By contrast, on April 6, the day after Galbraith wrote him, Kennedy discussed his suggestions for neutralizing Vietnam with Harriman. Harriman agreed with Galbraith’s advice to minimize the U.S. military role in the conflict. He showed Kennedy his April 4 cable to Nolting emphasizing the need to keep U.S. military activities in Vietnam as quiet as possible and saying that we had no intention of fighting Vietnam’s war. Harriman, however, rejected the proposal to seek a neutral solution in Vietnam and the suggestion that the U.S. dump Diem: While “Diem was a losing horse in the long run . . . there was nobody to replace him.” Despite Harriman’s response, Kennedy told him to forward Galbraith’s memo to McNamara and to instruct Galbraith to discuss a mutual withdrawal of North Vietnamese and American forces from South Vietnam with the Indians.
Kennedy didn’t trust that Harriman would follow his directive. He saw Harriman as intent on making Vietnamese policy without regard for his wishes. He sensed that Harriman thought he knew better than the president how to deal with this crisis. Kennedy continued to worry that Harriman and other hawks in the State Department and Pentagon were more inclined to fight in Vietnam than he was. He wanted to be sure that Galbraith would be instructed to seize upon any opportunity that might allow the United States to reduce its involvement in Vietnam. Kennedy wasn’t ready to sign on to negotiations, but he didn’t want to exclude that possibility; at least, not yet.
After reviewing Galbraith’s argument for a political solution, McNamara and the military chiefs emphatically dissented. They argued that the policies in place had not been given a fair trial and that a negotiated settlement in Vietnam would have disastrous effects on U.S. relations with allies everywhere. Galbraith’s proposals were “tantamount to abandoning South Vietnam to the Communists” and losing Southeast Asia. The country was “a testing ground of U.S. resolution in Asia. . . . The Department of Defense cannot concur in the policy advanced by Ambassador Galbraith,” the Chiefs told Kennedy, “but believe strongly that present policy toward South Vietnam should be pursued vigorously to a successful conclusion.”
When Bowles followed in June and July with additional memos urging consideration of neutralizing Vietnam, Rusk told him, “You realize, of course, you’re spouting the Communist line.” The State Department’s Far Eastern Bureau called Bowles’s initiatives “unrealistic, impractical and premature.” Bowles warned that a likely deterioration in South Vietnam would force a choice between increased troop commitments and an embarrassing withdrawal, but his prediction was dismissed as unworthy of further discussion. It was a measure of how intense the argument over Vietnam had become that Rusk would accuse Bowles of communist sympathies. Vietnam had taken on meaning in the Cold War that greatly exceeded its importance for U.S. national security. But any officeholder who might have pointed out Vietnam’s inflated importance would have exposed himself to attacks not only on his judgment but also on his commitment to defeating the communists.
On May 1, Kennedy had already put aside consideration of neutralizing Vietnam and indicated as much to advisers who doubted the wisdom of trying to negotiate a settlement with Hanoi. During a White House discussion with his national security officials about the merits of Galbraith’s suggestion for negotiating a neutralized coalition government for South Vietnam, Harriman and Roger Hilsman “vigorously opposed this recommendation and the President decided against it.” After the “loss” of China to Mao Zedong’s communists in 1949 and Truman’s failure to oust Kim Il Sung’s communist regime in North Korea, the domestic political consequences, more than the national security perils, made “losing” South Vietnam through a political arrangement too risky for Kennedy to accept or openly favor in the first half of 1962.
At the same time, however, he remained quietly receptive to hearing about any possible interest by Hanoi in discussing a settlement. On May 16, Rusk told Galbraith that Kennedy was interested in a conversation Galbraith had had in New Delhi with the Indian representative to the international control commission on Vietnam. The Indian thought that there might be a chance for negotiations in the future and Kennedy wanted Galbraith to continue informal discussions about the likelihood of talks on ending the conflict in Vietnam and ending U.S. participation in an unwanted war.
