3    Loose the Fateful Lightning (1961–1964)

Theodore H. White, journalist extraordinaire, almost single-handedly established the presidential campaign narrative as a genre of American writing. He began with a big book covering the 1960 election that brought John F. Kennedy to the White House. The book, The Making of the President, 1960, followed every candidate, their speeches, campaign stops, the issues, the nominating conventions, the political maneuvers, and the voting.¹ In the thousands of words of text in White’s blockbuster, it is remarkable that none of his foreign policy discussions concern Vietnam or Southeast Asia; only Laos is mentioned, once, in passing. The names Ngo Dinh Diem and Ho Chi Minh never appear. This is striking, considering that White spent World War II next door in China as bureau chief for Time magazine and had been a don of the Overseas Press Club. It is even more startling in the present context, since three of the five presidential contenders—Kennedy himself, Richard Nixon, and Lyndon B. Johnson—had been involved in the Dien Bien Phu crisis. This inattention is a measure of the minimal importance of Vietnam at that time. Even in televised debates—1960 was a watershed year for that—it hardly mattered. The candidates argued over Cuba and the Taiwan Strait, not the Diem experiment.

Americans worried, but their fears were inchoate. As White put it, “1960 was a year of national concern—but vague, shapeless, unsettling, undefinable.” Yet, he noted, those very “atmospherics” were “more than anything else, [what] made it possible for John F. Kennedy’s political exertions to triumph.”² So far as Vietnam is concerned, the problem began to assume a clearer character only days after the election, with the Saigon coup. Then, during the interregnum, while president-elect Kennedy assembled his team, came crisis in Laos. When Eisenhower met Kennedy to review the problems the outgoing president would be handing over, Laos loomed as the key disaster in the making. Vietnam stayed on the back burner—for some people.

For others, that was not true. Among them was Edward G. Lansdale. By this time Lansdale worked at the Pentagon, in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, for a unit that supported intelligence activities of all kinds. Though much of his energy was taken up with preparations for the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion, he responded with alacrity when superiors sent him to Saigon for a fresh appraisal. Lansdale had already rendered his opinion on the coup attempt; now he focused on broader issues. Reporting three days before Kennedy’s inauguration, Lansdale wrote, “1961 promises to be a fateful year for Vietnam.” He found that the communists were much further along in their objective of winning back Vietnam south of the Demilitarized Zone than he “had realized from reading the reports received in Washington.” He commented that Vietnam was in “critical condition” and recommended that the United States “treat it as a combat area of the Cold War, as an area requiring emergency treatment.” Lansdale advised sending a new ambassador with plenipotentiary powers, changing the operating methods of the U.S. mission, and flying closer to South Vietnamese allies.

Yet, even with that sense of tragedy that became America’s Vietnam war, myopia endured. Lansdale insisted the only man capable of leading in Saigon was Diem, even while quoting the Vietnamese leader’s own remarks that showed how out of touch he was. “If it hadn’t been for the dedicated anti-communism of about a million Catholics,” Diem had stated, “Vietnam could never have been kept going this long.” Diem’s own brother, Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc, thought otherwise, claiming that the northern Catholics had settled down in their lucrative, favored positions, had gone soft, and no longer wanted to fight.³

The great mass of Americans knew nothing of this. They saw only the excitement of the Kennedys—the young, dynamic president, the charming first lady, the glitter of Camelot. History tells that it snowed in Washington the day before the inauguration, and it was cold all that week; films of Kennedy taking his oath of office picture the frigid breath he exhaled. But Vietnam lurked behind him as the new president thrilled the nation with his address: “And so my fellow Americans, ask not what the country can do for you, ask what you can do for the country.”⁴ Kennedy captured the imagination of his countrymen and -women.

Not yet prepared to ask Americans to give their all for South Vietnam, President Kennedy nevertheless responded to Saigon’s troubles as a policy problem. As part of a general defense review, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric took charge of a panel on Southeast Asia. In the spring of 1961 it reported out a menu of more than forty measures to increase the effectiveness of Saigon’s war effort. Kennedy’s approach rejected the Eisenhower “New Look” doctrine in favor of a full-spectrum capability that replaced missing links, among them the capacity to respond to guerrilla warfare. JFK became a counterinsurgency enthusiast, ordered senior officials to attend seminars on the subject, and in many respects regarded South Vietnam as a laboratory where theory and practice could be tested in the field. The Gilpatric committee recommendations were largely accepted in that spirit.

The Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) became the experimental apparatus. Since its inception, the ARVN had been the object of much pulling and hauling in Washington. Right into the Kennedy years, quietly and below the surface, the shape of the ARVN had been the touchstone for differences among U.S. authorities. Perceptive officers wanted to craft a South Vietnamese military suited to internal security and designed for counterinsurgency. Top leadership at the State Department and Eisenhower’s minions on the Joint Chiefs of Staff worried about a North Vietnamese invasion across the Demilitarized Zone. They wanted the ARVN trained and equipped for conventional war. The smart money was on the latter choice. Saigon’s military establishment, organized in divisions to maneuver with large groups of forces, would be oriented to wars like Korea and World War II.⁵

Of course, this recitation is oversimplified. Washington’s military assistance did not follow a pure strategy, due to both U.S. parsimony and Saigon proclivities. On the American side, Eisenhower never committed to the level of aid that could have produced a thoroughly modern conventional force. In particular, the ARVN lacked sufficient tanks and armored vehicles to endow it with capable mobile forces, its scale of artillery equipment was far less than that of comparable U.S. formations, and the Vietnamese Air Force (VNAF) possessed only modest strike and bombardment capabilities. During the 1957–1959 period, the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group actually drafted 200 different organizational schemes for the standard ARVN division before ending up with the one implemented.⁶ There were seven of these ARVN units in 1961. Washington thought the United States could make good the weaknesses if necessary, but had there ever really been a North Vietnamese invasion, those factors would have come into play and would indeed have driven the need for American intervention, despite the obstacles to that course.

Saigon’s desires also shaped the ARVN. The army’s origins during the French period played a role, since the Vietnam National Army had been recruited, trained, and based territorially, then operationally focused on territorial sectors. This was good for the ARVN, since it meant that cantonments could be located close to the men’s families, reducing the need for leave, travel costs, and other expenses; however, it also made it difficult to move ARVN units to remote areas. Only the general reserve forces—the Airborne and Marines—were truly mobile. That suited Ngo Dinh Diem because it simplified the task of protecting his regime. The nature of the forces made it quite difficult for any disaffected military commander to concentrate troops against Saigon. Diem had only to ensure the loyalty of those few commanders of the general reserves and of formations in the Saigon area—a less formidable challenge. Operational irrationality was a political necessity.⁷

President Diem also felt that political reliability would be improved by shifting the locus of officer training from French military schools to the more technical American ones, and he suspended all ARVN officer training in France in mid-1956, soon after the last of the Expeditionary Corps had left South Vietnam. Given the huge shortfall in officers required for effective leadership, Saigon could have used trained men from wherever it got them.

