CHAPTER 15

Maxwell Taylor

Architect of defeat

T he same men we have lionized as part of “the Greatest Generation” were the generals we have demonized, rightly, for their part in the Vietnam War. The generals of Vietnam, William DePuy once noted, were the frontline combat commanders of World War II. “All the way from Westmoreland down through the division commanders, most of us were battalion and regimental commanders in World War II,” he observed.

These men were not just survivors; they were winners on a global scale. Born around the time of World War I, they had gone through the Depression as adolescents and had scrambled to get college educations. “We never had very much,” Gen. Walter “Dutch” Kerwin recalled decades later. “We never had radios and we never had a car. Along came the Depression and my father lost his job and, well, for about four years or so, we were in dire straits. So it was always impressed on me as a young kid that if I wanted to go anywhere I was going to have to fight for it.” During World War II, they not only survived but thrived. They rose quickly in rank as they took on and crushed the greatest external threat that ever faced the United States. These were men who in an Army of millions had been star performers. Kerwin, for example, as a major on the besieged beach in Anzio, Italy, in early 1944, effectively had been given the power of a general to sort out and make artillery fires effective against the German counterattackers. He was severely wounded in France later that year and, after recuperating for months, ended the war in Ridgway’s old post as the morning briefer to Gen. Marshall. Waiting his turn outside Marshall’s office, he would see “brigadier generals and major generals coming out of there with the shakes. He was very understanding, but a very disciplined man, and hard as nails.” In 1967, Kerwin would become Westmoreland’s chief of staff in Vietnam.

It is difficult to put aside the miserable end of the Vietnam War and recall that, as the United States entered it, an overwhelming optimism pervaded the Army’s generals. Their outlook, verging on arrogance, was shared by their civilian overseers at the Pentagon and the White House. These men stood astride the world. Even now, it is startling to consider the awesome capacity of a nation that could simultaneously wage and lose a war on the far side of the planet, undergo a social revolution at home, and also launch a space program that placed human beings on the moon.

But in a hot, wet, strategically insignificant corner of Southeast Asia, this world-beating generation of Army generals would become bogged down in frustration, so much so that the support of the American people, which they had learned to take as a matter of fact, began to erode. “It was the strangest thing that we have ever gotten mixed up with,” Gen. Bruce Palmer Jr., who at age thirty-one had been the chief of staff of the 6th Infantry Division in World War II, said not long after the end of the Vietnam War, in which he was a corps-level commander. “We didn’t understand the Vietnamese or the situation, or what kind of war it was. By the time we found out, it was too late.”

This generation was led into Vietnam by Maxwell Taylor, who, slightly older, had commanded the 101st Airborne Division during World War II, though he missed its most celebrated engagement, at Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge. In 1960, a year after stepping down as Army chief of staff, he published a bitter critique of Eisenhower’s defense policies titled The Uncertain Trumpet. (The first draft of the book was written largely by Taylor’s staff aides, among them William DePuy and John Cushman, about whom more will be said later.) During the presidential campaign of 1960, Taylor and his book became favorites of the Democratic nominee, John F. Kennedy. “We had been affected tremendously by his book,” said the president’s brother and closest adviser, Robert Kennedy, who named a son after Taylor. Taylor’s book “may have influenced the United States involvement in Vietnam more than any other,” concluded Lt. Gen. Dave Richard Palmer.

In the early 1960s, Taylor would become almost the opposite of George Marshall. Despite having worked for Marshall as a young officer in 1941–42, Taylor became a highly politicized officer who, rather than keep the White House at arm’s length, made his personal relationship with the president his base of power. Though out of uniform when John Kennedy became president, he would have more influence on the American entry into the Vietnam War than any general on active duty, playing Pangloss to Kennedy’s Candide.

As Army chief, Taylor had felt unappreciated by President Eisenhower. But under Ike’s successor, the Army would reclaim the spotlight as Kennedy focused on the non-nuclear uses of the military. In 1961, even as Taylor’s misbegotten Pentomic concept was being hastily dropped by the Army, his influence was growing at the White House. Early in Kennedy’s term, in mid-April 1961, Taylor was given an opening by the Bay of Pigs debacle. The CIA-led attempt to send Cuban exiles into Cuba to depose Fidel Castro had caused the president to distrust the Joint Chiefs of Staff; he felt they had distanced themselves and failed to warn him of problems they foresaw. “Those sons of bitches with all the fruit salad just sat there nodding, saying it would work,” he reportedly complained.

