WASHINGTON
THE MURDER OF NGO DINH Diem quickly ended David Halberstam’s criticism of President Kennedy’s policy in Vietnam. The Saigon bureau chief of the New York Times personally disliked Diem, and his one-sided reporting often angered Kennedy. Two days after Diem’s overthrow, Halberstam was upbeat. “For the moment, the Americans are gratified by a sense of joy in Saigon,” Halberstam reported November 4. His report reflected Lodge’s exultation of “joy in the streets.” The same day, Lodge cabled Kennedy, “We should not overlook what this coup can mean in the way of shortening the war and enabling Americans to come home.”
But Halberstam and Lodge could not lift Kennedy’s spirits on that overcast November 4 in the Oval Office. The president was full of misgivings about his decisions that led to a bullet in the head for the president of South Vietnam as he squatted, hands tied behind his back, in an armored personnel carrier. The news photo of Diem’s blood-caked corpse sickened him. While he worried that Diem would be killed, Kennedy did nothing during the turmoil of the coup to ensure his safe exile. There was a touch of grief in his voice—his voice thickened—as he spoke into his office dictation machine on November 4. He knew Diem, saw an inner strength in Diem’s dark eyes, and remembered the ticker-tape parade in New York City for the anticommunist miracle man.
“I was shocked by the death of Diem and Nhu,” Kennedy said. “I’d met Diem with [Supreme Court] Justice Douglas many years ago. He was an extraordinary character. While he became increasingly difficult in the last months, nevertheless, over a ten-year period, he’d held his country together, maintained its independence under very adverse conditions. The way he was killed made it particularly abhorrent.”
Not far from where Kennedy was sitting, press secretary Pierre Salinger was telling reporters the administration did not oppose the coup, but that it was the Saigon generals—not Kennedy—who fomented the overthrow and lost control at the end when “trigger-happy” soldiers killed Diem and Nhu. The same story was handed out by Rusk to Congress.
Kennedy was dictating a different version that would remain unheard for forty-nine years. “I feel that we must bear a good deal of responsibility for it beginning with our cable in early August in which we suggested a coup,” Kennedy said. “In my judgment, that wire was badly drafted. It never should have been sent on a Saturday. I should not have given my consent to it without a roundtable conference in which McNamara and Taylor could have presented their views. That first wire encouraged Lodge along a course to which he was anyway inclined.” Kennedy ticked off supporters and opponents of Diem’s overthrow. “It culminated three months of conversation about a coup, a conversation that divided the government here and in Saigon.” Without unanimity among his advisers, it fell to Kennedy to make the final decision. He was brooding about it when three-year-old John-John and six-year-old Caroline came shrieking into his office. A welcome diversion, they playfully added their voices to the Dictaphone. “Naughty, naughty,” John-John said at one point.
At his farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Eisenhower shook his head over grisly newspaper photographs of the bloodstained Diem on the floor of the armored personnel carrier. From CIA chief McCone, Ike knew the extent of Kennedy’s involvement in the events that led to the death of a man he greatly admired.
“No matter how much the [Kennedy] administration had differed with him,” Eisenhower said in a November 11 letter, “I cannot believe any American would have approved the cold-blooded killing of a man who had, after all, shown great courage when he undertook the task some years ago of defeating [the] communist attempt to take over his country.”
Eisenhower was responding to a note from his vice president. “I think our complicity in Diem’s murder was a national disgrace,” Nixon had written on November 5. A decade later, as president, with a particularly Nixonian flair, he sought to remind Americans of Kennedy’s complicity: A cable intimating Kennedy’s involvement was forged and leaked to Life magazine but never published. The bogus document was one more footnote in the Watergate scandal.
Eisenhower’s anger over Kennedy’s role in Diem’s murder could possibly have fueled a Republican investigation of the administration’s role in the Saigon coup, which would have opened a line of attack for Goldwater and others during the 1964 presidential campaign.
Kennedy’s cover story was dented in Los Angeles where “that bitch,” Madame Nhu, portrayed the coup as an American-inspired betrayal. “The Nhu family has been treacherously killed,” she told reporters. “That will only be the beginning of the story.” As for the Saigon generals—“incited and backed by Americans, official or not”—she forecast an incompetent junta. “For how long will they hold power—if they ever hold power?”
Any Senate investigation of the coup would likely invite Gordon Cox to testify. He was the Canadian member of Vietnam International Control Commission, which was created to supervise both Hanoi and Saigon as part of the 1954 peace treaty. Cox was an important supporter of Diem, and after the assassination blasted the United States. According to Cox, the coup was engineered by the Americans, who also directed the execution of Diem and Nhu. “The coup is an absolute catastrophe which will lead to the communist takeover of Vietnam,” Cox said. Secretary Rusk filed a formal protest with the Canadian government over Cox’s outburst.
