As the Harriman faction worked to bring about a 180-degree turn in U.S. policy toward President Diem, it was helped along by journalists whose negative reporting soured public opinion about America’s involvement in South Vietnam. Ambassador Nolting, meanwhile, stuck to his mission to maintain a working relationship between Washington and Saigon by assuring President Diem of America’s support.
The Harriman group consisted, at one time or another, of Chester Bowles,1 Michael Forrestal,2 John Kenneth Galbraith,3 Roger Hilsman,4 Paul Kattenburg,5 Joseph Mendenhall,6 William Sullivan,7 and James Thomson.8 The common bonds that tied these men together were their loyalty to Averell Harriman, their relatively powerful positions within DOS and the Kennedy administration (thanks to Harriman), and their dislike of Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu. In the judgement of these men, the insurgency in South Vietnam was a civil war caused principally by Ngo Dinh Diem’s ineptitude and corruption.9 Thus, they logically concluded that the solution to the conflict was the removal of President Diem. While some of these men may have disliked Diem because some of his actions to thwart the Communists violated their democratic ideals, Harriman’s dislike of the man was “personal and unforgiving”, and he had the power to translate that passion into policy.10 He led the fight for a coup against Diem, said Robert Kennedy. “It became an emotional matter. . . and in fact, his advice was wrong. In fact, he started us down a road which was quite dangerous.”11
As previously stated, the so-called civil war in South Vietnam was, in fact, a Communist insurgency organised and supported by Communist powers outside the country. Even the Americans who lined up against Diem understood it as a critical battle in the overall Cold War. The Viet Cong predated Diem’s government; its infrastructure had been in place and growing since the French Indochina wars. The depth of the infrastructure’s organisation and the discipline with which operations were carried out betrayed the not-so hidden hand of Ho Chi Minh. While the Harriman group sought a replacement of Diem who could succeed against the Viet Cong, in part by making democratic reforms and therefore winning over some of his political enemies, including those in America, Robert Thompson stated that the president of South Vietnam—regardless of who he was and what reforms he implemented—would still be faced with an unrelenting Communist insurgency.
Roger Hilsman, a veteran of guerrilla warfare in Burma during World War II, praised Thompson’s work and agreed with many of his ideas, as we have seen, but he nevertheless assigned much blame for the insurgency to President Diem, and he aggressively advanced the argument for his removal. Even before top military brass, Hilsman was pugnacious. “He was known to correct high-ranking military briefers in the presence of the President, the secretary of state, and the secretary of defense, using their maps and charts to launch soaring military and geopolitical expositions that left his superiors with jaws set and gripping the arms of their chairs.” Vice President Lyndon Johnson “took a simmering dislike to him because of the way he excoriated Diem and asserted himself in matters Johnson considered in the province of the military.”12
By late 1962 the various men advising President Kennedy about Vietnam constituted a house divided, with the Harriman group on one side and Secretary Rusk, Vice President Johnson, and the Pentagon on the other. Thus, Harriman’s biographer noted: “Averell was the godfather of the anti-Diem band; Rusk was the faithful ally of the Pentagon school that spoke in the same breath of defeating the communists and supporting the government in Saigon.”13 President Kennedy encouraged both sides, “accepting the McNamara-Pentagon advice to up the ante while encouraging Harriman and the Diem critics to keep up the pressure for reforms”.14
The division within DOS, between Rusk and Harriman, led to mixed signals being sent to the White House as the two men vied for the president’s ear.15 President Kennedy had perceived that there were problems at DOS, but even after instituting its reorganisation he was still perplexed.16 Arthur Schlesinger Jr. noted, “To the end, the Department remained a puzzle to the President. No one ran it; Rusk, Ball and Harriman constituted a loose triumvirate on the seventh floor and, passing things back and forth among themselves, managed to keep a few steps ahead of crisis.”17
According to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the Pentagon was pleased with the military progress being made in Vietnam and had no intentions of getting behind a coup in South Vietnam. General Paul D. Harkins, who headed up the U.S. military mission in Vietnam, maintained that Diem was on the “right track” and so was U.S. policy in supporting him and his government. Until the Buddhist crisis in the summer of 1963, there was little to no support for the Harriman group at DOD.18
