He believed it was worth giving the Hamlets program a chance to work, but warned that if they failed, the United States would face the possibility of “a truly massive commitment of American military personnel and other resources—in short going to war fully ourselves against the guerrillas—and the establishment of some form of neocolonial rule in South Vietnam. That is an alternative I most emphatically do not recommend. . . . We are not, of course, at that point at this time. But the great increase in American military commitment this year has tended to point us in that direction.” Mansfield warned against a rapid slide into a quagmire. He urged a reassessment of U.S. interests in Southeast Asia, which might discourage any expansion of U.S. commitments to Vietnam’s civil war. He shared the English view that “[e]very people have a right to their own Wars of the Roses.” The failure of the present effort should persuade the administration to seek neutralization of the region.
A front-page New York Times story by Halberstam on December 3 describing Mansfield as “Cool on Vietnam War” angered Kennedy. In a discussion with Mansfield at his Palm Beach retreat in December, he told the senator that his assessment did not tally with what he was hearing from administration subordinates. Afterward, Kennedy told Kenny O’Donnell that “I got angry with Mike for disagreeing with our policy so completely, and I got angry with myself because I found myself agreeing with him.” He was more irritated with his military and national security advisers for once again urging him to take on what might prove to be an impossible challenge. This could be worse than the Bay of Pigs. The failure there was a quick disaster, but this could be a slow, drawn-out fiasco that could cost American lives and significant amounts of money and undermine him politically at home and abroad.
In public, he tried to maintain a measured posture on America’s part in the conflict. At a December 12 press conference, a journalist described “a good deal of discouragement about the progress” in Vietnam despite a year of stepped-up aid, and asked Kennedy’s assessment. The president acknowledged that “we are putting in a major effort” with about ten or eleven times the number of men there than a year ago and a lot of equipment. He also described “a number of casualties and great difficulty . . . in fighting a guerrilla war. . . . We don’t see the end of the tunnel,” he said, but he didn’t think conditions were worse than a year before.
Events in January of the new year deepened Kennedy’s private skepticism about rescuing South Vietnam from a communist takeover. On January 3, 1963, in a pitched battle at Ap Bac, a village thirty-five miles from Saigon in the rich Mekong Delta, which the government saw as vital to its survival, a Viet Cong battalion—a force of some two hundred men—inflicted a stunning defeat on Diem’s forces. Despite a four-to-one advantage in troops backed by artillery, armor, and helicopters, the South Vietnamese performed miserably. According to a U.S. adviser’s after-action report, they showed “a reluctance to incur casualties, an inability to take advantage of air superiority, and a lack of discipline.” In short, the government’s men could not match the enemies’ willingness to take losses and fight for something they believed in. The battle also cost the lives of three American advisers, including an Army captain “out front pleading with them [the South Vietnamese] to attack.” Five U.S. helicopters ferrying troops into battle were shot down. When the defeat became headline news in the United States, the Joint Chiefs, instead of acknowledging that military advisers had had little success in turning South Vietnamese troops and their commanders into an effective army, criticized the reports as distorting “both the importance of the action and the damage suffered by the US/GVN forces.”
To refute the press accounts, which stirred complaints that the Kennedy administration had been hiding the truth about Vietnam from the public, General Harkins and Admiral Felt attacked the newsmen as irresponsible for saying that the South Vietnamese forces didn’t and won’t fight and for ignoring victories that they asserted were occurring more frequently. To bolster the view that the war was going much better than journalists said, the Chiefs sent Army Chief of Staff General Earle G. Wheeler to lead a team of Pentagon officers on an inspection trip to Saigon to report on future prospects for the war. A career Army officer, the fifty-four-year-old Wheeler had served in a variety of senior staff positions, but had limited experience as a field commander and deferred to those who did. He seemed unlikely to take issue with what Harkins thought, which is what the Chiefs wanted. If the United States wasn’t winning on the battlefield, at least it could encourage perceptions that it was until the tide turned against the Viet Cong.