Where history would rank the 35th president of the United States was important to Kennedy. He had retained on his staff a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian—Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—to establish a baseline. “Put that in the book,” Kennedy told Schlesinger after more than one event. But Schlesinger was not privy to many meetings where Kennedy made decisions hidden from the world. A Thousand Days, Schlesinger’s account of Kennedy’s thirty-five months in office, contained little of the reality of the Cuban missile crisis, the bugging of Martin Luther King, or the instigation of the coup and the death of Diem. His closest aides had no idea Kennedy was bequeathing to posterity tape recordings he personally engineered, turning on and off microphones at moments he considered important during high and low moments of his presidency. Kennedy’s confession of culpability in the assassination of Diem was a glimpse of a man being painfully honest with himself, if not with American voters. Diem’s ham-handed suppression of Buddhist protestors had triggered a political backlash just as Kennedy was preparing for his 1964 reelection campaign. Diem “became increasingly difficult” by ignoring the political backlash against Kennedy. Kennedy was explicit in August that nothing should happen to the Ngo brothers. And in September he did try to warn Diem through Congressman Macdonald. But his order to Lodge prohibiting help for Diem after the coup began contained no exception to prevent Diem’s assassination. When Lodge objected to the ban, Kennedy’s order was amended to mean a ban of U.S. military assistance to either side once the coup got under way. Lodge also raised the question as to whether U.S. aircraft could be used to fly Diem to safety. There is no record of Kennedy’s reaction to plans for Diem to enter exile, only of his attitude about asylum for the coup plotters. Instead, the cables in the last hours were more concerned about the safety of the Reverend Tri Quang, the Buddhist leader who vowed to overthrow the Diem government. He “is of course to come and go as he pleases,” Rusk told Lodge the day the coup started.
Perhaps Kennedy had Diem’s safety in mind when Rusk sent a cable to Lodge to remind the coup leaders to behave. “Following are points we hope the Generals will bear in mind,” Rusk said. “Safe passage for family to exile.” No mention of Diem and Nhu. It could have meant Nhu’s children, who were later flown to Italy. The reminder was too late anyway. It was timed out in Washington at 6:53 P.M.—6:53 A.M. in Saigon. Seven minutes later the Ngo brothers were dead. CIA agent Rufus Phillips, who regretted his role in the downfall of Diem, thought the assassination could easily have been avoided. “Just require Diem’s safety as a condition of U.S. recognition of the new government,” Phillips said. This was never mentioned in cables between Washington and Saigon. The absence of presidential direction may have affected Lodge’s final decision. In the end, Lodge threw Diem and his brother to the wolves.
In orchestrating the coup, Kennedy overrode top military advisers who warned the loss of Diem would weaken the war against Hanoi’s communist aggression. These thoughts were with him on a gray Monday in the Oval Office as he dictated. “The question now is, Can the generals stay together and build a stable government?” Kennedy said. It was a legitimate worry. Lodge had cabled that day—two days after Diem’s murder—that the generals were arguing over the composition of the junta government. Major General Ton That Dinh, the man Kennedy bribed to stage the coup, wanted to be minister of the interior, over the strong objections of others. And there were bitter complaints from the formidable General Nguyen Khanh. “General Khanh’s only stipulation for joining the coup was that the President not be killed,” Lodge cabled. One of Diem’s last requests was relayed to General Khanh by the president’s military aide. Khanh had come to Diem’s side in the 1960 attempted coup. “Tell Khanh to avenge me,” Diem said as he fled to Cholon with Captain Do Tho.
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A week later, Kennedy was in a brighter mood as he made plans for his 1964 reelection campaign. The Democratic National Convention would be in Atlantic City, a gift to New Jersey supporters, who consistently put the Garden State in the Democratic presidential column. George Stevens Jr. would produce the films for the convention. “The guy is fantastic,” Kennedy said. “These should be made in color. They come over TV in black and white. But they will come over NBC in color. I don’t know how expensive it is. But color at the convention is damn good if you do it right.” A film biography would feature his family and clips from his inaugural, West Berlin, Dublin, and American University speeches. Khrushchev might even have a cameo in the portion on the Cuban missile crisis. Then the film would show personal moments along Cape Cod with John-John, Caroline, and Jackie.
More fundamental was Kennedy’s search for just the right issues to be the focus of his campaign. “What can we do to make them decide to vote for us, the Democrats and Kennedy?” Kennedy told his political advisers. “What is it we have to sell them?” Prosperity for the average voter? “We hope we have to sell them prosperity, but he’s not very prosperous. And the people who really are well off hate our guts. I am trying to think what else. Like Negroes.” Then again, his campaign for civil rights was hurting him with voters in the South and the North where African-Americans were moving into all-white neighborhoods for the first time. Kennedy had misgivings about making that a campaign issue. Civil rights as a campaign issue was quickly discarded. “We’re the ones who are shoving Negroes down their throat,” Kennedy said. Also off the list was Vietnam. Kennedy anticipated pressure from both Democrats and Republicans on the 1964 campaign trail. With Diem dead, Senate Majority Leader Mansfield was ready to push for total withdrawal from Vietnam. It could become a liberal cause in Atlantic City. Senator Goldwater, the likely GOP presidential candidate in 1964, was leading Republican criticism of the overthrow of Diem and of losing ground in the war against the communists.