The foreign policy of the U.S. government toward Vietnam from 1961 to 1962 was summed up by an American reporter as “sink or swim with Diem”. But with the strengthening position of the Harriman group, this policy was about to become, in the words of Thompson, “sinking without him”. By heeding more and more the advice of his anti-Diem advisors, Thompson wrote, Kennedy made a great error in 1963, when he informed the South Vietnamese generals that, if they overthrew President Diem, they would continue to receive full American support. “It was one thing to threaten the withdrawal of aid from Diem but quite another to offer it instead to others. In any circumstances and by any standards it was monstrous interference in the internal political affairs of another state. . . . By it the United States was committed to an open-ended assistance policy towards Diem’s successors and assumed full responsibility for the outcome of the war.”19
By late 1962 it was apparent to Ambassador Nolting that “sinking without Diem” was precisely the direction the Harriman group was leading the Kennedy administration. What particularly confounded him, and the reason the Pentagon resisted the Harriman group, was that measureable progress against the Viet Cong was being made.20 “When we first arrived with our families,” wrote Nolting, “we could hardly go out of Saigon without an escort, and then you took a chance on getting ambushed. By 1962 we could drive to many provinces without escort and without much danger. . . . This was just one indication of the gradual pacification brought about by the Diem government with our help and advice.”21
The proof of the substantial gains made by the GVN was clear to the experts in the spring of 1963. As Robert Thompson reported, “Now, in March 1963, I can say, and in this I am supported by all members of the mission, that the Government is beginning to win the shooting war against the Viet Cong.”22 Two months later, Secretary McNamara reported that the overall situation in Vietnam was improving: “In the military sector of the counter-insurgency, we are winning.”23
The French, who were mostly critical of American efforts in Southeast Asia, praised the counterinsurgency of the early 1960s, stating that South Vietnam was being returned to a stabilised security environment within which their big businesses, such as the Michelin Rubber Company, were able to conduct business again.24 Even the enemies of the GVN acknowledged the progress it had made. According to Australian radical Wilfred Burchett, 1962 was a year of defeat and setbacks for the Viet Cong. After making considerable gains in terms of territory and population, the Viet Cong were pushed back by the ARVN with the help of American military aid: “The use of helicopters and amphibious tanks to increase rapidity of movement and to avoid the devastating ambushes that the Diemist troops invariably fell into when they moved by road or river, caught the guerrillas off balance.” Burchett added that “the drive to set up ‘strategic hamlets’ was also a problem” for the Viet Cong.25
The Harriman group was not content with these military successes, however, because the Diem government was still far from the Western-style democracy demanded by the idealists in the Kennedy administration, the press, and the American public. Nolting would later say that the group’s insistence on government reform was the greatest blunder of the Kennedy administration. “The error was in its refusal to understand that the elected constitutional government of Vietnam was the best available. If we were to help South Vietnam survive at all, the only available vehicle that could sustain and carry forward the country was the government that had been in power eight years (after two elections).”26
The role of the American press in focusing the Kennedy administration on Diem’s government cannot be overstated. Historian George Herring recorded the successes of the CIP in South Vietnam between 1961 and 1962. He also noted, however, that the young news reporters of the American press corps in Saigon placed an entirely different story before the American public. In their version, they did to President Diem what American reporter Theodore White had done to President Chiang Kai-shek of Taiwan.27 White, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1962, first earned a name for himself by exposing the weaknesses and the abuses of the pro-American, anti-Communist General Chiang.28 The comparison of the media’s treatment of President Diem with White’s treatment of General Chiang was also made by Clare Boothe Luce, who observed that both storylines included the obligatory dragon lady: in Taiwan Madame Chiang Kai-shek, in South Vietnam Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu.29 In an ad in the New York Times, just before Diem’s murder, the former ambassador and congresswoman asked the following rhetorical question about South Vietnam: “Is the history of the Liberal Press in Chunking and Havana going to repeat itself?” She answered: “The evidence is that it is.”30
