I am not going to lose Vietnam.
—LYNDON JOHNSON
AT 12:34 p.m. Central Standard Time on Friday, November 22, 1963, just three weeks after Ngo Dinh Diem’s death, the United Press International news service sent out the first intimation that something terrible had just happened in Dallas. Just seconds before, the UPI correspondent Merriman Smith, who was sitting in the press pool car trailing the presidential limousine, had seized a radio telephone to inform the UPI’s Dallas bureau chief, “Three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas.”1
Only four minutes had elapsed since those shots had rung out, hitting not only President Kennedy but also Governor John Connally of Texas, who was in the same vehicle, along with their wives, Jacqueline Kennedy and Nellie Connally. The president’s car, a 1961 Lincoln convertible, was even then bearing its occupants at high speed to Parkland Memorial Hospital. At 1:35 p.m., as William Manchester noted in his magisterial account of the shooting and its aftermath, “UPI bells chimed on teletype machines around the world: FLASH PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S DEAD.” “Over half the population wept,” Manchester wrote, quoting an opinion poll. “Four out of five, in the words of the report, felt ‘the loss of someone very close and dear,’ and subsequently nine out of ten suffered ‘physical discomfort.’ ”2
The mourning and shock would continue—in some ways they would never end—as John F. Kennedy’s body was borne back to Washington in the cargo hold of his own airplane, a Boeing 707 designated Air Force One. After his murder that Friday afternoon in Dallas, the hope and perceived innocence that had characterized the initial years of the Kennedys’ mythical Camelot would never return, the vanquishing of a youthful president somehow symbolizing America’s expulsion from an illusory Eden. On Saturday, November 23, the casket was placed on display in the East Room of the White House, where notables—senators, generals, former presidents—arrived to say their final goodbyes. On Sunday, November 24, an estimated three hundred thousand people lined up in silent respect along Pennsylvania Avenue to watch a caisson drawn by six matched gray horses pull the flag-draped casket from the White House to the Capitol building. Hundreds of thousands more stood in another line stretching for more than three miles, waiting in near-freezing temperatures for as long as ten hours for a chance to walk through the Rotunda to pass by the coffin. The poignant farewell concluded on Monday, November 25, with a funeral mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral attended by world leaders and royalty followed by burial at Arlington National Cemetery with full pomp and circumstance.
MANY PEOPLE never accepted—and never will—the verdict rendered by numerous independent investigations, that Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone. The murder of a beloved young president, an idol and an inspiration to millions, appeared too consequential an event to be the work of one deranged misfit, a disgraced former marine armed with a mail-order rifle. The fact that Oswald himself was killed shortly thereafter by a gunman with Mafia links only added to speculation that Kennedy had been the victim of a far-reaching plot. In the decades after Kennedy’s murder, phrases such as “grassy knoll” and “the Zapruder film” would enter the popular culture, thanks to an industry of conspiracy-mongers, their work culminating in 1991 with the release of the director Oliver Stone’s $40 million epic JFK.