So despicable was Diem’s execution that Kennedy was planning to offer up Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. as a sacrifice to stanch political outrage over American foreign policy in Vietnam, just as former president Eisenhower had predicted. Kennedy set Lodge up for the fall with a note of gushing praise for his total control of events in Saigon. Kennedy would spring the trap when Lodge arrived in the Oval Office on November 25. Brother Bobby looked forward to Lodge’s demise. “Henry Cabot Lodge was being brought back—and the president discussed with me in detail how he could be fired—because he would not communicate,” said Bobby in 1965. In fact, his brother was against overthrowing Diem, Bobby said. “The person who really did that was Henry Cabot Lodge.” Lodge’s political antennae sensed the possibility in Saigon. “They’re going to try to blame this on me,” Lodge told Bob Healy, a reporter for the Boston Globe who flew to Saigon after Diem’s assassination. “Equally absurd is the statement [that] the president did not know that a coup was coming,” Lodge said. “He was thoroughly informed about everything.” As Diem was buried, Lodge’s image was enhanced by the media as a patriotic Republican, a straight shooter rising above lies and treachery. In Saigon, he was above the partisan fray at home, where fellow progressives were organizing a stop Barry Goldwater drive. The Arizona conservative was working to lock up the 1964 GOP presidential nomination. In Saigon, Lodge was in a prominent but politically neutral situation, similar to that of General Eisenhower when Lodge had induced him to run for the presidency. Eisenhower, reluctant to leave his post in Paris as the Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force, became a candidate only after winning the Minnesota primary in 1952 as a write-in candidate. Senator Lodge orchestrated the upset victory before steamrollering conservative opponents of Eisenhower. Lodge planned on meeting with Ike after seeing Kennedy on Monday morning, November 25. Perhaps a write-in candidacy in some primary might work for him as it did Ike.
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On the afternoon of November 22—the clock atop the Texas School Book Depository said 12:30 P.M.—many in Dealey Plaza thought they heard firecrackers. Not Merriman Smith of United Press International. He was riding eighty yards behind Kennedy’s limousine, part of the official convoy in the designated wire service car equipped with a radiotelephone. Smith was a hunter and a marksman. To him, the overhead pop, pause, pop, pop that interrupted the applause and cheers for Kennedy were unmistakable. “Those are shots,” Smith said to the driver and three other newsmen in the rear seat. They all were jerked back in their seats as the motorcade hurtled out of Dealey.
Smith picked up the radiotelephone and gave the operator the number of the Dallas UPI bureau. Around the world, teletype machines rang five bells as Smith’s bulletin told anchormen and editors:
THREE SHOTS WERE FIRED AT PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S MOTORCADE IN DOWNTOWN DALLAS.
The teletype operator timed it off at 12:34 P.M.—four minutes after Lee Harvey Oswald fired from the sixth floor of the depository. In the backseat of the wire car, Jack Bell of the Associated Press heard his competitor dictating an earthshaker of a news report. The wire car was now doing ninety to keep up with the Kennedy limo. Bell reached over Smith’s shoulder and said, “Give me that goddamned phone.” Smith refused, saying the Dallas bureau had trouble hearing him. He leaned over the phone. Bell began hitting him on the back. Smith threw the phone at Bell as the wire car pulled into the emergency entrance at Parkland Hospital. Smith got out and walked over to Kennedy’s open car. Jacqueline Kennedy had the president in her lap in a puddle of blood and brains. Secret Service agent Clint Hill was covering Kennedy with his coat as Smith walked up. “How badly was he hit, Clint?” Smith said. “He’s dead, Smitty,” Hill answered. Smith walked into the emergency room and got on the phone. Now fifteen bells rang on global teletype machines to herald a flash.
FLASH FLASH KENNEDY SERIOUSLY WOUNDED, PERHAPS FATALLY BY ASSASSINS BULLETS.
That was timed off at 12:39 P.M. By 12:41, Smith had dictated a full story that newspapers could use. A generation would remember exactly what they were doing when they heard Smith’s news. So far nothing had appeared on the AP wire because of Bell’s bumbling. Smith did not stick around after the formal 1:40 P.M. announcement of Kennedy’s death. He had raced to Air Force One at Love Field to witness Lyndon Johnson being sworn in as the 36th president of the United States. Bell and the AP missed that, too.
In France, it was 7:30 P.M. when Kennedy was killed. In a Paris hotel, CIA agent Néstor Sánchez handed over Dr. Edward Gunn’s fabulous Paper Mate. With a click, the ballpoint pen would extend a syringe so fine that Fidel Castro would barely feel the injection of poison. The CIA’s Dr. Do Harm recommended Black Leaf 40, a commonly available insecticide with a lethal dose of nicotine. The man willing to assassinate Castro, Major Rolando Cubela Secades, was not impressed with the Paper Mate or Black Leaf 40. “Cubela didn’t think much of the pen,” Sánchez reported. As a medical doctor, he could come up with a better poison and delivery system, Cubela said. What he really wanted were twenty hand grenades, two high-powered rifles with telescopic sights, and twenty pounds of C4 plastic explosive. Yet he put the Paper Mate in his pocket. The syringe was empty. As they left the hotel meeting, they learned of Kennedy’s assassination. “Cubela was visibly moved,” Sanchez said. The man who had been recruited to kill Castro looked at Sanchez and said, “Why do such things happen to good people?” Three years later, Cubela was arrested and the Cuban police seized his CIA-supplied rifle mounted with a 4 × 40 scope. He was sentenced to death by firing squad. Castro called for leniency. Cubela’s sentenced was reduced to twenty-five years in jail. But he was released after ten years and then emigrated to Spain.
