A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (2 page)

The man who had been the attending physician at the birth of South Vietnam, Maj. Gen. Edward Lansdale, was standing on the steps beneath the portico, saying hello to friends and acquaintances as they passed him on their way into the chapel. He had retired from government service four years earlier. He was a widower and alone because of the death of his wife that spring. “I’m sorry about your wife, Ed,” one man said, shaking his hand. “Thanks,” Lansdale replied with his habitual smile and a throaty voice that was now tired and old.

It was difficult to imagine that this ordinary-looking man of sixty-four had been the legendary clandestine operative of the Central Intelligence Agency, the man who had guided Ramón Magsaysay, the pro-American Filipino leader, through the campaign that had crushed the Communist Hukbalahap rebels in the Philippines in the early 1950s; that this unstylish man in a light brown business suit had been the famed missionary of American democracy in the Cold War era, the “Colonel Hillandale” of a best-selling novel of the period,
The Ugly American
. In an ironic
play on its title, the novel told how imaginative Americans filled with the ideals of their own Revolution could get Asians to defeat the dark ideology of Communism in the Orient.

Lansdale had arrived in Saigon eight years before Vann. He had gone there in 1954 after his triumph in the Philippines, when the United States was tentatively but openly extending its power into Vietnam to replace the French, whose will had been broken by their defeat at Dien Bien Phu. America’s new hope in Saigon, a Catholic mandarin named Ngo Dinh Diem, had faced more enemies than it seemed possible to vanquish. Arrayed against him were rival politicians, pro-French dissidents in the South Vietnamese Army, and two religious sects and a brotherhood of organized criminals. The religious sects and the organized-crime society also had their own private armies. Lansdale had arranged the defeat of them all. He had denied the Vietnamese Communists the chaos that would have permitted them to take over Vietnam south of the 17th Parallel without another war. He had convinced the Eisenhower administration that Diem could govern and that South Vietnam could be built into a nation that would stand with America.

Waiting just behind Lansdale, a step above him, was Lt. Col. Lucien Conein, the best-known member of the team Lansdale had employed to help him preside over the creation of South Vietnam. Conein was a rough and sentimental man, an adventurer born in Paris and raised in Kansas. He had enlisted in the French Army at the beginning of World War II. After the fall of France and the entry of the United States into the war, he had joined the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II forerunner of the CIA. He had first landed in Indochina by parachute in 1945, under the pseudonym Lieutenant Laurent, to conduct raids against the Japanese Imperial Army. He had been of considerable assistance to Lansdale ten years later because of his felicity for what the intelligence trade calls “dirty tricks.” When Lansdale had returned to the United States in 1956, Conein had stayed on in South Vietnam, and in 1963 he had accomplished the act that is one of the highest professional aspirations for a man of Conein’s calling—setting up a successful coup d’état. He had been the liaison agent to the South Vietnamese generals who had been encouraged to overthrow the man whose position Lansdale had taken such pains to consolidate. Ngo Dinh Diem had outlasted his usefulness to the United States in the intervening years. He and his family had been getting in the way of the Kennedy administration’s campaign to suppress the Communist-led rebellion. Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, had been assassinated in the coup.

Joseph Alsop, the newspaper columnist and journalist of the American
Establishment, was already inside the chapel. He was sitting in one of the center pews on the left, dressed in a sober blue suit made by his English tailor, with a matching polka-dot bow tie and a white shirt. John Kennedy had once displayed his esteem for Alsop’s advice and friendship by stopping at Alsop’s Georgetown home for a bowl of turtle soup on the night of his inauguration in 1961. It was fitting that Alsop should attend Vann’s funeral. He was a grandnephew of Theodore Roosevelt, an instigator and captain in battle in the Spanish-American War at the turn of the century. That “splendid little war,” as a friend and collaborator of Roosevelt had pronounced it at the time, had gained the United States the Philippines, made America a power in the Pacific, and started the nation on the course to Vietnam. Alsop was a faithful scion of the Anglo-Saxon elite of the Northeast that had determined the standards of taste, morality, and intellectual respectability for the rest of the country. He had given his professional life to public battle for the expansionist foreign policy his forebears had conceived. He regarded Vietnam as a test of the will and ability of the United States to sustain that policy and had been undeviating in his advocacy of the war. At sixty-one he remained the man of contrasts he had always been. A bulldoggish face belied his slight frame, and the many lines and wrinkles of his face were exaggerated by large, round, dark horn-rimmed glasses. He was an aesthete who collected French furniture and antique Chinese porcelain and Japanese lacquer; an accomplished amateur historian of art and archaeology and the ancient civilizations of Greece and the Middle East; a man of kindness, loyalty, and consideration to his friends and relatives—the godfather of nearly thirty of their children. In his professional life, however, he was the ferocious combatant his granduncle had been. He did not see those who disagreed with him as merely incorrect or misguided. He depicted them as stupid men who acted from petty or selfish motives. In the final years of Vann’s life, Alsop had been his principal champion in the press. Alsop had come to have a singular affection for this Virginia cracker who so differed from him in background and personality. He had felt toward Vann a sense of comradeship.