The film features a shadowy character, played by Donald Sutherland and identified only as X, who claims that Kennedy was killed by the “military industrial complex” in a plot orchestrated by “General Y.” The movie furnishes some telltale clues to Y’s identity. X says that Allen Dulles was Y’s benefactor and that Y was in charge of Operation Mongoose. In case there is any further doubt of Y’s identity, the camera briefly pans to his office desk. His nameplate is obscured but the visible part reads “M/GEN. E.G.” above the words “U.S. AIR.” It does not take much imagination to infer that this is the desk of Major General E. G. Lansdale, U.S. Air Force. And just as the identity of Y was obvious, so too the identity of X was never in doubt either. Stone himself identified X at a press conference as L. Fletcher Prouty, a retired Air Force colonel who had worked as a liaison officer in the Pentagon’s special operations office when it was run by Lansdale between 1961 and 1963.3
Stone held up Prouty as a fearless truth-teller—a man who, in his words, “will go down in history” for revealing the “Secret History” of the United States and uncovering “the ugliest nest of vipers the civilized world has probably seen since the dreaded Mongol raiders of the tenth and eleventh centuries.”4 (The Mongol invasions actually occurred in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.) In reality, Prouty was a crank with a febrile imagination—“a complete nut,” in Rufus Phillips’s words.5 He was a “good pilot of prop-driven aircraft,” Lansdale later said, “but had such a heavy dose of paranoia about CIA when he was on my staff that I kicked him back to the Air Force.”6
Prouty would be associated after his retirement from the Air Force in 1964 with the white supremacist Liberty Lobby, the Church of Scientology, and the cult leader Lyndon LaRouche; he grandiosely compared LaRouche’s federal prosecution for conspiracy and mail fraud to the trial of Socrates. He also claimed that the fall of the Berlin Wall was stage-managed by David Rockefeller to profit from “the rubles and the gold,” that he had personally seen a UFO, and that “the Churchill gang” murdered Franklin D. Roosevelt.7
Prouty’s old boss was a favorite target of his bizarre and inventive accusations. He claimed that Lansdale had concocted the entire Huk threat—that so-called Huk attacks were actually carried out by Philippine army special forces in order to elect Ramon Magsaysay president, although he never explained why Washington would want to elect Magsaysay if there was no Huk threat.8 In a similar vein, he claimed that the members of Lansdale’s Saigon Military Mission were “a band of superterrorists” who deliberately created the Vietcong by moving a million Vietnamese from the North to the South in 1954–55. Their goal, Prouty explained, was to spark a war that could profit the military-industrial complex.9 (In reality, as we have seen, most of the refugees were Catholics who were staunchly anti-Communist.)
To back up his grave accusation that Lansdale was the mastermind of the Kennedy assassination, Prouty could offer but one piece of “evidence”: a photograph taken on November 22, 1963, near Dealey Plaza, showing a man in a suit walking by three tramps who are being escorted by two police officers. The man is visible only from the rear, but Prouty nevertheless claimed that this was none other than Lansdale and that the “tramps” were actors hired by the conspirators.10 Yet even Prouty insouciantly admitted, “The picture could be a hundred other people and I could be wrong.”11 He was definitely wrong about the tramps: they were finally identified by an enterprising reporter in 1992, who established they really were vagrants and not assassins in disguise.12
There is no reason to imagine that the man seen from the back was Lansdale—why, after all, would he have wanted to kill Kennedy? Prouty and Stone claimed JFK had mortally offended the “military-industrial complex” by embracing the cause of peace and trying to end the Cold War. In reality, while Kennedy contemplated reducing the number of U.S. advisers in Vietnam if conditions continued to improve, he also made clear that the “security of South Viet Nam is a major interest of the United States” and that “we will adhere to our policy of working with the people and government of South Viet Nam to deny this country to Communism.”13 Nor did Kennedy end attempts to overthrow or kill Fidel Castro, as JFK suggested. On November 22, 1963, at the very time that the president was being killed in Dallas, a CIA case officer was meeting in Paris with a disaffected Cuban military officer to give him a hypodermic syringe filled with poison, disguised as a Paper-Mate pen, which could be used to “eliminate” Castro.14 And far from cutting the defense budget, Kennedy, as he boasted in a speech in Fort Worth on the very day of his demise, had increased defense spending by more than 20 percent.15
Even if Kennedy had actually been intent on reducing the U.S. presence in Vietnam, ending the plots against Castro, or cutting defense spending, Lansdale would hardly have objected. He was a critic, not an advocate, of the Americanization of the Vietnam War. He was never a proponent of expensive weapons systems; he argued that the best weapon was a well-trained soldier, diplomat, or spy who would deal sympathetically with the local populace. And, although he ran Operation Mongoose, he was happy to end his participation in what he viewed as a thankless task. A staunch advocate of spreading liberty abroad, Lansdale was scarcely likely to undermine liberty at home by participating in a military coup d’état against the lawfully elected president—a man he had worked for and respected, even if he was less enamored of the president’s younger brother.