Two days after Kennedy’s death, President Johnson told the architects of U.S. policy in Vietnam they had produced a disaster. “This was a mistake,” Johnson said of the Diem overthrow. “This was a decision we did not have to make.” Johnson was opposed to the overthrow of Diem, didn’t care for Harriman and Hilsman’s campaign for the coup, personally disliked Lodge, and thought it stupid to push demands for democratic reforms on Vietnam. Johnson laid out his feelings to Rusk, McNamara, McCone, Lodge, and McGeorge Bundy who took notes at the 3:00 P.M. meeting in the Executive Office Building. The meeting started off with an upbeat assessment by Lodge, who showed photographs of Saigon celebrations after Diem’s death. He gave “the impression that we are on the road to victory,” Bundy said. Setting what Bundy called a new “tone,” Johnson unloaded. The new president noted misgivings about the coup and “strong voices” in Congress for withdrawal from Vietnam. This had caused Johnson considerable concern, and “he was not at all sure we took the right course in upsetting the Diem regime.” Bundy noted the inference: Johnson would not have supported the action, which led to the coup. Yet he was resigned to the situation. “It was a fait accompli” to Johnson. In his account of the meeting, the ex-Harvard dean probably chose to put this French phrase in the mouth of the West Texan. From his service with Lodge in the Senate, Johnson knew the Saigon ambassador to be easily bored with the grind of duty, often outright lazy, with a very short attention span. “He ain’t worth a damn,” Johnson would say later. “He can’t work with anybody.” Even so, Johnson would reappoint Lodge to the Saigon post two years later in hopes of winning Republican support in Congress—just as Kennedy had done.
At the November 24 meeting, Johnson focused on the chaos at the embassy in Saigon. “The president then stated he has never been happy with our operations in Vietnam,” Bundy noted. “He said there had been serious dissension and divisions within the American community and he told the ambassador that he was in total charge and wanted the situation cleaned up.” Johnson knew Lodge cut General Harkins out of all the cables leading up to Diem’s overthrow. He wanted an end to bickering and urged the ouster of anyone who failed to conform to policy. “The president was holding the ambassador personally responsible,” Bundy said. Soon after the meeting, Johnson ordered Harriman excluded from policy decisions about Vietnam. And he triggered a competition between Rusk and Undersecretary George Ball as to who would fire Hilsman, the assistant secretary of state for the Far East.
Almost instantly, the news from the battlefield in Vietnam went from bad to worse. With the death of Diem, the Viet Cong guerrillas, surging throughout South Vietnam during 1963, increased their offensive operations. Hanoi, astounded at the execution of its archenemy, made dramatic military inroads as an important obstacle to the Viet Cong—the Strategic Hamlet Program—was abandoned. In the first ninety days after Diem’s death, the Viet Cong destroyed seventy-five strategic hamlets in Binh Dinh province alone. “They were gifts from heaven for us,” said Nguyen Huu Tho, chairman of the National Liberation Front, the Viet Cong political group. “Our enemy has been seriously weakened from all points of view—military, political, and administrative.” To the U.S. military commander in Saigon, the Viet Cong upsurge went unchallenged as the new junta scrambled for control. “While it cannot be directly linked, unusual pattern of VC attacks reported in Vinh Long,” General Harkins reported the day Diem was killed. The Viet Cong, staged a truly massive attack—two hundred guerrillas wearing blue uniforms—to overrun Strategic Hamlets in the province.
Two months after Diem’s assassination, Khanh moved to avenge Diem’s death. He arrested Big Minh, Tran Van Don, and Ton That Dinh—leaders of the Diem overthrow—in a January 30 bloodless coup. Khanh also arrested Nhung, the military aide to Big Minh who had killed Diem and Nhu. Nhung, it was announced, committed suicide in his cell. In reality, Khanh personally executed Nhung. “He just took him out and shot him,” said Colby of the CIA. “There’s no doubt about it.”
Lodge shifted easily from Big Minh, who was once the solution to Diem, to Khanh, who seemed to be more determined to take on the Viet Cong. Two days after the second coup, Lodge told the new president that the thirty-six-year-old Khanh was able. With American military aid and increasing Saigon army forces, the new junta leader had only to press the fight. “This requires a tough, ruthless commander,” Lodge cabled on February 1. “Perhaps Khanh is it.” A month later, Johnson was told Khanh and the Saigon army were on the verge of defeat. The grim outlook came from McNamara, who had told Kennedy six months earlier that victory was likely in 1965. “The situation has unquestionably been growing worse at least since September,” McNamara told Johnson in a March 16 report. Half of South Vietnam was under Viet Cong control, and in some provinces, 75 to 90 percent were dominated by Hanoi’s guerrilla force. The Saigon army was beset by desertions and draft dodgers, while South Vietnamese were joining the Viet Cong at record rates. Popular support for Hanoi was growing while “large groups of the population are now showing apathy and indifference.” Diem, who once brandished his telephone as his weapon to keep the province chiefs in line, had taken a working infrastructure with him to the grave. “The political control structure extending from Saigon down into the hamlets disappeared following the November coup [against Diem],” McNamara told Johnson.