Taylor first came to the White House to lead an investigation into the Bay of Pigs fiasco for the president. He stayed on to become the president’s personal military adviser, a new position in which he effectively supplanted the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, enjoying far more access to the Oval Office than did anyone in the military. “I would often see him several times a day on many different subjects,” Taylor recalled of the president. He was seen not just as a general but as an important White House official with an open portfolio. “General Taylor had an influence with President Kennedy that extended far beyond military matters; rightly he regarded him as a man of broad knowledge, quick intelligence, and sound judgment,” said Gen. Earle “Bus” Wheeler, who became Army chief of staff in 1962. Wheeler recalled that the first issue Taylor took up, once he was officially a member of the White House staff, was what to do about Vietnam.

In 1962, Kennedy made the de facto situation de jure by naming Taylor to succeed Lemnitzer as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, a position Taylor held until 1964. He was regarded warily by the other members of the Chiefs as the White House’s man, according to his not unsympathetic biographer, retired Army Brig. Gen. Douglas Kinnard. Discourse between the Chiefs and their commander in chief was strained under Kennedy, and would remain so under his successor. After two years as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Taylor again retired from the military, this time to become the American ambassador to South Vietnam, where he officially held the powers of a proconsul, overseeing both the civilian and military sides of the American effort. After leaving Vietnam, Taylor served as a consultant on the war to President Johnson for three years. He also was instrumental in putting in place two of the three top American commanders in the Vietnam War—first one of his former aides, Paul Harkins, and then another, William Westmoreland.

American memory scapegoats William Westmoreland as the general who lost the Vietnam War, but Taylor should bear much of the blame for getting the country into it. As the strategic expert Bernard Brodie once put it, Taylor “bears as much responsibility as any other military man for the sad story of our commitment to Vietnam,” having been the man who peddled the idea of an intervention and who then shaped the American military’s approach to the conflict. Gen. Nathan Twining, a member of the Joint Chiefs for most of the 1950s, first as Air Force chief and then as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said in 1967:

He is largely responsible for our position in Vietnam right now. He’s the one that wanted to do that, against all our advice. We argued this day after day, many times. . . . Taylor believed, at least he said so, that we could fight a war over there. Oh, we’ve argued this in the JCS time and again. He was the only advocate of it. All the Navy and the Marines and the rest of us were against it, but his statement was that we could fight a war over there by not shooting, not a shooting war, but have our forces there in not too big numbers, but we would supply the equipment, the training and all that for these people and let them do the fighting for us. . . . He was as much responsible for this as anybody.

Twining here is overstating the extent and nature of JCS opposition to involvement in Vietnam during the 1950s—and especially misstating his own role—but the essence of his point is nonetheless correct: Taylor led the way.

Taylor tugged the Joint Chiefs of Staff into supporting American involvement in a ground war in Vietnam. Before Taylor was involved, the Joint Chiefs had concluded that Vietnam was at the periphery of American interests. In the spring of 1954, Matthew Ridgway, who succeeded J. Lawton Collins as Army chief of staff, spearheaded a vigorous internal campaign to keep the American military out of a direct combat role in Indochina. Early in April 1954, Adm. Arthur Radford, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs, polled the Chiefs on whether they would support limited American military support for the beleaguered French forces at Dien Bien Phu. Radford was for it, and the representatives of the Navy and the Air Force were inclined to go along with him. “My answer is a qualified ‘yes,’” responded Twining, who thought “about three A-bombs” would take care of the Indochina problem.