Far from plotting to kill John F. Kennedy, as numerous conspiracy-mongers continue to allege, Lansdale was as grief-stricken as the rest of the country by his shocking death and as uncertain about what would come next. Like most Americans, he must have wondered whether Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had been seeking power all his life, could rise to the challenge of exercising the supreme authority he had now inherited by dint of an assassin’s bullets.
BORN IN 1908 a few months after Edward Lansdale, Johnson had been raised in the dirt-poor Hill Country of central Texas. His mother dressed him in Little Lord Fauntleroy suits, just as Lansdale’s mother did, and imbued him with a sense that he was superior to his impoverished classmates. When Lyndon was young, his father, Sam Ealey Johnson, was a considerable success; not only did he make a comfortable living trading in cattle, cotton, and land, but he also won election to the Texas legislature. Lyndon idolized his strong-willed father and was devastated when he lost all of his money and his 433-acre ranch in the recession of 1922, which also hit the Lansdale family hard. In an instant, as Johnson later said, he “dropped to the bottom of the heap,” and his father went from a big man in the community to a laughingstock.16 The humiliation of his family’s downfall gave him added impetus to succeed, while also infusing him with deep-rooted resentment of those who were more privileged than he was.
Johnson would first come to Washington in 1931, while Lansdale was moving from Los Angeles to New York, as the aide to a newly elected congressman. He soon became the “boss” of the hitherto inconsequential Little Congress made up of Hill staffers—a feat he achieved by stuffing the ballot box just as he had done as an undergraduate at Southwest State Teachers College to win student body elections. “My God,” a future president of the organization wondered, “who would cheat to win the presidency of something like the Little Congress?”17 By 1937, while Lansdale was moving to San Francisco to launch his advertising career, Johnson was already a congressman himself, having won a special election when he was only twenty-eight years old. His first attempt to win a Senate seat in 1941 failed after his adversary stole more votes than he did. Vowing never to be beaten in such a manner again, Johnson did just enough to squeak out an 87-vote victory in the 1948 Senate election. By 1953, while Lansdale was engineering Ramon Magsaysay’s election as president of the Philippines, “Landslide Lyndon” had been elected leader of the Senate Democrats. Two years later, while Lansdale was fighting the “battle of the sects” in Saigon, Johnson became at the age of forty-six the youngest majority leader in Senate history—and the most powerful.
The “Leader,” as he was known, became famous in Washington for giving senators, journalists, donors, civil servants, and anyone else who came into his orbit “the treatment.” Johnson was physically imposing, at more than six feet three inches tall, with gangly arms and huge hands, giant ears jutting from his head, and coal-black eyes blazing with intensity. He would often put his face next to the face of someone he was talking to, almost nose to nose, while he draped a giant arm around his interlocutor. “You really felt as if a St. Bernard had . . . pawed you all over,” the Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee recalled.18 No one in Washington was better than Johnson at intimidating people, ferreting out their weaknesses, and bending them to his will. Hubert Humphrey compared him to a “tidal wave. . . . He went through the walls. He’d come through a door, and he’d take the whole room over. Just like that.”19
The tidal wave was temporarily at low tide while Johnson was vice president—a job he hated because he was denied real power. He bristled at the condescension of Kennedy aides who called him “Rufus Cornpone” behind his back. His trademark energy, which throughout his life had led him to work brutally long hours and to eat, drink, and womanize on an equally prodigious scale, seemed to have dissipated. He was listless and had trouble getting out of bed. He wallowed in self-pity.
