Chapter 6

Kennedy’s Frontier: Wars of National Liberation: 1961–1963

LAOS

Among the many possibilities to be considered in the origins of the second Vietnam war is that it did not begin in either North or South Vietnam, but in Laos.¹ Whether it really wanted to or not, the US, like North Vietnam, was nevertheless prepared in 1960 to meet what it considered to be a major challenge: to the extent that it had allowed itself to become involved in a civil war which, in turn, at the end of the year brought the USSR into Southeast Asia. All of this took place, not in Vietnam, but in the neighbouring Kingdom of Laos, which at Geneva, in 1954, had been given the unlikely and unwanted role of shock absorber between China and Thailand.² It was, as Eden said, essential that the US should not attempt to establish a military influence there, for any attempt to do so was bound to provoke some counter move by China. At the same time it was obvious, not least to the US, that Laos had played an important and, in the prologue to the battle of Dien Bien Phu, even a critical part in the first Indo-China war and the fate of South Vietnam could no more be settled in isolation from Laos than it could from North Vietnam.

As in Vietnam, so in Laos, its peoples had fought with and against the French but, unlike Vietnam, and in spite of hopeful but rather preposterous claims that theirs was the only lawful government of Laos, the resistance forces of Pathet Lao were never, either in military strength or political support, in the same class as the Vietminh. Nevertheless they did have a regional foundation in the northern provinces of Phong Saly and Sam Neua which was recognized at Geneva in 1954; and after they in turn recognized the authority of the Royal Government in November 1954 it took another three years of negotiation, punctuated by sporadic skirmishes, government changes and incipient foreign intervention before authority in fact was transferred to the King of Laos in November 1957. On the following day, Prince Souvannaphouma formed his Government of National Union and included in it, as Minister of Planning and Reconstruction, his half-brother, Prince Souphanouvong, leader of Pathet Lao. Complexities such as this, not to mention what often looked like the Ruritanian character of Laotian politics, at one time suggested consideration in comic-opera terms but the unfolding tragedy of Laos, Vietnam and, above all, Cambodia also suggests that the origins of conflict should be sought in totally different comprehension of political purposes and values if not in almost total incomprehension of unfamiliar people and society.

Whether or not neutrality was possible Laos found itself in the same unhappy position as the island of Melos, as described by Thucydides, which wished only to maintain its neutrality in the war between Athens and Sparta. As the Melians were told when, in this classic account of realpolitik, they appealed to justice, that was something that was only to be found between parties who were equal in strength. Laos, with some 2½ m. people, was, as it had been historically, largely unable to deal with powerful and predatory neighbours and was now quite unequal to the power of those countries who thought of it as an extension of their own foreign policies rather than as an entity in itself: the US and North Vietnam. For the US it was convenient to pretend, to begin with, that Laos was an integrated nation state and it was expected to behave as such. But at best it was a nation state in the making and, whether or not neutrality would have worked, politics in Laos were never allowed to find their own level. Instead, from the US, it received reproduction furniture in the form of an army, support for a political grouping and controlled elections; massive and debauching economic aid; and the foreign policy role it was quite unable to fill. From the communist world it seemed at first sight to have received something more appropriate: an emphasis on national democratic revolution which looked as if it might be more useful in the Laotian context.

Thus Pathet Lao, the former army of the resistance, turned itself into Neo Lao Hak Xat (Lao Patriotic Front), a political party which, when, with its allied ‘peace’ party it challenged the existing but fragmented political parties in the ‘supplementary’ elections of 1958, won 13 out of 21 seats and Prince Souphanouvong got more votes than any other candidate. On one reading, 13 out of the 21 seats contested, it was a sensational result. As a proportion of the total seats in the assembly, 13 out of 59, it looked less impressive and less alarming. It depended on the inferences. The first, optimistic possibility, was that it was a genuine reformist vote, aimed at the corruption of the administrators and reflecting the alienation of the hill tribes.³ The second, more sinister, was that in spite of his personal popularity and whether or not he could be said to be a communist, Prince Souphanouvong was the front man for a much smaller, hard-core communist party which took its orders from and relied heavily upon the Communist Party in North Vietnam. On the first interpretation, and if one may assume that the US was moving away from its objections to neutralism in principle, it might have taken a more relaxed and benevolent attitude towards an exercise in nation-building. On the second, and with its self-conscious and self-proclaimed fears of coalition with communist parties, whether in China or Czechoslovakia, it might have been expected to oppose these developments and, even, on the evidence and in the mood of 1958, to intervene.

Laos may have been incomparable but there were, at least in US perceptions, some striking resemblances with the Lebanon and, on the larger scale, between the problems of nationalism and communism in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. In both cases, at least on the evidence of Eisenhower's memoirs, it was a problem of communism and how to contain it. In 1957 Eisenhower had apparently come close to intervention in the Lebanon when President Chamoun appealed for help in dealing with pan-Arab agitation from Jordan.⁴ In 1958, when Chamoun had provoked Muslim riots by attempting to amend the constitution so as to extend his term of office, his ‘uneasiness’, according to Eisenhower, was the result of ‘one more communist provocation’. ‘Behind everything’, says Eisenhower, ‘was our deep-seated conviction that the Communists were principally responsible for the trouble, and that President Chamoun was motivated only by a strong feeling of patriotism.’⁵

Whether Eisenhower's real fear was of radical Arab nationalism, rather than communism (much more obvious in the case of Britain's parallel intervention in Jordan) it was enough for him to send marine battalions on to the beaches of Beirut in an act of perhaps symbolic intervention. Their purpose, according to Eisenhower, was to encourage the Lebanese government in defence of its sovereignty and integrity which were deemed vital to the US national interest as well as to world peace; or, as he told the American people, it was essential to the welfare of the US.⁶ The integrity of Lebanon was something that could, perhaps, have been taken for granted (in retrospect, the last 30 years suggest a different assessment) but the sovereign integrity of Laos and its preservation was another convenient argument for intervention in one form or another. Writing in his memoirs of King Saud's usefulness at this time as a potential bulwark against Communist expansion in the Middle East Eisenhower noted that, temporarily at least, it was at an end. In Laos, on the other hand, it seems as if Prince Souvannaphouma's usefulness had never begun. If it had, it disappeared at the moment when he took off on a visit to Peking and Hanoi in 1956⁷ and agreement in 1957 for neutralization and coalition so infuriated Dulles, who, according to George Ball, ‘thought coalitions with Communists a halfway house to perdition’, that:

He made use of his own family ties by persuading his brother, CIA Chief, Allen W. Dulles, to force out Prince Souphanouvong and replace him with a politician bearing the more unlikely name of Phoui Sananikone.⁸

‘Prince Souphanouvong’ is, presumably, a mistaken reference to his half-brother, Prince Souvannaphouma. Ball has some fun with Laotian names in what he describes as ‘a preposterous long-running serial’ and his outspoken and invaluable memoirs are supplemented by another member of the Kennedy administration, Roger Hilsman, who says that on two occasions the US used its economic hold on Laos as a weapon ‘to bring down the government of one Lao leader and to break the will of another’.⁹ Whether the suspension of aid on this occasion was for political reasons, or whether it was a belated attempt to curb the rampant corruption in its distribution, there is little doubt both in general and particular that the clandestine activities of the CIA at this time had become a part of US foreign policy in general as well as in Laos. As a third of Kennedy's associates aver, two of the most senior members of the Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities which Eisenhower himself had set up could discover no reliable system of control and reached the point where they begged Eisenhower once more to reconsider ‘programs which found us involved overtly in the internal affairs of practically every country to which we have access’.¹⁰

Perhaps nowhere at this time was the US more heavily involved than in Laos although it was certainly not the CIA alone which was having such an impact on Laotian politics. Dulles and the State Department had called for an army of 25,000 men. The Defense Department demurred but when, eventually and illicitly, it became involved in training the Laotian army, and when the army turned to politics, the Americans inevitably had their favourites. The army as a whole could have been described as a foreign mercenary force in so far as it was paid for entirely by the US and, incidentally, was in aggregate the highest-paid army in Asia. Not that all the money reached the troops but in this respect, as with the overwhelming economic assistance, accounting procedures for a long time did not seem to matter too much. When, eventually, some sort of control was introduced so that, for example, TV sets were no longer imported for a country which had no television broadcasting, the Laotian economy had reached unbelievable dimensions.¹¹ In part, it was inflation in its various forms – the devaluation of money, swollen numbers in the army and in the bureaucracy – and the associated corruption which produced an extra-parliamentary reaction to the existing political élites. Before long the Committee For The Defense Of The National Interest, with its increasingly important army component, could be seen not only as a major influence in Laotian politics but as a major instrument of US policy as well.¹² Practically from the start it seems the CIA was involved. According to Hilsman, the CIA believed that sooner or later Laos would become a major battleground in a military sense between East and West and their programmes, which they conceived and pushed through in Washington, were based on this assumption. Commenting on their approach Hilsman says:

It was a policy, in a word, that had the weaknesses as well as the strengths of Allen Dulles' notion of fighting Communist fire with fire. In the first place, any organisation with the professed aims of the CDNI would be a natural magnet for political opportunists in any country, for men whose only principle would be their own driving ambitions. In the second place, there was a profound difference between an organisation espousing the goals of patriotism that is spontaneous and totally native and an organisation, which, while espousing such goals, still derived its impetus and its subsistence from interests, that are, inescapably, foreign.¹³

Under Souvannaphouma's successor, and a CDNI Foreign Minister, Laotian politics began to polarize and its foreign policy became that of ‘co-existence with the Free World only’. One of two Pathet Lao battalions awaiting ‘integration’ was surrounded and disarmed; the other escaped. Prince Souphanouvong and Pathet Lao leaders were arrested as accomplices; they, too, escaped. A Nationalist China consulate opened in Vientiane, to the obvious anger of Peking. Skirmishes resumed between the Laotian Army and Pathet Lao forces and at the end of the year, after claims of massive intervention from North Vietnam, the arrival of a UN team and Secretary-General Hammarskjöld himself, the government admitted rather sheepishly that while their claims might not have been true they were designed to call attention to Laotian problems. They were, however, enough to step up US participation in the organization and training of the Laotian Army and in August 1960, after the CIA, with or without the Embassy's approval, had helped to rig an election, attention again focused on Laos when a diminutive paratroop captain, Kong Lé, staged a coup with his battalion in favour of Prince Souvannaphouma. Retrospectively, at least, Eisenhower described his motives as ‘obscure’ but had little doubt that Souvannaphouma was either an accomplice or a captive of Kong Lé who, himself, was an accomplice of the Communist Pathet Lao.¹⁴ Closer observers, such as Hugh Toye, took a different view. It was a coup in favour of neutrality and against civil war. Kong Lé and his men knew from experience that there were no foreign communist invaders in Laos but on both sides foreigners were promoting the war between Laotians. Personally, Kong Lé liked Americans (there were ten of them attached to his battalion) but of course they were the foreigners on the one side as the Vietminh were on the other, and while their wish to help Laos was appreciated, they must not be allowed to fight their own battles in Laotian blood as the price of their aid.¹⁵ Whether this amounted to any more than ‘sincere nationalism’, ‘naive isolationism’ or whatever, the US soon stepped up aid to their principal protégée, Souvannaphouma's rival, General Phoumi Nosavan, who had formed his own counter-coup committee and had taken up his position in the southern part of the country. From here, helped by a Thai blockade of his opponents as well as by US aid and advice, he eventually advanced upon the administrative capital, Vientiane.

A solution to the Laotian problem now seemed to be in the making. Having closed off what it regarded as unacceptable political options – Souvannaphouma, neutralism, national reconciliation – US purposes in Laos depended upon the military outcome with the overwhelming odds on the army which it paid for and the general it supported. If its opponents could be eliminated Laotian politics might again turn on a Lao—Thai axis and the link between northern Laos and North Vietnam would be broken, although the distance between Hanoi and the Pathet Lao stronghold of Sam Neua was only 120 miles. Even without intervention from North Vietnam, and making allowance for the fact that Pathet Lao would have found it difficult to survive without North Vietnamese support, it had been as difficult for the US to steer a course through the shoals of Laotian politics as it would have been to send a US battleship or indeed any kind of ship up the Mekong; the country simply did not lend itself to such adventures. Nevertheless, when the battle for Vientiane began in mid-December 1960 the odds were still very much on General Phoumi Nosavan's US-backed forces who, but for one miscalculation, might have won the day and put a military régime in power. A fusion between Kong Lé's forces and those of Pathet Lao might have been anticipated but when the Russians arrived in Vientiane that, one might say, was something else. Up to the moment when their planes started landing at Vientiane Russian intervention, while it may have been unthinkable, was quite logical. No petrol or food could cross the Mekong because of the Thai blockade. The US refused to help. Souvannaphouma turned to the USSR. As far as US calculations were concerned one must assume that the Russian airlift was both inadvertent and unexpected even though it might be regarded as a climax to Khrushchev's boisterous session at the UN that autumn when he was alternately praising Cuba and demanding colonial freedom and even if he made no mention at all of Laos. Conversely, when Eisenhower and Kennedy met just before Kennedy's inauguration in January 1961, Laos headed the list of foreign policy problems and the new US administration had to decide what to do about a civil war in which, no matter on how small a scale, it was already involved as one of the principal contestants.

If it did nothing else Soviet intervention in Laos suggested the need for American restraint unless they were prepared to challenge the USSR and to do in Laos what they were not, or not yet, prepared to do in Cuba. Even allowing for Khrushchev's adventurism it is unlikely that the USSR would have been prepared to withdraw there and then from a commitment that they had only just made even though this was itself a challenge to the US premise that their clients alone should control Laos. In Eisenhower's opinion the issue of communist control of Indo-China was so important as to justify, in the last resort, unilateral US intervention.¹⁶ The question for Kennedy was whether Laos could conceivably be such a serious issue in itself even if it could soon be regarded as exemplar, catalyst and major influence in the formation of a new US foreign policy.

