Chapter Thirteen

McNamara had come in at a dead run; by the time he was sworn in he had already identified the hundred problems of the Defense Department, had groups and committees studying them. He had his people plucked from the campuses or the shadow government of the Rand Corporation and other think tanks. They were cool and lucid, these men, men of mathematical precision who had grown up in the atmosphere of the Cold War, and who were students of nuclear power and parity and deployment, men whose very professions sometimes sounded uncivilized to the humanist. He took over the Defense Department for a Chief Executive who had run on the promise of getting America moving again (one pictured them always without overcoats and hats, moving and pushing quickly through crowds, always on the move; Kennedy had once gotten angry at Robert Bird, a reporter for the Herald Tribune, because Bird had written that the reason that this dynamic young man was able to campaign without an overcoat in the cold of New Hampshire and Wisconsin was that he wore thermal underwear), on the assumption that we were losing our power and manhood, they had more missiles. McNamara had assumed that his first job when he took over would be to hurry up production and close the missile gap, but he soon discovered that there was none. Shortly after the election McNamara told Pentagon reporters this, a statement which caused a considerable flap, particularly among Republicans, who had lost an election partly because of a nonexistent gap. How many God-fearing, Russian-fearing citizens had cast their votes to end the gap and live a more secure life, only to find that they had been safe all along. When Kennedy called McNamara the next day to find out what had happened, McNamara denied that he had ended the missile gap, a denial which made the Pentagon reporters, who had heard the statement with their own ears, very leary of his word in the future.

But it was true, there was no missile gap, so instead of increasing the might of the United States and catching up with the Russians, McNamara set out to harness the might, to control it and to bring some order and rationality to it, and soon, above all, to limit the use of nuclear weapons. To control the weapons, to limit them, to rationalize their procedures absorbed his time and his energy; and Vietnam, which was a tiny little storm cloud on the horizon, seemed distant, small, manageable, far from the real center of man’s question of survival or self-destruction. It would be one of the smaller ironies of his years as Secretary of Defense that in making his arguments against nuclear weapons, forcefully, relentlessly, he had to make counterarguments for conventional forces, to build up those conventional forces. We had to have some kind of armed might, so he made good and effective arguments for conventional weapons (and if the Chiefs wanted to use them in Vietnam, to send American combat troops without nuclear weapons, he had to go along, since he had developed the thesis, the mystique of what conventional weapons could do with the new mobility). He gave them a rationale, for his overriding concern was quickly to limit the possibilities of nuclear war, to gain control of those weapons.

It was a very different time, the immediate post-Eisenhower years. The Chiefs, who were held over from the previous Administration (generals who believed in a more balanced posture, like Ridgway and Taylor, had been either winnowed out, or more or less ignored), were men who believed that nuclear war was a viable kind of military position; indeed, the entire American military posture was essentially based on a willingness to use nuclear weapons. That was an eerie-enough thought, and some people wanted to crawl away from it. Men such as Henry Kissinger, then of Harvard, had just made himself something of an intellectual reputation as a theoretician of tactical nuclear weapons (that is, finding something respectable between blowing up the world and being too soft), and there was thus something of a fad for tactical nuclear weapons. (Though one problem was that in the Pentagon’s war games there always seemed to be a problem with the tactical nuclear weapons. No matter which side fired first, the other side would retaliate, and every time without fail it would somehow expand to strategic weapons; whoever was behind on the little stuff would let fly with the big stuff.)

Daniel Ellsberg discussed the subject of nuclear weapons with McNamara during a luncheon meeting; later he would remember the Secretary’s passion on the subject. He was against using tactical weapons (“They’re the same thing, there’s no difference,” he said, “once you use them, you use everything else. You can’t keep them limited. You’ll destroy Europe, everything”). Ellsberg had heard that McNamara was a man without convictions or emotions, but decided that this was a deliberately chosen pose, and an effective one, to cover real feelings. It was, he thought, an impressive performance, not just because of McNamara’s almost emotional abhorrence of the weapons but because he understood the dangers of his situation: he had to keep his feelings hidden, for if the Chiefs or Congress found out how he felt he would be finished as Secretary of Defense. The whole might of America was concentrated on nuclear weapons, and we had sold the idea of nuclear retaliation to the Europeans; if the word got out of the Secretary’s negative attitude, it would mean that the United States was virtually disarmed, so of course he would not be able to stay in office.

Shortly after lunch Ellsberg received a call from Adam Yarmolinsky, who had been present during the meeting. “You must not speak of this lunch to anyone. It is of the highest importance. Not to anyone. It must not get around.” Ellsberg agreed, and then mentioned a rumor that the President himself felt the same way about the weapons. (There was a story going around hip Pentagon circles that Kennedy was unreliable, almost soft on nukes; he had been taken to visit a SAC base, and when he saw a 20-megaton bomb, he blanched visibly. “Why do we need one of these?” he asked. It caused a scandal in SAC circles because this, of course, was the standard bomb, they were all like this.) “There is no difference between them at all,” Yarmolinsky answered.

 

McNamara worked hard to change Western thinking about nuclear policy. He set out to educate not just the Pentagon but his European colleagues as well, forming the Nuclear Planning Group for his European counterparts, men who were politicians first, not managers, and thus felt themselves particularly dependent on their generals. He forced them to build a table where only the defense ministers could sit. No prepared papers or set speeches were allowed, and they could not turn to their generals who then turned to their colonels. They came to the meetings, only one person from each country at the table, only four others allowed in the room, he hated crowds. At first it did not work too well because McNamara overwhelmed them, he was too strong a presence, but gradually he forced them to take political responsibility for defense positions, and equally important, build skilled professional staffs which could challenge the technical thinking of the military at the lower levels, point by point, so they would not be forced into blind choices at the highest level.

He worked hard to bring greater control to the entire nuclear system. When he entered office he had found it surprisingly hair-trigger and chancy. The military had constructed a system in which the prime consideration was not control but getting the weapons into the air, no matter what; controls and safeguards were secondary. Even on the weapons themselves the safety features seemed marginal; there was, he decided, far too great a chance that one could go off in a crash, and he insisted on other safety features being added. He evolved PAL (Permissive Action Link), a system which was developed first as a technical device to lock up all nuclear weapons not under U.S. control; that is, the nukes in other countries. With that in mind he got development of it, his rationale being: I love nuclear weapons as much as the next man, but if we let these Greeks and Turks have them . . . Technically, none of the nuclear weapons here in the United States could be used without a specific order from the President; in practice, if the Chiefs felt that communications had failed, they could make a decision to use the weapons based on their best judgment. It was a very subtle thing; once he got started with the rationale of keeping them from the non-Anglo-Saxon peoples of NATO, he was able eventually to slip the controls on American weapons. Had the military been exactly sure of his intentions—they sensed them, of course—they might have blocked him from the start. At the end they fought and fought hard. After all, it downgraded the field commander, and to them, the threat that the reaction time was slowed down was greater than that a crackpot might take over the base.