The president’s options, McNamara outlined, were a deeper commitment to a prolonged ground war or the neutralization of South Vietnam, which, he said, was the same as turning Saigon over to communist Hanoi. With Johnson’s approval, Army General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, began planning an American air war against North Vietnam. Those plans blossomed into Operation Pierce Arrow. U.S. warplanes bombed North Vietnam in retaliation for what Johnson called “a new and grave turn” with Hanoi’s August 2, 1964, attack on the destroyer USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. One carrier pilot, Lieutenant JG Everett Alvarez Jr., was shot down and captured August 5. He was held prisoner for eight years. Years later, it was established that U.S. warships provoked Hanoi. Instead of innocent patrols, the USS Maddox was on spy missions and supporting secret Saigon attacks on North Vietnam island and coastal military installations. At the time, American voters and Congress were told it was a provocation by Hanoi. And both the House and Senate approved a joint resolution “to promote the maintenance of international peace.”
Johnson used it as a license for an unlimited war on Hanoi without resort to nuclear weapons. Senator Mansfield, who had succeeded Johnson as the majority leader, tried to get the president to think twice. Two weeks after Johnson took office, Mansfield warned that with Diem gone, the United States risked committing ground troops to a jungle war. “What national interests in Asia would steel the American people for that massive costs of ever-deepening involvement of that kind?” Mansfield wrote. He reminded Johnson that Eisenhower won political support by negotiating an end to the Korean War in 1953, not by expanding it. He urged Johnson to enlist Russia, France, and Britain in a new Vietnam peace conference. Johnson’s answer was to order his staff to come up with a point-by-point refutation of Mansfield’s letter.
While Vietnam threatened to be a campaign problem for Kennedy in 1964, it vanished as an issue for Johnson in the presidential race with Republican Arizona senator Goldwater. One reason was that Goldwater refused to make it an issue. After the party conventions, Goldwater met secretly with Johnson. “I do believe it is in the best interest of the United States not to make the Vietnam War a political issue,” he told Johnson. “I’ve come to promise I will not do so.” In exchange, Goldwater asked Johnson not to challenge the Republican’s stance on civil rights. “We shook hands. I kept my promises and Lyndon Johnson kept his.” Goldwater carried Arizona and the Bible Belt—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. Johnson carried the rest in what remains the third largest landslide in U.S. history. At the time of the secret deal, Goldwater knew he had no chance. Goldwater blamed his loss on attacks on him by the moderate wing of the Republican Party led by Henry Cabot Lodge. In a surprise upset, Lodge won the New Hampshire presidential primary with a noncampaign in Saigon. He would fly to Manila and other cities to make phone calls to political supporters. Lodge’s presidential ambitions were doused by a defeat in the Oregon primary by New York governor Nelson Rockefeller.
In the White House, the war in Vietnam preoccupied the newly elected president. As the Saigon government and its army disintegrated, Johnson more and more saw the killing of Diem as the cause of all his problems. Saigon’s collapse was forcing the United States to take over the fight. Johnson’s frustrations grew after hearing Saigon’s 200,000-man army was being defeated by 34,000 Viet Cong. “How can 34,000 lick 200,000?” Johnson asked. If Saigon’s army refused to take on the communists, perhaps he could threaten U.S. withdrawal. “Why not say, ‘This is it!’” Johnson said. “Not send Johnson City [Texas] boys out to die if they [are] acting as they are.” General Taylor, who had replaced Lodge as ambassador to South Vietnam, was in Washington to hand-deliver the bad news at a December 1, 1964, meeting. “[It] won’t collapse immediately, but [it is] a losing game,” Taylor said of the Saigon government.
“How did Diem do it?” Johnson asked. “[He] ran a tight ship,” Taylor replied. “We could have kept Diem,” Johnson said, adding later that Taylor should “create another Diem.” The president was resigned to spending more on Saigon army equipment and training. “[We do] not want to send the widow woman to slap Jack Dempsey,” Johnson said. “[The] day of reckoning is coming.” Instead of following advice from Mansfield and Undersecretary of State George Ball to negotiate the United States out of Vietnam, Johnson deferred to General Eisenhower. Without some clear success on the battlefield, Ike told Johnson that it would be a mistake to seek talks with Hanoi with a weak hand. It would be up to the Saigon army to halt Viet Cong infiltration. “We can, however, play a major role in destroying the will of the enemy to continue the war,” Ike said. It was advice that led to Johnson’s day of reckoning as he ordered more bombing—Operation Rolling Thunder—of North Vietnam. What Johnson got was more political turmoil in Saigon. General Nguyen Cao Ky, the flashy chief of the Saigon air force with a playboy reputation, became the third junta leader. “Hot damn, I’m getting sick and tired of this goddamn coup shit in Vietnam,” Johnson told an aide. “It’s got to stop.”
By 1965, the Saigon army had collapsed to the point where it could not provide perimeter defense for the American-supported air base in Da Nang. U.S. Marines waded ashore on Red Beach March 8. The 3,500 infantrymen were greeted by women with leis and signs: “Welcome, Gallant Marines.” To Maxwell Taylor, who had replaced Lodge as ambassador, the Marines were the “nose of the camel under the tent.” They were the first of 8 million Americans who came and went in the Vietnam Theater of Operations over the next decade.