The atmosphere of excitement, the promise of major departures in foreign policy and the idea that the US stood on the threshold of a new age were all suggested or contained in Kennedy's inaugural address. It was devoted entirely to foreign affairs and, with its renewed sense of manifest destiny and its unlimited commitment to the survival and success of liberty, it was an unmistakable promise – or warning – that the US was about to take off on new and thrilling flights of foreign policy. Where Eisenhower, and Dulles before he died in 1959, had come to represent the old guard – faithful but rather tired and unimaginative defenders of the national interest – Kennedy was a young President and surrounded by many young, successful and supremely confident men who were convinced that they could get things done. It seems quite likely that by their nature and by the nature of the presidential campaign that had just ended they would in any event have given US foreign policy a much bolder profile but at the same time as they had to decide what to do about the physical confrontation with the USSR in Laos they felt they were confronted with a much more formidable ideological challenge and a contest for supreme influence in the under-developed world.

KHRUSHCHEV'S CHALLENGE?

The Moscow Conference of World Communist Parties that was held in November 1960 was, as Khrushchev said, principally concerned with questions of war and peace. In spite of his somewhat erratic behaviour there and the miscarriage of the Khrushchev/Eisenhower summit in Paris in May 1960, when the shooting down of the U-2 may have offered Khrushchev a convenient excuse to go home, it seemed to the Chinese that the Russians, both operationally and dialectically, were getting far too close to the US. In the aftermath of the Paris fiasco Khrushchev had said that he would seek agreement with the President who would be elected in November. To the Chinese, agreement of almost any kind with the US was anathema. What they wanted instead (as G. F. Hudson has argued) ‘was an admission that American imperialism was incorrigible and that nothing more than a temporary truce with it was possible’.¹⁷ Operationally, the Moscow Conference may be understood as an argument about détente. Ideologically, if not fundamentally, it was about the nature of peaceful co-existence and the inevitability of war with capitalist states and when the Conference was over Khrushchev set about squaring the circle: how to prevent war on the one hand and encourage it on the other. In retrospect, at least, Khrushchev's warning about the dangers of nuclear war may be seen to have been directed principally at the Chinese. A small imperialist war, Khrushchev told Russian party theorists in Moscow on 6 January 1961 in what was afterwards a widely disseminated speech, no matter which of the imperialists began it, might grow into a world thermo-nuclear and rocket war. All peace-loving forces, in the socialist camp and outside, had therefore to be mobilized to prevent aggressive wars; but their attitude to Khrushchev's third category of wars – ‘liberation wars and popular risings’ – should be entirely different. National liberation wars, of which the armed struggle of the Vietnamese people or the war of the Algerian people were the latest examples, were revolutionary wars and were not only admissible but inevitable. In Algeria it was a liberation war of a people for its independence, even, said Khrushchev, a holy war, which we recognize, we help and we will help. Communists fully supported such just wars and march in the front ranks of the people waging liberation struggles.

Obviously this was an outline of a global policy the significance of which went far beyond Southeast Asia but on the matter of Vietnam it was equivocal or, at least, historical.

How was it that the US imperialists, while wanting to help the French colonialists in every way, nevertheless decided against direct intervention in the war in Vietnam? They did not intervene because they knew that if they helped France with armed forces Vietnam would get appropriate aid from China, the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, which could lead to a world war. The outcome of the war is known. North Vietnam was victorious.¹⁸

Khrushchev made no mention at all of South Vietnam but, on the evidence of his understanding of what had happened in the first Vietnam War, the role of the communist countries standing guard against US intervention seemed to apply with particular force to Laos: although that country was not mentioned by name either.

Having found itself locked into the rigidities of ‘massive retaliation’ and the comparative neglect of conventional forces it was hardly surprising that the new US administration should be looking at new or refurbished styles of warfare but, for all its ambiguities, it was the Khrushchev statement on the ‘just wars’ of national liberation which they understood as the announcement of a forthcoming communist offensive whose challenge they accepted. All members of his administration were apparently directed by Kennedy to read the Khrushchev speech and to consider what it portended.¹⁹ At about the same time Lansdale's influence had reached its peak and after a visit to Vietnam his memorandum on the situation reached Kennedy.²⁰ It warned that 1961 was likely to be a fateful year; that the Vietcong were well on their way to winning but the situation could be reversed if it were possible to find an unusual American who, in Lansdale's characteristic prose, could work with ‘real skill’, ‘great sensitivity’ and ‘a fine sense of the dangerous limits of Vietnamese national security in a time of emergency’. Too many Americans in Saigon, said Lansdale, believed in defeat. Ambassador Durbrow, for example, who was incapable of ‘the warm friendships and affection which our close alliance deserves’ should be removed immediately and ‘if the next American official to talk to Diem would have the good sense to see him as a human being who has been through a lot of hell for years – and not as an opponent to be beaten to his knees – we would start regaining our influence with him in a healthy way’. In Lansdale's opinion Diem was still the only effective president to be seen but it may be significant that for all his approval Lansdale said that Diem would have to be supported until another strong executive could replace him legally. In the meantime he recommended, hopefully, ways in which the US could get the ‘oppositionists’ together and promote two-party government in South Vietnam.

Optimistic, or even naive, as these ideas and proposals may seem they at least recognized some of the political features of America's problems in South Vietnam. On the operational level, however, US plans for counter-insurgency, by contrast, were concerned to ‘prevent the growth and possible final complete military success of VC (Vietcong) military action’ while, as they put it, ‘awaiting solution of the political “causes”’. This Counter-Insurgency Plan for South Vietnam, generated on the spot, which reached Washington just before President Kennedy took office bore, as the Pentagon Papers writer says, the impress of General McGarr, who had arrived in Vietnam in September 1960 as head of the MAAG (Military Assistance Advisory Group). By this time, even if there was not a clear-cut divergence between ‘civilian’ and ‘military’ opinions and solutions the latter tended to assume that the problems were essentially those of co-ordination or command structure. That if there was, as a Special National Intelligence Estimate put it in August 1960, evidence of increasing dissatisfaction with the Diem government this was because of its failure ‘to communicate understandably with the population’ and it was simply a series of ‘psychological’ tasks for all Americans in Vietnam (the ‘Country Team’) to attract the loyalty of the population to the Diem régime, to persuade people that the Saigon government was acting in its interests, and to foster a spirit of national unity and purpose among all elements of Vietnamese society.²¹

These last considerations, somewhat metaphysical and incidental to what, after all, was essentially a military plan were however the ones that were stressed by the President when the Counter-Insurgency Plan was discussed in Washington on 28 January 1961. Kennedy asked whether, in fact, increases in Vietnam's armed forces would allow them to go over to the offensive, which the plan purportedly would do, or ‘whether the situation was not basically one of politics and morale’. Lansdale, who had been invited to the meeting, said that a maximum US effort in 1961 could thwart communist plans, enabling South Vietnam with US help to move over onto the offensive in 1962 and, according to a composite source, the Counter-Insurgency Plan was apparently accompanied by a memo which, if the Plan were put into effect, promised that the war could be won in 18 months.²²

KENNEDY'S COMMITMENT

Kennedy was obviously much impressed by Lansdale although at the meeting on 28 January it appears that he had not yet read Lansdale's report. According to Walt Rostow, another admirer of Lansdale, he persuaded the President to read it, in full, on 2 February and on Kennedy's suggestion it was later published as an unattributed article in the Saturday Evening Post under the title ‘The Report The President Wanted Published’. When it appeared it was, in a way, a rationalization of a decision that had already been taken. In spite of Ambassador Durbrow's reservations – which he withheld in view of the growing threat presented by the Soviet airlift in Laos – on 30 January President Kennedy approved the recommendation in the plan that the Vietnamese Army should be increased by 20,000 men to be paid for, like the increase of over 30,000 men in the Vietnamese Civil Guard, by the US. If it was seen, as the Pentagon Papers observed, as quite a routine action, it may also be regarded as part of the answer to Kennedy's question ‘How do we get moving?’ However one looks at it, ten days after his inauguration President Kennedy had signalled his commitment to Vietnam and had taken the first step towards the dual climax which, with his death and that of Diem, would find 17,000 US servicemen in Vietnam waiting for a more formal confirmation that another war had begun. Even so, spending another $40 m. to improve the defences of South Vietnam hardly looked like a major commitment in itself. It could be seen as the payment of another premium on the original containment policy which although it might not be entirely suited to new purposes would at least allow time for further enquiries. But the notes of the meeting where the Counter-Insurgency Plan was discussed on 28 January reveal a style of decision making on Vietnam which would characterize the Kennedy administration. The significant input, from Lansdale on this occasion, suggested a critical but manageable problem in terms – high morale, will to win, getting close to the Vietnamese – which must have appealed to Kennedy, as would anything that would persuade the Vietnamese ‘to act with vigor and confidence’. Allen Dulles, as CIA Director, offered a non-specific, para-military solution to a para-military problem – build up counter-guerrilla forces first – and Kennedy, anxious to get moving, wanted to turn guerrillas loose in North Vietnam.²³ In all four contemporary crisis areas – Vietnam and Laos, Cuba and the Congo – we must, said the President, be better off in three months than we are now.

Of the four crises it was, arguably, Laos alone which would show any improvement over the next three months or so when a cease-fire was announced on 3 May 1961: but that was only after the US had been on the brink of massive military intervention and, having backed away, was itself prepared to change course. In Vietnam the problems were familiar, intractable, and open to no different assessment in Dean Rusk's State Department then they had been to his immediate, Republican, predecessors. Rusk, on the whole, was not an assertive Secretary of State. Some commentators, Sorensen for example, have suggested that Kennedy would have welcomed bolder, more explicit and more imaginative alternatives to Pentagon plans. At times Rusk ‘seemed almost too eager to disprove charges of State Department softness by accepting Department of Defense toughness’.²⁴ Ultimately, and particularly under Johnson and in spite of Rusk's experience, this may have been so but in the early months of the Kennedy administration decisions on Vietnam seemed to have a presidential stamp. In any case it has been said that Kennedy was well enough qualified to have been his own Secretary of State and, moreover, had a genuine if somewhat superficial interest in Vietnam.²⁵ Rusk, too, had a long-standing interest in, as well as wartime experience of, Southeast Asia and although one could hardly distinguish his public position on resistance to Chinese communism from that of Dulles he was a steadfast supporter of collective security and the independence of small states.²⁶ For him this did not beg the question whether South Vietnam was a legitimate sovereign state or not. He took it as axiomatic that it existed in its own right and, furthermore, that the extension of SEATO'S protection to it, under the American-induced protocol, was itself part of ‘the law of the land’ for the US. That it might have been a tautology never seems to have occurred to him nor, as the Kennedy administration began to develop its own policy towards Southeast Asia, was there an occasion to stand back and re-appraise the Vietnam connection. Even if its peculiar and perplexing problems did not assume the dimensions of an absolute quandary, one which required the US to take on the role of unmoved mover in Vietnamese affairs, the State Department was not designed to function as a Colonial Office and, lacking such control or central point of contact, the management of Vietnamese affairs was, as it were, to be shared between a number of US government departments and agencies.

By January 1961 the armed struggle in South Vietnam had been going on for more than a year. As it grew in intensity so did the inclination to regard it as some kind of military problem, para-military perhaps, but one where the State Department had no particular expertise on offer. Indeed, in so far as persuasion and acceptability are two of the principal characteristics of the diplomat, the transmission of US policy in South Vietnam now suffered from the unacceptability of its Ambassador to an increasingly beleaguered and paranoid family government. Such was the intensity of US involvement in Vietnamese politics and its interest in a ‘successful’ outcome that, in the course of an unsuccessful paratroop coup against Diem in November 1960, for a while Ambassador Durbrow appeared as a mediator between Diem and the rebels, although the aftermath may well have been Diem's conviction that there were ‘Americans in the Foreign Service who are very close to those who tried to kill him’.²⁷

Intentionally or not Lansdale had been advertising himself as the ideal replacement to lead the American Embassy in Saigon if not to orchestrate US civil and military policy in South Vietnam. Whether it was because his unconventional views did not appeal to senior and regular officers or whether the State Department put its foot down, although Durbrow was removed he was replaced by another Foreign Service officer, albeit one with practically no Asian experience, who soon got close enough to Diem to identify with his fortunes if not to induce any visible change of course. However, even though it was not Lansdale in person who went to Saigon to inaugurate a new policy of what amounted, in effect, to ‘Be nice to Diem’, it sounded remarkably like the Lansdale script from which Ambassador Nolting was working and which had now become official US policy. ‘Increasing the confidence of President Diem and his government in the US’ was to be the starting point of a new US approach to Vietnam. It was one of the major points of the ‘Politics’ Annexe to what was described as ‘A Program Of Action To Prevent Communist Domination of South Vietnam’ which was devised and subsequently redrafted, principally by the State Department, for the Vietnam Task Force. This group, headed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Gilpatric, had been established on 20 April 1961 and given a week to produce its plan. Weighted, by membership, towards Defense, it included Lansdale, Nitze, Rostow as well as Alexis Johnson, the Deputy Under-Secretary of State, and representatives of the CIA and the JCS. Many years later, and knowing how it had all turned out, Gilpatric recorded what he felt was the group's basic lack of understanding of almost everything about the peoples of Indo-China or how the Vietnamese would react to US involvement and plans to make the Vietnamese more effective. ‘We were’, he said, ‘kidding ourselves into thinking that we were making well-informed decisions’.²⁸

Well-informed or not, and whether they were as brash and as bold as Gilpatric says they were, it was upon the Task Force's recommendations that US policy to strengthen South Vietnam was based. Not only, however, would the US seek to increase the confidence of President Diem and his government in the US. In the directive of the National Security Action Memorandum (52) of 11 May 1961 the US would also attempt to strengthen Diem's popular support within Vietnam by reappraisal and negotiation under the direction of Ambassador Nolting.²⁹ The US was therefore unmistakably locked into the internal politics of South Vietnam, as well as to its defence, and even if that was not his official designation, Ambassador Nolting, and his successors, were cast in the role of pro-consul. What this renewed, personal commitment to Diem also meant, the other side of the equation as it were, was that when it did not work, when the government and its people had not been made more effective, he would have to be removed. A situation, one might say, that was indistinguishable from a colonial relationship although not many Americans cared to recognize it as such at the time.