 

He felt himself very much alone, surrounded by hostile forces in his quest. He had no following on the Hill and he felt that his detractors did, so his loyalty to the President, which was strong in any case, was doubly strong, the President was his only patron and protector, and his source of power. But if the President had doubts about him, then he lost power in this savage world in which he was operating. He was already a compromised figure. He was fighting for the highest needs of mankind, plotting against the bureaucracy, dissembling inside, but eventually the compromises that he made did not really work out satisfactorily, he had to give so much in order to appear respectable. To a degree the fault lay in the era. The nation was beginning to emerge from a period of enormous political and intellectual rigidity (it had virtually been embalmed) because of the Cold War, a period which nonetheless had seen a great jump in the technological might of the United States. The growth of the sophistication of weapons and the enormous increase in their price had given the Pentagon a quantum jump in power. Its relationship with the Congress, always strong, but based in the past largely on patriotism and relatively minor pork-barrel measures, was now strengthened by a new loyalty, based on immense defense contracts conveniently placed around the homes of the most powerful committee chairmen.

On how many fronts could he fight? If he had tried to turn the country around on chemical and biological warfare, for instance, Senator Russell surely would have opened hearings. Did you want a fight on everything? By holding them off on the B-70, a bomber which no one needed, he almost brought on a constitutional crisis, with the Congress passing the money that the executive branch did not want to spend. He was constantly fighting with the Chiefs, but also deciding how much each point was worth. On the test-ban treaty McNamara virtually locked them in a room for a week to fight it out with them. He made them promise that once he had broken an argument they could not go back to it, because he felt that arguing with the Chiefs was a lot like arguing with your mother-in-law; you win a point and go on to the next only to find that they are back at the first. So, for a week, hour after hour, he went through every objection they had, breaking them down point by point, until finally he won. He read his victory as a conversion. His aides felt differently, however; they felt he had shown how important the treaty was to him, and as one said later, it was virtually a case of going along with him or resigning. But how many issues were worth this much effort, particularly since many of these fights were not his by tradition? It should have been the Secretary of State, not of Defense, who was fighting for a nuclear-test ban.

Yet he took over at a time when the world was changing. The threats of the Soviet Union were not the same. There was no longer a Communist monolith. (The Chiefs, for instance, were far slower to accept the Sino-Soviet split than most people in Washington, believing it finally when the Russians massed troops on the Chinese border.) The bureaucracy around him often seemed more rigid than the needs of the world required. More missiles for NATO. More troops. Bigger bombers. It was as if at a crucial moment in history he sensed the problems and the end of certain myths and worked hard to correct them, yet as if finally it was all too much. His record clouded even on nuclear weapons. Had they tempered the arms race as they might have or had they helped push the Soviets into another round of mutual escalation of missile building?

 

He compiled an awesome record in Washington in those days. He was a much-sought-after figure, a man of impressive qualities. In a flashy Administration which placed great emphasis on style, McNamara was at home. He had always liked style among people at Ford, judging them not only by what they said, but how they said it. He was popular at dinner parties and was considered unusual in that he did not bore women at dinner by talking about nuclear warheads. He was a friend of Jack and Jackie’s, of Bobby and Ethel’s, and yet he lived simply, driving his own car more often than not, a beat-up old Ford. He was gay when the occasion called for gaiety, sober when it called for sobriety. If he made enemies on the Hill, they were at least the right enemies—Vinson, Stennis, Rivers—men hardly revered by social-intellectual Washington. His congressional appearances were impressive, well prepared, grim and humorless. McNamara testifying on the Hill was not someone you wanted to cross. Yet he was unbending, he knew too many answers. The Hill didn’t like that. He was perhaps a little too smart, and when Southerners say someone is smart they are not necessarily being complimentary. His deputy Roswell Gilpatric cautioned him, suggesting that it would be a good idea to go over and have a few drinks occasionally, get to know the boys, humanize yourself and your intentions. The oil in the wheels of government was bourbon. But McNamara would have none of it. He worked a fourteen-hour day already; if he did his job and presented his facts accurately and intelligently, then they would do their job by accepting his accuracy and there was no need to waste time in missionary work. He had his responsibilities and they theirs, and if they could not see the rightness of what he was doing, he did not think he could woo them by drinking. Probably he was right.

Yet even his enemies added to his reputation; they were the right enemies, the generals, the conservatives on the Hill. And if there were doubts about his sensitivity on some political issues, even his liberal critics found something admirable in him, his capacity to change, to follow the evidence and to keep his ego separated from his opinions. So as the Kennedy Administration progressed he seemed to have started toward a career as the classic Secretary of Defense, particularly working for a President of the United States who was wiser, whose political instincts were better and more sophisticated. The combination of Kennedy-McNamara seemed to work well. The President had a broader sense of history, a sense of skepticism, and it blended well with McNamara’s sheer managerial ability, his capacity to take complicated problems of defense, which were almost mathematical in their complexity, and break them down. Kennedy understood the gaps in McNamara; even if he was brilliant, he was not wise. When Kennedy told him to bring back an answer on a question, McNamara would work diligently, come back, and present the answer to the question. If Kennedy noted that this was not the answer he wanted, McNamara would disappear and come back with the right answer this time. (In 1962 McNamara, always cost-conscious, came charging into the White House ready to save millions on the budget by closing certain naval bases. All the statistics were there. Close this base, save this many dollars. Close that one and save that much more. All obsolete. All fat. Each base figured to the fraction of the penny. Kennedy interrupted him and said, Bob, you’re going to close the Brooklyn Navy Yard, with twenty-six thousand people, and they’re going to be out of work and go across the street and draw unemployment, and you better figure that into the cost. That’s going to cost us something and they’re going to be awfully mad at me, and we better figure that in too. So Kennedy ended the closing down, but in 1964 under Johnson, McNamara came right back with the same proposals. Johnson, who loved economy, particularly little economies, light-switch economies, was more interested in the idea until Kenny O’Donnell, who had become one of McNamara’s more constant critics within the government and who would later argue vociferously with Bobby Kennedy that most of the mistakes of the Kennedy era had stemmed from McNamara, pointed out that the shipyards always tended to be in the districts of key congressmen, men like John McCormack and John Rooney, and though it saved a few million, it might cost them the Rules Committee.)

 

When McNamara began to take charge of Vietnam there was a growing split between the civilians and the military over the assessment of Vietnam. Now McNamara, a civilian heading a military enterprise, was to become the principal figure, in effect the judge of the controversy, a man with civilian attitudes responsible to military pressures and military assessments (one of the problems with him on the war, a friend would later note, was that though he thought the military knew nothing about hardware and about weapons systems, he did think they knew something about running wars). But when he moved in on Vietnam he was not, as he was on so many other issues, aided by those bright young civilians from the Defense Department, the Whiz Kids, whom he usually let loose to become his own independent sources of information with which to break institutional information networks. Rather, he took over as if he were the desk officer, with John McNaughton later serving as his own aide. (In 1965 he finally sent the first of the Whiz Kids to Vietnam as a civilian member of the headquarters there. The young man’s pessimism differed sharply from Saigon’s optimism and had an important effect on McNamara’s own doubts. The young man was Daniel Ellsberg.) McNamara, who had unleashed these young men elsewhere in the Pentagon, moved virtually alone in an area where he was least equipped to deal with the problems, where his training was all wrong, the quantifier trying to quantify the unquantifiable. What had worked for him so effectively in the past, the challenge of his own civilians loyal only to him and their craft, to the existing facts and preconceptions, was missing. He had no independent information with which to compete with the military’s information; he had journalistic accounts, of course, but journalists were not serious people and even at the Pentagon they seemed like adversaries who existed for the sake of adversity.

