Your list is incomplete. You’ve left out the most important factor of all.
—EDWARD LANSDALE TO ROBERT MCNAMARA
BEING secretary of defense was, from the start, an almost impossible job. Although the National Security Act of 1947 had created this post to preside over the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps, it gave the officeholder scant power. The first secretary of defense, the Wall Street banker and former Navy secretary James Forrestal, spent his tenure locked in internecine battles with the military services over their funding and missions. He left office in 1949 a broken man, suffering from what psychiatrists diagnosed as the equivalent of combat fatigue. Just two months later, he jumped to his death from the window of the naval hospital where he was receiving psychiatric treatment.1
After Forrestal’s tragic exit, a revolving door was in effect, with none of Harry Truman’s remaining secretaries of defense serving longer than a year and a half. Eisenhower’s first secretary of defense, Charlie Wilson, was in office much longer—nearly five years—but he was widely regarded as a figurehead; the five-star president was, in many ways, his own defense secretary. A former automobile executive, Wilson would be remembered primarily for saying that “what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa.” The first secretary of defense who would exercise real, indeed nearly absolute, authority was John F. Kennedy’s choice: Robert Strange McNamara. This would be good news for those who believed that the Pentagon’s unruly bureaucracy needed a firm hand at the top. It would be bad news, however, for Edward Lansdale and his hopes of influencing the nation’s Vietnam policy.
Lansdale got his first intimation of what McNamara was like in the early days of 1961 when he was summoned to the Pentagon’s inner sanctum, Room 3E-880, to give the new defense secretary a ten-minute briefing—and not a second more—on his Vietnam trip. He knew that McNamara, who had come to the Pentagon, like Charlie Wilson, from a car company, in his case the Ford Motor Company, had no background whatsoever in guerrilla warfare in general or Vietnam in particular. McNamara later admitted as much, conceding, “I had never visited Indochina, nor did I understand its history, language, culture, or values.”2 Lansdale sought to begin McNamara’s education by bringing with him a collection of Vietcong weapons, including “handmade pistols and knives, old French rifles, and bamboo punji sticks,”3 that he intended to donate to the Special Forces headquarters at Fort Bragg.
Lansdale found the defense secretary wearing, as always, a dark suit, his thick brown hair slicked back on his head and parted in the middle, old-fashioned wire-rim spectacles framing his mirthless eyes, his jaw clenched tight, a severe expression on his face, looking very much like the Presbyterian elder that he was. He was ensconced behind his nine-foot-long mahogany desk, which was polished to a mirrorlike shine and adorned, as a reporter noted, “with half a dozen in-and-out baskets brimming with problems of peace and war.”4 Behind him was a portrait of his tightly wound predecessor James Forrestal. It was a fitting if unconscious warning of the way that McNamara himself would crack under the pressure of the Vietnam War.
Lansdale unceremoniously dumped his cargo of dirty weapons, caked with mud and blood, on the secretary’s immaculate desk with a “great clatter.” He recalled telling McNamara,
The enemy in Vietnam uses these weapons—and they were just using them just a little bit ago before I got them. Many of them are barefoot or wear sandals. They wear black pajamas, usually, with tatters or holes in them. I don’t think you’d recognize any of them as soldiers, but they think of themselves that way. The people that are fighting there, on our side, are being supplied with our weapons and uniforms and shoes and all of the best that we have; and we’re training them. Yet, the enemy is licking our side. Always keep in mind about Vietnam, that the struggle goes far beyond the material things of life. It doesn’t take weapons and uniforms and lots of food to win. It takes something else, ideas and ideals, and these guys are using that something else. Let’s at least learn that lesson.5
“Watching his face as I talked,” Lansdale was to say, “I got the feeling that he didn’t understand me. Too unconventional. Somehow I found him very hard to talk to.”6 That was because Lansdale did not speak McNamara’s language—the language of numbers.
Ever since he was a schoolboy, Robert S. McNamara had been entranced by the seductive logic of mathematics. As an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley, in the 1930s, he began, he later said, “to talk and think in numbers.”7 That tendency became even more pronounced during his postgraduate studies at Harvard Business School, where he became convinced that a mastery of financial data was the key to business success. Cold, unemotional, aloof, and intolerant of those less brilliant than him, Bob McNamara began to cultivate a reputation as a human computer—an “IBM machine with legs.”8 During World War II, he became a statistician in uniform, helping the Army Air Forces to maximize the effectiveness of their bombing campaign against Japan. In a sign of what was to come in Vietnam, his number crunching helped kill hundreds of thousands of civilians, but he remained seemingly impervious to the human cost of his work. After the war, he and his fellow Air Force statisticians, dubbed the Whiz Kids, moved en masse to the Ford Motor Company, where they engineered a turnaround employing quantitative methods, much to the chagrin of automobile enthusiasts such as Lee Iacocca. McNamara’s incisive biographer Deborah Shapley was to write that he became “the epitome of a bean-counting manager who understood nothing about engineering cars.”9 By the end of 1960, he had risen to become president of Ford, the first nonfamily member ever to hold that post.