It was a situation that would also have been familiar to the French in their Indo-China war and in South Vietnam it was probably as bad as it had been during most of their struggle which, it will be remembered, had been mainly in the North. In April/May 1961 the Vietnam Task Force estimated there were already 12,000 guerrillas in the South (and the number was increasing rapidly), 650 violent incidents per month, 4,500 casualties (on both sides) in the first three months of the year, and 58 per cent of the country under some degree of communist control. This last figure in particular showed what a daunting task the US faced. Understandably, therefore, many if not most of President Kennedy's advisers throughout his first year urged him to send US forces of some kind to South Vietnam. What were they going to do when they got there? What exactly was the purpose? In the first instance, as the Task Force recommended, they would provide the training for another 12,000 Vietnamese troops. In the second instance, as part of the same plan, and taking their own declaration seriously – ‘Come what may, the US intends to win this battle’ – they had under consideration the deployment to South Vietnam of two US battle groups to be concentrated in two divisional battle training areas in the high plateau region plus an engineer battalion to build roads and airstrips. But if the situation got worse they suggested the deployment to Tourane (Danang) or Nha Trang of ‘a tailored, composite joint task force specifically designed for carrying out a counter-guerrilla civic action/limited war mission.’

In the event this large and open-ended concept was only developed as a contingency plan. The actual deployment of forces was limited to 100 extra men for MAAG and then, a few days later, the President approved proposals for covert action: the dispatch of a 400-man Special Forces team was to be the first open US violation of the Geneva Agreements. That it was such a cautious enlargement of the US commitment, and one which it was thought could be reversed, may be seen in contrast to what were eventually the colossal numbers that were recommended for intervention in Laos but it is something which may first be explained by Kennedy's uncertainty and scepticism arising from another inherited plan of the Eisenhower era.

The US-sponsored invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, for all the subsequent recriminations has been described as that rare event in history, a complete disaster. A modest US investment in the overthrow of communism in Cuba, it was liquidated in less than a week. They bombed on Saturday, landed on Monday, and surrendered on Wednesday. Eleven hundred prisoners of the Cuban Brigade were left on the beaches to face death or ransom. It was the plan which could not fail but it had come spectacularly unstuck. Nevertheless it served as a warning, at least to Kennedy, about the risks of similar adventures. ‘All my life’, he told Theodore Sorensen, ‘I have known better than to depend on the experts. How could I have been so stupid, to let them go ahead?’ In Sorensen's analysis, and its obvious implications for Vietnam:

With hindsight it is clear that what in fact he had approved was diplomatically unwise and militarily doomed from the outset. What he thought he was approving appeared at the time to have diplomatic acceptability and little chance of outright failure. That so great a gap between concept and actuality should exist at so high a level on so dangerous a matter reflected a shocking number of errors in the whole decision-making process – errors which permitted bureaucratic momentum to govern instead of policy leadership.³⁰

The immediate lessons to be drawn, however, were in Laos rather than in Vietnam. Again, as in Vietnam, Kennedy's civilian and military advisers – the JCS, Rostow and even Rusk – for different reasons and at different times declared that US troops had to be sent. The numbers varied. According to Rostow, the State Department was trying to bring a SEATO force into being – the precedent for intervention, incidentally, was to be the Lebanon case – but if that did not work then a modified plan would use about 26,000 troops, something less than half of them American, to ‘go in merely to hold certain key centers for diplomatic bargaining purposes’. Not, said Rostow, to conquer the country, although they would shoot if shot at.³¹ Quite inadequate, said the JCS. If US troops went into Laos, or even into Thailand, and if North Vietnamese or Chinese troops moved into Laos as well, the US would need 60,000 men, plus air cover, and be prepared to use nuclear weapons against both countries. What the Russians, already involved in Laos, were expected to do in these circumstances and how the Americans, in turn, would respond is more difficult to discern. In fact, there is an almost complete blank in the Congressional Research Service Study but what, drawing as it does on other sources, is evident is, first, that Kennedy was considering a very limited force of four or five battalions to hold Vientiane and other key points and second, that every effort was to be made to get the USSR to agree to a cease-fire and a conference.

A month later after Kennedy had appeared on TV to draw attention to the seriousness of the problem, there was a real crisis in Laos produced, in part, by the rapid retreat of US-backed forces. On 26 April 1961 the US Ambassador in Laos asked for formal authority to call in air strikes against Pathet Lao to deprive them of key objectives.³² The following day, said Robert Kennedy, everyone at a stormy National Security Council meeting was in favour of sending troops to Laos; the viable number, according to the JCS, had shot up to somewhere between 120–140,000 men, authorized to use nuclear weapons and, if there was serious opposition to an American air landing, the Chief of Naval Operations apparently made it perfectly plain that an atomic bomb should be dropped on Hanoi.³³ The crisis, such as it was, in Laos produced something like hysteria in Washington. Apart from Admiral Burke's drastic solution Robert Kennedy said the main question was whether the US would stand up and fight and Assistant Secretary of State Chester Bowles, perhaps the most ‘liberal’ of Kennedy's foreign policy team, declared that America was going to have to fight China anyway in 2, 3, 5, or 10 years’ time and it was just a question of where, when and how (a remark which provided an unexpected opportunity for the belligerent Air Force General Curtis Lemay to suggest an early start. Within two years, he said, and before the Chinese acquired nuclear weapons.)³⁴

With all this excitement going on about him Kennedy kept his head. Perhaps, with the Bay of Pigs fiasco only a week old he had more reason than anyone else to question the premises and assumptions of the advice which was being given on Laos; in many cases by the same men who had advised him so badly on the Cuban expedition. President Kennedy for one had drawn a lesson from the Bay of Pigs. ‘I don't think there is any question’, said Robert Kennedy, ‘that if it hadn't been for Cuba, we would have sent troops to Laos. We probably would have had them destroyed.’³⁵ Instead, in Laos, the US went for a negotiated settlement but in return for its agreement on neutralization the President, according to Schlesinger, promised the national security establishment that he would do something for resistance in South Vietnam.³⁶ At least by comparison with Laos it looked like a better place for the US to take its stand. In any event, as Kennedy is supposed to have remarked, he couldn't take another defeat that year.

JOHNSON GOES TO VIETNAM

Nevertheless, at least to begin with, the problem of reaching a settlement in Laos served to restrain the US commitment to South Vietnam. On 5 May 1961, for example, Rusk argued that no combat forces could be sent to Vietnam before the Geneva Conference on Laos had begun, but the possibility that the US might have to settle for something that was less than satisfactory in Laos made South Vietnam, Diem in particular, understandably nervous. To a considerable extent it was becoming convenient for the US administration to attribute the insurgency in the South to the instigation of the North; the increasing number of insurgents to arrivals from the North; and to that part of Laos that was controlled by Pathet Lao and their North Vietnamese allies the certainty that this was the vital staging area for the North Vietnamese guerrillas who were going south. So far, however, the US had not been able or had not chosen to try to redress the balance of power in Laos and the danger, apparently, throughout Southeast Asia was that ‘the public, or, more precisely, the political, reaction to Laos had drastically weakened the ability to maintain any strongly pro-US orientation’. This, at any rate, was the message Vice-President Lyndon Johnson brought back from Vietnam in May 1961.³⁷ He had been dispatched to increase Diem's confidence in the US and took with him a letter from Kennedy which must have been particularly gratifying. With its expression of great confidence in Vietnam's long-range political and economic future it was an offer of absolutely unconditional US support and one which implied that money was no object ‘in our joint effort against the Communists’.³⁸

Politically, too, it must have been gratifying for Diem to hear himself described by Johnson as the Winston Churchill of Southeast Asia and even more so had he realized that this was apparently a description suggested by the State Department rather than one of Johnson's flights of fancy.³⁹ Nevertheless, Johnson, as look-out man, had seen the shoals which lay ahead even though he had no doubt about the course to be followed. Described as his personal conclusion he reported: ‘The battle against Communism must be joined in Southeast Asia; the struggle was far from lost; there was no alternative to US leadership; SEATO was not, and probably never would be, the answer.’ In short, the time had come to make a basic decision; ‘whether to help the countries of Southeast Asia to the best of our ability or throw in the towel and pull back our defences to San Francisco. If it was the latter’, said Johnson, ‘we would say to the world that we don't live up to our treaties and don't stand by our friends.’ For Johnson there was no doubt that Diem was a friend. The country could be saved, if the US moved quickly and wisely, but they had to decide whether to support Diem – or let Vietnam fall. At that stage combat troop involvement was not only not required, it was not desirable. What was wanted, instead, was a fundamental decision: whether the US would meet the challenge of communist expansion in Southeast Asia.⁴⁰

At that stage also one notes the nature of Johnson's commitment: Diem was Vietnam, there was no question of an alternative. To support him would cost another $50 m. in military and economic assistance; but at some point in the future, said Johnson, we may be faced with a further decision of whether to commit major US forces to the area. Johnson's recommendation was for ‘a clear-cut and strong program of action’ and without, on Johnson's assessment anyway, the necessity of sending US divisions – what he called ‘the spectre of combat troop commitment’ – it still did not look like an unmanageable affair. Rather, on the Dutch progression, the US had moved from ‘Let me show you how to do it’ to the next position ‘Let me help you do it’ although the joint responsibility that was to be assumed obviously required the massive injection of US resources into what they believed to be a nation-building programme. Thus, the economic mission headed by the Stanford economist, Dr Eugene Staley, went far beyond what might be expected of most financial groups. Understandably, considering South Vietnam's problems, its recommendation for ‘a short-range economic impact program to strengthen popular support for the government’ took priority over the one which, in the long term, was supposed to produce a self-sustaining economy but the report also recommended the establishment of parallel US-Vietnamese committees to improve the execution of military as well as economic programmes.⁴¹

If it had been possible to bolster South Vietnam economically and militarily, which meant at least that economic and military programmes would have been co-ordinated between South Vietnam and the US and the probability of a significant input of US political ideas as well, it is arguable that, by blunting the spearhead of guerrilla attacks and checking the erosion of government support in the villages, a commitment of substantial US forces could have been avoided. In so far as America's problems were with Diem and his government, as much as with the National Liberation Front, there were, however, few signs of progress. Diem claimed, characteristically, and by way of reply to Kennedy, that he had already anticipated reform. What he needed was more men and more money and, in the meantime, in response to Kennedy's suggestion that he should mend his fences with Cambodia, there was, he said, nothing to be gained from dealing with Sihanouk who was committed intellectually and morally to communism.⁴²

A few days before Diem sent his reply to Kennedy, Kennedy was finding out for himself in Vienna what communism was itself committed to, or, at least, what points of contact and friction there were between him and Khrushchev. From all accounts it was a bruising encounter for Kennedy, with Khrushchev very much on the attack and leaving Kennedy in no doubt about USSR support for wars of national liberation.⁴³ For all that, it seems that Khrushchev had professed no great interest in Laos so that, in a remarkable joint statement, Kennedy and Khrushchev reaffirmed their support for a neutral and independent Laos under a government chosen by the Laotians themselves. In Geneva, where a 14-nation conference on Laos had begun, it was obvious from the beginning that the main confrontation was not between the US and the USSR but between the US and China (who, amongst other things, was demanding that SEATO be wound up) and with neither communist country showing that much interest in Vietnam it seemed as if the US might deal with the problems in the South without risking the sort of direct confrontation that had occured in Laos. That is, unless they chose to do so or unless the implications of their resistance per se to communist-supported wars of national liberation led them to consider an attack on what they presumed to be its source.

At the beginning of October 1961 a Special National Intelligence Estimate (October 5) put the number of armed, full-time Viet Cong in South Vietnam at about 16,000: an increase, despite substantial combat losses, of 12,000 since April 1960 and of 4,000 in the previous three months. Of the total strength, they reckoned that between 10 and 20 per cent consisted of cadres infiltrated from North Vietnam, mostly via mountain trails through southern Laos, and that most of them were drawn from the 90,000 or so Vietminh from southern and central Vietnam who had gone to the North after 1954. The Estimate was focused on what it called ‘Bloc support’ for the Communist effort against the government of Vietnam and although it assumed that most of the arms and equipment being used by the Viet Cong were of US and French origin it assumed further that the ability of the Viet Cong to maintain its expanded effort would to a large extent depend upon improved logistical support from outside. This was one of two critical premises. The other was that when the dry season began in November the Viet Cong would attempt to create a second ‘liberated area’ in the plateau region adjacent to Southern Laos (the first had been established for years in the Ca Mau peninsula at the southern tip of Vietnam) and that this would enable them to keep government forces divided and prevent their concentration against either guerrilla area.

Within the South perhaps the most ominous and obvious sign of guerrilla strength was their ability (when they chose to do so) to concentrate units of 500–1,000 men, and more, for attacks on government positions but concentrations of that size are tempting targets for regular forces particularly when they have the advantages of mobility and massive fire-power. In a sense this sort of reaction can be thought of as counter-insurgency and the opportunity which it might offer to US forces coincided with the apparent but growing necessity for ‘saving’ South Vietnam. It was also a matter of coincidence between the President's principal military and civilian advisers. The former, embodied first in the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were, however, about to propose a scheme of allied military intervention, a modified SEATO Plan 5, which would have had almost as many Commonwealth (4,400) as US (5,000) troops in a total force of more than 22,000. The primary purpose would be to allow South Vietnamese forces to conduct offensive operations elsewhere while the Field Force commander would also be free to join in operations to interdict the infiltration of men and materials from North Vietnam. Realistically, perhaps, it envisaged the possibility of a massive Chinese reaction in which case, as they put it, ‘there would be issues whether to attack selected targets in South China with conventional weapons and whether to initiate use of nuclear weapons against targets in direct support of Chinese operations in Laos’. In this event also the SEATO force would have to increase to 278,000 men and would require a call up of appropriate forces to maintain the US strategic reserve.⁴⁴

This, obviously, was Johnson's ‘spectre’ of US ground force deployment but the following day, 10 October, a rather more modest plan ‘Concept For Intervention In Vietnam’ was prepared which would have deployed a ground combat force of 11,000 men although it was conceded that 40,000 might eventually be needed to ‘clean up the Viet Cong threat’. The difference between this plan and the somewhat apocalyptic proposals of the JCS was that it was an attempt to combine civil and military ideas and represented, in addition to the JCS and the State Department, another significant influence on US Vietnam policy: the White House staff in the persons of Dr Walt Rostow and General Maxwell Taylor. Part of what was described as a ‘mini-State Department’ their intention may not have been deliberately to by-pass the State Department itself but to the extent that the State Department proper was preoccupied with matters other than Vietnam, notably the crisis over the Berlin Wall, they made a major contribution to thinking about Vietnam, and, in Rostow's case, to the dissemination of ideas about counter-insurgency in general.⁴⁵

It was not surprising therefore that, as the plans and the problems proliferated, Kennedy should have decided to send Taylor and Rostow to Vietnam to report on the feasibility of committing US forces. For one thing, the Vietnamese at this stage may have wanted them: although they might only have been an alternative to the alarming request from Diem for a bilateral defence treaty. For another, Taylor and Rostow represented a new, integrated approach to problems of limited war and the importance of its political dimension. Taylor had been retrieved from premature retirement after disagreement with the previous Administration's emphasis on nuclear deterrence while Rostow was widely quoted on the general problem of counter-insurgency. Whether they were sent by Kennedy in the expectation that they would report on the nonnecessity of sending US troops seems doubtful. On the other hand, if their visit was designed to produce a professional second opinion that troops were needed Kennedy went to extraordinary lengths to block the recommendation – as indeed he had to considering that when Taylor and Rostow came home in November he was almost the only senior member of the Administration who opposed it.