Thus he went into Vietnam virtually alone. The reasons for keeping his civilians out are complicated. For one thing, it was a sensitive issue; the Chiefs were already somewhat neurotic about the use of systems analysis, sensing, not entirely inaccurately, that it was about to become a civilian JCS giving independent judgments. It was one thing to offer systems analysis in the technical areas, the mathematical and hardware areas, but quite another to compete with their judgment on a war, on the facts produced by a war. It would immediately have brought Stennis and Rivers down on him. The second thing was that though by and large he did not respect the military very much in his fields (which were in managerial decisions, rationalism, cost accounting), he did think they were professionals in one area, that whatever else, they knew how to fight at war; thus one did not mess with them in their area of specialty because it was very delicate in the first place, and in the second place because it went against their professionalism. And there was that confidence which bordered on arrogance, a belief that he could handle it. Perhaps, after all, the military weren’t all that good; still, they could produce the raw data, and McNamara, who knew data, would go over it carefully and extricate truth from the morass. Thus the portrait of McNamara in those years at his desk, on planes, in Saigon, poring over page after page of data, each platoon, each squad, studying all those statistics. All lies. Talking with reporters and telling them that all the indices were good. He could not have been more wrong; he simply had all the wrong indices, looking for American production indices in an Asian political revolution.

There was something symbolic about him during those trips. He epitomized booming American technological success, he scurried around Vietnam, looking for what he wanted to see; and he never saw nor smelled nor felt what was really there, right in front of him. He was so much a prisoner of his own background, so unable, as indeed was the country which sponsored him, to adapt his values and his terms to Vietnamese realities. Since any real indices and truly factual estimates of the war would immediately have shown its bankruptcy, the McNamara trips became part of a vast unwitting and elaborate charade, the institutionalizing and legitimizing of a hopeless lie. Those trips seemed to symbolize the foolishness and hopelessness of it all, particularly if McNamara represented the best of the society. And memories of him still remain: McNamara in 1962 going to Operation Sunrise, the first of the repopulated villages, the villagers obviously filled with bitterness and hatred, ready, one could tell, to slit the throat of the first available Westerner, and McNamara not picking it up, innocently firing away his questions. How much of this? How much of that? Were they happy here? McNamara was always acting out his part in those carefully planned visits, General Harkins acting as his travel agent, and just to make sure the trip was a success, always at his side. (Years later, when McNamara had turned against the war, he talked with John Vann, the lieutenant colonel who had left the Army in protest of the Harkins policies, and the one who had shown statistically how badly the war was going. McNamara asked Vann why he had been misinformed, and Vann bluntly told him it was his own fault. He should have insisted on his own itinerary. He should have traveled without accompanying brass, and he should have taken some time to find out who the better-informed people were and learned how to talk to them.)

The Harkins briefings were of course planned long in advance; they were brainwashings really, but brainwashings made all the more effective and exciting by the trappings of danger. Occasional mortar rounds going off. A captured rifle to touch, a surly captured Vietcong to look at. What was created on those trips was not an insight about the country but an illusion of knowledge. McNamara was getting the same information which was available in Washington, but now it was presented so much more effectively that he thought he understood Vietnam. Afterward Arthur Sylvester, his PIO, told reporters how many miles he had flown, how many corps headquarters, province headquarters, district headquarters he had visited, how many officers of each rank. The reporters sat there writing it down, all of it mindless, all of it fitting McNamara’s vision of what Vietnam should be. Vietnam confirmed McNamara’s preconceptions and specifications.

One particular visit seemed to sum it up: McNamara looking for the war to fit his criteria, his definitions. He went to Danang in 1965 to check on the Marine progress there. A Marine colonel in I Corps had a sand table showing the terrain and patiently gave the briefing: friendly situation, enemy situation, main problem. McNamara watched it, not really taking it in, his hands folded, frowning a little, finally interrupting. “Now, let me see,” McNamara said, “if I have it right, this is your situation,” and then he spouted his own version, all in numbers and statistics. The colonel, who was very bright, read him immediately like a man breaking a code, and without changing stride, went on with the briefing, simply switching his terms, quantifying everything, giving everything in numbers and percentages, percentages up, percentages down, so blatant a performance that it was like a satire. Jack Raymond of the New York Times began to laugh and had to leave the tent. Later that day Raymond went up to McNamara and commented on how tough the situation was up in Danang, but McNamara wasn’t interested in the Vietcong, he wanted to talk about that colonel, he liked him, that colonel had caught his eye. “That colonel is one of the finest officers I’ve ever met,” he said.

And so he created the base of knowledge, first-hand, on which he would make his judgments and recommendations. It was all based on those terrible trips out there, the unwillingness to accept civilian assistance in challenging the military reporting, the unwillingness to adapt his own standards and criteria. In these crucial middle years he attached his name and reputation to the possibility and hopes for victory, caught himself more deeply in the tar baby of Vietnam, and limited himself greatly in his future actions. It is not a particularly happy chapter in his life; he did not serve himself nor the country well; he was, there is no kinder or gentler word for it, a fool.

 

In the spring of 1963 the war seemed to come to a halt. The ARVN stopped initiating action. In Washington some of the civilians were becoming more and more dubious about the military reporting from Saigon, and Harriman, increasingly the dominant figure at State, was telling Roger Hilsman not to depend too much on MACV’s reporting. It was all right for him to rely on CIA and journalistic dispatches as a basis for his own estimates and he could also use some of the military’s facts, but without their conclusions.