Beside Alsop, wearing the three silver stars of a lieutenant general on the epaulets of his dark green Army tunic, was another warrior whom Alsop admired, William DePuy. Bill DePuy was also a slight man, but his features at fifty-two were the tawny, hard ones of a soldier who enjoys his trade and keeps himself fit for it. He had been a model of the generation of majors and lieutenant colonels who had led the battalions in Europe during World War II and then gone to war in Vietnam
as generals accustomed to winning. He combined intelligence and skill at articulating his ideas with an impetuous self-confidence and courage. He had been convinced of the invincibility and universal application of the system of warfare the U.S. Army had derived from World War II. The system consisted of building a killing machine that subjected an enemy to the prodigious firepower that American technology provided. DePuy had been the main architect of the building and deployment of the machine in Vietnam. He had been chief of operations on Westmoreland’s staff in 1965 when Lyndon Johnson had persevered in Kennedy’s commitment and embarked upon a full-scale war. DePuy had planned the strategy of attrition that was supposed to achieve victory over the Vietnamese Communists. The machine was going to decimate the Viet Cong guerrillas and kill off the troops of the North Vietnamese Army faster than the men in Hanoi could send them down the Ho Chi Minh Trail into the South. The machine was going to make the Vietnamese soldiers on the Communist side die until the will of the survivors and their leaders was broken. Westmoreland had rewarded DePuy for his talent at strategic planning with the leadership of the 1st Infantry Division, “the Big Red One.” DePuy had set himself apart from his fellow generals by turning the firepower of the machine loose with even more lavishness than they did and by ruthlessly dismissing any subordinate commander who did not meet his standard of aggressiveness in battle. He and Vann had clashed because Vann had considered the war-of-attrition strategy the cause of needless death and destruction and a waste of American soldiers and munitions. Vann had been particularly contemptuous of DePuy’s practice of it. From Washington in 1972, however, DePuy watched Vann wield the firepower of the artillery, the helicopter gunships, the jet fighter-bombers, and the B-52 Stratofortresses to beat back the North Vietnamese Army at Kontum. When Vann was killed, DePuy paid him a DePuy tribute. “He died like a soldier,” DePuy said, and came to sit at his funeral alongside their mutual advocate, Joseph Alsop.

Senator Edward Kennedy was late. He got to the funeral shortly before the service was to begin at 11:00
A.M.
He entered the chapel as unostentatiously as was possible for a Kennedy—by having one of the ushers seat him in a pew in the back. The last of the Kennedy brothers had turned against the war that his elder brother John had set the nation to fight. He had not kept the faith, as Vann had, with the call of his brother’s inaugural address, which was engraved on the granite of John Kennedy’s tomb at Arlington: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any
hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to insure the survival and success of liberty.” Liberty as defined by John Kennedy and the statesmen of his Presidency had meant an American-imposed order in Kennedy’s “New Frontier” beyond America’s shores. The price of trying to organize the world had been the war in Vietnam, and that price had gone too high for Edward Kennedy to bear. His brother Robert had also begun to turn against the war before he too had been assassinated and buried in a simple grave near John’s elaborate tomb. Edward Kennedy and John Vann had become friends, because Edward Kennedy had shared Vann’s concern for the anguish of the Vietnamese peasantry and had, like Vann, attempted to persuade the U.S. government to wage war with reason and restraint. Edward Kennedy had made it his special mission to alleviate the suffering of the civilian war wounded and the peasants who had been reduced to homeless refugees. He had traveled to Vietnam to see their plight, had held Senate hearings, and had brought political pressure to bear for more humane conditions in the refugee camps, for adequate hospitals, and for an end to the indiscriminate bombing and shelling of the countryside. He and Vann had corresponded, and Vann had briefed him in Vietnam and passed him information to help exert more influence on the administration in Washington.