Administration resistance to a negotiated settlement partly rested on the conviction that, despite relying on the unpopular Diem, U.S. sponsored anticommunist military and political actions were showing positive signs—or at least that’s what American officials in Saigon were telling McNamara. At a March hearing before the House Appropriations Committee, which was considering the annual foreign aid budget, McNamara voiced unqualified optimism about U.S. policy in Vietnam. In fact, he saw a definite endpoint without the need for U.S. ground forces. Vietnam’s troops, aided by U.S. advisers, were “terminating subversion, covert aggression and combat operations.”
When Secretary of the Army Elvis Stahr returned from a visit to Vietnam in April, he reported that the Vietnamese were “greatly encouraged by our policy toward them and by our strong support. Slowly but surely they are working out the techniques of counter-insurgency and of civic action.” The South Vietnamese army was becoming an effective fighting force. Harkins and Nolting were working well together, and since Stahr had served for two years in Asia during World War II and recently spent much time focused on the problems of the Far East, he was able to make authoritative judgments on conditions in Vietnam, or so he and others were ready to believe. At the same time, a U.S. Embassy official who visited four South Vietnamese provinces, where he spoke with various officials and local residents, saw the great likelihood of a substantial improvement of security in a year or two. Things were “not too rosy” at the moment, but “we are moving in the right direction.” Sterling Cottrell, the director of a Defense Department task force on Vietnam, returned from meetings in Saigon convinced that “we have found the right formula.”
A four-day visit to South Vietnam by McNamara from May 8 to 11 gave added support to rising hopes. But McNamara’s inspection tour was not an excursion by a commonly tough-minded skeptic; rather, it was a ceremonial glimpse at the war front as portrayed to him by General Harkins, who was intent on persuading him that they could defeat the Viet Cong. When Harkins looked at a briefing map showing more areas under communist control than he wished McNamara to see, he directed a junior officer to doctor the map, which then gave the secretary a much brighter picture of the fighting. As eager for a victory as Harkins, McNamara uncritically accepted what he was shown and signed off on a Defense Department report describing an atmosphere of restrained optimism in every area he visited. In Pentagon-speak, McNamara declared that “victory is clearly attainable through the mechanisms that are now in motion.” The whole operation from McNamara down was at best an exercise in auto-intoxication and at worst a use of unmitigated deception. If the facts did not support a rosy war scenario, Harkins was determined to make it appear that way and McNamara was all too ready to embrace good news.
Journalists who trailed McNamara on his tour were puzzled by his seeming acceptance of all that the military was telling him. When he echoed the feel-good reports of his briefers to reporters during an informal session in Nolting’s home, one asked McNamara if he might have a different view if he extended his stay. “Absolutely not,” he said. He thought his optimism would be strengthened. Neil Sheehan, a young United Press International reporter who had only been in Saigon for two weeks, had heard enough from his more seasoned colleagues to confront McNamara privately about his conclusions. As he was about to get in his car, Sheehan pressed him to say how he could be so optimistic after so brief a visit to the front lines. McNamara abruptly replied: “Every quantitative measurement we have shows that we’re winning this war.”
Did he believe it? Probably. It was an expression of his unbounded confidence in social science engineering. And so whatever the current realities, he was confident that they could find the means to defeat a smaller, less well equipped enemy. Moreover, after sixteen m
onths in which he had been repeatedly at cross-purposes with his military subordinates, the defense secretary was keen to support their plans for winning a conflict that might become a model for fighting other guerrilla wars. Besides, he and Kennedy didn’t want to “lose” Vietnam, and there seemed to be no current alternative to what the military proposed to do.
McNamara’s snub of Sheehan reflected the White House and Pentagon view that the journalists were an impediment to winning in Vietnam. The reporters, however, had no desire to undermine the Kennedy administration’s reach for victory in Vietnam. But they had a different take on what they saw in Saigon and the provinces and believed that they were not only doing their job by reporting what they learned but also serving U.S. and Vietnamese interests.