Under the Johnson and Nixon administrations, 58,209 Americans were killed—almost an even division. Another 211,454 were wounded by punji sticks, old women and boys planting booby traps, and raggedy-ass little bastards with a ferocious perseverance that only Diem understood. When some of the wounded came home to the United States without arms or legs or faces or genitals, they were despised by many as war criminals. Some were. U.S. Army Lieutenant William “Rusty” Calley’s platoon massacred at least 600 old men, women, children and infants in My Lai. His men were in a rage at the death of a popular sergeant killed by a booby trap set near the village.
This happened in 1968, a year later marked by Army psychiatrists as the end of the “good” war. Before 1968, soldiers saluted, followed orders and sought to defend villagers against the communist threat. After that the “bad war” began, when soldiers—many drugged on heroin and marijuana—would kill an unpopular commander. A hand grenade rolled into an officer’s tent became known as a fragging. American grassroots opposition to the war dramatically affected troops in the field. It shredded the morale of many of the 539,000 men and women in the country in 1969. Many officers, such as Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Haig, would spend one year in the country, get his ticket punched and leave. Haig wound up working for Henry Kissinger at the White House, where he would tell President Richard Nixon—and me, for that matter—that there would be victory in Vietnam.
The real warriors, such as Major H. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., would spend tour after tour getting wounded four times in one firefight, earning two Silver Stars for bravery. “I hated Vietnam,” Schwarzkopf said. “I hated what it did to the army.” In 1992, he led the massive Desert Storm army to victory in Kuwait and ticker-tape parades down Broadway.
By 1966, Johnson was sounding as if he was locked in a back room at the Hanoi Hilton with other American prisoners of the Vietnam War. There were 385,000 American troops in Vietnam, and Johnson was being pressured to send more. Killed so far were 8,494 Americans, and thousands more were wounded. As more Democrats in Congress joined Senator Mansfield in calling for a withdrawal of American troops, Johnson described his plight to Senator Eugene McCarthy. The Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor liberal was one of Johnson’s few personal friends from his Senate days. The president spoke as if his will was being broken by Hanoi and the New York Times.
“Well, I know we oughtn’t to be there, but I can’t get out,” Johnson told McCarthy on February l, 1966. “I just can’t be the architect of surrender. I’m willing to do damn near anything. I am willing to do near anything a human can do if I can do it with any honor at all. But they don’t have the pressure on them to bring them to the table as of yet. We don’t know if they ever will.
“They started with me on Diem, you remember? He was corrupt and he ought to be killed. So we killed him. We all got together and got a goddamned bunch of thugs and we went in and assassinated him. Now we really have no political stability since then.” He was aiming for a settlement through the United Nations once Hanoi buckled to his policy of “attrition.” More North Vietnamese would be killed than American losses, which were soaring. Trouble was, Johnson explained, Hanoi was convinced they would win. “They got it, and they know it,” Johnson told McCarthy.
“The most helpful thing they have is the belief that I have more problems on my hands than Ho [Chi Minh, the premier of North Vietnam] has on his. And I have the New York Times. It’s awful hard to have a foreign policy they don’t approve of.” He described how his critics were elevated by the newspaper with stories that “have four dirty cracks against me. And they’ve [Hanoi] got it made. It has a hell of an effect.” In a background meeting with reporters, Johnson famously explained how Hanoi was ignoring American feelers for negotiations to end the conflict. Through a variety of diplomatic avenues, he sought Hanoi’s approval for an exit that would somehow leave South Vietnam an independent country. He was listening for a reply, he told a group of reporters who asked him about signals from Hanoi.
“Signals?” Johnson shot back. “I’ll tell you about signals. I got my antenna out in Washington. I got my antenna out in London. I got my antenna out in Paris. I got my antenna out in Tokyo. I even got my antenna out in Rangoon. You know what signals all my antennae are picking up from Hanoi?” The newsmen became silent as Johnson scanned their faces. “I’ll tell you what the signals from Hanoi are saying: ‘Fuck you, Lyndon Johnson.’”
Johnson took one body blow after another as the nation divided over a war they saw nightly on television. Parents with sons old enough to be forced into military service—the draft—were early opponents to the Vietnam War. Not far behind were their children and college students. Some fled to Canada to dodge the draft. As the war continued, the draft’s inequities became the heart of antiwar demonstrations in which draft cards were burned. Those with resources, such as Richard B. Cheney engineered deferments to avoid combat in Vietnam. As a White House adviser, congressman, secretary of defense, and vice president, Cheney consistently favored sending Americans into war. Cheney was frequently criticized as a “chicken hawk.” Another American vice president, Dan Quayle, used family connections to win a spot in what was then a safe haven, the National Guard. George W. Bush, who would become the 43rd president of the United States, enlisted in the Texas National Guard in 1968. He sat out Vietnam in Houston and Montgomery, Alabama. The rich went to one graduate school after another. African-Americans and poor whites answered the call.