On the political side, the government still seemed stagnant, unable and unwilling to reach an almost sullen population in the cities, and unable to counteract the sometimes subtle, sometimes ferocious Vietcong challenge in the rural areas. Yet there were few visible symptoms of the dissidence in the spring. But in early May 1963, Buddhists who were celebrating Buddha’s birthday in Hué, the old imperial capital of Vietnam, were told by government troops to disburse. When they refused to break up, armored vehicles opened fire, killing nine people. The government, unable to reach out to its own population, unable to admit a mistake, blamed the entire incident on the Vietcong. This was the beginning of the prolonged Buddhist crisis which finally brought the Diem government to its knees. It became a full-scale political crisis as the militant, skilled young Buddhist leaders—sensitive to the new political forces and well aware of the changes in psychology and attitudes which twenty years of revolutionary war had brought about—offered the population, for the first time under the Diem government, an outlet for latent nationalist forces. For Diem and his government, sponsored by the Americans, represented, like the French before them, foreign coin, foreign language, foreign style, and the officers of Diem’s army were tainted by the Western touch. Now, with the coming of the Buddhists, there was for the first time an outlet for a Vietnamese leadership which had no contact with the Americans, did not take their money and scholarships or visit with their ambassador. The leadership was brilliant, indigenous, nationalist in the true sense, and in no way beholden to the American embassy. The effect of this on the population was potent: the Buddhists became a spearhead for a vast variety of dissident groups, and with their ability made the rigid, unbending, ungenerous government look foolish. Under the press of the Buddhist protest, all the flaws, all the shortcomings, all the intolerance of the Diem regime came to the surface; so, too, did American impotence, the inability of the Americans to move the regime despite the deep involvement with it. To watch the regime stumble through the crisis over a period of five months was like watching it commit suicide; it proved its detractors prophets, its supporters fools.

In late May 1963 John Mecklin, head of the United States Information Agency in Saigon and a member of the Country Team, sat talking with two reporters. Mecklin had been an experienced reporter for Time magazine himself before taking this job, which he had accepted because he felt challenged by the Kennedy inaugural. He had arrived in Saigon full of enthusiasm, almost immediately sponsoring a contest to give the Vietcong another name which would indicate that instead of being legitimate guerrillas, they were just outlaws—a typical American gesture which died in infancy. With the Buddhist crisis developing into a full-scale foreign policy crisis, his own doubts were growing, and he would ultimately be a major dissenter. But now, as he sat with the reporters who were much younger, he was drawing on his reportorial expertise to forecast the events ahead.

The men to watch as the pressure of events grew, he said, were not Nolting and Harkins; they were already too committed, both by age, by generational outlook, by their public and private words on the regime. No, the interesting men were the two who were at the fulcrum, William Trueheart, the Deputy Chief of Mission, and Brigadier General Richard Stilwell, the new chief of staff to Harkins. They were, said Mecklin, in extremely difficult positions. They were both in their early forties and seemed to have brilliant careers ahead; yet the policy was clearly being challenged, indeed collapsing, and they might have to go against their superiors and perhaps their institutions as the pressures increased. Mecklin’s point had a certain validity, and at first glance Stilwell seemed the more likely candidate to switch. Whatever else, no one would ever accuse Paul Harkins of being brilliant, but Stilwell was preceded by a reputation for brilliance; he was one of that special group of Army intellectuals, smooth, poised, sophisticated, a former CIA man, a staff officer for General James Van Fleet when he was director of military aid to Greece. Stilwell was well read, dropped the names of books he had just read, of writers and reporters and publishers he knew well and had just lunched with. He was a skilled and subtle briefer, and did not talk mindlessly of dead bodies, but he knew the lexicon of insurgency well, almost too well. He knew backgrounds, forces, and so the word was passed quickly in Saigon: See Stilwell, Stilwell knows, a hot general going places, a breath of fresh air after Harkins, and great things were expected of him. They materialized in a way; he got his second and third stars, and his career blossomed but he never challenged the Harkins line—perhaps the pressure the military staff system puts on a subordinate to go along is too great, perhaps it is unthinkable to challenge your superior. He became the hatchet man for Harkins, the man who personally quashed the reporting of the dissenting colonels, who challenged all dissenting views, who, though he was not in the intelligence operation, went through the intelligence reports, tidying them up.

Trueheart seemed, on the surface, a less likely candidate to break with the line than Stilwell. Not only had he faithfully followed the official line from the start but he was a Nolting man, brought to Saigon at the ambassador’s personal request; the two were old friends and had stayed in very close touch. Nolting was the godfather of both of Trueheart’s sons, and Trueheart seemed, if anything, more Nolting than Nolting, a little stiffer at first glance, a product of that same Virginia-gentleman school of the foreign service. An early memory of him in Saigon was his being asked to protest the expulsion of François Sully, a Newsweek correspondent. He had answered that it was not a great question; after all, Sully was a pied-noir (a term used to describe the French lower class in Algeria, like calling an American a redneck).

But in late June 1963 an exhausted and dispirited Nolting went on a prolonged vacation, despite the mounting Buddhist crisis. Nolting chose to sail in the Aegean Sea, where it was difficult to reach him (this became an important point because he felt Trueheart did not try hard enough to reach him and therefore was disloyal; others felt that there had been efforts to reach him but that he had made himself particularly inaccessible). With the crisis continuing to grow, Trueheart followed the straight Nolting line, but after a while, as Diem refused to negotiate and meet any of the Buddhist demands, as the protest mounted and reached deeper and deeper into the society, as unrest mounted in the military and as the government continued to mislead the Americans regarding its intentions, Trueheart opened up the embassy reporting. Together with Mel Manful, the political officer, Trueheart began to talk to dissidents, to Buddhists, and as embassy officials reached more of the society, the reporting changed. It went from blind support to being skeptical, cool and iconoclastic in its appraisal. Doubts were raised, questions asked. The embassy began to doubt that Diem could handle the Buddhist crisis, and it reported that the Buddhists had become the focal point for all sorts of dissidence and that the government was totally isolated. It also cast doubt upon Nhu’s sanity, doubts which were accurate; Nhu was more and more on opium in his last years. The embassy saw Diem almost totally a prisoner of his family. The terrible thing, the embassy learned about the Diem regime in that crisis, was that all the clichés about it turned out to be true.

The change in Trueheart was crucial. His reporting was not so much anti-Diem (as opponents charged later) as it was analytical and detached, no longer blindly pro-Diem; it let loose a floodgate of doubts. For the first time, American reporting in Saigon resembled the American diplomatic reporting from China. Five months earlier only American journalists had been pessimistic about the war and the future; now the State Department people in Saigon were pessimistic, the CIA was pessimistic, the hamlet people were pessimistic, along with the journalists. Only the military held devotedly to the line of optimism. These doubts and divisions of Saigon were reflected in Washington, where Kennedy faced a divided bureaucracy. Earlier in the year he had seemed to be encouraging the Harriman group in its dissent; if not exactly siding with it, at least moving the play in their direction but doing it slowly, trying to prevent an open schism within his Administration, trying to keep from driving the military to the side of the right wing in Congress.

 

By mid-1963 Kennedy was a very different President with a very different sense of his own confidence and competence, more sure of himself, more dubious about the institutional wisdom of force in many areas of the world. He had been through the Cuban missile crisis, and that had restored all the credentials lost so early in the Bay of Pigs; he had handled himself coolly, had faced down the Russians, and though some, like Dean Acheson, did not think he had been forceful enough, the country had rallied to him. As he and his staff considered these his finest hours, so did most of the country, with the exception of the radical left, which thought too much had been risked for too little, and the radical right, which thought that too little had been risked for too much. Now newer, milder, more rational approaches were possible; the Cuban missile crisis had produced such a real vision of nuclear death, it had taken both the United States and the Soviet Union so close to so much of the reality of their propaganda and their threats that it also produced a possibility for a genuine thaw, and this he was now pursuing. Speeches and ideas that had not been possible in 1961 as he searched for his balance and confidence were now possible. On June 10 he gave perhaps the best speech of his Administration at the American University commencement. Here was an American President not just calling for a lessening of tensions, a greater attempt to control and limit the weapons of destruction, but also, and more important, calling upon Americans to redefine some of their attitudes toward the Soviet Union and toward Communism.