Consequently, they could not accept McNamara’s upbeat view of the conflict. They remained critical of Diem and continued to publish accounts questioning prospects for success in the war. July 25 and July 29 stories in the New York Times reported that some American embassy staff and military advisers thought that the war was not going well and that McNamara’s optimism was unwarranted. Administration spokesmen responded with fresh pronouncements on the importance of saving Vietnam from the communists and the likelihood that it could be done without U.S. combat forces—only advisers and matériel.
Homer Bigart, the New York Times correspondent in Saigon, who in 1962 had a reputation as a tough-minded seeker of truth, thought that U.S. actions in Vietnam were ineffective and began saying so in his dispatches. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for reporting during World War II and in Korea, the fifty-four-year-old Bigart angered Diem, Nolting, and American military chiefs, who considered him a subversive force. In the middle of May, after Bigart published a critical story about the South Vietnamese government’s shaky hold on the provinces, Lemnitzer told a meeting of a Special Counterinsurgency Group that Bigart’s report ignored the fact that the defense of various provinces was going well. Always alert to any published story that might embarrass the administration, Bobby Kennedy urged Lemnitzer to send the president a note “pointing out Bigart’s inaccuracy.”
Despite his reservations about the administration’s growing involvement in Vietnam, George Ball also defended its policy. In speeches in Chicago and Detroit, he announced that U.S. national security demanded a proactive policy in Southeast Asia, where the communists were aggressively trying to seize control of South Vietnam and dominate the region. Although conceding that it would take years, he asserted that we would definitely win by relying on the South Vietnamese. “We are not running the war,” he asserted. Harriman as well weighed in with a New York Times Magazine article explaining “What We Are Doing in Southeast Asia.” Bundy and Kennedy, who remained keen to negotiate a settlement in Vietnam, worried that the Ball speeches might reduce chances of persuading Hanoi to talk peace.
Because serious negotiations seemed like a distant reality, Kennedy and his advisers focused on hopes of aiding South Vietnam to find the wherewithal to defeat the Viet Cong. No one discounted the difficulties, but wishful thinking blotted out harsh truths. U.S. military and embassy officials put a positive face on any glimmer of hope. At the end of May, the embassy reported that a Strategic Hamlets program, which aimed to defend some sixteen hundred villages across the provinces from the Viet Cong, who compelled villagers to join their forces and supply foodstuffs, showed “considerable momentum behind [a] promising idea.” Despite troubling “weaknesses in the GVN administration, . . . US counsel and advice are becoming increasingly acceptable and should produce further dividends,” the embassy told Washington.
The positive reports became a spur to calls for more action and encouraged additional expressions of optimism. Rostow once again urged a more robust military campaign against Hanoi, including bombing raids against North Vietnam’s transportation and power grids and the mining of Haiphong Harbor. In June, Nolting reported that, in spite of some setbacks, he saw considerable improvement. On June 18, picking up on the hopeful signs coming from Vietnam, Hilsman told Harriman that deterioration in political and military conditions in Vietnam had been arrested, with “heartening progress” in the effectiveness of South Vietnam’s fighting forces. Chances of success in the war were “good” if Saigon made continuing progress in its current strategy. In the cliché of the day, there was growing light at the end of the tunnel.
CHAPTER 8
“If We Listen to Them, None of Us Will Be Alive”
After eighteen months of interactions with his counselors, Kennedy had diminished confidence in most of the men advising him on policy. With the exception of Bobby, who was principally a sounding board and instrument for testing out ideas on others, he thought it best to rely less on his associates and more on himself for the hard decisions he seemed to be confronting all the time.
Neither Rusk nor McNamara nor Bundy nor Rostow nor Taylor had impressed him as all that masterful about any of the big issues they had faced on Cuba, Berlin, or Vietnam. As for Sorensen and Schlesinger, they had been impressively helpful in composing speeches and preparing him for press conferences, but they were as much at sea as everyone else about how to solve his foreign policy dilemmas.