In 1962 and 1963, American journalists David Halberstam of the New York Times and Neil Sheehan of United Press International wrote that the war in South Vietnam was being lost mostly because of Diem’s corrupt and self-serving government, which, amongst other things, made the Strategic Hamlet Program a “sham” and caused avoidable military losses involving American casualties.31 Despite his praise for their writing and research, which he described respectively as “brilliant” and “exhaustive”, William Colby thought the conclusions reached by Sheehan and Halberstam were just plain wrong. Criticising a government was one thing, he wrote, but to recommend undoing a functioning government in a time of war pretty much guaranteed that whatever would follow would be worse. Intellectual capability has its place, but it is simply no substitute for wisdom, the latter being a virtue that Colby thought the reporters lacked.32
The press was causing difficulties for Nolting, and the ambassador, in his memoirs, addressed this directly. He noted that at the beginning of his mission in Saigon his relationship with the press had been amicable, and he wrote that he was at a loss as to what later made the reporters hostile.33 He did not seem to realise that because the reporters in Saigon had already concluded that Diem was the wrong leader for South Vietnam,34 no amount of goodwill he tried to create with them would protect him, or anyone who supported Diem against their better judgement, from their assaults.35 He admitted that he had severely underestimated the antipathy of these men toward Ngo Dinh Diem and himself.36 During this period, Nolting stumbled upon a little-known fact: at least one American reporter in South Vietnam regarded the country as a career “backwater” and was looking for a sensational story to provide him with a star exit. On one occasion, when President Diem was dragging a whole entourage around on one of his quick-paced, long-distance marches to inspect all manner of crops and fish ponds while talking with the local farmers, New York Times reporter Homer Bigart made his discomfort more than clear to Nolting. As Nolting recalled, the day was hot and humid, and everyone had trouble keeping up with Diem, who seemed to come alive on these occasions when he could, as in his happier times as a village and then a provincial chief, be directly involved in the projects improving the lives of his people. Bigart, however, “was furious with the whole set-up”.37 He seemed not to realise that Diem’s passion for solving the practical problems confronting the farmers was not feigned for the benefit of reporters or other onlookers. His interest in and talent for infrastructure development emerged during the rule of Emperor Bao Dai and the French, and Ambassador Nolting had witnessed both firsthand on many occasions.38
After this incident, when Bigart’s visa expired, the GVN refused to renew it because of his negative reporting. Nolting went straightaway to President Diem—even before receiving instructions to do so from Washington—and argued that expelling a representative from one of America’s leading newspapers could only harm their mutual efforts.39 Diem poured out his frustration about the media’s constant attacks against him and his government.40 Yet in order to show good faith to the American ambassador, Diem telephoned the minister of the interior and asked him to renew Bigart’s visa. The very next day Bigart called Nolting and accused him of ruining his newsworthy expulsion from Vietnam.41
David Halberstam soon replaced Bigart, and Nolting’s initial impression of him was positive to the extent that the twenty-seven-year-old reporter seemed to be an improvement over the unhappy Bigart. Within a few weeks, however, “Halberstam became the leader of the ‘get Diem’ press group in Saigon.” Nolting continued, “His articles implied that if we stuck with Diem, we would sink as if we were tied to a stone. Halberstam’s considerable writing talent enhanced his influence. Beginning like drops of acid, his reports steadily conditioned the climate of American opinion. I suspect that Halberstam may have been catering to the Times’ editorial line. He was, I think, influenced by his bosses and they by his reports, creating a crescendo of anti-Diem propaganda.”42 Later, in August 1963, Nolting’s suspicions that Halberstam was catering to New York Times editorial bias were reinforced. He received reports from a trusted colleague that Halberstam had been at the Caravelle Bar (a popular place for American reporters to congregate) “proudly displaying a telegram from his newspaper in New York, which said, in substance: ‘Good going. Keep it up. State Department is beginning to see it our way.’ ”43
Mike Mansfield, the Senate majority leader and an influential member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, touched upon the subject of American press coverage in a report about his December 1962 visit to South Vietnam. In a meeting with Ngo Dinh Nhu, Mansfield noted that relations between the American and the Vietnamese governments were excellent but for the negative news reports. The concern of the Kennedy administration, Mansfield said, was that the difficulties the South Vietnamese government was having with Western reporters, particularly Americans, was reflecting negatively on the Diem government back home. Nhu, in his reply to the senator, fully acknowledged this problem and placed the blame on the shoulders of the American reporters. Nhu claimed that their youth, immaturity in outlook, and passion were to blame, and that Vietnam needed older, more experienced reporters who could comprehend the difficulties the country was facing.44