This was a landmark speech, coming after some seventeen years in which the American government had espoused the line that it was Soviet attitudes and only Soviet attitudes and actions which had brought on the Cold War, that the United States had been an innocent auxiliary to it all. It was, some thought, the beginning of the second part of the Kennedy Administration, the first part having ended after the Cuban missile crisis. It was as if he were liberated from the insecurities of his first two years with that one act, and now, more confident of himself, more confident of the nation’s response to him; he was the President. The country now trusted him, the spurs were won; he could begin (slowly of course) to challenge some of the ideas and attitudes which had frozen so long in the government. The second part of his Administration, they felt, was marked by the search for a test-ban treaty with the Soviet Union, a milder and more tolerant tone in his speeches about the Cold War, increasing doubts on Vietnam, and a general, growing awareness that one historic era was coming to a close, and by a desire to ride the changes without being destroyed, either by moving too fast on them, anticipating them too much, or by being too slow in recognizing the changes. For he had a feeling, which he passed on to some aides, that the country was ahead of Washington, Washington was living more in the Cold War than the nation. The country did not want war and did not want a constant nuclear tension with the Soviet Union. Kennedy was beginning to sense this and he would in his last major trip into the country find, not to his great surprise, that it was true. So by mid-1963 he was pushing for a test-ban treaty, and he was looking for a lessening of tensions. He was being plagued more and more by the question of the back-burner issue. Berlin, ironically, was on the back-burner now. The problem of Vietnam was proving very troublesome and now, as he had suspected, it refused to go away.

Faced with a divided bureaucracy, Kennedy gave the men around him an indication that he was uneasy with the use of force and dubious about reports of success. But he also felt uneasy about the question of change, of dumping Diem. He seemed to move with the doubters; the White House staff people, who had become increasingly pessimistic and were searching for alternate policies, found themselves encouraged by him. Encouraged, but not too encouraged. It was all still run carefully and cautiously; he wanted, they felt, to move the bureaucracy along, and the key man in this was apparently Robert McNamara. McNamara was still going on those trips to Vietnam, more and more often now, and coming back relentlessly optimistic. It was beginning to be known as McNamara’s war, which at the time did not bother him. Some people in the government objected to his trips. When Roger Hilsman (who had been promoted to Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, to replace Harriman, who was on his way up as Undersecretary) complained to the President about the fact that each time McNamara went out there, it resulted in a great amount of publicity which stirred the public interest in the war and brought out the fact that the United States was committed there (this was before the days when the major networks had resident correspondents, and thus the McNamara trips, bringing as they did major television teams, escalated the press coverage), Kennedy would answer yes, he knew it was a problem but he was having troubles there and the only way he could keep the Chiefs on board was to keep McNamara on board, and the only way he could keep McNamara on board was to let him make those trips.

One sign of the presidential distaste and disillusion with Vietnam was the change and the rise of Hilsman. He was, if anything, a talisman of the Kennedy years both in strengths and contradictions. He had started by being an enthusiast on counterinsurgency and thus the commitment to Vietnam. Yet at the same time, with Bowles gone, and Stevenson ineffectual, he was the government’s leading advocate of a change in the nation’s China policy. He still held to his enthusiasm for antiguerrilla warfare, but as the sour news came in from Saigon he began to wonder if the Diem regime was capable of waging any kind of political-military war, and he had grave doubts about both the policy and the use of greater force.

Hilsman had risen quickly in the bureaucracy; Kennedy liked him particularly because he was unafraid to challenge the military. One challenge was particularly memorable. At one of the first crisis meetings on Laos, General Lyman Lemnitzer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had shown up at the White House in order to brief the President, and suffered a mild humiliation at the White House gate. Since the police there were not prepared for him and his staff, his aides were not allowed to enter, so Lem had to struggle through carrying his charts and cases all by himself. A greater humiliation lay ahead. Lemnitzer began his briefing, charts ready, pointer poised. First the big picture: This is the Mekong Valley. Pointer tip hit the map. Hilsman, watching, noticed something, the point tip was not on the Mekong Valley, it was on the Yangtze Valley. Hilsman rose, went to the board, took the pointer. “General,” he said, “you’re mistaken, the Mekong Valley is right here.” A switch of the pointer. But Lem’s humiliation was not over. Hilsman did not sit down but continued the briefing, pointing out the key features of the Valley until finally the President said, “Mr. Hilsman, would you mind letting us hear the military briefing from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff . . .” Later, when Hilsman was teased about this by friends, he protested, “But he was pointing at the wrong river . . .”

It was this very audaciousness which delighted Kennedy, the willingness to take on the military; in fact, when Hilsman had been moved up to Director of Intelligence and Research at State, he was told by Rusk that he was specifically not to challenge the military view. When he got back to his office, he received a White House phone call. A very high official congratulated him on his promotion and noted that by now he had probably been told by the Secretary not to push the military, but he was to disregard that last bit of advice; he had been promoted precisely because he did take on the military and he was to continue to challenge them. So he did, first at INR and then as Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, his rise and Harriman’s rise seeming to coincide with Kennedy’s doubts. Kennedy used to call Hilsman in the morning to complain about the military’s repeated attempts to give their own optimistic assessments of the war (the Kennedy public relations program was backfiring) until finally Hilsman, on Kennedy’s orders, drafted a national security paper forbidding any general officer to go to Vietnam without the written approval of the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs.

The struggle in the bureaucracy during the summer of 1963 centered mainly around intelligence and interpretation of the war. There was no essential challenge to goals, although there were increasing interior doubts in the minds of some civilians about them. The basic controversy was on a more primitive level; after all, why challenge your goals if you are attaining them? If the military were right, if the war was being won, then the problems being reported by the civilians were exaggerated, minor squabbles among Vietnamese intellectuals blown up out of proportion by jittery civilians. So in the summer Hilsman, still at INR, began to challenge the military’s estimates with great regularity, an assault as much as anything on McNamara, who still held to the military’s figures. It was convenient for McNamara to stick to these statistics, since they were not only the thing he knew best, but more important, by holding to them he did not get into a fight with his generals over the failure of the existing policy, and thus perhaps have to confront the pressure for a new, expanded policy. He simply froze his attitude: it was all going well, the statistics were there to prove it, and he was not interested in trying to find out why there were two different sets of information, and what lay behind the difference. Civilians traveling around with him to Saigon in those days found him surprisingly rigid; they tried to discuss their doubts with him but he would not really listen. When they said the Diem government was losing popularity with the peasants because of the Buddhist crisis, McNamara asked, well, what percentage was dropping off, what percentage did the government have and what percentage was it losing? He asked for facts, some statistics, something he could run through the data bank, not just this poetry they were spouting. And as far as charges that his data bank was corrupt and unbalanced, reflecting only the vested-interest optimism of the government and of MACV—why, their data bank was just as corrupt. They now factored in only people who had doubts, they did not listen to anyone who was optimistic.