Johnson at one point went to see off a unit of the 82nd Airborne at Fort Bragg. “About 50 percent of them were Negroes,” Johnson said. “I understand they volunteered because of the high morale in the Airborne and the extra pay. Those boys expressed no sentiment, but it was obvious to me that none of them was happy to be going.” Perhaps because he struggled with poverty as a boy, Johnson had a deeper feeling for the plight of African-Americans than most of his Democratic predecessors. Within eight months of assuming the presidency, Johnson manipulated the House of Representatives and enlisted Senate Republicans to pass the landmark civil rights legislation that was beyond Kennedy’s legislative skills.
“Let us close the springs of racial poison,” Johnson said at the ceremony marking the signing of the bill. He shook hands and gave a memorial pen to King. The exchange was watched by Hoover and his boss, Robert Kennedy, the attorney general. They also attended the ceremony. With Johnson’s approval, the FBI would continue its surveillance of King until April 4, 1968, the day he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Before he was killed, King made the civil rights movement one of the leading opponents of Johnson’s war in Vietnam. “If America’s soul become totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read ‘Vietnam,’” King said in 1967.
King reflected the black community’s anger over the disproportionate use of their sons and husbands.
Blacks were suffering high casualty rates in Vietnam, and in 1965 alone they comprised almost one out of every four combat deaths. With the draft increasing calls for more soldiers, the Pentagon significantly lowered its admission standards. In October 1966, McNamara launched Project 100,000, which further lowered military standards for 100,000 additional draftees per year. McNamara claimed this program would provide valuable training, skills, and opportunity to America’s poor—a promise that was never carried out. Many black men who had previously been ineligible could now be drafted, along with many poor and racially intolerant white men from Southern states. The number of U.S. military personnel in Vietnam jumped from 23,300 in 1965 to 465,600 by the end of 1967. Between October 1966 and June 1969, 246,000 soldiers were recruited through Project 100,000, of which 41 percent were black, while blacks made up only about 11 percent of the population.
Passage of the civil rights law was achievement enough for any president. But Johnson’s domestic record rivaled that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. By 1965, Johnson had signed into law Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor. Other progressive legislation would clear the air and the water in U.S. cities and set safety standards for automobiles, leading to the lifesaving cars of today. All this was blotted out by Johnson’s handling of the Vietnam War. In the end, Vietnam ended his hopes for a second full four-year term in the 1968 presidential election.
Johnson saw himself a victim of media attacks. “They call me a murderer,” he told one Senate colleague. “But Ho [Chi Minh] has a great image. I wish Mike [Mansfield] would make a speech about Ho Chi Minh.”
Despite their friendship, McCarthy would lead the nation’s opposition to the war and Johnson’s presidency. Hanoi’s massive attack on South Vietnam’s cities launched on January 30, 1968, the Tet Offensive, forever ended Washington’s talk of victory. McCarthy made a strong second-place showing against Johnson in the March 12, 1968, New Hampshire primary. The media turned McCarthy’s defeat into a “moral victory.” New York senator Robert F. Kennedy soon announced he, too, would challenge Johnson for the presidential nomination. Nineteen days later, Johnson echoed Lincoln in describing the nation as a house divided—“a house that cannot stand.” He shocked the American political establishment by announcing he would not run for reelection to a second term.
Only a few knew of Johnson’s plans to withdraw. One was Senator Mansfield, who sat through an evening at the White House as Johnson went over his speech. Mansfield had only a low-key response to Johnson’s dramatic gesture. “I couldn’t get out of there soon enough,” Mansfield said. His inability to sway Johnson or Kennedy out of military solutions to Vietnam would forever haunt him. Mansfield became the center of the debate about whether Kennedy would have sent combat troops to Vietnam.
“He told me he would get out of Vietnam, a complete withdrawal,” Mansfield said. “But he said, ‘Mike, I can’t do it until after I am reelected [in 1964].’ I believed him.” And I believed Mansfield. But events swept away Kennedy’s promises. In eliminating the Diem government, Kennedy created the first of a series of military juntas that followed Washington orders until Hanoi’s army rolled into Saigon and changed its name to Ho Chi Minh City. The predicted instability of military governors came on schedule. There were four changes of government in Saigon as the generals and colonels staged coup after coup.
Would the reelected Kennedy have withdrawn as the Saigon army folded? His closest adviser, his brother Bobby, repeatedly said no. Rather than abandon the field to the communists, Bobby, McNamara, Rusk, and other Kennedy appointees said Jack would never have left Saigon undefended. However, Roswell Gilpatric, number two at the Pentagon, saw Kennedy as steadily opposed to sending combat troops and against a deeper and more costly commitment. But confronted with the collapse of the infrastructure that followed Diem’s overthrow and a more aggressive Hanoi, Gilpatric said he was uncertain if Kennedy would have made the same decisions as his successor. “No one can say what he would have done, but my view is that consistent with everything he did and said before his death, he would have been reluctant to involve ourselves to the extent the country did after President Johnson took over,” Gilpatric said.
As Kennedy’s spirit was lifted to elsewhere—he was a believer in the soul’s immortality—he wound up in a pantheon where few presidents reside. Myth overtook reality. One debate that would intensify as millions died in Vietnam and American society divided in bitterness was Kennedy was ready to withdraw when he was struck down. Oliver Stone’s ludicrous film JFK had Vice President Johnson killing Kennedy to thwart such a withdrawal. As did “eyeball-to-eyeball,” another myth was inserted in the American psyche.