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. also noted the deep antagonism that set in between the American reporters in South Vietnam and the U.S. diplomatic and military missions in the country. He quoted Halberstam, who wrote that the U.S. embassy had “turned into the adjunct of a dictatorship” and that the Strategic Hamlet Program was “a fake and a failure”. The reporter took the moral high ground for himself and his colleagues: “We are representatives of a free society and we weren’t going to surrender our principles to the narrow notions of a closed society.”45
In a hasty reaction to the attacks that Halberstam and other newsmen were making about American involvement in Vietnam, Kennedy despatched Roger Hilsman and Michael Forrestal in late 1962 to make a report on the situation.46 Although critical of Ngo Dinh Diem, Hilsman acknowledged that the Communists had indeed suffered serious setbacks in 1962. “The war in South Vietnam is clearly going better than it was a year ago. . . . The Viet Cong, in sum, are being hurt—they have somewhat less freedom than they had a year ago, they apparently suffer acutely from lack of medicines, and in some very isolated areas they seem to be having trouble getting food.”47 Hilsman did not praise Diem or the GVN. Rather he condensed his report to the following: “Our overall judgment, in sum, is 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 gain already made.”48
The White House requested the Hilsman-Forrestal report not only because of the press but also owing to the surprisingly negative tone of Senator Mike Mansfield’s report on Vietnam—particularly as it related to the SHP—which reached Washington in December 1962. Mansfield was considered the Senate authority on Indochina and Vietnam.49 He was well connected in the Democratic Party and enjoyed many years of friendship with Lyndon B. Johnson.50 Along with Francis Cardinal Spellman and then senator John F. Kennedy, Mansfield had thrown his considerable political weight behind Diem in the mid-1950s.51 In late 1954 the senator went on a fact-finding mission to Saigon and issued a report upon his return to Washington that gave powerful support to an official American commitment to Diem. He asserted that if Diem were to be removed from power—for example, by the French—then all U.S. aid should be suspended since Diem was the only nationalistic leader who was dedicated to a truly free Vietnam.52
Shortly after receiving the first Mansfield report, President Eisenhower heard negative reports about Diem from General Joseph Lawton Collins. Senator Mansfield immediately came to Diem’s defence, arguing that General Collins was “playing with political dynamite”. Mansfield told Eisenhower that “the remarkable aspect of Diem was [that], unlike most of the Vietnamese, he really was honest, incorruptible and a devoutly dedicated nationalist as well.”53 To back up his firm stand in support of Diem, Mansfield asserted that he spoke for all the Democratic leaders and that their position was unequivocal: they would not agree to the support of any government in Vietnam other than that of Diem.54
Given Senator Mansfield’s earlier absolute support for Diem, his December 1962 report stunned Diem supporters within the Kennedy administration. In it he warned against expecting too much too soon from the SHP. He observed that while Diem remained “a dedicated, sincere, hardworking, incorruptible and patriotic leader”, he was older and faced problems that were far more complex than those he had faced a decade ago. Mansfield continued:
The energizing role which he played in the past appears to be passing to other members of his family, particularly Ngo Dinh Nhu. The latter is a person of great energy and intellect who is fascinated by the operations of political power and has consummate eagerness and ability in organizing and manipulating it. But it is Ngo Dinh Diem, not Ngo Dinh Nhu, who has such popular mandate to exercise power as there is in South Vietnam. In a situation of this kind there is a great danger of the corruption of unbridled power.55
President Kennedy was alarmed by this assessment and hence called for a second opinion, by sending Hilsman and Forrestal to Vietnam in December 1962.56
At this time, Secretary of State Dean Rusk argued that the information he had received “cited improvements in supply and intelligence operations and in the Vietnam command structure as evidence, in fact, the Vietnamese were winning the war”.57 Therefore, another fact-finding mission was not necessary. But between the time Hilsman and Forrestal visited South Vietnam and submitted their report, a sensationalised story about a military blunder made headlines.
Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann provided American reporters in Vietnam with information about the failed Battle of Ap Bac, an American-Vietnamese military operation in which he took part. Here is William Colby’s description of Vann’s involvement with both the battle on January 2, 1963, and the news reports that followed:
The [ARVN] division he advised bottled up a Communist unit there but with a combination of laxity and disinclination to close had allowed the enemy to escape through a gap conveniently left in the lines around them. The Vietnamese force had lost eighty dead and over a hundred wounded and the Americans five helicopters, with three from their crews dead and eight wounded. . . . With his usual forcefulness, Vann had exploded to the press that highlighted the affair as a further indication that the Diem regime and its Army were unworthy of American support. Vann became so incensed at the official American reaction to the affair, in his mind condoning the ineffectiveness of the Vietnamese unit and its commander and trying to muzzle his protests, that he resigned from the Army.58
Colonel Vann’s outrage at the bungling of the ARVN at the cost American lives gave reporters a sensational story. From the perspective of the Pentagon, the action revealed nothing more than the fact that the ARVN was a fledgling, or “green”, fighting force at this level of engagement; in short, there really was no surprise in what happened. Indeed, some very experienced U.S. senior commanders were more than willing to give the ARVN the benefit of the doubt: they noted that, while the army seemed somewhat hesitant and lacked co-ordination in the face of enemy fire, the soldiers nevertheless did not break down and flee. Vann, however, saw the behaviour of the ARVN differently, and in addition to informing the press, he filed an official complaint of the operation that ended up in the hands of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In it “Vann attributed the failure to the poor state of training of the South Vietnamese units, a system of command that never placed a Vietnamese officer above the rank of captain on the battlefield, a reluctance to incur casualties, an inability to take advantage of air superiority, and a lack of discipline.”59
Newsmen like Sheehan and Halberstam included Vann’s criticisms in their reports.60 In due course their articles created a furore back home in the United States. The New York Times used the battle to launch a full-scale attack on Diem and his government, claiming that Ap Bac had been a major military defeat and that Americans were not getting the full story of what was going on in Vietnam.61
It is worth quoting some excerpts from the news reports of the battle. In the article “Vietnamese Reds Win Major Clash”, which appeared in the New York Times on January 4, 1963, Halberstam wrote: “Communist guerrillas, refusing to play by their own hide-and-seek rules in the face of Government troops, stood their ground and inflicted a major defeat on a larger force of Vietnamese regulars yesterday and today.”62 In another story two days later, Halberstam wrote that the battle “has bewildered high United States officials in Saigon. . . . United States advisers in the field, however, have long felt that conditions here made a defeat like this virtually inevitable. . . . American officers throughout the Mekong Delta feel that what happened at Ap Bac goes far deeper than one battle.”63 On January 10, 1963, Halberstam blamed the problems with the ARVN on Diem’s leadership:
The advisers feel that there is still too much political interference in the Vietnamese Army and that promotion too often depends on political loyalty rather than military ability. . . .
These Americans recalled that in a recent shuffle of the high command two officers widely respected by the Americans were removed from field commands and that officers promoted and given field commands were men who had shown loyalty to President Ngo Dinh Diem at moments when his regime was threatened with internal revolt. . . .
These sources also feel that one of the basic problems now hindering military improvement is a fear among many Vietnamese commanders of incurring casualties. Some commanders are said to feel that they will not be promoted and may lose command if they suffer too many casualties. . . .
Americans who deal with President Diem, however, say that he knows there will be casualties and is willing to allow for this. If this is true, the field commanders say, the word has not reached the Vietnamese in the field.64
The editorial “What’s Wrong in Vietnam?”, which appeared in the New York Times on January 15, 1963, plainly targeted Diem and his government as being the cause of the Ap Bac defeat:
It is worthwhile being reminded that losses in one battle, or even a dozen battles, do not portend loss of the war in South Vietnam. The fact remains, however, that serious defects of political policy and leadership in South Vietnam do seriously hamper the spirit and effectiveness of the South Vietnamese military forces. A defensive reaction to adverse reports about last week’s battle should not obscure a deficiency that is well-documented and is often cited by Americans on the spot in Vietnam.