PRAGMATIC RESOLVE AND LIMITED PARTNERSHIP

The mood of Kennedy's Vietnam policy makers in the middle of November, 1961 was described by one of those most closely involved, William Bundy, as ‘pragmatic resolve’. A month earlier he had told the President it was ‘now or never’ which meant that a ‘hard-hitting’ operation, if it were done soon enough, would have a 70 per cent chance of checking the decline and giving Diem a chance to do better. Having seen for themselves, the Taylor-Rostow team, which included Lansdale, had decided that although Diem should be kept in place (one State Department member considered and rejected the idea that the US might engineer a coup: ‘not something we do well’) his administration should be turned inside out. It would be part of the shift ‘from advice to limited partnership’ in which Vietnamese performance in every domain could be substantially improved if Americans were prepared to work side by side with the Vietnamese on key problems and it reflected the inevitable optimism of Lansdale: one year of devoted duty by Americans who were willing to stake all on the outcome would spark a complete psychological change in Vietnam and take the initiative away from the Communists. On a more mundane level, MAAG would have to become something like a wartime operational HQ and in the light of the Taylor-Rostow report it was subsequently suggested to Diem that he should establish a National Emergency Council which would include what sounded like a figure from Lansdale's cast: ‘a mature hard-headed American’.

The difficulty with this and similar suggestions was that if he thought it meant losing power, Diem would not agree. As Ambassador Nolting reported from Saigon, Diem and most Vietnamese would interpret it as handing over his government to the US. Taylor, however, was confident that what the US could see needed to be done could be brought about by what he called persuasion at high levels, working with other Vietnamese who were prepared to collaborate and, by using the US presence, ‘forcing the Vietnamese to get their house in order’. In short, a sort of benevolent administrative re-colonization which, in Rostow's view, would help the US to demonstrate its ability to cope with the example of a Khrushchev war of national liberation. By itself, however, it would not be enough and although the purpose was not altogether clear Taylor reported the unanimous opinion of US government officials in Vietnam that a US military commitment was needed as well. Whether or not it would function as the ‘tough mobile striking force’ which the CIA representative recommended, a force of 6–8,000 Americans, including combat troops, would obviously establish a US presence but this might not be sufficient to ‘clean-up’ the insurgency either. Ultimately, it was recognized ‘there is no limit to our possible commitment’ but the caveat which seemed to establish a terminal point was ‘unless we attack the source in Hanoi’. Or, in the State Department's input to the Taylor report, which would be the foundation of policy for Kennedy's successors: ‘If the combined US-GVN [Government of Vietnam] efforts are insufficient to reverse the trend we should then move to the ‘Rostow Plan’ of applying graduated punitive methods on the DRV [Democratic Republic of Vietnam] with weapons of our choosing.’

On the basis of this report the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff now prepared their recommendation to the President. South Vietnam would fall to communism unless there was a commitment of substantial US forces. The country would respond better to a firm initial position than to gradual commitment. The struggle might be prolonged but even if Hanoi and ‘Peiping’ intervened their (emphasis added) logistic difficulties would ensure that the US would not need to commit more than about 205,000 men. In spite of this finely calculated optimism in what might be thought of as something like a Doomsday enterprise the fact that success was seen to depend upon many factors, some of which were not under US control, introduced a final note of caution. It was, said William Bundy, who drafted the memorandum, sinking in how much a commitment depended upon South Vietnamese performance and it was for that reason that in the end they were only ‘inclined to recommend’ that the US commit itself to the clear objective of preventing the fall of Vietnam to communism and that this commitment be supported by the necessary military actions.

RUSK AND MCNAMARA AGREE

In the State Department there were even more doubts although, principally, they were about means rather than ends. When task forces were proliferating the State Department had set up its own, on Southeast Asia as a whole, which was in no doubt that the US had to resist communist encroachment ‘by appropriate military means, if necessary, with or without unanimous SEATO support’. When it had reported in July it seemed concerned that the US ‘should make the basic decision now’. In November this was still an outstanding issue but Rusk had begun to have doubts about Diem, ‘attaching greatest possible importance to security in South-East Asia’ but ‘reluctant to see US major additional commitment American prestige to a losing horse’. Perhaps it was because he found the issue to be so finely balanced or perhaps, as Ball suggests, it was because he remembered what had happened in Truman's time when the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense weren't on speaking terms, but, whatever it was, ten days later Rusk had swallowed his doubts and had agreed with McNamara on a joint memorandum to be sent to the President. Both Secretaries had made concessions. At first sight Rusk seemed to have made more.

The US should commit itself to the clear objective of preventing the fall of South Vietnam to Communism. The basic means for accomplishing this objective must be to put the government of South Vietnam into a position to win its own war against the guerillas.

We shall be prepared to introduce US combat forces if that should become necessary for success. Dependent upon the circumstances, it may also be necessary for US forces to strike at the source of the aggression in North Vietnam.

Both agreed to the Taylor-Rostow proposal that individual US administrations and advisers should be provided ‘for insertion into the Governmental machinery of South Vietnam’, but when it came to a commitment of US forces they distinguished between small, specialized components such as helicopters or intelligence and ‘larger organised units’ and, for the latter, rediscovered Catch-22: if South Vietnam was strong enough they would not be needed. If it was not, US forces would not be much good ‘in the midst of an apathetic or hostile population’. So, although contingency plans for operations that would go all the way up to dealing with ‘organised communist military intervention’ were to be made, the actual deployment would be limited to the small, specialist units.

Thus, on 11 November, anniversary of the end of America's first major war of the 20th century, the blue-print was submitted for what perhaps was to be the last. The President's principal Executive advisers simply wanted a recognition of the irrefutable objective. Once the end was agreed the means would follow even though it looked as if the war would not be limited to South Vietnam and even though the only war that was mentioned was the one which the government of South Vietnam must be allowed to win. It was a surprising compromise between the two principal Secretaries: instead of sending troops they should not do so yet but they should be prepared to send them rather than rule them out. It is also remarkable that they felt the need to ask for an irreversible commitment at all but perhaps it was because they felt that it was as much as they could get from a President who had more doubts than they had about where it would end and a far clearer view of what the arrival of US battalions in Vietnam would mean. Or, as William Bundy puts it in his account of a meeting that day when the memo was discussed: ‘The thrust of the President's thinking was clear – sending organised forces was a step so grave that it should be avoided if this was humanly possible.’⁴⁶ Apart from the President's thinking there was also the Laos connection: what Rusk and McNamara recognized was the considerable risk of stimulating a communist breach of the cease-fire and the resumption of hostilities in Laos if US combat forces were introduced to Vietnam before a Laotian settlement. After a Laotian settlement, however, if there was one, it would be different: they would stabilise the position both in Vietnam and Laos because it would be seen that that was as far as the US would go and that communist influence would be allowed to develop no further. This would at least allow an immediate decision on combat troops to be postponed but the remaining issue was whether to accept the Rusk-McNamara proposal for categorical commitment to prevent the loss of South Vietnam.

At the meeting, again according to William Bundy's account, the President decided against the Rusk-McNamara proposal and in favour of George Ball's argument that a flat commitment without combat forces was the worst of both worlds. Ball was one of the few of the President's men with an acute and apocalyptic sense of what was impending. Remembering what had happened to the French he had warned Kennedy that once US forces were committed they would have 300,000 men in the paddy fields and jungles and never find them again. To which Kennedy replied, ‘with an overtone of asperity’: ‘George, you're just crazier than hell. That just isn't going to happen.’⁴⁷ Kennedy had also been warned by General MacArthur against ever introducing any US troops into Southeast Asia under any circumstances⁴⁸ and although, at this stage of development, US policy may be seen as almost ‘executive altogether’ Congressional leaders such as Senator Mansfield had specifically urged the President not to send combat forces to Vietnam. But the dilemma remained. Five years before, Kennedy would have spoken for both himself and Mansfield when he described Vietnam as ‘a test of American reliability and determination in Asia’⁴⁹ and what most of his advisers now proposed was in the logic of that conceptual commitment.

Before the meeting of 15 November when the critical decisions were made Kennedy received more recommendations that he should send troops. The whole world, said Rostow, with some exaggeration, was asking a simple question: what was the US going to do to stop North Vietnam supporting the war in the South? Rostow's fears that ‘strong, decisive action’ would not be taken and which, he said, would best avoid a war, might have been met if Kennedy had agreed there and then to send a division for military action in South Vietnam: when it was needed. This was the requested advice of his National Security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, who argued that, unlike Laos ‘which was never really ours after 1954 … South Vietnam is and wants to be’. It was probably the underlying assumption of most of the National Security Council when it met to prepare its policy directive on 15 November and although they were considering a joint State Department-Defense memo that they should not send US divisions or even battalions into Vietnam at that stage one feels that, without the President, an emotional predisposition would nevertheless have become an operational commitment. McNamara, for example, seemed to think that the situation in Vietnam, which Kennedy, by contrast with Berlin, described as vague and the guerrillas as phantoms, would be clarified once US forces were involved and neither he nor Rusk excluded Hanoi, either, as an eventual target. Even if they were only involved in what Taylor called ‘the guerilla-suppression program’ McNamara warned, however, ‘in all probability US troops, planes and resources would have to be supplied in additional quantities at a later date’ which was in marked contrast to Rusk's more benign forecast that firmness ‘might achieve desired results in Vietnam without resort to combat’.⁵⁰

KENNEDY'S DOUBTS

Whatever the consequences of a major troop commitment would be it was the commitment itself against which Kennedy argued with considerable courage and skill. He disagreed with Rusk's attempted analogy with Berlin,⁵¹ questioned Rusk's comparison with Korea, and said he could even make a rather strong case against intervening in an area 10,000 miles away against 16,000 guerrillas with a native army of 200,000 where millions of dollars had been spent for years with no success. All this notwithstanding, and in the absence of any conspicuous support for that proposition, Kennedy's role may really have been that of devil's advocate. Even though he was asking others to define their positions the action to be taken was more or less assured. In the President's mind at any rate, and according to William Bundy's analysis, there was the belief that the US seemed to be the single crucial, sustaining power against multiple communist threats. Standing firm on Berlin probably meant standing fairly firm at the same time on Vietnam, more particularly if concessions were going to be made over Laos; and if there really was a danger that South Vietnam was going to collapse, and if that could be avoided without a massive and sudden commitment of US forces, policy became self-evident. Like Eisenhower and Dulles before him, Kennedy also faced a problem of enlisting Congressional if not popular support and as the earlier crisis at Dien Bien Phu, while it had not led to unilateral US intervention, had at least created SEATO in the hope of dealing with situations like this, it might have been prudent to wait until the new crisis also became self-evident so that the US could engage in some genuine ‘united action’. In the meantime, having come that far, the decisions would be taken that responded, even if they did not conform, to the advice that Kennedy had asked for from his White House advisers, Taylor and Rostow.⁵² Theirs, in effect, were the assumptions that would bring Vietnam back to first principles. The Communists were pursuing a clear and systematic strategy in Southeast Asia which extended their power and influence in ways which by-passed US power as well as the conventional strength of indigenous forces in the area. International law and practice did not yet recognize the mounting of guerrilla war across borders as aggression justifying counter-attack at the source. But ‘this new and dangerous Communist technique which by-passes our traditional political and military responses’ led to Taylor's ‘judgment and that of my colleagues that the US must decide how it will cope with Khrushchev's “wars of liberation” which are really para-wars of guerilla aggression’.⁵³

The Taylor-Rostow mission produced a notable prognosis and some notable misconstructions. That South Vietnam was not an excessively unpleasant place for US troops to operate. That North Vietnam was extremely vulnerable to conventional bombing and, on one interpretation, that the risks of backing into a major Asian war by way of South Vietnam ‘are present but are not impressive’. These assessments aside, the fact that they had gone to Vietnam in itself had been part of, as they put it, a sequence of expectations that had been set in motion by Vice-President Johnson's visit. Having found the atmosphere in South Vietnam to be, on balance, ‘one of frustrated energy rather than passive acceptance of inevitable defeat’ it remained for the US to harness this energy. If it did not, and unless there was a ‘hard US commitment to the ground’, they believed that morale in South Vietnam would crumble rapidly.

In the event it seems that neither Taylor nor Rostow was satisfied with the commitment that was made: increased airlift for the GVN forces, air reconnaissance, small craft and crews for naval operations, more training and equipment for the Civil Guard and for the Self Defence Corps, whatever was necessary to improve the military-political intelligence system, military assistance in operational collaboration with GVN and operational direction of US forces and, finally, the offer of individual administrators and advisers for the entire governmental machinery of South Vietnam and for joint operational surveys in every province of the country.⁵⁴ But at least of equal importance was the set of instructions that was sent to Ambassador Nolting in Saigon pointing out that Diem would soon be assigned an increased number of Americans for operational duties and that the new joint plan would involve them, not in the old advisory capacity, but in a much closer relationship. The US, in fact, would expect to share in the decision-making process in the political, economic and military fields as they affected the security situation.⁵⁵ Together with these instructions Nolting was given the pro forma of a reply from Diem although it was to be hoped that it would not be an exact copy.