Because Mansfield’s report had so troubled him, Kennedy earlier had directed Hilsman and Forrestal to make a fact-finding trip to Vietnam to see if anything could be done to improve chances of a successful outcome. On the ground for ten days beginning December 31, the two kept extensive notes on what they found, which was the basis for a lengthy report they sent Kennedy on January 25. They saw clear evidence of improvement in the war from the previous year and substantial optimism at the U.S. Embassy and among the military about long-term results in the fighting. Harkins and Nolting were decidedly optimistic.
But the “negative side of the ledger,” Hilsman and Forrestal reported, “is still awesome.” They were hard-pressed to understand the excessively positive official outlook: “Things are not going nearly so well as the people here in Saigon, both military and civilian, think they are.” They agreed “that we are probably winning, but certainly more slowly than we had hoped. At the rate it is now going the war will last longer than we would like, cost more in terms of both lives and money than we anticipated, and prolong the period in which a sudden and dramatic event would upset the gains already made.” They suggested the need for a plan better coordinating civilian and military actions; providing some long-range thinking about future conditions in South Vietnam; better understanding of how to conduct a counter-guerrilla war; and means of persuading Diem to win greater popularity among his countrymen. It was hardly a prescription for how to win the war—just another call to find the means to do so.
Kennedy at once read the battle at Ap Bac and the Hilsman-Forrestal report as evidence that Galbraith, Ball, and Mansfield were right about the nearly impossible task of defending an unpopular regime in Saigon against a highly motivated insurgency. When he read press reports of visits to Vietnam by senior U.S. military and civilian officials that increased impressions of American involvement in the war, he complained to Forrestal on January 25: “that is exactly what I don’t want to do.”
On February 1, Forrestal reminded Kennedy that he would meet that afternoon with General Wheeler as well as Rusk, McNamara, Taylor, Harriman, and McCone to hear Wheeler’s report on Vietnam. Forrestal listed seven questions Kennedy might want to ask the group, including whether a new ambassador should replace Nolting, whether the administration was being firm enough with Diem, and whether the United States should reconsider the way it was conducting military and political operations.
After the meeting, Forrestal apologized to Kennedy for the “complete waste of your time.” The meeting was supposed “to provide you an opportunity to initiate action on some of the problems in South Vietnam” listed in his earlier memo. “The rosy euphoria generated by General Wheeler’s report made this device unworkable.” Speaking for the Joint Chiefs, but especially Taylor, who even more than McNamara saw the conflict as his war, Wheeler tried to counter the negative impressions of Hilsman and Forrestal and the journalists. He described a situation in South Vietnam that had changed from near desperation to likely victory. The United States was winning and only needed to stay the course. Because he and the Chiefs did not want to attack Kennedy’s civilian advisers directly, Wheeler said the greatest problem was the reporting of U.S. journalists in Saigon, who had done “great harm” by encouraging public and congressional concern the United States was locked into a losing effort. It was transparent to Forrestal and Kennedy that the military was spinning its wheels. No doubt they believed their own rhetoric, but
Wheeler’s performance only deepened Kennedy’s conviction that they weren’t to be trusted.
For the next three months, from the beginning of February to the end of April, while he focused on nuclear test ban negotiations, finding some fresh approach to Cuban problems, and made plans for a European trip, Kennedy gave limited attention to Southeast Asia. Four passing mentions in his January State of the Union address, led by an optimistic assessment that the “spear point of aggression had been blunted in Vietnam,” underscored his wish to put the conflict at the bottom of his priorities. He left it to his military and civilian officials and the journalists in Saigon to argue about how the United States could defeat the communists and withdraw from Vietnam. Kennedy allowed the problem to fester rather than confront a hard decision to expand U.S. involvement or shut it down. His hope was eventually to withdraw from Vietnam with at least the appearance, if not the actuality, of victory. It was something of a pipe dream, but simply walking away from Vietnam did not strike him as a viable option—for both domestic political and national security reasons.
