A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (63 page)

This assessment by “Vietnamese No. 1 general” (Minh was considered by Americans, including Harkins, to be the most professional of the Saigon generals) was being “echoed” by Diem’s faithful acting minister of defense, Nguyen Dinh Thuan, “who wants to leave the country,” Lodge went on to tell Kennedy. He also warned in other cables against Harkins’s claim that Diem was a good man who was being victimized by the Nhus and might eventually be persuaded to rid the regime of them. He pointed out that the brothers did not see the world differently and that Diem was convinced he needed Nhu’s skill at manipulating the police and intelligence services in order to keep the army in check. Diem “wishes he had more Nhus, not less,” Lodge said.

Kennedy was uncertain and wavered. He had virtually no understanding of political and social revolution in modern Asia and little feeling for the realities of counterguerrilla warfare. He feared a wave of Communist-inspired guerrilla wars in the underdeveloped countries and was determined to build a capability to crush them, but he lacked knowledge of what he feared. Had he possessed sensitivity on the subject, he would have stopped Harkins and Anthis from bombing and shelling the Vietnamese peasantry. He was constantly issuing instructions and suggestions for counterguerrilla warfare to the Army through his military aide, Maj. Gen. Chester Clifton, Jr. His ideas never went much beyond employing Special Forces men, popularly known as Green Berets because of their headgear, in “Terry and the Pirates” ventures and the sort of technological gimmickry and superspy intrigues that filled the James Bond novels he liked to read. It was Kennedy who had given the Special Forces their romantic headgear to mark them as the shock troops of his “wars in the shadows.”

At a National Security Council meeting at the White House on Friday, September 6, 1963, he accepted a suggestion from McNamara to fly Krulak out in a jet to “get the facts” and report back to the NSC by Tuesday. Hilsman interjected that a State Department representative
should also go along for an independent viewpoint. Kennedy agreed. McNamara tried to outsmart Hilsman by putting Krulak in the air to Vietnam within minutes of the end of the meeting. Hilsman telephoned and made him hold the plane until he could get his man, Joseph Mendenhall, the former political counselor of the embassy, out to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington. The plane was a windowless Boeing 707, an Air Force tanker version of the four-engine passenger jet, converted for the ferrying of important men by the installation of desks and bunks. The type had been nicknamed the McNamara Special because of the secretary’s fondness for fly-and-sprint trips. Twenty thousand miles and four days later Krulak and Mendenhall read diametrically opposed reports to another NSC meeting at the White House on Tuesday, September 10.

“You two did visit the same country, didn’t you?” Kennedy asked.

“I can explain it, Mr. President,” Krulak said. “Mr. Mendenhall visited the cities and I visited the countryside and the war is in the countryside.”

“I want to see you after this in my office,” Kennedy said to Krulak.

McNamara accompanied Krulak into the Oval Office when the meeting had ended. The president looked up from something he was reading. “I just wanted you to know that I understand,” he said to Krulak, indicating by his manner that he was preoccupied and did not wish to talk. Krulak and McNamara left. In the limousine on the way back to the Pentagon, McNamara and Taylor were pleased. They interpreted Kennedy’s remark in the Oval Office as meaning: “I understand what happened and I agree with you.” Krulak was also happy. He interpreted the president’s remark similarly and was convinced that he had put down Mendenhall.

Kennedy may have agreed with Krulak, but he sent McNamara and Taylor to Vietnam two weeks later for more “facts.” One of Lodge’s independent assessments may have prompted him, perhaps the cable relaying Minh’s frightening views. By the end of September, when the jet carrying McNamara and Taylor lifted off from Tan Son Nhut with another report for Kennedy, one could drive down to My Tho and see the ghosts of the strategic hamlets along the road. The lines of steel fence posts with shreds of chopped-off barbed wire hanging from the notches announced who owned most of this main route into the Delta. From a helicopter the sense of the guerrillas’ power was greater and the sight of these ghost hamlets stranger. The rows of roofless houses looked like villages of play huts that children had erected and then whimsically abandoned.