When Taylor and Rostow had been in Saigon it seems from the record that they had given Diem little indication of what might be required of him in exchange for increased US help other than vague references to a loss of confidence on the part of the US and Rostow's comment that the ‘secret of the turning point is offensive action’. Now, however, Diem would be expected to carry out thorough-going reforms to convince the American people, as well as world opinion, that they were not supporting an unpopular or ineffective régime and his understandable but unhelpful reaction to what his vice-president called great concessions in the realm of sovereignty in exchange for little additional help, was that Vietnam did not want to be a US protectorate. Nor, apparently, did a number of members in Kennedy's administration, not to mention Ambassador Nolting in Saigon, who responded to accusations in the government-controlled press that Vietnam was becoming a ‘pawn of capitalism’ by suggesting that the US concentrate on efficiency rather than on the ‘particularly offensive’ concept of political reforms. Two weeks after the US had demanded large-scale reforms as the price of its enhanced support, the situation was clarified. What the US really had in mind was a partnership that was ‘so close that one party would not take decisions or actions affecting the other without full and frank prior consultation’.⁵⁶

After more than five years of mutual assistance, during which time America had supported Diem and Diem had supported US purposes in Vietnam, the US now found itself at the end of Kennedy's first year in office in a common-law alliance with obligations that would be more onerous, and less reputable, than those towards states whose legitimacy was unchallenged. Even so, for any self-respecting government there must have been something rather demeaning about being rehearsed in the request it was to make for assistance. Conversely, while the US publicly reaffirmed that it would help the Republic of Vietnam to protect its people and to preserve its independence, it was doing rather less and rather more than responding to a request.⁵⁷ Either way it would have difficulty in treating the government of Vietnam as anything like an equal partner but South Vietnam could still be a show-piece of US resistance to what it regarded as a spurious war of national liberation. Nevertheless, and although it may have seemed insignificant at the time, once US armed forces were sent to Vietnam, once they started shooting and, unmistakably, once they were killed in combat, the US was engaged in acts of war. In attempting to conceal or deceive – for example, by having a Vietnamese on board US aircraft engaged in combat operations or attaching the prefix ‘reconnaissance’ to familiar Second World War medium bombers, in deference to the 1954 Geneva ‘restrictions’ – the US seemed to conceal from itself the fact that these were the first operations of its own war. The arrival of a 15,000-ton US aircraft ferry in the middle of Saigon on December 11, was a highly visible sign of the US commitment to Vietnam.⁵⁸ What was invisible, and might therefore be discounted, was the feeling of attachment and loyalty that had already developed, particularly between American Special Forces and their montagnard tribes, and a sense of an irrevocable commitment in the face of death. There were already several hundred American Special Forces in Vietnam and hundreds of US military advisers were about to arrive, many of whom would soon be engaged in combat. In these circumstances, and although it is perhaps sentimental, it is understandable that many of them felt that the personal and the national commitment had fused. It was now a matter of honour.

It may be equally sentimental but one should also, of course, consider the impact on those who encountered US power and might have been unable to understand its limited purpose. In Laos, for example, they would have derived little comfort from the fact that there had been no blanket authorization for the use of napalm by the nominally re-designated RB-26s: it was to be used only for particular targets.⁵⁹ Similarly, in Vietnam, where the appearance of Americans on field operations was supposed, by US law, to be in a non-combatant capacity both the Ambassador in Saigon and the President would have to lie to conceal the fact that US advisers had been in action and that the distinction between peace and war had become remarkably blurred.⁶⁰ However, as Rusk had told Nolting, they felt there had been no need for a decision which would, in effect, have shifted primary responsibility for the defence of South Vietnam to the US and, presumably, by this token, the US did not regard itself as a primary enemy as far as the Viet Cong were concerned. So far, in the first year of the Kennedy administration, the most important commitment to Vietnam had been conceptual. Although they may not have gone as far as McNamara, the JCS or even Rusk may have wanted they had committed themselves privately and publicly to Diem's government and, at the same time, by making the commitment visible, had attached the prestige of the US as well. Having set the compass the US course would now take it over the operational barrier represented by the Geneva limitation on the numbers of its military advisory group although this was at first done obliquely by denouncing the part played by North Vietnam in the reinforcement, supply and organization of the Southern insurgency.⁶¹

COUNTER-INSURGENCY

In this presentation South Vietnam, a sovereign state, was under attack from North Vietnam. What had until then been a US Military Assistance Advisory Group could now be transformed, on 8 February 1962, into a Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. Its commander, who would be responsible for all US military operations in Vietnam, would have authority to deal direct with Diem on military matters. According to an agreement reached between McNamara and Rusk, political and what were called ‘basic policy matters’, however, would be the responsibility of the US Ambassador and the only joint responsibility in Vietnam was that they should keep each other informed of their respective operations.⁶² The stage was thereby set for a notable divergence of approach to a problem which had already been identified and to which the US was about to make a second conceptual commitment: counter-insurgency. On 18 January 1962, after various expressions of Presidential concern, the Special Group (Counter-Insurgency) was set up under the chairmanship of General Maxwell Taylor which included, in addition to the Under Secretaries of State and Defense, the Chairman of the JCS and the Director of the CIA, and as a mark of Presidential concern, his brother Robert Kennedy, the Attorney-General. Its primary function was to ‘insure’ [sic] proper recognition throughout the US Government that subversive insurgency (‘wars of liberation’) was a major form of politico-military conflict equal in importance to conventional warfare but in designating South Vietnam, along with Laos and Thailand, as the area of special concern it left open the question of what the appropriate policies would be.⁶³ Again, perhaps, it was a matter of who deferred to whom although one may say that by having his own military adviser, General Taylor, as chairman Kennedy had put a presidential stamp on its proceedings.

In an earlier organizational stage of counter-insurgency deliberations in Washington, Kennedy had ensured that his own enthusiasm was transmitted through his brother's presence on the Counter-Insurgency Committee. In the end, according to Schlesinger, the failure of counter-insurgency was another phase in the education of Robert Kennedy, but from the beginning one can see in the scale of operations that was being recommended by another enthusiast, Robert Komer, a distinctively US approach which could create its own problems. ‘What should we do? How about the President directing that all wraps are off in the counter-guerrilla operations etc. in South Vietnam. We will fund and pay for any crash measures however wasteful which will produce quick results.’ The US would in fact do anything that was needed in sending arms and ammunition, and providing MAAG advisers in association with what were called socio-economic operations designed to win back the countryside. Instead of haggling with Diem over who should pay what proportion of the effort the US would regard this as a wartime situation in which the sky was the limit. In short, the US could not afford to go less than all out in cleaning up South Vietnam and the objective (this was written at the end of July 1961) was to achieve a major defeat of the Viet Cong before the end of the year.⁶⁴ Komer, as it happens, eventually became one of the most important and articulate proponents of, and participators in, far more sensitive pacification schemes but one can see how that sort of proposition and its embodiment in US policies in Vietnam could promote certain reflections on American character in general.⁶⁵ Towards the end of 1961 Americans in Saigon were somewhat annoyed by the interest being shown by the Vietnamese administration in the much smaller, more modest and more successful application of counter-insurgency which had, over 12 years, defeated a communist insurrection in Malaya. Ultimately, it may be argued, success in the Malayan experience, even in a colonial situation, had depended upon good government; and the last Secretary of Defence in the British administration in Malaya, Robert Thompson, arrived in Vietnam in October under US auspices to study the situation and to advise Diem on what might be done. The problems may or may not have been comparable and some of Sir Robert's subsequent premises about the moral imperatives of the war may be objectionable but he was, nevertheless, one of the outstanding analysts as well as one of the most successful practitioners of effective counter-insurgency per se and his proposals for a strictly limited application of a scheme that might have produced security in the Delta still suggest a fascinating alternative to what actually happened. What is also remarkable is what Thompson's subsequent experience in Vietnam, and his support for the US notwithstanding, led him to say about the defects of the US approach to counter-insurgency in Vietnam. As much as anything Thompson thought the problems were to be found in the American character. They were, he said, impatient, impulsive, aggressive and rich and, in a more professional assessment, ‘influenced by the very worst interpretation of Clausewitz and the Prussian example of Moltke, so that the sole aim of most orthodox American military commanders had always been “the destruction of the enemy's main forces on the battlefield”’⁶⁶

Perhaps, by 1962, the ability of the NLF (National Liberation Front) forces to launch attacks on a battalion scale, and larger, in any case made it imperative that numbers and fire-power should be assembled which would be sufficient to repel them. But the principal result in 1962, as far as the US Army and MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) were concerned, was a concentration on fire-power and air mobility which, while it could inflict heavy casualties on identifiable targets, as long as they did not disperse, did not begin to tackle the long-range fundamental problem. ‘If, as Thompson told Diem, ‘the main emphasis is placed merely on killing terrorists there is a grave risk that more Communists will be created than are killed.’ Any counter-insurgency plan must have as its overall aim ‘winning the people’ and this was something that everyone engaged in anti-terrorist operations, whether military of civilian, had to keep in the forefront of their minds.⁶⁷

Thompson's detailed proposals and, even more, his suggestion for a complete governmental reorganization to deal with the guerrillas and his idea of an overall strategic plan for the entire country ran into immediate difficulties both in Washington and Saigon. Apart from the command problems it would pose, and how or whether the Vietnamese and US military efforts could be meshed, from a military point of view and using rather different criteria, it probably seemed unnecessary. On 1 January 1962 there were already 2,500 Americans in Vietnam and by the end of June the figure was due to increase to over 5,500. Almost 300 US aircraft, mostly helicopters, would give hitherto unimagined mobility to the Vietnamese Army as well as air-strike capabilities and by April 1962, General Harkins, the US Commander in Vietnam, announced that the military defeat of the Viet Cong was at hand. There was, perhaps, some doubt as to what he meant by ‘defeat’ but when McNamara asked him in July 1962 at Hawaii how long it would take for the Viet Cong to be eliminated as a significant force he reckoned ‘about one year from the time RVNAF (Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces) and other forces became fully operational and began to press the VC in all areas’.⁶⁸ McNamara, apparently more cautious, suggested that the end of 1965 would be a reasonable target date for the withdrawal of US forces.

In retrospect, at least, McNamara's assessment seems to have been founded not on caution, but on the wildest optimism. As the Pentagon Papers analyst puts it, describing the detailed projections for the simultaneous building up of GVN (Government of Vietnam) forces and the withdrawal of the US, all this planning began to take on a kind of absurd quality as the situation deteriorated drastically and visibly although it could be argued that until what he called the ‘basic unrealities’ were exposed there were enough people making more or less confident assessments to suggest that the US and the GVN might have been putting a successful act together. For example, in his self-confident and scathing report on Diem and his government in November 1961, Professor John Galbraith, Harvard economist, personal friend of President Kennedy and, at the time, US Ambassador to India had reported direct to the President: ‘Given an even moderately effective government and putting the relative military power into perspective, I can't help thinking that the insurgency might very soon be settled.’⁶⁹ So, it might seem to have been just a matter of getting the factors in the right order, type and quantity; a finite problem with a finite solution. Certainly the statistical indicators appealed to McNamara – ratio of GVN to VC casualties, numbers of weapons lost and recovered, numbers of operations and ‘contacts’ initiated by government forces – and even if most of them were military and/or supplied from GVN sources the State Department's own Intelligence and Research report in June (from the cautious Roger Hilsman) while it warned against a premature judgement on ultimate success in the campaign against the Communist ‘war of national liberation’ in Vietnam, ended up by saying ‘We do think that the chances are good, provided there is continuing progress by the Vietnamese Government along the lines of its present strategy’.⁷⁰

The Vietnamese government and its strategy was the caveat, the critical factor and, ultimately, the excuse for what went wrong; but when McNamara was establishing a matrix for US policy whose objectives were to be accomplished in the finite period of three years there were other, hopeful, signs. First, there had been an extraordinary success on the night of 20 July when: ‘In the largest helicopter attack so far in the war, day or night, government troops put down right smack on top of a Viet Cong battalion and killed 141 losing less than 30 of their own.’⁷¹ Most important, was that agreement had been reached at Geneva three days later, on 23 July 1962 the same day as McNamara's Hawaii conference, on the neutralization of Laos. One of the inferences that was being drawn from this diplomatic settlement was that it was in fact a triumph of US resolution and proof that it had been US determination which had in large part brought about it. After another runabout battle in which General Phoumi's forces were again in headlong retreat from northern Laos to the Mekong in May, and after hurried consultation with Congressional leaders, 5,000 US troops had been sent to Thailand, units of the Seventh Fleet were in the Gulf of Siam and even Britain had contributed an RAF squadron from Malaya.⁷² In Washington Dean Rusk had declared that the integrity and independence of Thailand were vital to US interests and, furthermore, that the US would honour its agreement to defend Thailand even if no other SEATO member was willing to do so. It appears that Kennedy, also, ‘was thinking much more about intervening this time’, even to the point of a Congressional resolution that would have approved US intervention, but in the event a cease-fire of sorts was resumed in Laos, the negotiations started again and the agreement was eventually signed in Geneva.⁷³ Ironically, as part of its confirmed neutrality, Laos declared that it would not recognize the protection of any alliance or military coalition, including SEATO, but whatever one thinks of the agreement, how it was reached, what, in the event, it was worth and why it collapsed, neutralization for Vietnam was an option that hardly received a second thought.

STRATEGIC HAMLETS

Instead, McNamara's divination led to the Comprehensive Plan for South Vietnam which was to direct US policy towards restoring the government of Vietnam in its normal functions, to the suppression of the insurgency and the expectation that all this would be accomplished within three years. Having imposed a semblance of order, purpose and, above all, time on US policy the Comprehensive Plan seemed to take on a life of its own and, whether or not it was a template of reality, it became an end in itself. As long as the correct sequences were observed, together with proper accounting, and the right figures kept rolling in it was possible to believe that the programme was on course and the US and the GVN were winning. Many of the military performance indicators were, indeed, improving but perhaps the most encouraging of all the performances and the one that was most important because it was what the GVN was doing itself, and because, for MACV, it took care of the awkward and unfamiliar requirement of ‘pacification’, was that of the Strategic Hamlet Programme.