Everything changed the minute John F. Kennedy was struck down. LBJ’s Boswell, Robert Caro, quotes one of his aides remarking that her boss was a “ ‘changed man, transformed’ . . . the very movements of his body were different; . . . instead of the awkward, almost lunging, strides and ‘flailing’ movements of his arms that had previously often characterized Johnson under tension, now his stride was shorter, measured, and his arms were staying by his sides, hardly moving at all; . . . ‘there was no flailing.’ ”20 Another aide, Bill Moyers, said after JFK’s assassination, “I’ve never seen him as controlled, as self-disciplined, as careful and as moderate as he’s been this week.”21
Johnson plunged into the presidency with “cyclonic vigor.”22 Determined to outdo his hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he launched a “war on poverty” that was to result in the creation of the Job Corps, the Community Action Program, VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), Head Start, Food Stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, and many other idealistic and costly initiatives designed to foster a “Great Society.” Johnson also won passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and then of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, two landmark pieces of legislation that the less Machiavellian Kennedy had not been able to pass in the face of Southern filibusters. By the spring of 1964, Johnson’s approval ratings were over 70 percent and his election as president in his own right—once far from assured—now appeared to be a foregone conclusion. The columnist Joseph Alsop wrote that “in the few short months since last Nov. 22,” Johnson has been “making Washington and the government his own.”23
SOUTH VIETNAM, unfortunately, had no Lyndon Johnson of its own to take over from Ngo Dinh Diem—and given the newness and fragility of its national institutions, it needed a strong successor even more than the United States did. On November 4, 1963, just two days after Diem’s death, the architect of the coup, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, alerted Washington that “the Generals are quarreling among themselves” over the division of power and that if they “cannot come to an agreement within next day, then Marines who actually led the coup against the regime would lead a countercoup.”24 The generals just barely reached an agreement: General Duong Van Minh (“Big Minh”), the head of the 22-member Military Revolutionary Committee, would become president of South Vietnam. Nguyen Ngoc Tho, Diem’s vice president, would serve as prime minister to give a patina of civilian legitimacy to the arrangement. But generals would occupy all of the key posts. These military men were utterly unschooled in governance, suspicious of one another, and deeply insecure. They immediately unleashed a reign of terror against officials who had served Diem. Most of the 42 province and 253 district chiefs, including officials known for being especially effective in fighting the Communists, were replaced, often by men who did not know the areas they were assigned to govern.
Dreams that South Vietnam would become a more liberal place were shattered as the new military dictators imposed strict censorship, shut down newspapers, and arrested anyone suspected of disloyalty. Martial law would be invoked far more often after Diem’s demise than it had been while he was still in charge. Within weeks, thousands of students were marching in protests and more Buddhist monks than ever were immolating themselves in public. After years of nation building, South Vietnam was returning to the chaos of the 1954–55 period—just as Lansdale had warned would happen if Diem were removed.
This was a heaven-sent opportunity for the Vietcong. “Our enemy had been seriously weakened from all points of view, military, political and administrative. . . ,” a leader of the National Liberation Front crowed. “The police apparatus set up over the years with great care by Diem is utterly shattered, especially at the base. . . . Troops, officers, and officials of the army and administration are completely lost.”25 The number of “violent incidents” across South Vietnam increased from four hundred per week before the coup to more than a thousand in the week after the coup.26 The Strategic Hamlets program, the most promising counterinsurgency program initiated by Diem, was all but abandoned as hamlet after hamlet was overrun by attackers and not rebuilt. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was widened and improved to allow trucks to deliver supplies through Laos all the way to the border with South Vietnam, while seaborne shipments of weapons to transshipment points in Cambodia and to secret landing spots along the ill-patrolled South Vietnamese coast increased. (The South Vietnamese navy was all but immobilized after its chief was murdered during the 1963 coup.)27 The quantity of supplies reaching Communist forces in the South would be four times greater in 1964 than in 1963.28 Most ominously of all, in 1964 the first North Vietnamese regular troops began heading south. Le Duan and the hard-liners were intent on accelerating the conflict, regardless of the risk of American intervention.29
IN THE early morning hours of January 30, 1964, another coup—the second in less than three months—occurred in Saigon. The instigator was General Nguyen Khanh, a member of the anti-Diem cabal who was aggrieved because he had been promised that no harm would come to the president and that he would get a handsome reward for his treachery. Neither promise had been fulfilled: Diem had been killed, and Khanh had been relegated to a corps command in the northwest. Khanh placed most of the leading generals responsible for the anti-Diem coup under house arrest. Khanh also arrested Diem’s killer (and Big Minh’s bodyguard), Captain Nguyen Van Nhung, who was subsequently found hanging in his cell.