The president-elect had said that he wanted a Republican or two in the cabinet, and McNamara seemed to fit the bill. “That a young Republican businessman could also be well thought of by labor, be Harvard-trained, support the ACLU, and read Teilhard de Chardin were all bonuses,” Shapley wrote.10 (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a trendy French philosopher.) Jack Kennedy instructed his aides, sight unseen, to offer McNamara his choice of cabinet posts, either Treasury or Defense. McNamara chose Defense, and began, with the help of his Whiz Kids, to apply his number-crunching philosophy to the armed forces.
“You can’t substitute emotions for reason,” he often said.11 He honestly believed that if only you got the inputs right, his mathematical models would unerringly spit out the right answers to such complicated questions as: How big should America’s nuclear arsenal be? What kind of next-generation fighter airplane should the Air Force and Navy buy? And how should the United States respond to Vietcong attacks? Anyone like Lansdale who tried to challenge McNamara’s “systems analysis” was given short shrift by the imperious secretary.
A year later, in early 1962, Lansdale was called in again to McNamara’s office to help him “computerize” the war in Vietnam. McNamara presented him with a long list of entries, written out with a pencil on graph paper, including factors such as the number of Vietcong killed—the “body count” of later infamy.
“Your list is incomplete,” Lansdale said. “You’ve left out the most important factor of all.”
“What is it?” McNamara demanded.
“Well, it’s the human factor,” Lansdale said. “You can put it down as the X factor.”
McNamara duly wrote down in pencil, “X factor.” “What does it consist of?”
“What the people out on the battlefield really feel; which side they want to see win and which side they’re for at the moment. That’s the only way you’re going to ever have this war decided.”
“Tell me how to put it in,” McNamara said.
“I don’t think any Americans out there at the moment can report this to you,” Lansdale replied.
McNamara then took out an eraser and began to erase the “X factor.” “No, leave it in there,” Lansdale said.
He then spent a week trying to figure out how to provide the numbers that McNamara wanted. He suggested that U.S. troops working with Vietnamese forces in the field answer questions such as “What was the villages’ attitude towards the Vietnamese troops?”; “What is attitude of Vietnamese troops towards civilians at check points on the highway?”; and “What are the feelings of [Vietnamese] troops at being in military service? Proud to be in uniform? Indifferent? . . . Homesick?”12 His work ultimately led to the Hamlet Evaluation System, a systematic way to judge whether each Vietnamese village was dominated by the government or by the Vietcong. But Lansdale knew all too well that such figures were inherently subjective and prone to manipulation. He pleaded with McNamara: “You’re going to fool yourself if you get all of these figures added up, because they won’t tell you how we’re doing in this war.”
Lansdale’s deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Samuel V. Wilson, recalled seeing McNamara’s eyes “glaze over” as Lansdale kept lecturing him about the X Factor. Wilson tried to get Lansdale’s attention by nudging him with a knee but Lansdale “just kept going strong,” uncharacteristically oblivious to the impression he was making. “He was turning McNamara off,” Wilson said, “but waxing more and more enthusiastic, speaking more rapidly.”13
From then on, McNamara had little time for Lansdale. With a bitter laugh, Lansdale later remembered McNamara’s reaction to his contributions: “He asked me to please not bother him anymore. He used to say, ‘Thank you, I’ve got something else to do now.’ ”14 When McNamara needed something from Lansdale’s office, he would call Sam Wilson. “Things were simply broken between Lansdale and McNamara,” Wilson said.15
McNamara was later to lament that no one in the administration knew much about Vietnam—“we found ourselves setting policy for a region that was terra incognita. Worse, our government lacked experts for us to consult to compensate for our ignorance.” Lansdale was, he grudgingly admitted, the only “Pentagon officer with counterinsurgency experience in the region,” but McNamara denigrated him as hardly comparable to Soviet experts such as Charles “Chip” Bohlen and George Kennan. “Lansdale,” he sniffed, “was relatively junior and lacked broad geopolitical experience.”16 Actually Lansdale was eight years older than McNamara himself, who was forty-four in 1961, and he had been working in Asia since 1945.