Washington’s Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) was spread thin throughout this period. The Geneva agreements prohibited the introduction of foreign military forces in numbers greater than existed in July 1954, when there had been 342 Americans in MAAG. The Eisenhower administration had devised a succession of subterfuges to exceed those limits—another U.S. violation of the Geneva agreements. “Temporary equipment recovery missions” and the like more than doubled the number of U.S. advisers, and when Kennedy took over, there were 685 members of MAAG. A constant refrain among U.S. advisers would be that the ARVN could be more effective if Americans served with more of its units, at successively ramified levels of the Vietnamese military. Indeed, one of the Gilpatric committee’s recommendations was to assign U.S. advisory teams to ARVN units at the regimental level for the first time.

Reviewing this period later, Pentagon analysts concluded that U.S. help had failed to produce an effective ARVN during the period up to 1959. There were many reasons for this failure, among them mistaken perceptions of the threat, an exaggerated view of the value of U.S. methods, political considerations that overrode military objections, and a lack of American leverage. The analysts’ language regarding the last point is worth quoting: “The U.S. quickly became so deeply and so overtly committed to the Diem government that any leverage inherent in the assistance program rapidly approached zero.”⁸

Military effectiveness was all about fighting the insurgents, and the Vietnam war began there. During Diem’s first years there had been no active resistance. About 80,000 Vietminh had gone to North Vietnam after Geneva. There were no precise figures, but it was estimated that between 5,000 and 10,000 former guerrillas remained in the South. Hanoi had stay-behind networks and some arms caches, but no active force. Diem’s security measures neutralized most of what remained; certainly the figures for arrests and executions far outnumbered the estimated enemy. North Vietnamese accounts quote letters from southern cadres literally begging for orders to resume fighting. For a long time Hanoi rejected such appeals. Until 1956 the Democratic Republic of Vietnam still hoped for national elections. For several years after that, Hanoi would be preoccupied with internal problems—fostering economic development with few resources proved to be tremendously difficult. In addition, a badly conceived and managed land collectivization program between 1955 and 1957 led to significant upheaval, including popular resistance. By most estimates, as many as 55,000 persons died from hunger, in local revolts, or in security crackdowns as agricultural shortfalls crippled the North.⁹

Meanwhile, Diem’s army maintained a permanent offensive against suspected Vietminh, and the number of surviving cadres was reduced by two-thirds. At length, former guerrillas began taking up arms despite the lack of instructions and even orders not to fight. The southern resistance began there and never stopped. Its character should not be misunderstood: these were southerners determined to bring the revolution to Saigon, not North Vietnamese. As late as December 1958, DRV prime minister Pham Van Dong offered to negotiate arms reductions with Saigon. The Diem government, viewing this as propaganda, rejected the suggestion. At a party congress in Hanoi, North Vietnam now decided to help the insurgents. In May 1959 Hanoi ordered specialists from its Vietnam People’s Army to create a supply route to the South. That became the origin of the “Ho Chi Minh Trail,” which the northerners named the “Truong Son Strategic Supply Route,” after the mountains that separated Vietnam from the inland nations of Laos and Cambodia. The first shipments arrived in the South in August 1959. That fall Hanoi added a seaborne component to its supply effort.

Resistance in the South doubled and redoubled, the growth made up almost entirely of southerners. The guerrillas who fought Diem were indigenous. Their impact was felt immediately. The number of kidnappings and assassinations of Diemist officials grew rapidly starting in 1958. Guerrillas, estimated at just 2,500 in 1959—with the ARVN forty times larger—increased to 5,000 late that year and to 12,000 in 1960. Early in 1960 the insurgents stunned the ARVN and its American advisers when a number of units coordinated to attack a regimental headquarters, decimating the army unit, overrunning its base, capturing documents, and burning the barracks. That July two Americans were killed while relaxing after a day’s work, the first battle deaths in a new war. Overall incidents, including all manner of attacks, mushroomed from about 600 in 1959 to ten times that in 1961. In Kennedy’s first months, the strength of the southern resistance would be estimated at 16,000 to 19,000. Referring to the guerrillas pejoratively as “Vietcong” did nothing to cancel their real power.

As had Eisenhower, Kennedy prematurely committed himself to Ngo Dinh Diem. JFK proceeded on the basis of his favorable memories of Diem from the 1950s, the need to sustain Saigon amid encroaching crisis—exemplified by the Laotian situation—and Eisenhower’s advice during the transition. Early on, JFK turned to his deputy national security adviser, Walt W. Rostow, to remark, “This is the worst yet.”¹⁰ Court historian Arthur M. Schlesinger defended Kennedy, arguing that perceiving Ho Chi Minh as a nationalist more than a communist would have meant rising above prevailing abstractions, and regardless of the validity, or lack thereof, of the Domino Theory when Ike proposed it, the concept had acquired a certain substance by Kennedy’s day. About the U.S. stake in South Vietnam, Schlesinger agreed that “Eisenhower’s letter created those interests.”¹¹

President Kennedy adopted many of the Gilpatric committee’s recommendations. To carry the good news, Kennedy sent his vice president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, to Saigon in April 1961. According to Roger Hilsman, who headed State Department intelligence at the time and was close to the Kennedys, LBJ found Diem remote and surrounded by persons less admirable than he, but Johnson nevertheless publicly proclaimed Diem the “Winston Churchill of Southeast Asia.”¹² Upon returning, Johnson reported to Kennedy in terms that could have come right out of his 1954 newsletters: “We must decide whether to help these countries to the best of our ability or throw in the towel in the area and pull back our defenses to San Francisco and a ‘Fortress America’ concept. More important, we would say to the world . . . that we don’t live up to our treaties and don’t stand by our friends.”¹³

Strategic Hamlets and the Vietnam Data Problem

In consonance with the idea of a combat laboratory, Kennedy’s program tried out new weapons and tactics in Vietnam’s rice paddies. He sent in a covert unit of U.S. combat aircraft, code-named “Farm Gate,” an Air Force component of U.S. Special Operations Forces. Army Special Forces, whom JFK first endowed with green berets, were to train a new ARVN elite formation, the Rangers. Kennedy approved a 20,000-man increase in the ARVN as a whole, as well as more South Vietnamese militia. U.S. aid increased to match the higher force levels, as did the U.S. military contingent, which nearly doubled to more than 1,200 by early 1962. American military aid to South Vietnam multiplied even faster.