Kennedy’s order to get rid of Diem was the real beginning of the American war in Vietnam. My viewpoint is shared by the three men most bloodstained from that war who consistently opposed Kennedy’s decision to replace the mandarinate with a series of hapless military juntas. One was Robert Strange McNamara. He warned Kennedy the coup would lead to chaos. Yet McNamara led the American military to a stupendous defeat while unleashing strategic bombers that dropped three times more tonnage on North Vietnam than all the bombs in Europe and the Pacific during World War II. He estimated that between 2 million and 3 million Vietnamese died, North and South. He became a haunted relic of Vietnam, refusing to leave Washington, coauthoring books and appearing in films. At one point, he admitted knowing in 1965 that the war was hopeless. Still, he kept up the pressure for more troops and more bombing until the Tet Offensive three years later.
Confessing his own skewed judgment, McNamara wallowed in a pool of regret for the rest of his life. Thirty years would pass before McNamara spelled out the disastrous dimensions of the 1963 coup. “Had Diem lived, I’m inclined to think he would neither have requested or accepted the introduction of large numbers of U.S. combat forces,” said McNamara. “I think the war would have taken a totally different course.”
Of all Kennedy’s advisers, only General Taylor foresaw the destruction of South Vietnam’s governmental infrastructure if Diem was overthrown. He wound up replacing Lodge as ambassador in 1964 and personally witnessed the collapse of the Saigon government and its military. “Our responsibility for the overthrow and the murder of Diem certainly contributed to our [military] contribution to South Vietnam,” Taylor said. “Diem’s overthrow set in motion a sequence of crises, political and military, over the next two years which eventually forced President Johnson in 1965 to choose between accepting defeat or introducing American combat forces.… What we could not know was that the American-supported coup would remove Diem and with him the lid from the political Pandora’s box in which Diem confined the genies of political turbulence.”
Diem’s assassination and the series of events it set into motion was just the sort of thing Kennedy was once determined to avoid. After blundering into the Bay of Pigs shortly after his inauguration, the new president resolved to never again make such an unwitting commitment. He took to heart the lesson of Gavrilo Princip’s shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. That assassination unleashed a string of seeming unrelated events that produced World War I. Historian Barbara Tuchman’s 1962 best seller, The Guns of August, detailed the bumbling and miscalculation by world statesmen. The book had two Germans puzzling over the events of 1914. “How did it all happen?” said one. “Ah,” the other replied, “if one only knew.” After reading the book, Kennedy summoned Army Secretary Elvis Stahr to the White House and handed him Tuchman’s book. “I want you to read this,” Kennedy told Stahr. “And I want every officer in the army to read it.”
Still, Kennedy ignored repeated warnings—from Hilsman, McNamara, Taylor, McCone, and Colby—that Diem’s assassination could lead to chaos and the collapse of the Saigon government. But with every warning, every meeting, every briefing, Kennedy brushed them aside. Diem posed an unacceptable threat to his 1964 reelection campaign. His choice was clear and fateful for his vice president and the Americans who spent ten years in the jungles of Indochina.
Johnson saved his most bitter recriminations for reporters who visited him at his ranch near Johnson City, Texas. He wore his white hair down to the collar and started smoking cigarettes again. The Diem overthrow “was a terrible mistake upon the part of our officials, and I don’t think we ever really recovered from it,” Johnson told Walter Cronkite. “And it has cost us many American lives, in my judgment.” To other reporters, Johnson saw Kennedy forced into ousting Diem because of political attacks by the press. “He couldn’t take the heat from the press,” Johnson said.
Two more presidents—Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford—would get the same response picked up by Johnson’s antennae from Hanoi’s negotiators in Paris. As Diem predicted, the Americans did not fathom Hanoi’s determination to seize South Vietnam and create a nationalist state with communist ties. Division after division began spilling over the North Vietnamese border at the exact points that Diem had predicted to Mike Dunn.
America’s defeat was complete in 1975 when its diplomats, some employees, and their Marine guards flew to safety in helicopters that landed on the U.S. embassy roof. General Big Minh, who helped place Diem in the presidential palace and later ordered his murder, was chosen to handle South Vietnam’s last official act. Big Minh chose a business suit over his uniform on April 30, 1975. Civilians, not soldiers, surrendered. President Nguyen Van Thieu, one of Minh’s coconspirators in the overthrow of Diem, had fled the presidential palace. Minh would hand over the Saigon government to North Vietnam. North Vietnamese tanks knocked down the iron gates around the palace. The tank commander, Colonel Bui Tin, stalked in.
“I have been waiting since early morning to transfer power to you,” Minh said.
“There is no question of your transferring power,” Tin said. “Your power has crumbled. You cannot give up what you do not have.”
With the arrival of Hanoi’s troops, Americans were ordered out. Malcolm Browne, now a science reporter for the New York Times, showed up in Saigon on special assignment. Along with other reporters and photographers, Browne was warned there would be a departure signal. American Forces Network would start playing Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas.” Dirck Halstead, for years the UPI photo editor in Saigon, had returned to photograph the final moments for Time magazine. He thought the departure signal was more of a spooky funeral dirge.
“You could hear Bing Crosby all over town,” Halstead said.