McNamara and Taylor assured Kennedy that “the military campaign
has made great progress and continues to progress,” despite “serious political tensions in Saigon,” and that the war would still be won by the end of 1965. Harkins should win it sooner in the rubber-plantation country and in the Highlands and the Central Coast provinces north of Saigon, they said in their top-secret memorandum of October 2. He should crush the Viet Cong there by the end of 1964. The slower progress in the Delta would delay the defeat of the guerrillas south of the capital until the end of 1965, and “it should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that time.” They recommended pulling out 1,000 Americans by the end of 1963 in order to demonstrate how well the plans for victory were being implemented. The White House announced a forthcoming withdrawal of this first 1,000 men.

The president gained no peace of mind. The analysts at the CIA told him that Saigon’s military position was deteriorating, and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research said that there had been “an unfavorable shift in the military balance” since July and that the regime would have been in trouble in the countryside even without the Buddhist crisis.

Kennedy showed how confused he was and how angry he had become at the messenger who most annoyed him when Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who had recently become publisher of the
Times
, paid a courtesy call at the White House on October 22. As soon as the pleasantries were over Kennedy asked: “What do you think of your young man in Saigon?” Sulzberger said that he thought Halberstam was holding up well. “Don’t you think he’s too close to the story?” Kennedy asked. No, Sulzberger said, he did not. Kennedy pushed harder. Had Sulzberger thought about transferring Halberstam? he asked. Sulzberger said that he had no plans to do so. If Kennedy had not been so upset, he probably would not have taken such a crude approach. Sulzberger was reacting defensively, as publishers almost always do when their reporters are attacked. Catledge, the managing editor in New York who had been so upset by Halberstam, was with Sulzberger on the White House visit. He would have been happy to transfer Halberstam out of Saigon, but he could not do so while the paper might lose face.

Halberstam, without knowing that the president had personally requested his transfer, thought that the Ngo Dinhs were going to grant Kennedy’s wish. He told Vann in a letter on October 29 that he suspected they would throw him out of Vietnam in a couple of weeks. His visa expired in mid-November. He was writing to thank Vann for having defended our reporting in letters to the editors of
News week
and
Time. (Newsweek
published Vann’s letter in its October 21, 1963, issue.
Time
declined to print it.) “We all still miss you and refer to you as the Bible,” Halberstam wrote. “There’s damn little joy in covering something which has such a sour meaning for your country,” he said. “The brightest spot is Lodge, whose performance for my money has been near perfect. He’s tough and intelligent and he has few illusions about this situation; he doesn’t intend to see the U.S. kicked around, and he … doesn’t think this Ngo outfit is worth a tinker’s damn.” The weaponry and firepower of the Viet Cong battalions in the Delta was getting “better and better … very ominous,” Halberstam told Vann. “And watching a police state in action, particularly an American-financed one, is a sad experience. But we still have a chance, I guess, and I like the way Lodge handles himself.”

Kennedy ended by deferring to Lodge’s judgment. Lodge had exacted what he needed from McNamara and Taylor during their late-September visit. In response to his arguments they had conceded in their memorandum to Kennedy that “further repressive actions by Diem and Nhu could change the present favorable military trends” and had recommended the suspension of economic aid and the cutting off of military and CIA support for Tung’s Special Forces as a way of exerting pressure for conciliation and reform. Lodge had wanted both measures in order to hold up the largest possible “Go” sign to the dissident generals. Kennedy decided on October 5 to let Lodge have his way. The plotting, which had been in hiatus, resumed in earnest. Kennedy asked only that Lodge guarantee him a successful coup, that he not be forced to endure the disgrace of another Bay of Pigs. Lodge would not mislead the president. He said that he thought the plot would succeed, but he could give no guarantee. “Should the coup fail,” he cabled, “we will have to pick up the pieces as best we can at that time.”