Unlike the earlier and more modest attempts at rural resettlement which had only produced a score of so-called ‘agrovilles’ in a couple of years the Strategic Hamlet Programme that had got under way in January 1962 aimed at the total transformation of the South Vietnamese countryside. On 3 January 1962, as a sort of birthday treat for President Diem, it was announced that 14,000 strategic hamlets were to be constructed in 14 months. The scale and the time were unbelievable and so were the results that were announced. Placed in the hands of Ngo Dinh Nhu, Diem's daemonic brother, practically from the start the Strategic Hamlet Programme assumed a mystical purpose which, with a mixture of Confucian and Communist-style slogans, were supposed to turn them into vehicles of the Personalist Revolution. At times it took on a bizarre and almost certain counterproductive form. Nhu, for example, apparently told Duncanson, one of the British advisory mission in Saigon, that the defenders of the strategic hamlets would, at most, have weapons loaned but generally speaking they were expected to capture them from the Viet Cong. Equally hazardous, as McNamara discovered for himself, was the emergency drill to be followed when villages were under attack – they were expected to send a runner to the nearest military or para-military unit – and although this led to an accelerated supply of US radio sets in most other respects the strategic hamlets only provided the illusion of security and pacification. It is hard, for example, to see what purpose four- or five-strand barbed wire fences served even against guerrillas who had no wire cutters, and although traditional bamboo, either in hedges or as sharpened stakes, was often a better defence all that a province chief had to do was to say that every village had its fence, most of its people were living inside, and the province was formally declared to be ‘pacified’. Even then, on this rudimentary basis, the GVN had something of a Red Queen approach to its own statistics. For example, on 1 October 1962 Diem announced that 7,267,517 people were sheltered in hamlets that had been completed or were in the process of completion. Ten days later in the report given by the Minister of the Interior, it seems the figure had gone down by almost 3 m. As the more objective US AID (Agency for International Development) noted later:

From the very inception of the Strategic Hamlet Program it was apparent that many of these (provincial Vietnamese) officials did not fully understand the concept, and were so frightened by the pressures from the President (that is, Diem) and his brother that they would employ any measures from forced labour and confiscation to false reporting to achieve the quantitative goals set. Although these tendencies were at first restrained, the pressures for ‘reporting’ steadily increased, while at the same time the influence of US advisors lessened, as a result of errors and misunderstandings on both sides.⁷⁴

IRREDUCIBLE OPTIMISM

Errors and distortions notwithstanding, 1962 was announced as the Year of the Strategic Hamlets in South Vietnam. It was the centrepiece of Diem's ‘pacification’ programme and if, as the Pentagon Papers analyst suggests, it was an attempt to translate the newly articulated theory of counter-insurgency into operational reality it was nevertheless very difficult to make intermediate assessments of progress: ‘one could not really be sure how one was doing until one was done’.⁷⁵ But even where specific indicators ‘almost invariably pointed to shortcomings in GVN's execution of the program’ they

were treated as problems in efficient management and operational organisation; the ineluctability of increased control (of security) leading somehow to popular identification by a process akin to the economic assumption of ‘flotation to stability through development’ went unchallenged as a basic assumption. Critics pointed to needed improvements; the question of whether or not these could be accomplished, or why, almost never was raised.⁷⁶

Simply to be able to report that a Strategic Hamlet had been completed thus became an end in itself. What happened then, apparently, seemed to be of less importance although it was certainly not likely to be what had happened in the analogous experience of the Chinese New Villages in Malaya which, after most of them really had been completed, provided, together with their approaches, the killing grounds during the insurrection. Chinese peasant farmers had provided the essential support for the guerrillas in Malaya. When they and their families were resettled or regrouped even within reasonably secure perimeter fences all that had been done was to make it more difficult for the guerrillas to get food. When New Villages began to enjoy some comfort and stability and, above all, some sense of identification with government – particularly when independence was clearly on the way – the next stage was reached. Finally, when New Villages showed that they were able to defend themselves successfully against guerrilla attack, and to provide the scraps of intelligence that allowed security forces to lay equally successful ambushes, the guerrilla's days were numbered. Whether, by analogy, ‘New Villages’ could ever have succeeded in South Vietnam is another matter. Between a government that regarded them as a literally captive audience for its eccentric ideas of personalism, to the exclusion of more mundane functions, and a US military effort that was only interested in Strategic Hamlets as long as it would allow them, and the Vietnamese Army, to get on with the principal business of killing guerrillas, the answer is, probably, ‘no’. Even so, as Duncanson suggests, there may have been hopeful signs. With increased government control ‘the yield from land tax doubled from 1961 to 1962. Viet Cong recruitment fell off for perhaps the only time after 1959 and by the spring of 1963 the situation was that the Strategic Hamlets succeeded … in facing the Viet Cong with an obstacle they urgently wanted out of the way, and at the same time in bringing the authority of the régime into many South Vietnamese villages for the first time.’⁷⁷ But perhaps the fatal blow was that the GVN tried to do too much too fast and as evidence quoted in support of this argument in Osborne's study of Strategic Hamlets is Colonel Pham Ngoc Thau's lecture at Cornell University in May 1964. Colonel Thau, one of the directors of the Strategic Hamlet Programme, was later distinguished by his abortive coup against General Khanh's régime in 1965 but an even greater distinction is that he was also one of the most highly placed Viet Cong agents in the Diem administration. Whether the breakneck speed of the Strategic Hamlet Programme owed something to him as sorcerer's apprentice or whether it would have outrun itself anyway must be a matter of speculation as Colonel Thau was killed shortly after his unsuccessful coup.⁷⁸

What is somewhat less speculative, however, is how the NLF responded to the largely unexpected arrival of US support for Diem in 1962 and how they began to cope, eventually, with US helicopters and with the strategic hamlets. The latter, in fact may have been much more of an inconvenience than the NLF would publicly admit and there is evidence that they were worried enough to ask advice from the North how to tackle the problem. From 1 January 1962, however, what had previously been the southern branch of the Vietnam Workers Party was supposed to have become the autonomous People's Revolutionary Party of South Vietnam and, again, there is some evidence that there was continuing tension between North and South (or at least a divergent assessment of Party interests) in assessing the stage which the revolution had reached. Where the South may originally have launched itself on a variant of the armed struggle out of sheer self-preservation, in the North self-preservation meant safeguarding the achievements of the revolution and this, in turn, meant doing nothing that would provoke a US attack. But with an apparent improvement in the fortunes of the NLF in 1961 it was hardly surprising that this should have been reflected in a new and hopeful party line. At about the same time as Taylor and Rostow were visiting South Vietnam to see how bad things were the Party's Central Office for South Vietnam was apparently making its own assessment of the revolution in the South, decided there was a high tide, and that ‘the period of temporary stabilisation of the US-Diem régime had passed and the period of continuous crisis and serious decline has begun’. In practical terms it announced that the ‘partial uprising’ had already started; that the military phase of the struggle was now dominant in the Central Highlands; but, in other respects, the Party leadership, in rather a Micawber-ish mood, was waiting for something to turn up.⁷⁹

In the event it was the Americans who turned up, in rapidly increasing numbers, to frustrate any hopes of transforming the partial into a general uprising and by the end of 1962 with the situation finely balanced, and in spite of each side believing it had the advantage, something like a stalemate had developed. If the GVN and the US between them had not suppressed a revolution at least they had dampened down a revolutionary war. On the other hand, by 1962 the NLF may have had something like 300,000 members and perhaps a passive following of more than a million.⁸⁰ The State Department's Intelligence and Research Bureau put the figure at 100,000 for irregulars and sympathisers but even if, as the GVN claimed, 21,000 Viet Cong had been killed that year this still left, on State Department estimates, 23,000 ‘élite fighting personnel’. Hilsman's presentation of these figures in December 1962 and his appreciation of the multiple factors involved in insurgency made this one of the most sensible and prescient accounts available to policy-makers and, with so much to contradict McNamara's confident assertion that all the objective criteria suggested the US was winning, one had to ask who was reading the reports and what effect, if any, were they having.⁸¹

Hilsman's memo had been addressed to the Secretary of State. But perhaps the single most important detail in understanding what happened in the Kennedy Administration's approach to Vietnam is that its Secretary of State never went to Vietnam and although it may be argued that any competent Secretary or Minister can get a very good picture by staying at home and evaluating the evidence, nevertheless Rusk's notable absence from Vietnam underlines why so many people felt that the State Department generally and he personally had abdicated responsibility and had turned it over to McNamara, to the Department of Defense and to the military in general. There were, of course, more urgent problems to be dealt with – Berlin in 1961, Cuba in 1962 – and, in any case, someone with the authority of the Army Chief of Staff had announced, in November 1962, that Vietnam was essentially a military problem. Even if that proposition was challenged there was still enough data on which to base hopeful conclusions. For example, in Hilsman's Intelligence and Research survey of December 1962 the VC controlled about 20 per cent of the villages but only 9 per cent of the rural population. Were these figures going up or down and, in either case, how fast? By the end of 1963 there would be bitter disagreement between State and Defense not only on figures and assessments from Vietnam but also on whether the State Department had any entitlement to prepare them – Rusk conceded to McNamara they had not – and with even the ‘civilian’ component of the American ‘country team’ in Vietnam telling US reporters that they should ‘accentuate the positive’ this helped to create a further gap between reality and understanding.

THE PROBLEM OF DIEM

But it seems that even critical observers and analysts continued to offer assessments of at least qualified optimism. Perhaps one might discount the same Army Chief of Staff, General Wheeler, when he said in January 1963 ‘We are winning slowly’ and although, like Hilsman, Michael Forrestal's report from Vietnam in February was particularly perceptive, nevertheless, if one was looking for a bottom line in that report for the President, it was ‘We are probably winning’.⁸² A month later, on a visit to the US C-in-C Pacific it appears that even Thompson reported: ‘One year ago we were neither winning nor losing in RVN. Now we are definitely winning.’⁸³ Perhaps, also, it was because, having seen what might be done, they saw what should be done and, having got that far, it became a question of what could be done. Thus, for Hilsman, it was essentially a problem of co-ordination; for Forrestal it was mostly a matter of an overall plan; and for Thompson, reporting to Diem, it was a matter of making strategic hamlets a reality rather than a matter of target dates and monthly statistics.⁸⁴ For at least two out of the three, however, it was also a matter of personalities: in other words, said Hilsman, it always came back to Ngo Dinh Diem.

US involvement in the coup which led to the assassination of President Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, is still, for many Americans, probably the most painful and controversial episode of the Vietnam War. It is also, arguably, something that was inherent in the logic of US intervention. The US, by virtue of its commitment to South Vietnam and, even more, by its commitment to Diem, had become involved in a revolution. If there was little or no hope that Diem's government could suppress the revolution, if, in fact, it had become an inadequate instrument for carrying out America's political purpose, then, unless the US was prepared to abandon this purpose, there was only one course to be followed. Some matter-of-fact considerations about removing Diem had been aired before the end of Kennedy's first year in office but there was a world of difference between action and speculation and although, after eight years, Diem's family government proved to be less rather than more amenable to US direction the fact that they were still in place, and the struggle had not been lost, entitled them to some respect and support in Washington. But the situation was beginning to change.

One of the more important changes occurred in the State Department in March 1963 when Hilsman became Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East and Harriman became Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. In six months' time they would mount their own successful Vietnam coup within the Administration but to begin with, the ‘balance of forces’, as a Viet Cong analyst might have described it, was very much in favour of those such as McNamara, Taylor (now Chairman of the JCS) and Nolting who were prepared to retain Diem or give him, once again, one last chance. Nevertheless, Diem was beginning to lose his support outside the Administration and previous champions such as Senator Mansfield had now become outspoken critics while others, such as Buttinger, were working actively against him. Kennedy, too, is said to have begun to have doubts, mostly on humanitarian grounds, about the way the Vietnamese Army was conducting its ‘search and destroy’ operations and there had been a notable defeat of ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) forces, with enormous military and political consequences, in a set-piece battle at Ap-Bac at the beginning of January 1963. Even taken together, however, they did not add up to either an immediate shift of power in Vietnam or a change in US policy. When the stalemate – for both sides in Vietnam, and in Washington – was broken it was in fact largely unexpected and somewhat accidental.

After one of the many superb summaries and analytical prologues in the Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers, the chronology for the chapter ‘The Overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem’ begins: ‘8 May 1963. Hué incident. Government troops fire on a Buddhist protest demonstration, killing nine and wounding fourteen.’ Thus, the Buddhist crisis had begun in which the latent forces of political discontent in South Vietnam were energized and mobilized to the point where they made a government change course; but in Washington, not Saigon. The incident in itself may have seemed trivial: Catholics in Hué had been allowed to fly Papal flags but Buddhists had been forbidden to fly their flags for the Buddha's birthday and although the government response was selective and savage enough on that occasion what really captured world attention was the horrific spectacle a month later of a Buddhist monk burning himself to death in a Saigon street. This, rather than anything else, is what seems to have prompted a profound re-examination of America's commitment to the Diem government. The New York Times concluded that if Diem could not genuinely represent a majority then he was not the man to be President; and in Washington Hilsman, Harriman and the Vietnam Task Force had already devised an improbable plan if the situation became more serious. If there were circumstances, in which the US would play no part, where Diem was ‘definitively unable act as President’, the US would want to back Vice-President Tho as his constitutional successor. They would deny it if the proposal was leaked but they also wondered whether they should tell Diem about the plan, too.⁸⁵

What the US would do if the Vietnamese themselves were to re-order their government, and whether the US wanted this to happen, was about to become a critical question. As long as Nolting was in Saigon he had shielded Diem from Washington's sharper criticisms and there seemed to be no major differences between him and the US military commander, General Harkins. Even when he had returned to Washington and the crisis there and in Saigon had reached its peak Nolting's benevolence and high regard not only for Diem but for Nhu as well seemed undiminished. At a meeting on 27 August 1963, by which time Nhu and his wife had clearly been identified as the primary US targets, Nolting told the President that Nhu was pro-Vietnamese rather than anti-American. In fact, said Nolting, he was an able person who had been responsible for the success of the strategic hamlet programme and although he was feared by the people the Vietnamese were respectful of those who could command. Nolting's advice was not to fight the internal situation in Vietnam too hard and in response to a question from Kennedy said: ‘He thought we should take it slow and easy over the next several weeks.’⁸⁶

By this time Nolting had left Saigon and was to be succeeded as Ambassador by Henry Cabot Lodge, the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate of 1960, one of Kennedy's nicely chosen appointments, who, on his arrival in Vietnam, found himself in the middle of another Buddhist crisis. Taking advantage of the hiatus between the departure of one US Ambassador and the arrival of another, on 21 August Nhu had unleashed his own Special Forces on Buddhist pagodas throughout the country. Aimed at depriving them of their leadership and presumably at presenting Lodge with an accomplished fact, Nhu's action was a violent repudiation of Diem's promises of reconciliation. It was also the act, in Hilsman's opinion, which severed relations between the Diem régime and the US. The announcement which dissociated the one from the other's actions – its ‘act of desecration in violation of its pledged word’ – was, he said, only the epitaph.⁸⁷ Considering what happened next it is understandable and indeed essential that Hilsman should have announced the alliance to be extinct. What the US was about to do was to get rid of the bodies, which were dead only in a political sense, and Hilsman would be one of the prime removers.