On March 6, when a reporter at a press conference asked his reaction to a Mansfield recommendation for a reassessment of U.S. Asian policy and a possible reduction of aid, he said, “I don’t see how we are going to be able, unless we are going to pull out of Southeast Asia and turn it over to the Communists . . . to reduce very much our economic programs and military programs in South Viet-Nam, in Cambodia, in Thailand. I think that unless you want to withdraw from the field and decide that it is in the national interest to permit the area to collapse, . . . it would be impossible to substantially change it particularly as we are in a very intensive struggle in those areas.” He asserted that if the communists controlled all of Southeast Asia, it would jeopardize India and all of the Middle East. “I don’t see any prospect of the burden being lightened for the United States in Southeast Asia in the next year if we are going to do the job and meet what I think are very clear national needs.” He said nothing, however, about what might come after 1964, signaling by his silence the hope that by then they might be able to ensure Vietnam’s autonomy or at least the appearance of it and bring home American advisers.
While Kennedy stood aside, the debate over Vietnam continued. On one side were the determined optimists: Nolting and Harkins in Saigon and the Chiefs led by Taylor in Washington, with unflinching support from Wheeler and Marine General Victor H. Krulak, special assistant to the Chiefs for counterinsurgency. They believed winning in Vietnam was an essential predicate to beating back communist insurgencies in developing countries. As important, they thought that the expanded U.S. involvement of the past year had established the conditions for victory. And the path to success was not through political reforms imposed on Diem, but through military action. As Wheeler had said in a speech at Fordham University in November 1962, “it is fashionable in some quarters to say that the problems in Southeast Asia are primarily political and economic rather than military. I do not agree. The essence of the problem in Vietnam is military.”
Civilian advisers, led by Harriman, Hilsman, and Forrestal, were no less eager to defeat the Viet Cong insurgency. But they were less certain about the outcome and were convinced that political rather than military initiatives were the key to success: Pressuring Diem and the Nhus to introduce political reforms was essential to Saigon’s long-term stability. They also believed that South Vietnam’s armed forces needed to take greater direction from U.S. military advisers in order to ensure more aggressive action.
American journalists in Saigon represented a third side in the debate. They did not think that a Diem government could outlast the communists. It was a corrupt regime sponsoring an Army led by handpicked Mandarins more committed to preserving their privileges and insulating their troops from battlefield losses than to sacrifices in the service of victory. These correspondents made every effort to expose the weaknesses in South Vietnam’s government and army. They saw their job as telling the truth about an unpopular autocratic regime and an army that wouldn’t fight. They were not, however, urging a withdrawal from Vietnam, but a change in government and military actions that could bring victory.
The argument in Washington and Saigon over how to win the war and escape from Vietnam intensified in early February when Forrestal suggested to Harriman that the United States broaden its contacts with noncommunists. Forrestal saw it giving the United States a more independent position in Vietnam and increasing our alternatives if a change of government became desirable. He thought that the embassy should make clear to Diem that U.S. interests meant “a friendly attitude towards all his people” and a full airing of differences with him.
Harriman passed Forrestal’s letter along to Nolting, who bristled at the suggestion that “we are living in cocoons here, dealing only with GVN officials and deliberately cutting ourselves off from other Vietnamese elements.” Nolting warned that encouraging oppositionists could “stimulate revolution. . . . If the idea is to try to build up an alternative to the present government . . . I am opposed.” He saw no alternative to Diem. Forrestal was scathing about Nolting’s resistance. “It’s about what I expected,” he told Harriman, “since this is more a question of attitude than of making a case one way or the other. . . . Fritz tends to be more concerned about preserving the legitimate government than keeping in touch with the opposition.” Schlesinger weighed in on Forrestal’s side, telling him that Nolting’s letter to Harriman “is one of the most dismal documents I have ever encountered.” He suggested replacing Nolting in Saigon. What no one wanted to confront was that the bureaucratic infighting signaled America’s involvement in a failing policy.