All these things proved insufficient. In the late summer of 1961 JFK decided to send people he trusted to make a fresh assessment of the situation. Led by General Maxwell D. Taylor, Kennedy’s personal military representative, and Walt W. Rostow, the Taylor-Rostow mission that November expressed serious doubts. Arguing that Saigon faced a double crisis of confidence—fear that the United States was not really determined to save Southeast Asia and that Diem’s methods would not suffice—Taylor and Rostow recommended a wide range of measures. They wanted not only a U.S. military presence (8,000 soldiers initially, ostensibly for flood relief in the Mekong delta) but also a radical increase in the size of MAAG, combined with overt lifting of the Geneva-imposed “ceiling” on the advisory group; use of American helicopter units to provide airlift for the ARVN in each of its three corps areas (effectively committing Americans to combat, albeit in a support role); a large increase in the militia plus modest growth of the ARVN; and better intelligence, including Americans discreetly inserted directly into the Saigon government structure. Kennedy approved everything except for administrators and combat troops. Schlesinger writes of this period, “Diem’s assurances led to little or nothing in the way of performance. This was increasingly the pattern of Washington’s relations with the Diem regime.”¹⁴

Some recent scholarship on Vietnam has endeavored to rehabilitate the Ngo family.¹⁵ In this formulation, Diem and Nhu are viewed as conservative modernizers, and an argument is made that Diem actually worked toward a vision of the Vietnamese future based on his philosophy of “personalism.” Diem appreciated that liberal capitalism would not work in Vietnam and, with this in mind, tried to gather the resources for modernization by means suitable to Vietnamese society—that is, forcing the peasants to contribute their money and labor. Diem’s officials are credited with the insight that Washington-favored reforms, such as a free press and free assembly, were not going to defeat the insurgency. American frustration with the Saigon leadership is castigated as being fueled by misperceptions different only in kind from those of French colonialists.¹⁶

There can be little doubt that Washington remained mired in its misperceptions of Vietnam throughout the war, but it does not follow that Diem’s approach was any more apt—in fact, it was not. All along, the best of the American actors in this tragedy argued for more suitable approaches. Diem’s vision, meanwhile, was belied by his actions—or, more properly, his inaction—in the face of the most pressing problems. Diem’s failure to eradicate corruption, for example, made efforts at capital formation within the society merely another vehicle for the enrichment of the elite. The same corruption negated much well-intended American aid. As elsewhere, Diem made promises but never reached below the surface. Initiatives that might have built a new Vietnam remained merely rhetorical. Land reform was proclaimed but not enforced. Industrial development plans stayed on paper. Road improvement focused on strategic military highways, not economic infrastructure, linking the Central Highlands to the Da Nang area or Kontum to the Laotian border. Diem’s social “reforms,” driven by Nhu and his wife, prohibited dancing, public assembly, and political parties; created a private elite and a “republican” youth movement capped by regime thugs; and did little to improve the lives of Vietnamese. If this was “conservative modernism,” Vietnam did not need it. The most telling commentary on Vietnamese rejection of the Diemist formula lay in the rapid rise of the southern resistance combined with the growing determination of South Vietnamese loyalists to oust him.

Population resettlement at once illuminates Diem’s immobilisme and the Americans’ illusions, while simultaneously having a direct impact on the rebellion. Classical theories of guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency hold that liberation movements draw sustenance, protection, and strength from the people, making the insurgents akin to fish swimming in the sea, to follow Mao Zedong’s formulation. The favored image in counterinsurgency theory is thus to drain the sea, leaving the fish flopping in the mud to be easily swept up. In practice, this meant isolating the population from the guerrillas. In Malaya in the 1950s the British gave substance to this notion, defeating an ethnic Chinese-based insurgency precisely by close population control. British security expert Sir Robert Thompson, an apostle of the technique, came to Saigon in 1961 to head a British advisory mission and served both Diem and U.S. commanders in South Vietnam, where population control would repeatedly be attempted. The Michigan State University contingent would also be quite active in this regard.

President Diem ordered preparations for resettlement in the Mekong delta in the spring of 1959, implementation that June, and expansion of the concept the following year. Peasants were to be removed to “agrovilles” and later to satellite hamlets. The intent was to separate the peasants from the insurgents, concentrate the people under the watchful eyes of security forces, create new communities, and carry out land reform—all at once and without U.S. assistance. The program was a disaster. Diemist officials conscripted peasants for forced labor to build the agrovilles, including during the harvest season; they demanded villagers spend their own scant money for materials and then treated the inhabitants like prisoners. Resettlement took villagers from their ancestral homes and burial sites—central to Buddhist culture—and obliged them to walk long distances to work the fields instead of living on the land. The new settlements actually gave insurgents a focus for recruitment by concentrating masses of disaffected villagers. The high point of the agrovilles coincided with the takeoff point of the southern resistance. The presidential palace long insisted that problems were due merely to the insensitivity of officials, but Diem did not replace them. In late 1960 the agroville program was canceled.

The next expedient was to fortify villages wherever they lay. This corresponded to Ngo Dinh Nhu’s idea of mobilizing youth and expanding a security cordon that could progressively cover the countryside. Experimental efforts in several provinces to create fortified “combat” villages, as well as the CIA–South Vietnamese Village Defense Program in the Central Highlands, were initiated in 1961. Late that year Sir Robert Thompson coined the term strategic hamlet when he advocated defended or “strategic” hamlets as part of a plan he proposed for securing the delta. In early 1962 Saigon made strategic hamlets a national program, and Diem appointed Nhu to head it.

Roger Hilsman became a linchpin in selling strategic hamlets to JFK. He learned of Thompson’s concept from the U.S. embassy and later heard the gist of it from Sir Robert himself. A paper Hilsman wrote for President Kennedy in early 1962 became the basis for JFK’s approval.¹⁷ Almost immediately strategic hamlets became mired in differences, both between U.S. military and civilian leaders and between Washington and Saigon. The military wanted to use them to stymie guerrilla recruitment and devised Operation Sunrise to bodily relocate a series of villages north of Saigon, in the style of the agrovilles. Hilsman opposed that idea, but Nhu and Diem backed it. Operation Sunrise became the first embodiment of strategic hamlets, which quickly took a hit when journalists reported that the new villages were virtual concentration camps.

Diem’s defenders argue in retrospect that Americans never appreciated the real significance of strategic hamlets, which were meant to be vehicles for social change and to put the peasants on the front line in defending themselves. This does not track with Hilsman’s memoir written in 1967, long before the Vietnam war had even ended. Hilsman cites Thompson thus: “the hamlet scheme and the bureaucratic apparatus that would be created to run it [were to be] the means for a revolutionary change in the peasant’s lot—economically, politically, socially, and culturally.” Views in Saigon and Washington were no different. Meanwhile, a serious Diemist commitment to the hamlets as agents of social change does not correspond to the consistently low priority Saigon gave them in terms of agricultural assistance, militia weapons, and communications equipment; the failure to carry out local elections; Saigon’s siphoning off of aid, requiring the peasants to pay for materials the United States had provided for free; or the fact that no social programs were actually initiated. Vietnamese peasants reacted the same way to strategic hamlets as they had to the agrovilles.