THE COUP

‘The Cable of August 24’, a chapter title in Hilsman's book, is still one of the most controversial episodes of the Vietnam War. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee study devotes ten pages to the cable and its aftermath and hardly anyone who was involved agrees on the details with the others.⁸⁸ In brief, the ‘end-run’ telegram, for those unfamiliar with American football, was a successful attempt to go clean around the opposition and tell the Saigon Embassy that, after reasonable opportunity to remove the Nhus, if Diem remained obdurate, the US was prepared to accept the obvious implication: he could no longer be supported. And, even more important: ‘You may also tell appropriate military commanders we will give them direct support in any interim period of breakdown central government mechanism.’⁸⁹ Drafted by Hilsman, with support from Harriman, Forrestal and Ball, Hilsman says it was cleared by the President, word for word and with that imprimatur it seems that no else felt like objecting at the time.⁹⁰ On the Monday following, 26 August 1963 (the cable was sent on the Saturday) there were opportunities for recrimination or, even, remorse and the argument went on for two or three days whether principals such as McNamara or Taylor or McCone (CIA) had been duped but on 29 August when Kennedy polled his advisers one by one they all agreed to stand by the original cable. The US was now committed to supporting a coup but only one which had a good chance of success. By then, or certainly over the next few months, they probably had a whole network of agents in South Vietnam who were actively engaged in plans to replace the existing government. One of the most senior agents had been approached by the newly appointed commander of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam a couple of days after the pagoda raids on 21 August. The CIA man reported that General Don had appeared not to know what to do next but with other contacts being made by the CIA with potentially dissident senior Vietnamese officers, and Ambassador Lodge entering the game with enthusiasm, it looked as if an army coup was imminent.⁹¹ In the event, it was not. General Harkins, for one, made no bones about his continuing support for Diem and his opposition to a coup. Fearing they might be betrayed the Generals called it off, leaving themselves for the moment in limbo and the Kennedy Administration in perhaps even greater disarray.

The coup which should have taken place in a week in fact took another two months to mature. In the meantime although Washington was obviously in two minds about continuing active involvement Kennedy let it be known in an American TV interview that unless the GVN made a greater effort to win popular support he didn't think the war could be won out there but, he added, ‘with changes in policy and perhaps with personnel I think it can’ and the State Department cabled his comments to Saigon with a note: ‘They represent the US Government's attitude towards the situation and should be followed as the official public position.’⁹² This at the time (2 September) may have been true but the significant changes, in personnel and even in policy, had by no means been agreed in Washington. In fact the essential deadlock continued with the Administration casting around all over the place for a policy to deal with the Ngo family. Almost all the permutations were tried: with Diem but without Nhu, with Nhu but without Mme Nhu and so on, not forgetting the other brothers as well. After a week of this and on the day before they received Lodge's ominous but euphonious cable from Saigon ‘The ship of state is slowly sinking’, Kennedy and his advisers called for an on-the-spot report to be made to them in four days' time.⁹³ When the two antagonists, General Krulak representing Defense and the JCS, and Joseph Mendenhall of the State Department, returned they presented what Krulak claimed were, in effect, the town and the country reports. Whether this was the basis of the difference or not Mendenhall thought the situation was hopeless. Krulak ‘believed strongly that we can stagger through to win the war with Nhu (did he really mean Nhu?) in control’. Obviously the NSC (National Security Council) could hardly make its decision if this was the crucial evidence, and after a week of deadlock it decided to send the next two members, Secretary of Defense McNamara and Chairman of the JCS, General Taylor. Again it seems significant that Rusk was not included. To be fair, for Rusk to have been more effective he would probably have to have been Colonial Secretary rather than the Secretary of State. Even though the recommendation, understandable though it is, ‘that Ambassador Lodge be told to tell Diem to start acting like the President of Vietnam and get on with the war' seems of little use beyond the nursery door.

Rusk embodied the US dilemma. ‘We will not’, he said on an earlier occasion, ‘pull out of Vietnam until the war is won and we will not run a coup.’⁹⁴ When McNamara and Taylor returned to Washington and presented their report to the President on 2 October they suggested the war was being won but they implied that a coup might still be necessary, although not yet. Altogether it was rather a neurotic report. The prospects of victory were there, indeed they were scheduled, but Diem and Nhu might, as they say, ‘blow it’. Obviously this put the US into a quandary but, beginning with the good news, so sure were McNamara and Taylor of the successes of the strategic hamlets and the soundness of Vietnamese tactics and techniques which ‘give promise of ultimate victory’ that they proposed withdrawal of 1,000 US military personnel by the end of 1963. Moreover, they believed, the US part in the task of counter-insurgency could be completed by the end of 1965 by which time it seems that victory would have been assured.

If, by victory, we mean the reduction of the insurgency to something little more than sporadic banditry in outlying districts, it is the view of the vast majority of military commanders consulted that success may be achieved in the I, II and III Corps area by the end of (Calendar Year) 1964. Victory in the IV Corps will take longer – at least well into 1965.⁹⁵

Whatever the reality of this dazzling prospect might have been – and it looked as if McNamara was still locked into his original schedule - it was obviously dimmed by discontent with what they called the Diem/Nhu régime which had now become ‘a seething problem’. It was indeed hard to imagine how victory would be achieved in a couple of years, as they reported that: The discontent of the élite – reflected chiefly in the progressive loss of responsible men – had now reached the point where it is uncertain that Diem can keep or enlist enough talent to run the war.’ As matters stood, political tension was acknowledged to be so high that it could boil over at any time into another cycle of riots, repressions and resignations but this tension would, they thought, disappear in a very short time if Nhu were removed. If this was so, what were the implications? The prospects of what they called ‘an early spontaneous replacement’ of Diem were not high. Even if there was a ‘replacement régime’ there was only a 50-50 chance that it would be an improvement. Obviously, clear and explicit US support could make a great difference to the chances of a coup but so far they neither knew ‘what acceptable individuals might be brought to the point of action’ nor did they know what kind of government would emerge.

If and when we have a better picture, the choice will still remain difficult whether we would prefer to take our chances on a spontaneous coup (assuming some action by Diem and Nhu would trigger it) or to risk US prestige in having the US hand show with a coup group which appeared likely to be a better alternative government.

At this stage, then, the inferences seem unmistakable: McNamara and Taylor and the Administration in general were afraid of an unsuccessful coup and because of (reciprocal) doubts about the Vietnamese generals were not prepared to ‘run’ one. Their recommendation was therefore that, having ruled out ‘reconciliation’ as well, the only way to bring Diem to heel was to use ‘selective pressures’. Nevertheless, when the report was debated it seemed that, as a compromise, everyone agreed that, casuistical though it might have been, ‘the US would work with the Diem government but not support it’. From here it was not a very big step to a renewal of more active involvement in a coup and, when it happened, one may ask why it happened. There seemed to be three major possibilities. The first, that it was simply deliberate, second, that it was to prevent an accommodation between Nhu and North Vietnam and the third is that it may have been inadvertent.

Considering what was decided on the basis of the McNamara—Taylor report the Senate Foreign Relations Committee analyst has no doubt,

When Kennedy made the decision on October 5 1963, to reject ‘reconciliation’, and to apply most of the pressures under the category of phase 2 of the pressure track, he was fully aware not only that these actions were calculated to induce a coup, but that they were the precise signals of US support for a coup that the opposition generals had said they needed to have before proceeding.

And, to reinforce the proposition:

Thus, October 5, 1963, was the day the President of the United States decided to move against President Ngo Dinh Diem, knowing the result probably would be the overthrow of the Vietnamese President.⁹⁶

An alternative and intriguing explanation has been put forward most recently by Professor George Kahin. Scrupulously honest in his presentation of the evidence, and himself raising the question whether it was US officials who exaggerated or misrepresented his actions, Kahin wonders whether Nhu was serious about at least exploring the possibilities of a cease-fire with North Vietnam.⁹⁷ McNamara and Taylor and the State Department member of their mission, William Sullivan, had all been aware of Nhu's ‘flirtations’ with the communists. Whether Nhu's advances were serious or not was another matter but Chester Cooper, in his CIA role, was wondering whether both Diem and Nhu would seek rapprochement with the North simply on the basis of a cease-fire in return for which ‘they might seriously entertain the certain minimum DRV demand for the removal of US forces.’⁹⁸ Whether, in this case, Nhu believed that Hanoi would respect South Vietnam's neutrality, and whether he assumed that Diem would be in a position to risk an election in which the NLF would compete, suggests, however, for someone as astute as Nhu, a major hallucination. It was, of course, by no means impossible, at least as an overture or an option that might be used to blackmail a fearful US government and one wonders whether it might have been corroborated by internal sources in North Vietnam. Alternatively, and drawing on the same source as Kahin uses, there is perhaps another explanation in the State Department's Intelligence and Research memo ‘The Problem of Nhu’. Nhu, it said, was capable of believing that he could manipulate the situation to his advantage, whether through fighting or negotiating with the Communists. His megalomania was manifest and his claim was that only he could save Vietnam but as a partial explanation for his excess of self-confidence and fantasies of power it suggested that, for the past two years, he had been smoking opium.⁹⁹ Whatever the cause of his behaviour, and whether he was rational or not, would not have removed US fears that Nhu was trying to cut the ground from under their feet but the question remains whether or not it was sufficient cause for the US once again to have become involved when the Vietnamese generals began their second attempt at the coup. Lodge, perhaps, had been right in August: there really was no turning back once the US had made contact with the dissident generals, no matter how conditional their interest. They might not, in spite of the increasing frequency of CIA contacts, be taking an active part but, bearing in mind that CIA Director McCone was against a coup, it was not a well established position. ‘We certainly cannot be in the position of stimulating, approving, or supporting assassination, but on the other hand, we are in no way responsible for stopping every such threat of which we might receive even partial knowledge.’ It seems, therefore, to have been a conditional imperative: ‘Thou shalt not kill but needst not strive officiously to keep alive.’

All of which argues for premeditation; and when, after last-minute hesitations, the ‘high prospect of success’ appeared at the end of October, the conditions of support had been set out, and the message that had been received from the White House was that it was in the interest of the US that the coup should succeed, there was that much less evidence to support the third possibility, the idea of an inadvertent commitment to a coup. One wonders, nevertheless, whether Kennedy and his advisers really did mean to start the ball rolling on 5 October or whether, at that point, they still hoped that Diem might prove to be amenable to the powerful influences of the US. Instead, and even if it did not evoke quite the same sense of horror as parricide did in earlier times, the US was eventually involved in the overthrow of a friendly government. Perhaps ‘amicide’ sounds too flippant but for another Director of the CIA, William Colby, and many others, what he called the American-sponsored overthrow of Diem was the worst mistake of the Vietnam War.

The coup, when it took place on 1 November 1963, was relatively smooth. Diem's loyal forces were blocked or nullified in some masterful chess moves and the assault on the Gia-Long Palace was, to add to the intrigue, led by Colonel Pham Ngoc Thau, the ‘Master Spy’. He and his men seemed, moreover, to have been within a hair's breadth of Diem and Nhu when they surrendered. Perhaps that had been his mission all along although whether their fate would have been very different if he had got to them first must, of course, be a matter for speculation. Having escaped from the Palace they eventually surrendered at a French church in the Chinese quarter, were put into the back of an armoured vehicle, and unceremoniously shot. After the event, and as a post-script, there was an interesting exchange of cables between Saigon and Washington. Part of Lodge's ‘Eyes Only’ telegram of 6 November is quoted by Schlesinger:

… The coup was a Vietnamese and a popular affair, which we could neither manage nor stop after it got started and which we could only have influenced with great difficulty. But it is equally certain that the ground in which the coup seed grew into a robust plant was prepared by us and that the coup would not have happened [as] it did without our preparation …

All this may be a useful lesson in the use of US power …¹⁰⁰

The cable has now been declassified. That particular paragraph continued ‘General Don as much as said this to me on 3 November. Our actions made the people who could do something about it start thinking hard about how to get a change of government.’ Selection from long cables is obviously a matter of choice and although Schlesinger acknowledges the element of US involvement in the coup it might have seemed stronger still if instead of the ‘…’ he had continued Lodge's ‘useful lesson in the use of US power’. It went on,

The President, the State Department, the Military, the AID, the USIS, and the CIA deserve credit for this result. Without united action by the US government, it would not have been possible. Many Americans in Saigon were required suddenly to start thinking differently, a difficult thing to do. The fact that they did so is creditable.¹⁰¹

In what was part commentary and part explanation of recent events Lodge had said earlier,

At the time of the pagoda raids of August 21 USG and GVN seemed to be totally deadlocked. Diem and Nhu evidently thought that the US was hooked. It seemed that we were on the horns of a dilemma in which we were forced either to do nothing or else to injure the war effort and dangerously lower the basic living standard of the people – or else to act like a colonial power. There seemed to be nothing which would hurt Diem and Nhu which would not repeat not hurt us as much, if not more. We were being totally taken for granted by the GVN; we were never asked to do even the smallest favour.

Listing the ways in which ‘we began to show our displeasure’, Lodge ended the first part of the cable: ‘Also, we did not, as we had done in the past, turn over coup information to GVN.’ He signed off the second part of his cable to the President: ‘My thanks to you and all those associated with you for comprehending and imaginative guidance and support.’