If it came to a vote, it looked as though the Joint Chiefs would favor air strikes. Two American aircraft carriers, the Boxer and the Philippine Sea, steamed in the South China Sea with small nuclear bombs in their weapons lockers. But what Ridgway lacked in votes he made up for in energy. “My answer is an emphatic and immediate ‘NO,’” he wrote in his own memo. “Such use of United States armed forces . . . would constitute a dangerous strategic diversion of limited United States military capabilities, and would commit our armed forces in a non-decisive theatre to the attainment of non-decisive local objectives,” he told his fellow members of the Joint Chiefs on April 6, 1954. Nor, he stated in another document, would the use of atomic weapons reduce the number of ground forces required to fight in Vietnam, which he estimated would be seven to twelve divisions (that is, at least 300,000 men, including support troops), depending on whether the French withdrew and the Chinese intervened. Over Radford’s objections, the Army’s dissent was briefed to the president. Ridgway was joined in his objection by the commandant of the Marine Corps. He likely also gained strength from knowing that his commander in chief agreed with him. In 1951, not long before becoming president, Ike had written in his diary about Vietnam, “I’m convinced that no military victory is possible in that kind of theater.” In a 1954 meeting, according to Douglas MacArthur II, the State Department official who was a nephew of Gen. MacArthur, Eisenhower vowed, “As long as I’m president we will not go in with ground troops to Vietnam.” In a meeting with Radford and Taylor on the morning of May 24, 1956, Eisenhower expanded on that view, emphasizing that “we would not . . . deploy and tie down our forces around the Soviet periphery in small wars.” Finally, Ridgway had history on his side: Everyone involved knew that just four years earlier, MacArthur had assured President Truman that any Chinese intervention in Korea would be halted by air strikes, which, painfully, had proven not to be the case. Ultimately—at least as far as 1954 was concerned—the minority view of the chief of staff of the Army and the commandant of the Marine Corps prevailed: America would not go to war in support of the French.

Yet Ridgway and his allies were not able to keep the United States out altogether. There is a subterranean aspect to the first ten years of American involvement in Vietnam, from 1955 to 1965. In the wake of Dien Bien Phu, the Americans stepped in to take over the military burden from the French—not in fighting but in advising and training South Vietnamese forces. Patterns and tendencies that became obvious later were set then, most notably an American inclination to push the Vietnamese toward building a conventional military designed to repel a North Vietnamese invasion, rather than a force tailored to conduct a domestic counterinsurgency campaign. As Gen. Westmoreland would observe years later, “American advisers in the 1950s saw the main threat to South Vietnam not from within but from the North Vietnamese army. In organizing and training the South Vietnamese forces, the Americans thus created conventional forces much in their own image.” Unfortunately, invasion from the North was not the threat South Vietnam would face, at least until much later in the war.

The senior American adviser in Saigon from late 1955 to late 1960 was “Hanging Sam” Williams, recovered from his battlefield firing in Normandy in 1944. Despite their facing a guerrilla insurgency, which generally calls for paramilitary forces performing police functions while living among the people, ideally among their longtime neighbors, Williams and his comrades tried to create versions of the U.S. Army divisions of World War II—that is, regular forces designed for regular, state-on-state war.

Lt. Gen. Williams “was convinced that that was the way the war was going to go . . . and that was the way he trained and organized the Vietnamese forces,” said Army Col. James Muir. “I don’t recall anybody ever trying to talk him out of it because that was one of those things you just didn’t do with General Williams.” Nor did Williams restrict his tongue lashings just to Americans. Describing his plans for the Vietnamese military, he was interrupted by a French officer who said that the Vietnamese were not capable of fighting. “Hell,” Williams responded, in a manner reminiscent of John Wayne’s film persona, “they just whipped your ass at Dien Bien Phu.” Elbridge Durbrow, the U.S. ambassador, in an official report on Williams, questioned his “tact, judgment on other than military matters, and his ability to cooperate with other members of the Country Team.”

The paradox of Williams is that he was advising South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem to engage in pacification programs. “The real danger lies in the local Viet Minh cadre,” Williams told Diem, according to a memorandum of a conversation between the two in December 1955. Diem apparently agreed; the memo noted, “The President stated that to be successful against the Viet Minh [the nationalist and Communist opposition] you must use the same tactics they employ.”