Diem and Nhu erected their own scaffold. Toward the end of October they discovered the plot that Lodge had been fomenting and decided to take advantage of it to spring a scheme they had conceived. They summoned General Dinh to the palace. He had continued to rule Saigon for them as its military governor since the sacking of the pagodas. The brothers instructed Dinh to draw up troop movement plans for a “false coup.” The phony coup had two purposes. The long-range purpose was to scare the Americans out of ever again attempting to interfere with their rule. This objective was to be achieved by making the false coup appear to be a “neutralist coup.” Since the surprise coup d’état in Laos in 1960 by Kong Le, the neutralist paratroop commander, Washington had feared the possibility of a similar occurrence in Saigon by some hostile or opportunistic group who would demand a U.S. withdrawal.
The demand would make a mockery of the American claim that the United States was in Vietnam at the invitation of a Vietnamese government to defend the South against “outside aggression.” The National Liberation Front was calling for the replacement of the Ngo Dinhs by a neutralist coalition. Charles de Gaulle, then President of France, was also promoting the idea as a solution to the war. The Kennedy administration regarded it, accurately, as a face-saving arrangement for a takeover by Ho Chi Minh. Nhu had been playing on Washington’s fear by feigning negotiations with Hanoi through Maneli, the senior Polish delegate to the ICSC, and the French ambassador. He had also been talking about the possibility of asking the Americans to withdraw and of turning South Vietnam into a country like Yugoslavia which would accept aid from both Communist and non-Communist nations.

Nhu had been mistaking for independence the slack in the string to which he and Diem were tied. He had not realized that his blackmail had played into Lodge’s hands by further alarming Kennedy. When the brothers had sacked the pagodas they had put out a cover story to try to shift the blame from themselves by having Radio Saigon and the government press agency announce that the raids had been carried out by the army and that the generals had requested Diem to declare martial law. Under their false-coup scheme they were going to have the radio and their press agency announce the formation of a neutralist coalition and broadcast a demand that the United States pull out of the country. They would have Dinh occupy the streets and main public buildings with troops and armor and emerge and announce that they had saved South Vietnam by crushing a neutralist plot. During the confusion they planned to carry out the second and immediate purpose of their false coup—a small bloodbath. They were going to have Tung’s Special Forces and Nhu’s hired gangsters murder Minh, Don, Kim, and a number of other generals and senior ARVN officers they suspected of involvement in the plot, civilian accomplices of the generals like Diem’s titular vice-president, Nguyen Ngoc Tho, and some Americans. They would later blame the killings on “neutralist and pro-Communist elements.” How many and precisely which Americans were to be killed has never been ascertained. Lodge was supposed to have been marked, but there will never be any way of knowing. Conein was an obvious target, as Diem and Nhu had by now learned of his role in the plot. Nhu code-named the scheme Operation Bravo One.

What Diem and Nhu did not realize was that in drawing up the movement order for Bravo One, Dinh was actually bringing into Saigon the troops and tanks and armored personnel carriers to conduct a second
scheme code-named Operation Bravo Two. Except for Cao, who sat in Can Tho in ignorance of the plot, Diem and Nhu had run out of generals. Their faithful Dinh—the same Dinh who had boasted two months earlier to his old CIA friend Conein that he had made himself “a great national hero” by foiling “the American, Cabot Lodge”—had turned traitor. Minh and Don had tricked Diem into offending him. They had told Dinh that he was a great national hero and that he should ask Diem to reward him by appointing him minister of the interior. When Dinh had tried to claim his reward, Diem had refused. (He and Nhu had already paid Dinh a large cash reward.) Dinh had gone off in a sulk and the plotters had then recruited him, promising him the ministry in their government. As insurance they also recruited the officers under him, so that they could shoot him and seize command of the troops and armor if he changed his mind at the last moment and tried to turn traitor on them.

Bravo Two began at 1:30
P.M.
on November 1,1963, with the storming of the National Police headquarters by a battalion of Saigon marines. Three hours later Diem telephoned Lodge from the palace. By the time of the call, which was tape-recorded, Diem knew enough to realize that his position was hopeless. Tan Son Nhut and all of the city other than the palace and the nearby Presidential Guards Barracks were in the hands of the coup forces. Diem had learned that Dinh was a traitor; that his other pillar, Tung, had been tricked into a meeting with the generals at JGS headquarters and shot; and that Cao was blocked from coming to the rescue with troops from Can Tho. Minh and Don had told Diem over the phone from JGS that they would give him and Nhu safe conduct out of the country if he surrendered and resigned the presidency. They had then put all of the other generals who had joined them on the line one by one so that he would understand the futility of resistance. They had also broadcast the offer over Radio Saigon. The offer might be a trick. If Diem surrendered, he and Nhu might be murdered. He would, however, save the lives of the soldiers holding out at the palace and the Presidential Guards Barracks.