The cable in reply set out the President's position

As you say, while this was a Vietnamese effort, our own actions made it clear that we wanted improvements, and when these were not forthcoming from the Diem government, we necessarily faced and accepted the possibility that our position might encourage a change of government. We thus have a responsibility to help this new government to be effective in every way that we can, and in these first weeks we may have more influence and more chance to be helpful than at any time in recent years.

It concluded: ‘With renewed appreciation for a fine job, John F. Kennedy.’ Just over two weeks later the US would also have a change of government when Kennedy, too, was assassinated.

REFERENCES AND NOTES

1. It is, for example, one of Dr R. B. Smith's notable observations ‘It arose not from anything the Americans did in South Vietnam – which Hanoi might dislike but could not effectively counter – but rather from the consequences of American policy in Laos.’ An International History of the Vietnam War Volume I, Revolution Versus Containment, 1955–61 (London 1983). Whether the US, as he suggests, decided to block Chinese ambitions in Laos, or whether they just capitalized on opportunities, one can at least agree that ‘the result was that the American presence, without being powerful enough to prevent further communist intervention in Laotian politics, seemed to threaten both Chinese and North Vietnamese interests in Laos’, pp. 80–1.

2. Useful sources on Laos, especially in the context of the Indo-China wars, are Stuart Simmonds, ‘Independence and Political Rivalry in Laos, 1945–61’ in Saul Rose (ed.) Politics in Southern Asia (London 1963) and ‘The Evolution of Foreign Policy in Laos Since Independence’, Modern Asian Studies II, I (1968). Hugh Toye, Laos. Buffer State or Battleground (London 1971). Arthur J. Dommen, Conflict in Laos (New York 1971). Charles A. Stevenson, The End of Nowhere (Boston, Mass. 1973). Bernard B. Fall, Anatomy of a Crisis (New York 1969). Marek Thee, Notes of a Witness (New York 1973). Michael Field, The Prevailing Wind (London 1965)

3. The extent to which their interests were represented by Pathet Lao is often overlooked. Concepts of ‘nationhood’ for peoples whose political range is only three valleys wide – their own, and the valleys on either side – were hard enough to establish at the best of times. They were further impaired by hostility to the ruling, lowland, Lao and by the fact that many of the same tribes lived on the other side of a not very meaningful border with North Vietnam. In 1960 the Federation of Malaya's Adviser on Aborigines, reported from Laos that 60 per cent of Pathet Lao forces were montagnards. As in Malaya, which had learned during the communist insurrection from the disasters of forcible resettlement, so the one successful montagnard resettlement scheme in Laos, in Nam Tha province, had taken eight years.

4. Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower, Vol. II, The President (New York 1984)

5. Dwight D. Eisenhower, The White House Years, Waging Peace 1956–1961, (London 1966), p. 267

6. Ibid. p. 275

7. ‘The delegation was seen off from the airport by a large crowd which included the heads of diplomatic missions. A notable absentee was the Ambassador of the US. This incident might be dismissed as too trivial to be included in an account of the period were it not for the fact that such studied discourtesies are long remembered in Laos.’ Simmonds, ‘Independence and Political Rivalry in Laos 1945–61’, p. 180

8. George W. Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern (New York 1982)

9. Roger Hilsman, To Move A Nation (New York 1967), p. 112

10. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy And His Times (New York 1979), pp. 490–2

11. In 1963, for example, the total value of exports excluding gold was put at a modest 57 million Kip. The value of imports was 2,323 million Kip. Budget revenue for the year came to 915 million Kip, while budget expenditure came to over 5,000 million. Short, ‘The Differential Economy’, Far Eastern Economic Review, December 24, 1964

12. Professor Simmonds remarks ‘It could be said that both the United States and the Communists now had front organisations in Laos.’

13. Hilsman, op. cit. p. 115

14. Eisenhower, op. cit. p. 608

15. Toye, op. cit. p. 142. Colonel Toye is too modest to mention it but the account in his book is based on his conversations with Kong Lé at the time of the coup.

16. According to Schlesinger, A Thousand Days (Fawcett 1965), p, 165. McNamara, on the other hand, said, flatly ‘President Eisenhower advised against unilateral action in connection with Laos.’ McNamara also records a divergence of opinion between Eisenhower and the outgoing Secretary of State, Christian Herter. Herter thought Communist members of a Laotian government would undoubtedly lead to subversion and a communist government. Eisenhower thought that even with communist representatives it might be possible to maintain a coalition government indefinitely. Another apparent discrepancy: according to outgoing Defense Secretary Gates the US could not of course meet two limited war ‘situations’ going on at the same time. According to McNamara Gates said ‘The US can handle any number of small limited war situations at one time.’ Also according to McNamara's account, when Kennedy asked what action could be taken to keep the Chinese Communists out of Laos there was no answer from Eisenhower. Among items of interest from Herter's ‘memorandum for the record’ of the same meeting on 19 January 1961 is that the British were chary about recognizing the ‘new’ government in Laos but that he, and presumably the State Department, were not; that this legal government now had the right to request SEATO assistance should external aggression be established and that, in their view, such aggression was constituted by the Soviet airlift. McNamara to President, 24 January 1961; Herter memo, 19 January. NSF Country File, Vietnam. Johnson Library. Historically, perhaps, the most interesting item in the McNamara account is ‘President Eisenhower stated in the long run the US cannot allow the Castro Government to continue to exist in Cuba.’

17. G. F. Hudson, Richard Lowenthal, Roderick MacFarquhar, The Sino-Soviet Dispute (London 1961)

18. Extracts from Khrushchev's speech may be found in David Floyd, Mao Against Khrushchev, (London 1964), p. 308

19. Hilsman, op. cit. p. 414

20. The memorandum will be found in US-Vietnam Relations, Book 11, pp. 1–12.

21. US-Vietnam Relations, Book 2, IV A.5, pp. 88–92.

22. W. C. Gibbons, The US Government and the Vietnam War (Washington 1984), Part II, p. 14. footnote 31.

23. So far, four eight-man teams had been organized ‘for harassment’ but had only been used in the South. Counter-insurgency, on the other hand, like the shibboleth it became, was not widely understood but, where it was, it suggested US intervention on a massive scale.

24. Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy (London 1965), p. 271.

25. Kennedy's article ‘What Should US Do In Indo-China?’ (Foreign Policy Bulletin, May 15, 1954) hardly answered his own question. Although it struck all the right notes it was difficult to pick out the tune.

26. As Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs in 1951 Rusk had denounced the ‘Peiping’ régime as a ‘Slavic Manchukuo’: tantamount to a colonial Russian government. ‘It is not the government of China. It will not pass the first test. It is not Chinese.’ Warren Cohen, Dean Rusk (The American Secretaries of State and Their Diplomacy, Volume XIX) (New Jersey 1980).

27. Gibbons, op. cit. p. 14.

28. Ibid. pp. 35–6.

29. Pentagon Papers (Gravel), II, p. 64

30. Sorenson, op. cit. p. 302.

31. Gibbons, op. cit. p. 21.

32. Herbert S. Parmet, JFK (London 1984), p. 148.

33. This is still according to Robert Kennedy, cited by Parmet. A somewhat different account is given in a ‘Pentagon Papers’ memorandum, US-Vietnam Relations, Book 11, pp. 62–6.

34. Ibid. p. 66.

35. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times (New York 1978). p. 757.

36. Ibid. p. 758.

37. US-Vietnam Relations, Book 11, pp. 159–66.

38. Ibid. p. 132.

39. At a farewell dinner Johnson compared Diem – at least in certain characteristics – to George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. Vice-Presidential Security File, Far East Trip, May 1961. Johnson Library. One suspects these were unscheduled references.

40. Later, in his own language, he told a large gathering of Senators ‘If a bully can come in and run you out of the yard today, tomorrow he will come back and run you off the porch’, Gibbons, op. cit. p. 46.

41. The recommendations are summarized in a memorandum from Rusk to the President, 28 July 1961. Gareth Porter, Vietnam: The Definitive Documentation of Human Decisions (London 1979), Vol. 2, p. 112.

42. Pentagon Papers (Gravel) II, pp. 167–73.

43. According to Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, Khrushchev again referred to their ‘sacred’ nature, p. 339.

44. A somewhat fuller version than that of the Pentagon Papers is in Porter op. cit. pp. 128–34.

45. Rostow's widely quoted address ‘Guerilla Warfare in Under Developed Areas’, a paraphrase of Kennedy's inaugural, is a fanfare without many notes and a justification for US intervention in Vietnam. It may be compared with the presentation which Roger Hilsman gave: ‘Internal War: The New Communist Tactic’ on 1 August 1961: with unmistakable Cold War attitudes and deductions but far more interesting and penetrating than Rostow. The principal parts may be found in T. N. Greene The Guerilla – And How To Fight Him (New York 1962).

46. Gibbons, op. cit. p. 91.

47. Ball, op. cit. p. 366.

48. U. Alexis Johnson, The Right Hand Of Power (New Jersey 1984), pp. 324–5.

49. Ball, op. cit. p. 364.

50. Gibbons, op. cit. p. 97.

51. Rusk's extraordinary idea that any plan of action in North Vietnam should strike first at any Viet Cong airlift into South Vietnam apparently went unchallenged.

52. The Senator Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers, Vol. II has a superb analysis of ‘The Fall Decisions’ in the chapter ‘The Kennedy Commitments and Programs’, 1961.

53. Gravel II, p. 90.

54. US-Vietnam Relations, Book 11, p. 419–20. National Security Action Memorandum no. Ill, Nov. 22, 1961.

55. Gibbons, op. cit. Part II, pp. 99–100.

56. Ibid. p. 103

57. Kennedy's letter to Diem on 14 December 1961. In State Department Bulletin, 1 Jan. 1962.

58. Below decks there were also US landing craft.

59. Summary report, Laos, 27 March 1961. Vietnam Task Force. Kennedy Library.

60. Gibbons, op. cit. pp. 108–9.

61. As early as May 1961, when he was in Geneva for the opening of the Laotian conference, Rusk had warned ‘We cannot now carry out expanded Vietnam program with any hope of reconciling it with restrictions of Geneva clause as interpreted by ICC.’ Rusk to State, from Geneva, 14 May 1961. Kennedy Library.

62. McNamara memo to Rusk, 18 December, US-Vietnam Relations, Book 11, p. 426.

63. US-Vietnam Relations, Book 12, pp. 442–4.

64. RWK memo 20 July 1961, Kennedy Library.

65. Komer's reflections on Vietnam may be found in Bureaucracy at War (London 1986).

66. Sir Robert Thompson, No Exit from Vietnam (London 1969), Ch. 9, ‘Failure of American Strategy’.

67. Thompson to Diem, 13 November 1961, US-Vietnam Relations, Book 11, p. 347.

68. Pentagon Papers (Gravel), Vol. II, p. 164.

69. US-Vietnam Relations, Book 11, p. 408.

70. US-Vietnam Relations, Book 12, p. 480.

71. Hilsman, op. cit. p. 444.

72. It first flew south to Singapore, so as not to compromise the Malayan government, and then, from a British base, it flew north.

73. Gibbons, op. cit. p. 116.

74. Quoted in Milton E. Osborne, Strategic Hamlets in South Vietnam, South-East Asia Data Paper, p. 35, Cornell University, NY, April 1965.

75. Pentagon Papers (Gravel), Vol. II, p. 128.

76. Ibid. p. 151.

77. Duncanson, op. cit. pp. 326–7.

78. Truong Nhu Tang, Journal of a Vietcong (London 1986), Ch. 6, ‘Albert Pham Ngoc Thau: Master Spy’.

79. Extracts from a resolution of an enlarged conference of COSVN, October, 1961 are in Porter, op. cit. Vol. II, pp. 119–23.

80. The figures taken from North Vietnamese sources, are given in Duiker, op. cit. p. 215.

81. ‘The situation and short term prospects in South Vietnam’, US- Vietnam Relations, Book 12, p. 489.

82. Pentagon Papers (Gravel), Vol. II, p. 719.

83. Gibbons, op. cit. p. 140.

84. Three studies of counter-insurgency, and the shortcomings in its application to Vietnam, may be found in Douglas Blaufarb, The Counter Insurgency Era (New York 1977); Larry E. Cable, Conflict of Myths, The Development of American Counter-Insurgency Doctrine in the Vietnam War (New York 1986); Andrew F. Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore/London 1986).

85. Gibbons, op. cit. p. 145.

86. National Security files, meetings and memoranda, 27 August Conversation with the President, Kennedy Library. Excerpts from this discussion may also be found in George McT. Kahin Intervention (New York 1987) (Anchor), pp. 161–3.

87. Hilsman, op. cit. p. 483.

88. Hilsman's account may be compared with that of George Ball, op. cit. and the interleaved reminiscences to be found in Charlton and Moncrieff, op. cit. I am grateful to the late Governor Harriman, and his office, for allowing me to read his Oral History in the Kennedy Library which throws light on this and many other episodes of the US involvement in Laos and Vietnam.

89. Pentagon Papers (Gravel) Vol. II, p. 734.

90. Gibbons, op. cit. p. 149.

91. Kahin, op. cit. p. 157.

92. Gibbons, op. cit. p. 163.

93. McNamara was apparently in such a hurry that he ordered his representative to depart within 90 minutes. Hilsman said he had to get the departure delayed until the State Department representative arrived at the airfield. Hilsman, op. cit. p. 501.

94. Kahin, op. cit. p. 166

95. Memorandum for the President, 2 October 1963. Report of McNamara/Taylor mission to South Vietnam. NSF Country file, Kennedy Library.

96. Gibbons, op. cit. p. 189.

97. Geoffrey Warner, who interviewed a number of the people concerned, presents a remarkable account in two articles on ‘The United States and the Fall of Diem’, Australian Outlook, December 1974 and April 1975. I am indebted to Professor Warner, also, for a copy of an unpublished lecture on the same subject.

98. Kahin, op. cit. p. 169. See also, Cooper, The Lost Crusade. Ch.9.

99. Director, Intelligence and Research, to Secretary of State, 15 September 1963, meetings and memoranda, Kennedy Library. Harriman recounted ‘He had just been down to Morocco: said he was going to settle the differences between Morocco and Algeria. Not well balanced; I don't mean to say he was off his rocker but he wasn't a rational administrator.’ Harriman, Oral History, Kennedy Library.

100. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, pp. 778–9.

101. NSF Country, Lodge to Secretary of State, 6 November, Kennedy Library.