Just thirty-six years old, General Khanh “was a chunky man with a small, dark goatee and slightly protuberant eyes,” noted an American press adviser, and he was given to wearing a “sharply creased field uniform” with boots polished to a mirrorlike sheen.30 Now that he was prime minister, Khanh worked to improve his popularity by importing American-style campaign tactics. “From the way he button-holed passers-by on Saigon sidewalks,” raved Time magazine, “the pint-sized Vietnamese officer in green fatigues could have been Nelson Rockefeller campaigning in the New Hampshire primary.”31 But Khanh did not prove any more adept at governing than Big Minh had been. He was not to be the Vietnamese LBJ.
LYNDON JOHNSON had not been an advocate of the Diem coup; he thought it was “a tragic mistake.”32 Having inherited what Robert McNamara aptly described as “a hell of a mess” in Vietnam,33 the new president struggled to find the right response.
Although a liberal in domestic affairs, Johnson was a foreign-policy hard-liner. He had spent long years on the House Naval Affairs and Armed Services Committees and then on the Senate Armed Services Committee championing a strong national defense and, not incidentally, ensuring that a disproportionate share of the defense budget found its way back to Texas in the form of bases and weapons contracts. Like most of his generation, Johnson was haunted by the failure of appeasement and isolationism in the 1930s. If Saigon fell, Johnson was terrified that he would be held politically responsible by Republicans as Truman had been held responsible for the Communist takeover of China. He would have recurring nightmares in which people kept shouting at him, “Coward! Traitor! Weakling!” Waking up “terribly shaken,” he would vow, “I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.”34 He urged his aides, “Don’t go to bed at night until you have asked yourself, ‘Have I done everything I could to further the American effort to assist South Vietnam?”35
Yet, determined as he was to save South Vietnam, Johnson hesitated to commit American forces to combat. He feared that a conflict would interfere with his Great Society agenda at home and that his popularity would suffer if he embroiled America in another land war in Asia like the Korean War.36 Balancing these competing imperatives, Johnson quietly shelved plans to reduce the American advisory presence as Kennedy had considered doing. In May 1964, he increased aid to South Vietnam by $125 million and sent another fifteen hundred advisers.37
He also embraced Nguyen Khanh as tightly as he could. Before Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor visited Saigon in March 1964, Johnson told them he wanted to see a picture “on the front pages of the world press” showing them holding up Khanh’s arms as a show of support.38 But far from strengthening Khanh, as LBJ expected, the resulting pictures strengthened the Vietcong narrative that Khanh was an American puppet. It did not help that McNamara, while grasping Khanh’s hand, tried to say Vietnam muon nam (“Vietnam ten thousand years”). But his pronunciation was so atrocious that it sounded to many listeners as if he had said, “Ruptured duck wants to lie down.”39
WHEN HENRY CABOT LODGE finally left Saigon in June 1964 to seek the Republican presidential nomination, after having done so much to undermine South Vietnam’s tenuous stability, Johnson named a high-powered replacement: Maxwell Taylor. Aloof, handsome, cerebral, the multilingual tribune of “flexible response” and advocate of “limited wars” had impressed Johnson as much as he had Kennedy. Assisting him as deputy ambassador would be one of the State Department’s rising stars, U. Alexis Johnson, a former ambassador to Czechoslovakia and Thailand and most recently deputy under secretary of state.