One suspects that McNamara’s problem with Lansdale was not that he lacked broad experience but that he lacked McNamara’s own misguided passion for reducing the complex problems of war and peace into easily solvable and greatly deceptive mathematical equations. Lansdale’s mishandling of the prickly secretary of defense—his tendency to drone on a little too long and a little too stridently—compounded the problem. In his attempts to influence American leaders, Lansdale lacked the deft touch he displayed in dealing with foreign leaders.
That would turn out to be an increasingly serious stumbling block for Lansdale because McNamara was fast becoming the most forceful and powerful member of the Kennedy cabinet, next to Attorney General Robert Kennedy himself. McNamara’s influence, as much as Dean Rusk’s, led to Lansdale’s precipitous fall from grace in the first half of 1961: he went from being the president’s favorite counterinsurgency expert and the front-runner to become the next ambassador to South Vietnam to being “practically without voice” as the situation continued to worsen.
BY SEPTEMBER 1961, the number of Vietcong attacks had nearly tripled, to 450 a month from 150 a month earlier in the year. In the early morning hours of September 18, insurgents overran Phuoc Thanh, a provincial capital only fifty-five miles from Saigon, beheaded the provincial governor, and slipped away into the jungle before government troops arrived.17 In response, Ngo Dinh Diem asked that the United States not only support a further buildup of the South Vietnamese army but also sign a bilateral defense treaty committing the United States to South Vietnam’s defense. Robert McNamara and the Joint Chiefs circulated plans, over the opposition of the State Department, to insert U.S. combat troops primarily to protect South Vietnam’s borders against Communist incursions.
President Kennedy was not sure what to do, and he could not devote his full attention to Vietnam. East German and Soviet forces had begun erecting the Berlin Wall in the early morning hours of August 13, 1961, to stop the hemorrhaging of refugees to the West. The Communists were threatening to force American troops out of the city altogether—a threat that Kennedy vowed to resist with force if necessary. While World War III was looming in Berlin, Kennedy decided on October 11 to send a team of trusted advisers to Saigon to recommend a way forward in Vietnam. The mission would include Edward Lansdale, and it would be led by two of the president’s favorites—Maxwell Taylor and Walt Whitman Rostow.
Kennedy had summoned Taylor, a former Army chief of staff, out of retirement in April 1961 to study the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation and had kept him in the White House as an all-purpose troubleshooter. Described by a fawning journalist as “an aloof, handsome man with cool china blue eyes, a knack for sketching a problem in broad perspective, and a talent for hammering out explicit courses of action,”18 Taylor was not only a decorated combat veteran who had jumped into France at the head of the 101st Airborne Division on the eve of D-Day; he was also fluent in four foreign languages and capable of citing Virgil, Polybius, Caesar, or Clausewitz in casual conversation.19 He was, in short, JFK’s kind of general. But he was not as attuned to the demands of counterinsurgency as the president might have imagined. Taylor had written a book called The Uncertain Trumpet to argue that the military had to prepare for “limited wars” rather than only World War III, but, as Lansdale had discovered during his battles with the Army in the late 1950s over giving the counterinsurgency mission to the Special Forces, Taylor did not advocate civic action and psychological warfare as Lansdale did. Instead, he seemed to believe that guerrillas could be defeated with the same kind of fire-and-maneuver tactics that his paratroopers had employed in the liberation of Europe.