The problem Hilsman anticipated was that the Ngos would overextend the initiative by trying to impose strategic hamlets all over South Vietnam simultaneously. That is precisely what happened. Saigon did not have the money for such a large effort, even with U.S. assistance. In addition, conditions differed widely in various parts of South Vietnam, so the design was not suitable for all forty-four provinces. To meet target goals, Saigon cut corners; in many cases hamlets were simply rechristened as “strategic” or wood palisades were installed around hamlets, and that was that.¹⁸ By April 1963 roughly 6,000 strategic hamlets had been completed, and there were plans for another 2,500 by July, covering the majority of South Vietnam’s roughly 14,000 hamlets.

Beyond all the difficulties of what would come to be termed pacification was the fact that the stronger these programs became, the more they conflicted with the U.S. military view of how to combat the insurgency, which minimized the importance of the southern resistance. The military, along with certain civilian officials such as Rostow, argued that an outside base—in this case, North Vietnam—was a sine qua non for guerrillas. In that vision, closing the border would drain the sea. Rostow would have gone further and struck the north to dissuade it from helping the insurgents, but he did not get his way. Instead, a host of efforts was attempted to seal the border, including naval patrols off the coast, border scouts and defense camps, and passive defense by minefields. Meanwhile, in the South, American advisers with the ARVN pushed conventional operations that rarely encountered the adversary.

Probably the most important event on the other side during this period was consolidation of the resistance into the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam, or, more simply, the National Liberation Front (NLF). Created in Tay Ninh province in December 1960 under a leadership council that included people from many regions and occupations, the NLF represented a united front in the same style as the Vietminh. Its chairman, Nguyen Huu Tho, was a French-trained lawyer who had agitated against colonialism and had been with the resistance since French times. Tho was first imprisoned in 1950. He was not openly a communist, but Diem claimed he was and incarcerated him. Tho was freed by a resistance commando raid. The NLF’s striking arm was the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF), the army that Saigon and Washington called the Vietcong. Already in this early period, the PLAF had assumed the character it would retain, with a hierarchy of regular units, provincial local forces, and village-based self-defense forces. The military was matched to a political apparatus in a hierarchy parallel to Saigon’s, with leaders at hamlet, village, district, and provincial levels and a wide array of popular organizations designed to enmesh as many Vietnamese as possible in the struggle. Diem talked about broad-based social organizations; the NLF actually created them.

Both the NLF and Hanoi mounted massive propaganda campaigns against strategic hamlets and the American combat techniques they called “special warfare.” Some observers interpret these acts as evidence that Diem was winning the war. There are indications of concern in Hanoi’s official histories. A Central Military-Party Committee directive in mid-1962 ordered the forces in the South to disrupt the strategic hamlet campaign. At the end of that year the DRV Politburo’s assessment was that the ARVN’s U.S.-backed buildup was outstripping that of the Liberation Front. And in June 1963, meeting again, the Central Military-Party Committee approved a decision to increase the infiltration into South Vietnam.¹⁹ But strategic decisions are made to manage situations and are judged by outcomes, not inputs, which as often as not are wrong. Hanoi had fears aplenty, among them the mass of U.S. power lurking behind the Saigon government. And its appreciation—from the outside—of the effectiveness of Diem’s pacification was based more on numbers of strategic hamlets than on any understanding of their coherence or effectiveness. It is noteworthy that the same session of the Central Military-Party Committee that decided to up the infiltration rate felt comfortable with Hanoi’s ability to act throughout Indochina, in both Vietnam and Laos. The Vietnam People’s Army official history notes that “after a period of difficulties” in late 1962 and early 1963,“the armed struggle movement combined with political struggle in Cochin China began to recover and grow.”²⁰

It is true that, according to U.S. statistics, the average number of Liberation Front attacks, terrorism, and sabotage incidents, plus detected propaganda efforts, fell between early 1962 and 1963 (from about 550 to 350 attacks a month, for example), while PLAF defections were up (from less than 100 to 375). Pacification statistics claimed that by April 1963, Saigon controlled 53 percent of the villages, a gain of 7 percent; in contrast, NLF control had fallen off a couple of percentage points, and villages where the NLF was ascendant had decreased by almost half.²¹ Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who visited South Vietnam in mid-1962, came away saying, “Every quantitative measure shows that we’re winning the war.” The CIA’s William Colby, who had left Saigon around that time and by early 1963 headed the agency’s Far East Division, carrying the water for the CIA’s Vietnam war, argues on this basis that Diem would have turned the corner if he had had two more years in power and would have beat the insurgency a few years after that.²²

Statistics support both sides of the issue, and even the ones cited here offer an incomplete picture. The Liberation Front activity described in these data began a period of sustained growth in early 1963, although totals remained lower than in the previous year. But numbers of claimed PLAF casualties were down and the ARVN’s were up, each by about 20 percent. South Vietnamese weapons losses were also up (in fact, higher than those of the NLF), an indicator of poor combat performance. Stated differently, the NLF was inflicting more losses on the ARVN in fewer attacks. NLF strength increased considerably, with between 22,000 and 25,000 regulars and at least 80,000 guerrillas, despite infiltration rates that remained constant. This indicates very successful recruitment by the southern resistance, which belies the data on reductions in Liberation Front population control.²³

There is also a very real question about the degree to which these statistics were falsified—made up, guesstimated, or deliberately contrived. The evidence of falsification is overwhelming. Intelligence officer–turned–historian John Newman argues convincingly in his study of Kennedy in Vietnam that the U.S. military engaged in a deliberate effort to demonstrate success through phony statistics and intelligence.²⁴ Journalist Neil Sheehan, biographer of the legendary U.S. adviser John Paul Vann, shows in excruciating detail how pessimistic reporting from MAAG’s best people in the field was suppressed at headquarters, which tended to focus on the positive in its dispatches.²⁵ Sheehan and other reporters such as David Halberstam, Malcolm Browne, Peter Arnett, and Homer Bigart, among others, were all subjected to attempts at manipulation. JFK even called the publisher of the New York Times in an effort to suppress some of Halberstam’s articles.²⁶ CIA officer Harold Ford notes that these war correspondents were “special targets for official pressure.”²⁷

George W. Allen, a veteran officer with the Defense Intelligence Agency, soon moved to the CIA because he was disgusted with the military’s inability to provide objective data. Allen was an old Indochina hand who had cut his teeth on Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu, working on Matt Ridgway’s presentation that had helped stymie the Eisenhower intervention. Allen had labored on Vietnam ever since and had encountered the success mentality many times. For instance, sent to Saigon in 1962 to help MAAG develop a better estimate of NLF strength, Allen used all available data and concluded that the PLAF guerrillas alone might have surpassed 100,000 the previous year. But when he proposed that figure, headquarters rejected it.²⁸