The one thing policymakers in Saigon and Washington could agree on was the destructive influence of the journalists on the war effort. When Hilsman held an informal meeting with American reporters during his January inspection trip, it turned into a shouting match. The journalists described Diem as hostile to his U.S. advisers, whom he was ignoring, and the South Vietnamese government as on the road to defeat. Hilsman, convinced that his firsthand experience with guerrilla operations in Burma during World War II gave him superior understanding, snidely dismissed the newsmen as “naïve.” The important thing, he told them, was not for Americans “to be liked, but to be tough and get things done.” The reporters had no quarrel with that prescription, but they were less accepting of Hilsman’s conviction, or at least hope, that Diem could be pressured into reforming his government and convincing his army to fight more aggressively, as the Americans were advising.
The U.S. military was angrier than Hilsman was with the journalists. When Admiral Harry Felt arrived in Vietnam after the Ap Bac debacle, Sheehan greeted him at the airport with a request for a comment. “I don’t believe what I have been reading in the papers,” he said, before hearing from subordinates in Saigon. “As I understand it, it was a Vietnamese victory—not a defeat, as the papers say.” Harkins, who was standing next to him, parroted his optimism. “Yes, that’s right. It was a Vietnamese victory. It certainly was.” Informed by an aide that his questioner was Sheehan, Felt said, “So, you’re Sheehan. . . . You ought to talk to some of the people who’ve got the facts.” Without missing a beat, Sheehan fired back, “You’re right, Admiral, and that’s why I went down there every day.”
There were also dissenting voices within the ranks of the American military and civilian managers trying to chart a winning strategy in Vietnam. Among the most informed and outspoken critics was John Paul Vann. He was thirty-seven years old, an up-through-the-ranks lieutenant colonel who had seen more combat operations in Vietnam—participating in more than two hundred helicopter assault landings—than any other American. He was a fearless warrior, frequently exposing himself to dangers in attempts to motivate aggressive action by the Vietnamese troops he accompanied on missions. His frustration at the refusal of the ARVN to take advantage of greater numbers and superior arms to attack the Viet Cong boiled over into outspoken complaints. A highly critical report he w
rote on Ap Bac angered his superiors, who wanted the whole command in Saigon to speak with one voice. Completing his tour of duty in Vietnam in April 1963 and assigned to the Pentagon, Vann tried to brief his superiors on Diem’s and ARVN’s failings, but Taylor, Wheeler, and Krulak, who shared the Saigon command’s aversion to conceding Vietnamese imperviousness to U.S. advice, refused to give Vann a hearing. It was groupthink unworthy of such intelligent and competent leaders and a formula for defeat in the war.
The State Department also downplayed tensions with the Vietnamese that undermined prospects of a more stable and secure nation; it was too frustrating to concede that nation-building in Vietnam was beyond Washington’s reach. As Hilsman told Rusk at the beginning of April, “the strategic concept . . . for South Viet-Nam remains basically sound. If we can ever manage to have it implemented fully and with vigor, the result will be victory.” But no one in the department seemed to have reliable suggestions for implementing it or could even demonstrate that the overall plan would work.
In March, the General Accounting Office had circulated a draft report on aid programs for Vietnam that was severely critical of the Vietnamese government’s failure to mobilize its resources. Nolting pressed the department to bury this “public chastisement of the GVN” as likely to encourage coup plotting, raise enemy morale, and reverse recent gains in the fighting. The department arranged to have the report classified and hidden from the press and public. Similarly, when a public affairs officer in the department took issue with the conviction that the correspondents in Saigon were a menace to the U.S. mission in the conflict, arguing that the reporters were better informed and had a clearer understanding of conditions in Vietnam than most U.S. officials in the country, the department shelved his report.