MACV (Military Assistance Command—Vietnam) was also receiving new leadership. The relentlessly upbeat General Paul Harkins was replaced in June 1964 by another up-and-comer: General William Childs Westmoreland. Like Max Taylor, his mentor and friend, “Westy” was an Army golden boy with an airborne pedigree. A courtly native of South Carolina, Westmoreland had been an Eagle Scout as a boy. At West Point, where he transferred after beginning his college years at The Citadel, he was named first captain, the top cadet. He led an artillery battalion ashore in North Africa in 1942, and he landed in Normandy on D-Day. After the war, he joined the 82nd Airborne Division—a more glamorous assignment than staying in the field artillery. When the Korean War broke out, Westmoreland was dispatched as a regimental commander. Further promotions followed rapidly once his patron, Max Taylor, became chief of staff in 1955. Westmoreland became the army’s youngest major general at age forty-two, assigned to command the storied 101st Airborne Division, Taylor’s old outfit. In 1960, he was appointed Superintendent of West Point, his alma mater. By early 1964, he was in Vietnam as Harkins’s deputy and successor-in-waiting.40
Fifty years old, tall, lean, vigorous, gray-haired, and handsome, Westy looked the very image of a “rugged, no-nonsense soldier”41—a “Tough Man” for a “Tough Job,” as one magazine put it.42 Some of those who knew him better were less impressed. Westy did little reading, and he had little interest in, or understanding of, Asia or counterinsurgency warfare. His level of intellectual sophistication was displayed when he told a visitor to Saigon—the Harvard professor Henry Kissinger—that the Americans in Vietnam were much better liked than the French had been because “when the French wanted a woman they simply grabbed her off the streets and went to bed with her,” whereas “when an American soldier wants a woman he pays for her.” “I thought at first he was kidding,” Kissinger recorded in his diary, “but I then found out he was absolutely serious.”43
A brigadier general who had served under Westmoreland warned the secretary of the army, Cyrus Vance, that “it would be a grave mistake” to send him to Vietnam. “He is spit and polish, two up and one back. This is a counterinsurgency war, and he would have no idea of how to deal with it.”44 Such prophecies were ignored by McNamara and Johnson, as was any unease that might have been stirred by one of Westmoreland’s early directives. He demanded that all American advisers “accentuate the positive,” “bring best thought to bear,” and avoid “frustration and stagnation.”45 This was designed to instill a positive, can-do attitude, but it became a prescription for wishful thinking and the denial of certain grim realities.
WHILE PRESIDENT JOHNSON was assembling a new team in Saigon, he was also authorizing a covert-harassment plan against the North cobbled together by an interagency committee chaired by Lansdale’s old rival Major General Victor “Brute” Krulak. In outline, it was reminiscent of Lansdale’s ineffectual Mongoose plans against Cuba: it called for increased intelligence collection, psychological operations such as leaflet drops and radio broadcasts, and a small number of “destructive undertakings,” that is, hit-and-run raids that would be carried out by South Vietnamese personnel with American support. Operation Plan (OPLAN) 34A, approved by Johnson on January 16, 1964, was designed “to inflict increasing punishment upon North Vietnam and to create pressures, which may convince the North Vietnamese leadership, in its own self-interest, to desist from aggressive policies.” 46
It did not occur to anyone that there might be a problem with staging OPLAN 34A raids along the North Vietnam coast at the same time that U.S. naval ships were offshore on intelligence-gathering patrols. The confluence of these two operations provoked North Vietnamese patrol boats on August 2, 1963, to stage an unsuccessful attack on the destroyer USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. The next day, the Maddox and another destroyer, the Turner Joy, reported a further attack. The two warships fired 372 shells and at least four depth charges while reporting that they had dodged multiple torpedoes and enemy gunfire. But American pilots flying overhead could not see any enemy vessels, and later analysis concluded that the second attack, unlike the first one, had not really occurred. “Hell, those damn, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish,” Lyndon Johnson concluded a few days later. But such doubts did not prevent Johnson from sending to Congress, and Congress approving with near unanimity, a resolution giving the president the authority “to take all necessary measures to repel armed attacks against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression” as well as to aid any American ally in Southeast Asia “requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.”
Neither the members of Congress nor Lyndon Johnson himself had any idea that the vague language of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution would be used to justify a ground war that would eventually draw in half a million American troops. On both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, there was fervent hope that South Vietnam’s government would be able to fight its own battles. But with South Vietnam still buffeted by the divisive reverberations from the anti-Diem coup, and with North Vietnam continuing to ramp up its offensive, the pressure would build to prevent a total collapse through the introduction of American combat troops. There was nothing inevitable about the outcome, but in hindsight it is easy to see the course upon which America was now embarked toward the deadliest guerrilla conflict in its history.47