Yet Williams did not follow through on that thought. Instead, in 1958, at his encouragement, the South Vietnamese government disbanded its six light infantry divisions, which Williams had criticized as being unable to hold their own against North Vietnamese divisions. When the Communists attacked in the late 1950s, they concentrated on heavily populated rich rural farmlands, which Gen. Cao Van Vien, chief of South Vietnam’s general staff from 1965 to 1975, noted were “precisely the areas which had not received adequate attention in the RVN [Republic of Vietnam] defense system.” The disbanded light divisions would have proven useful when small Viet Cong guerrilla units, conducting hit-and-run operations, “gradually gained control in rural areas,” recalled Lt. Gen. Ngo Quang Truong, generally regarded as one of the most combat capable and tactically sharp of the South Vietnamese officers. He continued:

When fighting finally broke out, it did not take the form of a conventional, Korean-style invasion. It rather began as a brushfire war fought with subversive activities and guerrilla tactics away from the urban centers. Day and night, this small war gradually gained in tempo, nipping away at the secure fabric of rural areas. In the face of a growing insurgency, ARVN [Army of the Republic of Vietnam] units found themselves ill-fitted to fit this type of war, for which they had not been trained.

In February 1960, the government of South Vietnam began a new program designed to improve counterinsurgency operations in the countryside—which, in retrospect, was exactly the right thing to do, and which the Americans would support vigorously nine years later. But at the time, their American advisers were appalled. Williams denounced the move as “hasty, ill-conceived and destructive to overall instruments of power.” Williams departed Vietnam in September of that year. His legacy, said Gen. Truong, was that of “a long and valuable time . . . irretrievably lost,” during which security could have been built up in the villages of Vietnam. (Lest this be dismissed as sour grapes, a March 1966 study by the U.S. Army staff would arrive at the same conclusion: “From 1954–61, our predominantly military advice nurtured a conventional GVN [Government of Vietnam] military force structure to repel overt armed invasion. Events have proved this formulation to be grossly in error.”)

Williams was replaced late in 1960 by Lt. Gen. Lionel McGarr, who was a bit of an eccentric. He made a habit in Saigon of staying in his house for days at a time, its steel shutters closed tight, while tape-recording instructions that he had delivered to his subordinates. He was even less congenial than his predecessor. “General McGarr was not an adept change agent,” wrote John Cushman, who worked with McGarr on “the Atomic Field Army” and would go on to become a lieutenant general. “McGarr came across as blunt, rough, humorless and suspicious—not easy to like.” Even the Army’s official history concludes that during his Vietnam tour, “Splithead” McGarr “made himself thoroughly unpopular in Saigon and Washington.”

In 1961, when the British proposed a classic counterinsurgency plan for Vietnam that was aimed more at winning control over the population than at killing insurgents, McGarr objected to it, worrying that, among other things, it would take too long to implement and also would undercut the “offensive spirit” he thought needed to be inculcated in the South Vietnamese army. Throughout the 1960s, recalled Brig. Gen. Tran Dinh Tho, chief of operations of the Vietnamese general staff for seven years, the Americans would show only “lukewarm interest” in counterinsurgency and pacification operations, which they did not regard as their mission. Meanwhile, American focus on the conventional South Vietnamese military would intensify, with such intense “mirror imaging” of American forces that by the mid-1960s, recalled one American general, every South Vietnamese division had its own marching band, just like American units. Gordon Sullivan, who went on to become Army chief of staff in the 1990s but was then a young adviser in Vietnam, recalled, “I never got the feeling that the U.S. advisory effort was coherent and ‘Okay, guys, here is what we are trying to do.’”

Part of the incoherence was due to a difference between what was needed and what was done. One of the jobs of generals is to ensure that the military bureaucracy responds to instructions. This was a problem in Vietnam. Robert Komer, the CIA officer who took over the pacification program in 1967, wrote years later that there was a striking “discontinuity between the mixed counterinsurgency strategy which U.S. and GVN police called for at the outset, and the overwhelmingly conventional and militarized nature of our actual response.” He concluded that the military bureaucracy had done not what it was told to do but rather what it knew how to do.