Daniel Ellsberg, the turncoat knight of the crusade, was sitting in the second pew just behind Vann’s family at the right front of the chapel. He had flown to the funeral from Los Angeles, where his lawyers were engaged in pre trial maneuvering. He was a pariah to those within the closed society of government secrecy, who had once considered him a valued member of their order. He was a traitor who had violated their code of morality and loyalty. Some resented the conspicuous seat he occupied in the chapel. He did not appear the pariah. He still dressed like one of them, as he had learned to do at Harvard. His suit was a conservative three-button model, a blue pinstripe with a matching striped shirt and an equally conservative foulard tie in a narrow knot. At forty-one he had let his hair grow from the crew-cut style he had worn when he had first met Vann in Vietnam seven years earlier. The frizzly, gray-black curls framed his high forehead and gentled the angular features of his lean and tanned face.

Ellsberg was a complicated man. The son of middle-class Jewish parents who had converted to Christian Science, he was an intellectual and a man of action. His mind had surpassing analytical ability. His ego was so forceful it sometimes got out of control. His emotions were in conflict. He was at once a florid romantic and an ascetic with a pained conscience.
What he believed, he believed completely and sought to propagate with missionary fervor. He had benefited from the social democracy practiced by the American Establishment by obtaining an education that had qualified him for a position of eminence in its new state, the great web of military and civilian bureaucracies under the presidency that World War II had created. A competitive scholarship funded by the Pepsi-Cola Company had put him through Harvard. He had graduated in 1952
summa cum laude
, and had been given a fellowship to continue his studies for a year at Cambridge University in England. He had then demonstrated his militancy by serving the better part of three years as an infantry officer in the Marine Corps. Harvard had selected him while he was still in the Marines to be a junior member of its Society of Fellows, the most illustrious assemblage of young scholars in American academia, so that he could earn his doctorate. From Harvard he had joined the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California, the brain trust of the Air Force, and had helped to perfect plans for nuclear war against the Soviet Union, China, and the other Communist states. He had been permitted to learn the nation’s most highly classified secrets. His performance at Rand had been rewarded by a position in Washington as the special assistant to the Pentagon’s chief for foreign policy, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.

In 1965 his intense desire for confrontation in the American cause had led him to volunteer to fight in Vietnam as a Marine company commander. When told that he ranked too high in the bureaucracy for such mundane duty, he had found another way to the war. He had gone as a member of the new team Lansdale had organized when Lansdale had returned to Vietnam in 1965 to try to reform the Saigon regime and devise an effective pacification program. Two years later, Ellsberg had gone back to the Rand Corporation from Vietnam dispirited by an unhappy love affair and ill from an attack of hepatitis. He had been discouraged too by the repetitive violence of the war of attrition Westmoreland was pursuing and by the unwillingness of the U.S. leadership to adopt an alternative strategy that he believed was the only way to justify the death and destruction and to win the war. The Tet 1968 Offensive had turned discouragement into disillusion. His inability to bring about a change had destroyed his faith in the wisdom of the system he served. He had concluded that the violence in Vietnam was senseless and therefore immoral. His conscience had told him that he had to stop the war. During the fall of 1969 he had begun covertly photocopying the top-secret 7,000-page Pentagon Papers archive on Vietnam and started an antiwar crusade with a public letter to the press demanding
the withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Vietnam within a year. After the
New York Times
had published the secrets of the Pentagon archive in a series of articles in June and July 1971, Ellsberg had been indicted at the order of Richard Nixon, who intended to send him to prison for as many years as possible. Ellsberg, the man who had staked his life on a career in the service of a power he had thought was innately good, had come to see buried the friend he had also lost to this war.