This was a very revealing insight into McNamara. Both at Ford and at the Pentagon he had always loved statistics and facts, particularly those which confirmed what he wanted to prove, and now he was making the same accusation against bureaucratic opponents that others had made against him. He did not seriously investigate the negative claims because he did not choose to go that path; however, years later, once he had switched sides, he could be very good at finding dissenting statistics. Then he consciously used the CIA instead of his own Defense Intelligence Agency (which he had invented) to respond to his dovish questions, and when a particular CIA agent showed signs of pessimism himself, McNamara would turn out to have lots of time to listen. But in 1963 he systematically fought off any challenge to the military estimates, and he and Hilsman in particular had some fierce confrontations: as the Buddhist crisis continued, Hilsman seized on it as one more means of showing that the government was ineffective, that the crisis was bound to affect the war effort, since, though the ARVN officers were Catholics, the NCOs and privates were Buddhists. When Hilsman made these claims, McNamara would flash back: Where are your figures? Where is your research?

So Hilsman commissioned Lewis Sarris, one of his deputies in INR, to do a major study on exactly this question. Sarris was to be an important figure in Vietnam, not so much for the role he played as for the role he did not play. His instincts were totally political and very true. He knew exactly what the limitations of the American presence were, how poorly the war was going; later he predicted accurately that the bombing would not work. Yet his views did not count; he was a pure intelligence man, not operational. He never got on the team, he never advanced his career as Vietnam expanded as a place to make a reputation. In a world of achievers he was a non-achiever. In 1963 Sarris was, however, briefly important because Hilsman, his superior, fought for him and for his opinions. So, encouraged by Hilsman, Sarris carefully pieced together a major report. He used some of State’s material, some journalistic accounts and a good deal of the military’s own reporting to compile an estimate which showed that the war effort was slipping away, that the Buddhist crisis was undoubtedly hurting it (he tied the Buddhist crisis to the war effort, and on this he may well have been wrong; the Buddhist crisis and the decline in the war effort coincided, but the military decline may have been based on more deeply rooted problems). Sarris knew exactly what figures to take from the military’s accounts (in effect most things, but never the bottom line), and the result was a devastating report on the course of the war.

The military were furious and when Hilsman pressed the report at several high meetings, McNamara and General Krulak fought back bitterly. The Joint Chiefs were very angry: it was one thing for the State Department people to challenge Diem’s popularity, to talk about the political problems (though of course the military frequently trespassed upon the political area by arguing that Diem was effective, his commanders were what they were supposed to be, the system worked), but it was quite another thing for State to challenge military estimates. Sarris’ findings were absolutely wrong, they claimed, but even more important, they questioned the right of State even to produce such a report. State must not trespass onto the military’s area.

After one particularly bitter assault by the military, when McNamara carried the ball and Hilsman received little support from his superiors, and when the report clearly was an embarrassment to Rusk, McNamara scribbled a note to Rusk saying: “Dean: If you promise me that the Department of State will not issue any more military appraisals without getting the approval of the Joint Chiefs, we will let this matter die. Bob.” (The note, so revealing of the period is now framed and hangs in the living room of one of the dissenters from that period.) Rusk was of course uneasy with this kind of estimate, anyway, not so much because it was pessimistic, since he had grave doubts himself, but because he was a strict chain-of-command man himself and did not like State’s getting into the Defense area; in a question involving the military he had an instinct to give primacy to Defense, and not to cause problems.

McNamara’s role was a reflection of his shrewdness as a bureaucratic player, since it meant that from then on State would be handcuffed in its analyses of the situation. It could only report on the politics of the country, and the political situation was not good, it was bad and getting worse. But if the war effort remained untouched, if the war effort was going well, as the military repeatedly claimed, then there were no serious problems. It was a shrewd move on McNamara’s part, designed to a certain extent to take the important decisions away from people he could not control. Thus, working between the President and the Chiefs, he would become the central civilian, he would determine what the President wanted and needed, and what the Chiefs would permit on a given issue, and he would be the negotiator. In addition, it was aimed at silencing critics, which it did temporarily, though in the growing collapse of the entire Saigon military and political structure there would be similar papers and estimates which Harriman, his bureaucratic opponent, continued to promote, making sure they were seen by the rest of the government. There were papers from Hilsman, cables from Trueheart: Has McCone seen this one? Has McNamara seen it? What about Gilpatric, did he see this one?

That particular meeting would not help Sarris’ career; he would be known thereafter by the military as the “coup-plotter,” and he would never rise in the Department. In 1969 one of the bright young State Department officers on Vietnam whose own career had been helped by Vietnam would find that a reporter was going to interview Sarris about the 1963 period. “Sarris?” he said. “Lew Sarris? Why him? He seems to me to be a pathetic figure; why, he sits in the very same office and does the very same thing that he did in 1962.” Which was true; he still sat there years later, still making the estimates, which were still rejected and disputed; others came and were usually wrong and had their careers advanced; Sarris was right and remained there. As for Hilsman, he was bouncy, full of himself then, but someone sitting there and watching the faces of McNamara and the military would think that this was a bright and bumptious young man, and hope for his own sake that his protectors stayed around to protect him. As for McNamara, he held to his statistics, though much later, in 1967, he would change and convert to dovishness. When he did, he went through a personal crisis. He would confide to friends that if they had only known more about the enemy, more about the society, if there had only been more information, more intelligence about the other side, perhaps it would never have happened; though of course one reason there was so little knowledge about the enemy and the other side was that no one was as forceful as he was in blocking its entrance into the debates.

 

By early July 1963, Washington knew that it had a major crisis on its hands. Though under great American pressure Diem had finally negotiated a partial settlement with the Buddhist insurgents in mid-June, it became clear shortly afterward that the government had no intention of implementing the concessions. A couple of weeks later, the intelligence community predicted that Diem would fail to carry out the provisions of the agreement and that it was very likely there would be either a coup against him, or an assassination. Saigon itself became filled with rumors of coups, and by early July at least three major plots had begun to form, reflecting different generational and regional preferences. In Saigon, Trueheart became more and more discouraged with the government; if Diem promised something to him, Trueheart found that it was repudiated the next day in the English-language Times of Vietnam, a newspaper controlled by the Nhus; worse, the darker forecasts of the Times of Vietnam over a long period of time more accurately reflected the government policy than the official promises of Diem. Thus while Diem was promising one thing to the Americans, in private sessions with his family he reverted to the harder line pushed by his brother and sister-in-law. If Diem promised to be conciliatory about the Buddhists in action and tone, the Times of Vietnam would soon charge that the first Buddhist priest who burned himself to death had been drugged. (Was this true? Kennedy asked Hilsman. No, answered Hilsman, religious fervor and passion was all that was needed.) In Washington, Kennedy was again discussing with his advisers the possibility of separating the Nhus from Diem, an idea which had long tantalized Americans, and received a pessimistic response. It was really too late. At the same time Trueheart passed on a variety of good liberal American suggestions to Diem: Diem should meet with the Buddhist leaders, should appoint Buddhist chaplains for a predominantly Buddhist army (which had only Catholic chaplains) and make a warm conciliatory speech about religious freedom. Trueheart received, in response, an excessively polite smile and thanks from Diem, that and nothing else; Trueheart was beginning to learn the lessons of Durbrow.