A former professor of economic history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rostow was more attuned to the softer side of counterinsurgency. His 1960 magnum opus, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, argued that economic growth was ineluctably leading the world in a liberal democratic, rather than a Marxist, direction and that it was in America’s interest to help developing nations reach the “takeoff” stage. He was already working with Lansdale on a small National Security Council task force to formulate a “U.S. Strategy To Deal With ‘Wars of National Liberation’ ”; their work would soon lead to, among other things, the creation of a high-level committee called the Special Group (Counterinsurgency), chaired by General Taylor and designed to focus bureaucratic attention on the “deterrence and countering of guerrilla warfare.”20 But, while he advocated Lansdale-style civic action, Rostow was also a firm believer in the efficacy of airpower. As an OSS officer in London, he had helped pick targets for the U.S. bombing campaign against Germany, and he would later be nicknamed Air Marshal Rostow for the enthusiasm with which he recommended bombing North Vietnam.21 He would never be mistaken, however, for a cigar-chomping militarist in the mold of General Curtis LeMay. Even those who disagreed with Rostow had to admit that he was a “warm human being.”22 A veteran of the Johnson administration was to call him “a sheep in wolf’s clothing.”23
By contrast, Taylor was more of a “loner” and “not a conciliator.”24 Lansdale got along well with the amiable Rostow but not with Taylor, who reminded him of his old nemesis Lightning Joe Collins—“the two of them were remarkably alike in their mastery of the fleeting smile, their pose of clean-cut all-American boy with graying hair, gentlemanly diction, and cold-blooded arrogance with subordinates in private.”25
The Taylor-Rostow mission took off on an Air Force executive jet, a Boeing 707, from Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington on October 15, 1961. Taylor, dressed in a yellow shirt and blue sweater, and Rostow, in gray sweater and open collar, called the eighteen group members up to the front cabin.26 Taylor then drew a line under the first four names and announced that everyone above the line would be going on protocol visits to meet Ngo Dinh Diem and other senior officials, while everyone below the line would not. Brigadier General Lansdale’s name was just below this line.27
While the group was flying to Vietnam, Taylor demanded that everyone write out “a list of the things you think you’re qualified to look into.” Lansdale gave him a long list of his interests and his contacts in Vietnam. Taylor ignored what he had written and assigned him to come up with a detailed plan to erect a high-tech barrier—a fence with electronic sensors—to prevent Communist infiltration of South Vietnam from Laos and Cambodia. “That’s not my subject,” Lansdale protested. “I’m not good at that.” Taylor wasn’t listening.28 When the delegation arrived in Saigon on October 18, 1961, Lansdale went over to the Military Advisory Assistance Group and told them, “You guys are good at figuring it out. This is going to cost us several billion dollars. Tell me how many billions and I’ll report it in.”29 (MAAG duly came up with a proposal, the first stage of which involved defoliating more than eight hundred miles of jungle at a cost of $3.5 million.)30
As soon as he heard that Lansdale was back, Diem sent an aide to bring him to the presidential palace for a talk—the last one the two men would ever have. Taylor was busy briefing the press, so Lansdale told Rostow that he was going to the palace “to see an old friend.” The big question on Diem’s mind was whether he should request U.S. troops. Lansdale recalled asking him, “Have you reached that point in your affairs now that you’re going to need that to stay alive?”
“So you think I shouldn’t ask?” Diem asked.
No, Lansdale said, just tell the truth—do you need troops or not? Diem couldn’t make up his mind. Ngo Dinh Nhu was sitting in on this meeting, and when Lansdale tried to press the issue he broke in to answer.
“I’m asking your brother these questions, not you,” Lansdale snapped. He was dismayed to see the extent to which Diem now deferred to Nhu on pivotal decisions.
Finally the brothers decided they didn’t need U.S. troops. “Well stay with that then,” Lansdale advised.31
While the world was transfixed by the continuing standoff between the superpowers in Berlin, the White House group spent seven whirlwind days in Vietnam—“a maelstrom of official calls, briefings, discussions, and visits to the field,” Taylor was to write.32 One day was spent visiting the DMZ, another day overflying the Mekong Delta to see the effects of recent flooding, the worst in decades, which had destroyed crops, left hundreds of thousands homeless, and exacerbated “a collapse of national morale.”33 The group left Saigon on October 25, 1961, and retreated to Baguio, the summer capital of the Philippines, to write their report amid the cool mountain breezes.