An especially egregious example of manipulation occurred in the spring of 1963 when the CIA compiled its latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). Previous NIEs had retained a healthy skepticism about Vietnam, continuing to warn of Diem’s political weaknesses as well as the military uncertainties. Work on this particular NIE began in October 1962. Senior analyst Willard C. Matthias managed its drafting and the coordination among all the relevant agencies, the special feature that made NIEs the considered opinion of the entire U.S. intelligence community. Matthias picked George Carver, formerly of the Saigon station, as lead analyst. Carver had been driven out of South Vietnam by Ngo Dinh Nhu for his role as go-between to rebels during the 1960 coup. Within a month Carver handed Matthias a draft centered on the Cold War angle and concluding that Soviet and Chinese stakes in Vietnam were limited. Matthias, however, wanted an NIE focused on the war, so he and Carver worked up a fresh paper. It found that no satisfactory objective means existed to assess progress, and there were difficult-to-surmount problems with such tactics as strategic hamlets. Progress would be possible only in the context of “radical changes in the methods and personnel of the South Vietnamese government.”²⁹ The Board of National Estimates, corporate manager of the NIEs, changed this language to a more direct indictment of the Saigon regime: “The modus operandi of the Diem government, and particularly its measures to prevent the rise of contenders for political power, have reduced the government’s effectiveness, both politically and militarily. We believe that unless radical changes are made in the methods of the government, there is little hope that U.S. involvement can be substantially curtailed or that there will be material and lasting reduction in the Communist threat.”³⁰

The draft went before the U.S. Intelligence Board on February 27, 1963. There, CIA director John McCone savaged the paper and its drafters, demanding to know why the NIE did not take into account the views of the people who (supposedly) knew what was really going on—the operators. His complaint triggered a round of interviews in which the CIA canvassed those responsible for the war. The final paper, NIE 53-63, issued on April 17, flatly claimed that the NLF’s progress had been blunted and the situation was improving; there was reason to expect that the peasantry could be won over, with Diem promising to mend his political fences.³¹ The estimate exuded optimism far beyond any sustaining data.

Roger Hilsman’s intelligence unit at State would be subjected to identical pressures. By now JFK had promoted Hilsman to assistant secretary for Far Eastern affairs, and deputy Thomas L. Hughes had taken over the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), as the unit was known. That summer, INR analyst Louis Sarris, Hilsman’s coauthor on the original strategic hamlets paper, began to study the statistics. By now the gloss had come off the NIE, and McCone had been forced to apologize to his own analysts and issue a pessimistic correction. That did not prevent an outside attack on Sarris’s INR paper when it circulated in late October. The Joint Chiefs filed an extensive complaint, which McNamara took to Secretary of State Dean Rusk. McNamara threatened to go to Kennedy unless State agreed that INR would stay out of the military estimates business.³² Rusk chewed out Hughes and Sarris and mollified McNamara with the promise that future INR papers on these subjects would be coordinated with the Pentagon.³³ By then, all the speculations and warnings about Ngo Dinh Diem’s political vulnerabilities had come home to roost.

The Fall of Ngo Dinh Diem

What ultimately shreds the fevered conjecture that Diem could have won the war is his overthrow not by Americans but by Vietnamese. Ngo Dinh Diem’s own ham-fisted policies led to this result, and his resistance to reform was just one aspect. Even old friends gave up hope. Wesley Fishel broke with Diem in 1962, convinced the Saigon leader had lost touch. The Michigan State University Group went home. By year’s end such stalwarts as Mike Mansfield were telling President Kennedy that Diem was through, and the next summer he argued that supporting Diem was unnecessary to U.S. interests in Southeast Asia. In Vietnam’s Central Highlands, where the CIA and Green Berets were working with the montagnards to create a large fighting force, Diem’s actions alienated the tribes at an accelerating rate, while Nhu’s suspicions of U.S. meddling minimized Saigon’s support of the program. One montagnard actually joined the NLF’s central committee, and in early 1962 the montagnards set up their own political organization. Later, when Diem released some montagnard activists from jail, he kept back two of the tribes’ major leaders.³⁴ Although villages enlisted in the defense program added to the count of strategic hamlets, in reality, the tribes were spiraling toward a revolt against Saigon. In the lowlands Diem’s favoritism toward Catholics did little to endear him to Buddhists, among whom the cinder ignited that began the last act of his reign.

President Kennedy was increasingly concerned about Diem’s prospects. Bad data or not, JFK could see little being accomplished. In January 1963 a fight took place at a village called Ap Bac in the delta. This time, despite the ARVN’s considerable numerical superiority, as well as mechanized troops and helicopters courtesy of the United States, a PLAF unit not only stood its ground but actually defeated the attackers, who suffered many casualties. Helicopters and armored personnel carriers were lost. Advisers, including John Paul Vann, in whose sector the battle took place, charged senior South Vietnamese officers with incompetence. Diem replaced neither of the responsible commanders. Kennedy had to notice. If strategic hamlets were to work, they had to be shielded by the ARVN.³⁵ As for the adversary, the Liberation Front wasted no time exploiting Ap Bac as a psychological success, with propaganda to emulate, or replicate, the victory.

Most important to Saigon was the army. Had Diem spent as much effort prosecuting the war and making his government a dynamic alternative to the NLF as he did countering antipathy toward the Ngo family, the military would have been no problem. Instead, the palace openly played with officer assignments and posts made desirable by opportunities for corruption. Many ARVN officers were committed anticommunists who only wanted to get on with the war.³⁶ Saigon cafés bubbled with talk of plots. After February 1962, when disgruntled air force pilots tried to kill Diem and Nhu by bombing the palace, both Diem’s antics and the talk got darker. Advocates of the “victory” thesis have never managed to explain how the ARVN was going to win the war while Diem was busily engaging it in back-alley political struggle.

A few examples will suffice. Duong Van Minh, who had led the Diemist forces in Saigon during the sect crisis, now headed the ARVN Field Command and was, in effect, its top general. But Diem, worried that army headquarters could control units all over the country, redesigned the system so that corps commanders answered to the palace, leaving Minh little to do. He spent most afternoons playing tennis at the Lido Officers’ Club in the nearby town of Gia Dinh. Later Diem shunted “Big” Minh, as he was known, into a meaningless inspector’s post. Officers felt that they had been robbed of their top honcho in the fight against the Liberation Front.