When Nolting went on vacation in early July, the President decided that a new ambassador was needed; though Kennedy was unhappy with Nolting (who also wanted out because of pressing family responsibilities) and did not trust Nolting’s version of events, he also realized that part of Nolting’s problems was the policy itself, the decision to commit the United States directly to Diem, which had originated in Washington; thus he himself was more than partly responsible. It just hadn’t worked and it was time to look around for a replacement, for an ambassador who would become less emotionally involved with Diem, and who was, as far as the Vietnamese were concerned, less a symbol of direct American commitment to Diem. Some people in the White House and at State pushed for Edmund Gullion, who had been a friend of Kennedy’s for years. They had first met in Indochina ten years before when Gullion was the leading dissenter from the French optimism; Gullion had since become Kennedy’s perhaps most successful ambassador during the difficult crisis in the Congo, where he had shown a considerable ability in cloaking American policy in terms which were reasonable to indigenous nationalist sentiment. But Gullion was not anxious for a return to Saigon, and Rusk was less than anxious to have Gullion there, so on Rusk’s insistence Kennedy chose Henry Cabot Lodge. The appointment of this patrician, symbol of the Establishment, defeated candidate for the U.S. Senate by Kennedy himself in 1952, defeated candidate for the Vice-Presidency by the Kennedy-Johnson ticket, made the liberals in the Administration uneasy (though Rusk and the military were pleased). The reason for Kennedy’s choice was obvious. If Vietnam turned into a disaster, what could be better than to have a major Republican name associated with it (which for the same reason made some high Republicans unhappy about the appointment).

Since it would take Lodge a certain amount of time to be prepared (he had to enroll in the counterinsurgency course), Nolting returned in mid-July for one last chance as ambassador. Those were very unhappy days. Nolting found Diem uncommunicative and unresponsive; Nolting, who had acquiesced to Diem on so many things in order to have money in the bank for just such an occasion as this, now found that he had little influence after all. If he was alienated from Diem, so he was separated from his own embassy. Trueheart he accused of disloyalty, but not just Trueheart, also Rufus Phillips in the strategic hamlet program, Mecklin at USIA, the AID (Agency for International Development) people, and many of the CIA people. His only allies now were the military people. The others in the embassy were sympathetic: they liked him personally, they knew how hard he had worked and the odds that had been against him, the personal sacrifice he had made, but it no longer worked, if indeed it had ever worked. Now that it had failed, everyone but Nolting accepted it, and there was a certain pain for him in watching his unwillingness to let go.

His last days there were particularly painful; the Nhus, exploiting his loyalty, involved him in a bogus ceremony designed to identify them with the Americans. It was an Orwellian scene: all the strategic hamlets in the country had allegedly competed for the honor of being named after Nolting; they had written essays, describing what the ambassador had done for their country. The winning hamlet had been chosen. Nolting would now visit it. He tried to get out of it; then, trapped, agreed and became furious when reporters said his acceptance was reluctant. He presided at a fake ceremony in front of stone-faced, stoic Vietnamese. The Vietcong soon knocked over the hamlet.

With everything collapsing around him, he turned in his fury on his old friend Trueheart and accused him of having destroyed the trust which Nolting had so carefully built up. Trueheart’s protestations that he had worked loyally for the policy, but that the months since May had seen the disintegration of that fragile hope, fell on deaf ears. The more Nolting realized that Trueheart’s reporting was accurate, the more he blamed Trueheart for not holding it together. If Nolting was impotent, then it was Trueheart’s fault, not the fault of history or of the policy. So when he went home he would write his final efficiency report about his once trusted deputy, entering into Trueheart’s personnel file the most damaging of all assessments, a charge of rank disloyalty, saying that he had brought this man Trueheart to Saigon, had placed his trust in him, and Trueheart had betrayed that trust, had undermined everything Nolting had worked for. It was powerful stuff and it almost destroyed Trueheart’s career. Hilsman, Harriman and others wrote answering letters, that Trueheart had worked loyally for one policy, but as that policy foundered he had reported its failure accurately and had continued to represent the best interests of the United States. Still, it would take Trueheart an extra six years to get his ambassadorial post (in Nigeria), and by that time Johnson was no longer President and neither Rusk nor McNamara was Secretary. At the ceremony Jonathan Moore, who had worked as a deputy to William Bundy all those years and who knew what Trueheart had gone through, would tell Trueheart’s son Charles that it was overdue, long overdue, it should have been done a long time ago.

But now events were out of control, no one could do anything. If people, Nolting said, would only keep their eye on the ball, if they would only stop being distracted by all this political activity. All of this was a side issue. The job was to win the war. Yet he was shaken. A television team that came to do an interview in his office saw him take down a portrait of Jefferson and replace it with one of Washington, explaining that Washington was less controversial. Finally it was all over, and on August 15 Nolting, a rather lonely figure at the airport, talked about the mutual traditions of the two countries “of humility and tolerance, respect for others and a deep sense of social justice.” The next day another monk burned himself to death, and within a week Diem and Nhu had crushed the Buddhists with a bloody midnight raid on their pagodas, disguising their private security army in uniforms of regular soldiers in order to put the onus on the army (and thus have the society put the blame on the army and turn more against it, in what was of course a political war).

The embassy had been caught unaware by the strike on the pagodas, including John Richardson, the CIA station chief, who was in a state of shock, with many Vietnamese thinking that since it was Nhu who had engineered the crackdown and since Richardson was deeply involved with Nhu, the raid had CIA approval. But the cover story soon faded. It fooled the embassy and Washington for about forty-eight hours, but American journalists had called it right from the moment it happened. It ended an era and a policy, and later, describing those events, John Mecklin wrote: “Thus the Diem regime’s final gesture to Fritz Nolting, flagrant abrogation of its solemn last word to this fine man who had staked his career on the regime’s defense.”