Taylor was to explain, “Personally, I had no enthusiasm for the thought of using U.S. Army forces in ground combat in this guerrilla war. . . . On the other hand, there was a pressing need to do something to restore Vietnamese morale and to shore up confidence in the United States.”34 As a compromise, Taylor and Rostow proposed the introduction of six thousand to eight thousand U.S. combat troops under the guise of flood relief.35 While Taylor did not envision U.S. troops clearing “the jungles and forests of Viet Cong guerrillas,” he did foresee the possibility of their being thrown into action “against large, formed guerrilla bands which have abandoned the forests for attacks on major targets.” And if this was insufficient to save South Vietnam, Taylor noted, in a separate “eyes only” cable to the president, bombing North Vietnam was always an option; he claimed that Hanoi “is extremely vulnerable to conventional bombing.”36
Lansdale was not entirely averse to the introduction of more American troops per se—certainly not as averse as he later said he was. He was willing to send a “ ‘hard core’ of combat forces” to buttress military units focused on civic action missions such as building roads and improving public health.37 But Lansdale never advocated bombing the North, nor did he envision U.S. troops fighting North Vietnamese formations as directly as Taylor did. In his report, Lansdale warned that “just adding more of many things, as we are doing at present, doesn’t appear to provide the answer we are seeking.” To “spark a complete psychological change in Vietnam’s situation, give the Vietnamese the hope of winning, and take the initiative away from the Communists,” he advocated sending more American advisers “as helpers, not as orderers.”38
The members of the Taylor-Rostow mission presented their findings to the president at the White House on November 3, 1961, as the Berlin Crisis was approaching a peaceful end.39 Kennedy turned down the proposal to send troops to Vietnam under the guise of flood relief. He told Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “The troops will march in; the bands will play; the crowds will cheer; and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send more troops. It’s like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another.”40 But Kennedy did approve a substantial enlargement of the advisory effort, as recommended by Taylor and Rostow. By the end of 1963, there would be sixteen thousand U.S. advisers in South Vietnam, up from only 685 when he assumed office. In February 1962, the lower-level Military Assistance Advisory Group would be expanded into the U.S. Military Assistance Command—Vietnam (MACV), led by a four-star general, initially Paul Harkins, a protégé of George S. Patton’s. American advisers would now be embedded with all South Vietnamese army units down to battalion level, while American-flown aircraft would provide air support to the South Vietnamese army.
Lansdale had argued in favor of letting military advisers participate in combat. “It would make all the difference in the effectiveness of their relationship to the Vietnamese,” he argued; “comrades are listened to, when they share the risk.”41 His advice was taken, and before long U.S. Air Force crews were flying attack missions in the guise of training Vietnamese crewmen who were simply along for the ride—not quite what Lansdale envisioned, but the natural consequence of allowing gung-ho Americans eager for combat to get into the thick of the action.42 The Taylor-Rostow mission subsequently would be seen as a major step toward the American armed forces’ entering the Vietnam War as a full-fledged combatant.
THE TAYLOR-ROSTOW task force put forward one additional idea that the president did not implement: a recommendation that Edward Lansdale be sent to Saigon as an adviser to Diem. South Vietnam’s president had personally made this request to Maxwell Taylor. On the cable sent back to Washington reporting the request, some unidentified State Department official wrote in the margin, “No. No. NO!” 43
The diplomats did soften their opposition a bit a few weeks afterward, in late November 1961, when they found Diem still reluctant to implement the governmental changes they advocated, including giving the United States a significant say in South Vietnamese decision-making. Diem saw that as a return to colonialism, this time under the Americans rather than the French.44 At that point, State suggested, just as Elbridge Durbrow had done in 1960, that Lansdale go to Saigon “and, presumably, clobber [Diem] from up close.”45 At least that was how Lansdale interpreted the request, which he adamantly rejected.
“Rather than just ‘hold Diem’s hand,’ apparently they want me to accept the hospitality of a friend whom I respect and then follow orders to threaten him with penalties from that close-in position, simply because he doesn’t comply with every wish of some Americans who remain foreign to the scene,” he wrote angrily to McNamara and Gilpatric. “The Communists in Vietnam can be defeated, but this isn’t the way to do it.”46
In his own eyes, and those of his friends, Lansdale was taking a stand on principle in a way that few other government officials would ever dare to do. In the eyes of Lansdale’s many internal critics, his position—go on his terms or not at all—was simply more evidence that he was an uncontrollable prima donna.
Walt Rostow, who at the end of 1961 was moving to the State Department to take over policy planning, tried one last time before he left the White House to persuade the president to post Lansdale to Saigon. It is “crucial,” he wrote to Kennedy on December 6, 1961, “that we free Ed Lansdale from his present assignment and get him out to the field in an appropriate position. He is a unique national asset in the Saigon setting.”47 Once again, however, Kennedy did not act. McGeorge Bundy later explained that the president “was relatively sympathetic to Lansdale. Lansdale was temperamentally somewhat his kind of person. I don’t think, on the other hand, that he felt so strongly about it that he wanted to push it against strong opposition from either the military or the diplomatic bureaucracy.”48
In his memoir, published a decade later, after tens of thousands of bodybags had come home, Rostow was to lament the failure to find a role for Lansdale in Saigon: “It is by no means certain Lansdale could have altered the tragic course on which Diem was launched; but he represented a kind of last chance.”49 With that chance lost, the abyss was looming nearer.