Then there was Colonel Pham Van Dong. He was a fighter—in French days he would have been called a baroudeur, or a barroom brawler. Dong became the first Vietnamese officer in the national army to lead a large combat formation, a mobile group. He had an excellent reputation among U.S. advisers. From 1959 to 1962 Dong served as chief of staff of III Corps, the command that included Saigon. Diem called him in one day and said, “Colonel Dong, I am told you are preparing to make the coup.” Dong denied it, but he was sent off to General Minh’s staff, then demoted to chief inspector of strategic hamlets. In itself, that assignment reveals something of Diem’s regard for strategic hamlets. Dong told American friends that he had been left behind—a comment that also speaks volumes about Diem’s war strategy. Many of Dong’s subordinates were now his superiors.³⁷

Or take the case of Lieutenant Colonel Lam Quang Thi. Basically nonpolitical, Thi had done nothing in the 1960 coup, even though, “by that time, my original excitement and hope in Mr. Diem had vanished.”³⁸ One of Thi’s brothers led a unit of the coup, which would have been enough to justify the arrest of Colonel Thi, except for the fact that another brother had commanded the tanks that saved Diem. Despite—or because of—his lack of a role, Colonel Thi was sent to head the artillery section of Minh’s staff. Then he was reassigned as an operations staffer to yet another headquarters without troops, the Army Command, which replaced the Field Command.

Such treatment made many enemies for Diem and Nhu. Because there were only a few lucrative or meaningful posts to dispense, over time, there were numerous disgruntled officers for each whose loyalty was bound to the Ngos. Disaffected subordinates could replace loyalists in key units. The air force commander was such a loyalist. But the transport wing commander, Colonel Nguyen Cao Ky, was not. Ky believed that the achievement of higher rank was dependent on party loyalty, as it was in communist countries. Nhu and his henchmen were diverting the American aid intended for strategic hamlets to the black market, but as Ky observed, “at that time even to speak against the Diem regime was dangerous.”³⁹ Ky saw something else too: the same falsification of data that bedeviled Washington being applied in Saigon. One day while shopping at the city’s central market, Ky saw police preparing for one of Diem’s extremely rare excursions outside the palace. The police, whom Nhu controlled, had instructed merchants that if the president asked about any item they should quote old prices from when Diem first took power. Once Diem got in trouble, Ky not only refused to help the president but also arrested the air force commander.

Colonel Ky, who was a Buddhist, had to be particularly upset by the Buddhist political crisis in the summer of 1963. It began in Hue with Diem’s brothers. First, Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc, who was celebrating his twenty-fifth anniversary jubilee, held parades through the city that included the carrying of religious flags. Since 1957 there had been laws against the display of any but the South Vietnamese flag. These were not enforced against the Catholics. Then on May 8, Buddhists celebrating the 2,507th birthday of Buddha paraded their own religious banners, and another brother, province chief Ngo Dinh Can, ordered a crackdown. When monk Thich Tri Quang was denied the chance to deliver a birthday message on the radio, some 10,000 Buddhists marched on the radio station, and Can had the police and army break up the demonstration. Major Dan Sy’s troops fired on the crowd, and an armored car crushed some of the protesters; eight were killed. Rather than accept responsibility, the Diem government alleged that the violence had been caused by an NLF operative with a hand grenade.

This tragedy led to a cycle of protest, repression, and mobilization—increasingly familiar to Americans of the civil rights movement. Demonstrations soon spread to Saigon. Buddhist elders met with Diem and tabled demands: the government should acknowledge its role, pay compensation, permit display of the Buddhist flag, and prosecute responsible officials. Diem prevaricated. Apologists asserted the NLF argument. Of course, the NLF was going to take advantage of any political opening, but that is excuse, not explanation. The fact is that Ngo Dinh Diem refused accommodation. He sided with his brothers and revealed his favoritism for Catholic over Buddhist citizens in an unmistakable fashion.

On May 28 Buddhist monks, called bonzes, held a protest in front of the National Assembly building in Saigon. These demonstrations soon became almost daily events. In early June police used tear gas to break up another protest in Hue. On June 8 Madame Nhu denounced the Buddhists, alleging they had been infiltrated by communists. Several days later bonze Thich Quang Duc immolated himself at a busy Saigon intersection while nuns chanted and burned incense. Efforts to allow cooler heads to prevail were blown when a government commission denied responsibility in the original incident. Nhu mobilized his republican youth, and Madame Nhu famously declared that all the Buddhists had done was to “barbecue a monk.”

Saigon’s hot summer boiled through August. Then Diem struck. A group of ARVN generals met to ruminate on the Buddhist problem and proposed a crackdown to Nhu; he told them to take the proposal to Diem, who approved it on the night of August 20.⁴⁰ The next morning Diem declared martial law and appointed General Ton That Dinh as Saigon regional commander. Ngo Dinh Nhu used security troops under the nominal command of General Dinh, particularly his U.S.-trained and -financed Vietnamese Special Forces, to attack and occupy An Quang and Xa Loi, the key pagodas in Saigon and Hue. An all-day pitched battle ensued at one location. The Ngos probably sealed their fate by trying to place responsibility on the ARVN this time, with Nhu telling the CIA that ten South Vietnamese generals had planned the pagoda raids. Within days, over two different channels, Vietnamese officers were asking what Washington’s attitude would be in the event of a coup against Ngo Dinh Diem.

The last months of Diem’s reign are a jumble of confusion. Starting with the ARVN generals and their renewed determination to oust Diem, Washington’s headaches were tremendous. Other threads weave through the tapestry also. One is the question of Kennedy’s own resolve and whether he intended to get America out of Vietnam. Some prefer to view JFK as committed to that course. Another matter is the issue of Laos—its role almost entirely ignored yet furnishing key evidence on the question. Washington politics yields another point of evidence.

The coup project against Diem proceeded fitfully. Initial feelers from ARVN officers triggered frantic soul-searching in Washington. This began with a notorious bureaucratic end run wherein Hilsman took advantage of the absence of many key players to get Kennedy’s approval to back the coup in a cabled response to the generals. McCone, McNamara, and Rusk, plus others, combined to quash the initiative, and a countermanding cable was sent. But after a series of White House meetings, JFK finally came back to the same policy. By then the Vietnamese had gotten cold feet, and nothing happened.

Postponement of the coup bought time to pursue other avenues. What the United States wanted was “effective” government in Saigon. That meant Diem had to rid himself of cronies, particularly the Nhus, on whom most U.S. attention focused. But the Saigon leader had promised reforms without delivering countless times before. Kennedy’s problem was familiar: lack of leverage. The president decided to pressure Saigon. Nhu would be shorn of the means to claim that the United States backed him. The most visible of those was CIA funding and training for Vietnamese Special Forces. This was terminated, with no effect. Nhu even struck back, orchestrating a pro-Diem demonstration outside the U.S. embassy, giving an interview accusing the CIA of fomenting the Buddhist crisis, and then having one of his newspapers blow the cover of the CIA station chief in Saigon. Washington’s ultimate form of pressure was to threaten to get out of Vietnam.