Plainly, the South Vietnamese armed forces are not so good and spirited as they might be because a suspicious, dictatorial government in Saigon must preoccupy itself with preserving itself in power, not just from Communists but from many patriotic Vietnamese who oppose the Communists. Loyalty to President Diem is the criterion for preferment among Vietnamese officers, rather than ability.65
The Joint Chiefs of Staff countered the press assaults against the GVN with a direct report to the president stating that news accounts of the battle were misleading: “It appears that the initial press reports have distorted both the importance of the action and the damage suffered by the US / GVN forces. Although unexpectedly stiff resistance was apparently encountered contact has been maintained and the operation is being continued.”66 General Paul Harkins, commander of the Military Assistance Command in Vietnam, tried to avoid placing too much blame on the relatively green ARVN. As an experienced soldier who had been under General George Patton in World War II, Harkins noted in a report to President Kennedy that the errors of the South Vietnamese forces were largely errors of courage rather than cowardice: “It took a lot of guts on the part of those pilots and crews to go back into the area to try to rescue their pals.”67
Ambassador Nolting later recalled that Vann’s description of a cowardly army under the control of a despotic and corrupt leader further diminished the reputation of the South Vietnamese in the eyes of the American public: “Colonel Vann, who later gave his life in Vietnam, caused great damage by his press interview. His outburst stemmed, no doubt, from genuine frustration, but it was unfair to the South Vietnamese Army and government and did great harm in terms of American public opinion.”68 Nolting countered the charges that Diem had been telling his army to avoid casualties. Nolting explained that the leader did tell his military not to allow innocent civilians to be killed just so that one or two fleeing or fighting guerrillas could be brought down on the spot. The ability to win over the fence-sitters in South Vietnam was harmed whenever innocent civilians were killed. Many American military advisors recognised then (and still recognise now) an almost golden rule of effective counterinsurgency: do not create more guerrillas by killing innocents.69
In his memoirs, Hilsman claimed that Diem had a “go slow” policy that even Harkins and Nolting did not know about: “It could be argued that he sensed that defeating the guerrillas would be a long, slow process and that it would be better to husband the strength of the government forces rather than dissipate it in too much American ‘gung ho’ offensive-mindedness. . . . But he never raised this question with either General Harkins or Ambassador Nolting, who did not learn of Diem’s ‘go slow’ instructions until much, much later.” Hilsman added that the motive he ascribed to Diem for his “go slow” policy gave credibility to the accusation being made by “a few of the military advisers” and “most of the American press, particularly David Halberstam of the New York Times and Neil Sheehan of the United Press International”.70 But his memoirs seem to be inconsistent with the Hilsman-Forrestal report of January 1963, which stated that the American press corps was playing loose with the facts: “Although our report, for example, is not rosily optimistic, it certainly contains the factual basis for a much more hopeful view than the pessimistic (and factually inaccurate) picture conveyed in the press.”71
One way the press conveyed an inaccurate picture, according to Ambassador Nolting, was by focusing on the failures of the ARVN and ignoring its successes. “There were far more successful military actions than there were debacles like Ap Bac. These successful battles did not make dramatic headlines because we expected our side to win. . . . The media tended to feature the setbacks, creating a false impression of the ARVN’s capabilities and of American training and advice.”72
In December 1962, as Hilsman gathered information on Vietnam for his report, he began to criticise Ambassador Nolting’s loyalty to Diem. In a series of memoranda for the record, he questioned Nolting’s optimism about the leader’s abilities with respect to the SHP.73 While Hilsman, with many caveats, accepted much of what Nolting had to tell him during his visit to Vietnam, he balked at Nolting’s defence of Diem’s leadership with, for example, the SHP. His “net reaction was that the case [for Diem] was not entirely persuasive”.74 He grudgingly admitted that Diem’s understanding of what was going on throughout South Vietnam was staggering in its scope and detail. Yet he did not believe that Ngo Dinh Diem was the best man, or the only man, available to lead the country. The others who aspired to take his place paled in comparison, as the coup in Vietnam later proved. Knowing this, Nolting continued his attempts to persuade Hilsman, and anyone who would listen in Washington, that U.S. and Vietnamese interests were both served by staying the course with Ngo Dinh Diem.
According to Nolting, “Hilsman seemed quite optimistic during his visit.” The ambassador found Forrestal less so: “Echoing Harriman, [Forrestal] urged more democratic institutions and methods, pressing Diem to broaden the base of his government and become more ‘popular.’ ”75 Nolting observed that Forrestal spent a lot of the time with the American press while he was in Saigon, presumably gathering information “untainted by the Embassy”.
Nolting thought the overall tone of the Hilsman-Forrestal report was positive, and he wrote in his memoirs that it did not call for any dramatic changes in U.S. foreign policy in Vietnam. He did note, however, that the report called for more to be done, and to be done more quickly.76 For those looking for reasons to remove Diem, they could find them in the report. Between the Mansfield report, the Hilsman-Forrestal report, and the ongoing negative reporting in the press, an anti-Diem momentum was building in Washington that could not be stopped by Ambassador Nolting or even Secretary Rusk. All of this carefully groomed pessimism acquired a weight of its own, and it became the foundation upon which Harriman was able to build the case and to marshal the forces for Diem’s removal.
Meanwhile, Ambassador Nolting fought against the inevitable. In 1963, Nolting’s last year in South Vietnam, his rearguard action begun in 1962 became an all-out fight to defend the honour of the American people, for as he understood it, they had given their word, through their president John F. Kennedy, that there would be no interference with the government of South Vietnam. Nolting argued right up to and after the murders of Diem and Nhu that it would be better for the United States to walk away from Vietnam than to breach its promise made to an ally.