 

In Washington the Harriman people had been pushing for months for a policy which would separate the Americans from the Ngo family; they still thought victory in a political war against the Vietcong possible, but felt it would not work with a government which unified all the population against its very dictates. Week after week in July and August, events had proved them right and the pro-Diem faction wrong: the regime had been unbending, had been unwilling to broaden its base, and above all, unable to deal with its own population. This last was crucial—the question was not so much whether the Buddhists were totally legitimate, but whether the government had the ability to deal with them (“We will throw them the banana peels for them to slip on,” said one young Buddhist priest, accurately describing Buddhist plans and government reactions). Now any chance for a settlement had been destroyed with the crackdown which had also shattered the illusion of people like Nolting that the United States had influence with Diem. In contrast to Nolting’s optimism, the Harriman group had predicted that the Ngo family would crush the monks. Thus within the bureaucracy its estimates and prophecies had been largely accurate, while the predictions of Taylor and Nolting had been increasingly inaccurate.

In America, the Buddhist crisis had been a growing embarrassment for the young Catholic President. The photographs of soldiers bringing their billy clubs down on Buddhist monks had been montaged on front pages with stories of the loss of life of young American officers. If in the past Kennedy had worried about right-wing opposition to the loss of part of the free world, now he was worrying about liberal reaction to American blood being spent for a petty family dictatorship. So when Lodge arrived in Vietnam (his mind already made up about the Ngo family before the attack on the pagodas, and inwardly enraged by this gesture aimed as much against him as anyone, presenting him with a fait accompli) he was already determined to broaden American policy, to move it, at the very least, away from the Nhus, and failing that, away from Diem himself.

With the Vietnamese military pressuring the Americans to absolve the army from responsibility for the crackdown, the Voice of America soon began broadcasting honest assessments, placing the blame on the Nhus. In addition, Lodge received a cable from Washington saying that the Nhus must go, that alternative leadership possibilities be investigated, that the Vietnamese military be told that the United States would no longer support a government which included the Nhus. It was, in effect, the go-ahead signal for a coup (no one in Washington or Saigon thought Diem would ever drop the Nhus; if it had been unlikely before the crackdown, it was even more improbable now).

The cable had been drafted by Harriman, Forrestal, Hilsman and George Ball on Saturday, August 24, at the President’s suggestion. Though Rusk was out of town, he was consulted regularly, and he was helpful. He even strengthened the cable, inserting provisions for supplying the generals with matériel should they be cut off during a breakdown (it was, significantly, a military suggestion on the part of Rusk; the old CBI planner still lived). McNamara and John McCone, Director of CIA, were on vacation, and Taylor was out of reach, having dinner at a restaurant. With McNamara out of town, Gilpatric was in charge at Defense, and he said the cable sounded fine, acceptable, he had no objections. At CIA, Richard Helms, whose doubts on Vietnam had always been considerable (reflecting the pure intelligence estimates rather than the operational end), told them that it was about time they moved this way, what had taken them so long in the first place? Forrestal dealt with Krulak, whose job it was to get clearance from General Taylor, which he did, though technically after the cable had gone out (Taylor did not know that the cable had already left, but he disagreed with nothing in it).

Later, when the principals gathered in Washington, there were second thoughts among some of them, particularly as each learned that some of the others had misgivings (it was a stunning example of how the domino theory worked if not with nations in Southeast Asia, then certainly with high government officials who wanted to sense which way the wind was blowing and did not want to be caught alone going against it). Taylor in particular was unhappy about the way it had been maneuvered. He thought everyone else had agreed, but of course they had not, since they had been out of town. There began to be murmurings to friendly journalists that Hilsman had pulled something slick. He had become the Washington target for the more conservative members of the government and for conservative journalists. Harriman was certainly no target; and one did not take on the President lightly; Forrestal was a quiet figure bearing a great Cold War name; but Hilsman, Hilsman was talkative, ebullient, almost outrageous, a lovely lightning rod. The President was furious with the cable mix-up; he was already fed up with the division within his government and the resulting newspaper coverage from Washington and Saigon which emphasized the split in his government. It was particularly strong from Saigon, where the entire mission had come apart (“This shit must stop,” he told an aide after one particular journalistic reflection of governmental dissension).

Now when some of his closest officials began reneging on a cable he thought they had agreed on, Kennedy blew up. He was furious at some of them for waffling, and furious at Hilsman and Forrestal for having been so sloppy as to leave an emergency exit for dissent, knowing that moving a bureaucracy toward a given objective was a difficult process, and when done, it should be done. Kennedy lashed out at Hilsman and Forrestal for incompetence, a rare and very real burst of presidential anger (“The lesson,” said the cool McGeorge Bundy, a bystander to all of the debate, “is never do business on the weekend”). But if Kennedy was annoyed at Hilsman and Forrestal, he was even more annoyed at the men who were now backtracking (showing their doubts not so much to him as elsewhere). So the next time they were gathered he looked at them and said, the voice very cold, very distant, that there had been some doubt about the cable, that it might have been precipitous. Fortunately it was not too late to change. Do you, Mr. Rusk, wish to change? No. Do you, Mr. McNamara, wish to change the cable? No. Do you, General Taylor, wish to change the cable? No. Do you, Mr. McCone, wish to change . . .

 

The United States was making it very clear to the Saigon military that it was ready for a coup. On August 29 Lodge cabled Rusk:

 

We are launched on a course from which there is no respectable turning back: the overthrow of the Diem government. There is no turning back in part because U.S. prestige is already publicly committed to this end in large measure and will become more so as the facts leak out. In a more fundamental sense there is no turning back because there is no possibility, in my view, that the war can be won under a Diem administration . . .

 

There was a flood of cables back and forth between Saigon and Washington, arrangements made about the possibility of a coup, which Vietnamese general to talk to, how to go about it, the extent to which the United States could be involved. Even the CIA station chief, John Richardson, who until recently had been so close to Nhu, was a surprising advocate of a coup, and a prophet that the coup would come and come quickly (“If the Ngo family wins now, they and Vietnam will stagger on to final defeat at the hands of their own people and the Vietcong . . . If this attempt by the generals does not take place or if it fails, we believe it no exaggeration to say that Vietnam runs serious risk of being lost over the course of time”).

But the generals, who met covertly with the Americans, did not move. The Nhus had caught them off balance with their strike against the pagodas, and tightened control on forces around Saigon; the Americans, who had long told the generals that only Diem would receive support, had now switched, but so quickly that they caught the generals unprepared. They wondered if the Americans really meant it. When General Harkins contacted the Vietnamese generals to imply that a coup was all right, wasn’t he still an agent of Diem? When the CIA people talked about logistics, didn’t it mean that Richardson was feeding all this back to Nhu (Nhu was telling people that it did)? Saigon, always filled with rumors, seethed with intrigue. And the generals did not move. Why hadn’t they? State cabled Lodge. “Perhaps they are like the rest of us, and are afraid to die,” Lodge told a friend.

But if there was not a coup, it marked the end of our total belief that Diem and Diem alone could be the instrument of American policy, a blind commitment to one irrational family. In the struggle within the American government it seemed that for the moment the civilian forces were dominant, though there were varying degrees of doubt among the civilians about whether a coup could be staged at all. Some, like Forrestal and to an increasing degree Robert Kennedy, were more and more dubious about the whole thing, while Rusk and Lodge, for instance, viewed an overthrow of the Diem regime as advantageous, as a way of winning the war.