Here the quest for leverage intersects with the notion of a “Kennedy withdrawal,” which seems to have gained the status of urban myth. There is no question that Kennedy was perplexed. He had certainly been driven far from his hopes for Diem in the 1950s. There are a number of quotations and meditations regarding Kennedy’s desire to extricate America from the quagmire, and a good-sized list of Kennedy’s senior officials all claim that JFK intended to get out after the 1964 election, when he would be in his second term and less vulnerable to political damage. Robert McNamara heads that list, but it includes Roger Hilsman, NSC Southeast Asia staffer Michael Forrestal, and others. John Kenneth Galbraith, Kennedy’s ambassador to India, had urged this as well.⁴¹ The withdrawal option, if real, was a further opportunity for America to have avoided its war.

But concrete evidence for the Kennedy withdrawal is sparse and subject to interpretation. There is, however, hard proof for a McNamara withdrawal: at a conference in Honolulu in 1962 the secretary of defense ordered plans for a drawdown of U.S. strength to a force level approaching that of the Eisenhower days. This was not a simple thing. In June 1962, about the time of that Honolulu meeting, U.S. troops in South Vietnam already stood at 9,000, and by mid-1963 there were 15,400 American servicemen and -women there. In some versions, the reductions were to be completed by 1965, but planning documents exist with schedules extending to 1968—timed to coincide with a prospective run for the presidency by Robert F. Kennedy. In all cases there was provision for residual forces, that is, not a total withdrawal but a restructured U.S. commitment. Most important, every withdrawal scheme was contingent on progress in the war and assumed the defeat of Hanoi and the NLF. The latter point, incidentally, underlines the importance of disputes over Vietnam statistics and data and suggests a motive for McNamara’s attack on State Department INR critiques of military progress, which occurred at just the time reductions were being considered. In sum, the record of withdrawal planning indicates an early version of what would eventually be called “Vietnamization,” not a U.S. exit from the war.

The situation in Laos is important with regard to the question of a Kennedy withdrawal. Kennedy deserves credit for his approach to Laos: he received a hot potato; quickly understood that conducting a war there, as Eisenhower had advised, was nonsensical; and drew the appropriate conclusion.⁴² Kennedy withstood the pressures of his military advisers and officials such as Rostow, who delivered a succession of appeals for active intervention in Laos. Assisted by W. Averell Harriman, JFK then championed an extremely complex negotiation that led to a renewed set of Geneva agreements on Laos in mid-1962. But the neutralization mandated there took hold in name only, and after Geneva, Kennedy acquiesced in covert CIA operations designed to counter the North Vietnamese and Laotian communists. No doubt seen as a way to preserve U.S. options, the CIA maneuvers lent confidence to anticommunist Laotians who conspired to contravene the agreements, while CIA tribal allies initiated attacks on their communist enemies. In the spring of 1963 war resumed in Laos after the murder of a key neutralist minister. Kennedy then entertained a series of escalation proposals that summer. He approved the last of these, National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 259, just two days before the Vietnamese generals asked about U.S. support for a coup. It is not possible that JFK was unaware of the relationship of Laos to the war in Vietnam, and highly unlikely that Kennedy would escalate in Laos while withdrawing from Vietnam.

The most concrete evidence for the Kennedy withdrawal, to get slightly ahead of our story, comes from meetings in early October, where the president agreed to go ahead with the first tranche of troop reductions, a withdrawal of 1,000 Americans. The NSC meeting where the president pondered this action and the decision document sanctioning the move (NSAM-263) are the supposed proof. But a tape recording of the NSC conversation exists, and JFK’s tone and inflection clearly show that he was doubtful and questioning, not affirmatively approving. Conversely, the paper reporting Robert McNamara’s and General Maxwell Taylor’s conclusions from another fact-finding mission, the subject of this NSC meeting, makes the link between progress and withdrawal, asserting “the military campaign has made great progress.”⁴³ On December 31, 1963, there were 16,300 American troops in Vietnam, roughly 1,000 more than at the moment of the presumptive withdrawal decision.⁴⁴

Publicly, Kennedy was straightforward and quite clear. In a television interview with Walter Cronkite of CBS on September 2, JFK referred to Vietnamization, saying,“In the final analysis it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it.” He also spoke directly on the subject of withdrawal: “I don’t agree with those who say we should withdraw. That would be a great mistake.”A week later in an interview with NBC television, Kennedy affirmed his belief in the Domino Theory and again said, “I think we should stay. We should use our influence in as effective a way as we can, but we should not withdraw.”⁴⁵ Apart from anything else, for President Kennedy to convey these public messages and then change course and approve withdrawal would have meant significantly increasing his political costs.

This raises the question of leveraging Saigon, to which JFK also alluded. The other way to interpret withdrawal talk is as a device to coerce Diem to dismiss the Nhus. Withdrawal was a means of calling Diem’s bluff, Kennedy’s biggest stick. Toward mid-September Idaho senator Frank Church drafted a congressional resolution threatening the termination of U.S. military and economic assistance unless Saigon abandoned its repressive policies. Church got JFK’s quiet backing, along with State Department help in drafting his resolution. Equally significant, there existed another U.S. withdrawal plan—one for total withdrawal, one assembled at exactly the same time by Roger Hilsman. It avowedly formed part of the coercion effort.

In early October members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, including Church but also such luminaries as J. William Fulbright and Wayne Morse, visited with JFK. Their questions went to why the United States had not done more. Fulbright asserted that a withdrawal would be unacceptable. In Congress, thus far only Oregon’s Morse and South Dakota’s George McGovern had called for an end to U.S. involvement, and they were voices in the wilderness. Public opinion remained muted. In the fall of 1963 American Friends of Vietnam (AFV) chairman “Iron Mike” O’Daniel threatened to resign if the organization came out publicly against Diem, even though the AFV had ended its open support a year earlier. Madame Nhu later wrote to O’Daniel to denounce AFV as “false friends and traitors.”⁴⁶ Thus political pressures existed, but their effect was to push Kennedy toward action, not withdrawal.

One purpose of the Taylor-McNamara mission was to encourage Diem to move against Nhu. Colby of the CIA went along with the specific purpose of convincing Nhu to leave; however, Colby’s attempt would be scotched by ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, who forbade him to have any contact with Diem’s brother. The Taylor-McNamara mission also looked into prospects for a coup by the generals and found an early coup unlikely. The ARVN generals and South Vietnamese students, who had joined the Buddhist protests, had been neutralized by Nhu’s security forces, the mission found. Perhaps with an eye toward the abortive August plot, Taylor and McNamara reported that the generals had little stomach for the attempt. But the day they left Saigon, CIA officer Lucien Conein encountered General Tran Van Don, who arranged for the CIA to be appraised of a coup led by General Duong Van Minh.

One of Minh’s options was to murder Diem and his brother. Colby wrote a reply for McCone, which the CIA director sent on October 6, declaring the agency could not encourage or support assassination but had no responsibility to stop every coup. But McCone also counseled Kennedy against overthrowing Diem. He repeated his arguments so often that JFK eventually rebuked him, asking McCone why he was so out of step. But Vice President Lyndon Johnson also opposed the plot, as did Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon, former ambassador Frederick Nolting, and MACV boss General Paul D. Harkins. Others, like McNamara, were uncomfortable with the use of CIA operative Conein as a channel to the generals. Kennedy instructed the State Department to have Ambassador Lodge neither discourage nor help the plotters.