The attitude of the Joint Chiefs toward Indochina shifted somewhat after Gen. Taylor became a power at the Kennedy White House, with the Chiefs beginning to support direct military involvement. “Kennedy’s preferred battleground appeared to be Southeast Asia, an area that the Army had not wanted to enter in 1954,” wrote Army Major Jay Parker. “That reluctance was not gone, but gradually the Army became willing to accept military involvement as both a national security imperative and as a means of validating its role.” Taylor also appears to have been the first American official to discuss bombing North Vietnam, in a memorandum to the president in November 1961. “The risks of backing into a major Asian war . . . are present but are not impressive,” he assured Kennedy, in large part because, he assumed, “NVN [North Vietnam] is extremely vulnerable to conventional bombing.” When the nature of such a campaign was being discussed in 1964, he and Gen. Westmoreland would jointly argue for a graduated response, which they termed “a carefully orchestrated bombing attack.”

Yet the Chiefs still had their own ideas, which neither Taylor nor the other Kennedy men much liked. In April 1961, Gen. George Decker, then Army chief of staff, told Kennedy, “we cannot win a conventional war in Southeast Asia; if we go in, we should go in to win, and that means bombing Hanoi, China, and maybe even using nuclear weapons.” Decker would serve as Army chief for just two years, half the normal tenure, as would Lemnitzer as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Taylor advised the president to replace Decker with Earle Wheeler, a pliable officer, while Taylor himself became the Joint Chiefs chairman.

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Taylor in the early 1960s became almost the opposite of George Marshall. He was intensely politicized. He did not seek to allay distrust between generals but instead played on it. He made a habit of saying not what he knew to be true but instead what he thought should be said. In a study written decades later, Maj. Gen. H. R. McMaster concluded that Taylor’s character flaws had played a central role in deepening American involvement in Vietnam:

When he found it expedient to do so, he misled the JCS, the press, and the NSC. He deliberately relegated his fellow military officers to a position of little influence and assisted [Defense Secretary Robert] McNamara in suppressing JCS objections to the concept of graduated pressure. . . . To keep the Chiefs from expressing dissenting views, he helped to craft a relationship based on distrust and deceit in which the president obscured the finality of decisions and made false promises that the JCS conception of the war might one day be realized.

To extend his influence even further, Taylor suggested another key change: a new top officer for the American presence in Vietnam. He had in mind Paul Harkins, who had been on Patton’s staff during World War II, helping draft the plan for the invasion of Sicily. Harkins said that, after Patton’s death, “Taylor . . . had sort of adopted me.” Under Taylor’s influence, Harkins was dispatched to Vietnam to take over the American advisory effort.

Harkins almost certainly was not a good fit. “I think General Harkins was an unmitigated disaster,” said John Dunn, later an Army general but at this point a lieutenant colonel working as an aide to Harkins’s bureaucratic foe, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. “He was totally insensitive to all the political considerations and simply gave his blind loyalty to whoever was running things at the time” in the government of South Vietnam. “He was not a clever man.” Early in 1964, about six weeks after Lyndon Johnson succeeded the assassinated Kennedy, national security adviser McGeorge Bundy informed the new president, in a memo labeled “TOP SECRET—EYES ONLY,” that his top general in Vietnam was a loser. “I do not know anyone except perhaps Max Taylor, in the top circles of your government who believes that General Harkins is the right man for the war in Vietnam now,” he began.

Harkins has been unimpressive in his reporting and analyzing, and has shown a lack of grip on the realities of the situation. . . . Harkins and Co. have been dead wrong about the military situation for months. . . . McNamara himself thinks Harkins should be replaced.

Defense Secretary McNamara certainly was underwhelmed by Harkins, telling the presidential historian Henry Graff that the old tank officer “wasn’t worth a damn so he was removed.” The problem, McNamara added, was a basic one: “You need intelligent people.” Gen. Donn Starry, who considered Harkins “a good friend,” agreed with McNamara about the nature of the general’s ouster. “When they relieved General Harkins and brought him out of there, it was in large part because things were not going well in the countryside.” The U.S. Army’s official histories of its wars usually are extremely discreet about personnel moves, to the point of not even mentioning them, but the volume that covered the Harkins era stated that in May 1964 the general “abruptly” was told by the president to travel back to Washington and then told not to return to Vietnam, an order that a “dismayed and embittered Harkins” viewed “as a thinly disguised dismissal.”

The way had been cleared for Westmoreland.