreign affairs above politics. During the years when his power was the greatest in the Senate, he seldom opposed President Eisenhower on foreign policy issues. In such matters he believed fully in bipartisanship. “I want to make absolutely sure,” Johnson said in 1953, “that the Communists don’t play one branch of government against the other, or one party against the other as happened in the Korean War. . . . If you’re in an airplane, and you’re flying somewhere, you don’t run to the cockpit and attack the pilot.” When bipartisanship died in the Vietnam War, Johnson reacted with anger and pain. “Don’t [the American people] realize,” he asked an aide, “I’m the only President they’ve got?” He could not explain to the people that he
was
their only pilot. Working in the small universe of the United States Senate, he had learned everyone’s likes and dislikes. A president cannot do that.

When he took the oath of office after Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson was a cold warrior. For Johnson the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, the Korean War, and the Cuban missile crisis were formative events in American history, bespeaking a commitment to keep the rest of the world from taking the road to communism. He was a true believer. There really was a monolithic communist conspiracy stirring up aggression around the world. In South Vietnam the threat was the Vietcong, who were pawns in the hands of North Vietnam, a puppet of Moscow and Beijing. The United States was in Vietnam, Johnson said, “to join in the defense and protection of freedom of a brave people who are under attack that is controlled . . . and directed from outside their country.”

For a while, that was the consensus among policymakers. Debate concerned tactics, not morality, questions of how, not why. Which weapons were appropriate; which was the more effective, conventional or coun-terinsurgency warfare; what would be the best use of air power; should the United States destroy the dike system in North Vietnam; should the stress be on victory, negotiation, or a reform of Vietnamese politics and society: Such issues divided legislators and administrators who shared the mindset of the times concerning power, virtue, technology, and the domino theory. Even the most serious critics of United States policy in Vietnam were preoccupied with the management of the war, not with its moral or intellectual foundations. While he was attacking American military leaders for their conduct of the war, David Halberstam of the
New York Times
wrote early in 1965: “Vietnam is a strategic country in the area. It is perhaps one of only five or six nations that is truly vital to U.S. interests.” And Vietnam, so believed Congress and the administration, was vital to American credibility. In order to maintain NATO, SEATO, and its other engagements abroad, the nation had to prove itself periodically. To flee Vietnam might raise questions about the strength of the American dedication to the world struggle against communism. In the mid-1960s war was raging in Laos, and in Cambodia Prince Norodom Sihanouk proclaimed his neutrality in the cold war. Chinese talk of fomenting wars of national liberation was as harsh as ever. Riots against the United States erupted in Panama, and Fidel Castro threatened to export revolution throughout the Western Hemisphere. For the nation to maintain its global commitment to anticom-munism, South Vietnam had to be saved. If South Vietnam fell to the communists, declared Dean Rusk, “Our guarantees with regard to Berlin would lose their credibility.” It was, he said, “part of the same struggle.”

Despite those fears, Johnson remained cautious. There were political risks in rapid escalation. If the United States intervened on a massive scale in South Vietnam, there would be an outpouring of criticism abroad as well as the possibility of serious opposition at home. Johnson had an ambitious program of antipoverty and civil rights legislation planned, and he did not want to undermine his political base in Congress. If the United States entered the war on a large scale, moreover, ARVN forces might cease to fight altogether. Like John Kennedy before him, Lyndon Johnson sought a middle road. But the war slowly escalated.

On February 1, 1964, the navy implemented Oplan 34-A, Victor Kru-lak’s plan for secret missions against North Vietnamese coastal installations. In case the time came to bomb or invade North Vietnam, the United States would need precise information about coastal radar, radio installations, and antiaircraft sites. Squads of South Vietnamese commandos in American-made patrol boats conducted covert raids along the coast in order to activate North Vietnamese radar. United States intelligence-gathering vessels in the South China Sea then collected the necessary information. By the summer of 1964 American military advisers in South Vietnam had reached 20,000 men.