And Schlesinger in particular had become something of a liability. The conservative press was describing him as promoting socialist ideas. In June 1962, Schlesinger confided to his journal: “I have a feeling that JFK is a little edgy about all this and may even be beginning to wonder whether I am not more of a liability than a working asset.” At the end of the month, when some high jinks at a Bobby Kennedy party, with Arthur shoving Ethel Kennedy into a pool, and accusations that he was unpatriotic and antireligious and had violated government policy by accepting payments for magazine articles became front-page news, Schlesinger was mortified and justifiably convinced that “whatever limited effectiveness I may have had will be diminished.” Kennedy advised him not to “worry about it. . . . All they are doing is shooting at me through you. Their whole line is to pin everything on the professors—you, Heller, Rostow.” Nonetheless, it rightly persuaded Schlesinger that Kennedy would need to hold him at arm’s length.
In the summer of 1962, no group of advisers was less helpful than a Vietnam task force describing great progress in the conflict. They saw slow but clear forward movement. On a visit to the United States, South Vietnam’s Foreign Minister Vu Van Mau echoed their optimism. But Lansdale and McNamara wanted a sharper picture of what was happening on the ground. When Lansdale designed a questionnaire that U.S. officers could use to gather data, McNamara told Lansdale: “An excellent set of questions Ed—it is this kind of info I need & am not receiving.”
Kennedy was reluctant to take the happy talk at face value. In July, during negotiations in Geneva about concluding a neutrality agreement on Laos, an intermediary asked Harriman if he was willing to meet privately with North Vietnamese foreign minister Ung Van Kiem. When Kennedy gave Harriman the go-ahead, James Barrington, the British undersecretary for Burmese affairs, arranged a meeting in his hotel room. Harriman and Ung talked past each other, exchanging accusations of blame for the fighting. “We got absolutely nowhere,” Harriman’s deputy recalled. “We hit a stone wall.” It was enough to encourage feelings that the only route out of Vietnam was through more U.S. aid and counsel that gave Saigon the wherewithal to beat back the insurgents.
At the end of July, McNamara returned to Hawaii for another meeting with Harkins, Nolting, and other embassy and military officials stationed in Saigon. Given the dead end in possible negotiations with Hanoi, the impulse to see a military solution to the Vietnam problem was greater than ever. Moreover, Harkins and Nolting could not have been more upbeat about prospects for a successful outcome. Harkins told McNamara that Diem was winning the war. McNamara wanted to know “how long a period before the VC could be eliminated as a disturbing force.” Harkins was unprepared for the question and clueless as to an answer, but McNamara’s aide recalls him “jumping up in his chair,” collecting himself, and answering: a year
after South Vietnamese forces were “fully operational and really pressing the VC in all areas.”
McNamara, however, believed it best to take a conservative view and assume that it would be three years before they could declare victory. It was all guesswork, resting more on hope than anything concrete—an astonishing bit of flimflam from someone who so prided himself on statistical analysis. Their problem during this time, McNamara believed, would be maintaining public support. U.S. losses in the fighting would raise questions about the wisdom of being in Vietnam. McNamara wanted plans for reducing U.S. involvement in the conflict that he could make public at the same time that the United States expanded its operations.
To delay public discomfort with the fighting, he directed his public affairs officer to begin getting “good material in the press.” Nothing was as perceptive on McNamara’s part about the growing U.S. role in Vietnam as his understanding that public dissent would become a major problem in fighting the war. But none of the national security advisers wanted to ask why, if the communists are actually losing, weren’t they willing to salvage something by talking? Instead, the objective was to issue upbeat reports and hope that the good news would eventually reflect reality.
In August, the State Department told Nolting that the White House and the whole government were committed to winning in Vietnam. But the president wanted hard data on why the embassy in Saigon thought the war was going so well. Michael Forrestal, the National Security Council’s expert on Vietnam, told Bundy that they wouldn’t really know if the war was progressing until the end of November, when the rainy season ended and military activity increased. He expected to know then whether sending more advisers and facilitating Strategic Hamlets were showing any results. He thought that American casualties would increase and “we will be in for real trouble” unless the public believed that they were winning the war.