“Big” Minh, Tran Van Don, and their cohorts needed no help. By late October their preparations were far advanced. Conein got updates. When the Vietnamese wanted money, the equivalent of about $40,000 was stashed away for them in Conein’s home safe. He would carry it around in a briefcase during the coup. Washington’s last chance to adopt a different course came on October 29, when Kennedy convened his advisers at the White House.⁴⁷ This gathering is especially important because Bobby Kennedy, Dean Rusk, John McCone, and Maxwell Taylor all expressed reservations (Lyndon Johnson attended but said nothing), but they did not affect JFK’s decision. The president’s brother, in particular, warned that “we have some very large stakes to balance here” and noted, “it’s different from a coup in the Iraq or [a] South American country.”⁴⁸ Everyone present recognized that the United States would inevitably be linked to the generals’ coup, no matter how it turned out. President Kennedy held firm.⁴⁹

General Minh went ahead on November 1. Ngo Dinh Diem, unable to maneuver his way out of this challenge, fled the palace, taking Nhu with him. They surrendered to the plotters the next day and were murdered.⁵⁰ The consensus among observers is that the assassinations were ordered by Minh. Certainly one of the killers was Minh’s chief bodyguard. Almost all historians of the American war agree that backing the coup froze the United States into a position that made extricating itself from Vietnam nearly impossible. It is fair to ask how John F. Kennedy, if he was serious about American withdrawal, could have agreed to this plot.

The question about Kennedy’s real attitude cannot be answered by events, for the president himself perished at the hand of an assassin just a few weeks later. After Kennedy was killed in Dallas on November 22, Lyndon Baines Johnson succeeded to the presidency. There is one more piece of evidence, however: NSAM-273. This decision was among the first to plop onto President Johnson’s desk after he took the oath of office. It represented deliberations among Kennedy’s team at Honolulu between November 20 and 22. A constant refrain had been that Saigon was ineffective because South Vietnamese leaders failed to make the grade; identical measures by Americans would work. The gist of NSAM-273 created a fresh action program, one that included direct pressure against North Vietnam, with key parts under unilateral U.S. control. The document existed in draft form before JFK’s death. Once more the question arises how Kennedy could be withdrawing while simultaneously preparing to escalate, this time not in Laos but in Vietnam.

Bill Moyers, among Johnson’s closest associates at the time, remembers NSAM-273 coming to LBJ and thought it an ambush.⁵¹ After all, Johnson had never abandoned Diem and thought the coup a mistake. The decision would tie LBJ’s hands. In taking over for the fallen president, Johnson had promised to continue Kennedy’s policies and even keep JFK’s staffers, so LBJ approved NSAM-273. This represented the next-to-last opportunity—if opportunity it had been—to avoid the Vietnam war.

Over the following months U.S. actions focused on making the war effort more effective. The advisory group, reconstituted as the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), received a new leader, General William C. Westmoreland. But results remained poor. Saigon politics roiled, the generals maneuvered for advantage, while in the countryside the Liberation Front gained ground, particularly in the delta. In late November the PLAF actually captured American prisoners when they overran a Special Forces camp at Hiep Hoa. South Vietnamese weapons losses increased even more after the coup. Liberation Front strength estimates from earlier in 1963 were now termed “conservative,” according to CIA experts on December 6.⁵² Even military intelligence admitted that the number of PLAF main-force battalions had increased, as had the average strength of its units. Over the first days of 1964 there was a succession of battles in which Saigon forces were either stopped or beaten. In one, a number of American helicopters were damaged; in another, ARVN losses exceeded the enemy’s.

Saigon and Washington each had its own response. In Saigon the South Vietnamese military blamed Minh’s junta for not consolidating power. Forces under General Nguyen Khanh overthrew Minh. After a week Khanh himself was ousted. He regrouped for a fresh coup and in January 1964 became the new military strongman, though that may be too forceful a term, since Khanh’s maneuvers ushered in a period of tremendous political instability: over the next year there were no fewer than seven coups d’etat—some by General Khanh against others, some against Khanh that he defeated, and one that finally threw him out. Unsettled politics affected the war.

In Washington the new game was promoting Saigon’s stability. In March 1964 the Joint Chiefs of Staff stated their solution: bomb North Vietnam, mine its harbors, and institute a naval blockade. That program did nothing for stability. Washington instead attempted rhetoric and imagery. Appearing with Khanh in a Mekong village in March 1964, McNamara and Taylor held up his arms like a victorious prizefighter. The NLF disrupted the image, nearly killing McNamara with a bomb planted on a bridge by saboteur Nguyen Van Troi, who was captured and executed. A month later, McNamara told newsmen he was pleased: if people wanted to call Vietnam “McNamara’s war,” so be it.

But the Americans continued to be aware of Saigon’s shakiness. Washington’s campaign of covert pressure against the North became the other part of the American response. This started with a secret military campaign called Operations Plan (OPLAN) 34-A, combined with cross-border forays into Laos—a new facet of the effort to seal the South Vietnamese border. Planning began at Honolulu in November 1963, McNamara reviewed the plans that December, and LBJ approved them early in 1964. The CIA and the U.S. military directly controlled the operations. General Khanh was merely informed and asked to furnish commandos for the attacks. Khanh, in search of a unifying theme to solidify his power, began speaking of a “March North.”

Meanwhile, LBJ still possessed considerable freedom of action. A late May poll by the American Institute for Public Opinion Research revealed that almost two-thirds of Americans had given no thought to Vietnam at all. Among the few who had, the largest single opinion category (6 percent) favored sending a United Nations peacekeeping force. The number of people who favored the existing policy (3 percent) was about the same as those who wanted to either fight or get out (4 percent). The two possible responses that provided for getting tougher and taking definite military action garnered the combined support of 9 percent of poll respondents.⁵³

Washington officials began work on what they called “the scenario,” a specific project structured to lead to congressional authorization for the use of force in Southeast Asia—the kind of approval Eisenhower had failed to obtain at Dien Bien Phu. They prepared a text. An interagency committee began coordinating all aspects of activity. In June 1964 the Johnson administration contrived to have a Canadian diplomat assigned to the International Control Commission go to Hanoi to threaten North Vietnamese leaders, raising the specter of stronger military action if the Democratic Republic of Vietnam did not abandon the National Liberation Front. DRV prime minister Pham Van Dong would not give an inch, warning that Hanoi would win and that if the United States pushed the war to the North, the people would stand up. The OPLAN 34-A operations were mere pinpricks. But they were against the North, and they were about to lead to a fresh escalation, one entirely by the United States. That happened in the Gulf of Tonkin.