JFK (20 page)

There is, and has been for centuries, in the highest-level power structure, a determination to destroy mankind’s traditional way of life, that is, that of the village. Traditional village life is effective, timeless, and impregnable. It is, above all, self-sufficient, something that American urbanization is not. Villagers have solved the problems of the necessities—food, clothing, and shelter—on a modest scale, and they do not need the omnipotent paternalism of the international banker, the chemical revolution, or the politics of the modem jungle. They would not recognize a lawyer if they saw one. They are not dependent upon the next eighteen-wheel, semitrailer truck for today’s food, either.

But Indochina was slated to be the next area for Malthusian destruction, and the Americans and the Vietminh knew how to do it. Their mentors in the CIA and KGB saw that they did it according to the planned international scenario. The American plan caused Diem, as its agent, to issue two relatively unnoticed edicts:

These edicts, which appeared to make sense from the Diem perspective, raised the level of internal warfare and assured the destruction of the Vietnamese village-type economy and way of life; that is, no law and order and no food and water. In the process they paved the way for the entry of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard to take part in the Vietnam War, under the guidance of the CIA’s master planners and the ambassador who remained in Saigon on the job, despite the nondiplomatic formalities of such a war.

“WHY VIETNAM?” Why was this remote, backward, ancient land chosen, as far back as 1943 or 1944, to be one of the major battlegrounds of the Cold War? A dog-eared copy of a 1931
National Geographic
likens Vietnam to a Garden of Eden. What was there about this historically serene Asian land that caused it to be chosen to be devastated by this massive war?

I say “chosen” advisedly. Who had directed that one-half of that great stockpile of weapons and other war-making matériel that was delivered to Okinawa for use during the invasion of Japan should, instead, be transshipped to Vietnam? Decisions of such magnitude would have to, one would think, have been made by such men as Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill, Clement Attlee, Stalin, and Chiang Kai-shek; but these men weren’t making “Cold War”—that is, “communism vs. anti-communism”—decisions at that time.

Questions like these require that we begin to think of the Cold War and its half century in terms of an awareness of a super power elite that can, and does, make such monumental decisions. Lest it appear that I am making these allegations out of thin air, may I suggest that others, now and at other times, have come to similar conclusions. Winston Churchill, in conversations with intimate friends during World War II, made reference to a “High Cabal.” R. Buckminster Fuller wrote positively and powerfully of a super “power elite.” Dr. Joseph Needham, the great Chinese scholar at Cambridge University, writes of a Chinese belief in “the Gentry” as a similar “power elite.” This is a serious subject, and one that concerns us all. The “Why Vietnam?” question causes us to later ask, “Why John F. Kennedy?” We shall see why.

To probe further, why did the Vietnam War cause the dean of American military correspondents, Hansen W. Baldwin, to write, in the foreword to Adm. U.S.G. Sharp’s book
Strategy of Defeat
, the following:

Admiral Sharp, who was the commander in chief of the Pacific (CINCPAC) and thus the senior American military man in the area, wrote, “The Vietnam episode was one of the most controversial eras of U.S. history. . . . When we accepted defeat. . . we seemed to be clearly saying to the world that what we had ultimately lost was our concern for the responsibilities, indeed the honor, that goes with a leadership role. If this is true, I fear for the peace of the world.” Lt. Gen. Victor H. Krulak, USMC (Ret’d), formerly the commander of the Fleet Marine Force Pacific, tells a similar story in his fine book
First to Fight.

This is what allows me to write from my own knowledge and experience. My immediate boss for two years was General Krulak. During those years I also knew Admiral Sharp. Before I worked for General Krulak, I served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense under both Thomas Gates and Robert McNamara. I have worked closely with Allen Dulles and his brother, Foster Dulles. I feel that it is essential to set forth important elements of this historical period in a way that will be most useful to the reader. We need to understand the CIA and its allies. We need to know why we were in Vietnam, or at least what caused us to be there, so that when we arrive at the year 1963 and the “1,000 Days of Camelot” we shall be ready to understand the true handwriting on the wall. These next chapters have the creation of that awareness as their objective.

Years after the Vietnam War had been brought to a close, Gen. Paul Harkins, head of the U.S. Military Assistance Command in South Vietnam from February 1962 to June 1964, said he had never been told what the American military objective was in that war. If that is true—and I have no reason to believe that it is not—then why were we there? What was the real purpose of that massive thirty-year struggle that cost 58,000 American lives, as much as $500 billion, and the lives of millions of noncombatants? What kind of a war can be waged without an objective?

Carl von Clausewitz, the nineteenth-century Prussian general and military writer, declared that of the nine principles of warfare, the most important is that of the “objective.” “If you are going to fight a war and you intend to be the victor,” he said, “you must have a clearly stated and totally understood military objective.” Furthermore, that objective should issue from the highest authority in the land. It is not just permission or authority to “do something.” As we shall see here, there was no official U.S. government directive and objective, of a military nature, in Vietnam at any time.

During World War II, when Gen. Creighton W. Abrams led the point brigade of Gen. George S. Patton’s victorious Third Army after the invasion of France, he had a military objective that old “Blood and Guts” Patton had put in plain words: “Cross the Rhine; destroy the German army; shake hands with the Russians.” That is the kind of job a military man can do, and Abrams did it. That objective led to victory on that front.

More than two decades later, General Abrams, one of the great armored force commanders, was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to replace Gen. William Westmoreland as commander of U.S. military forces in Vietnam. During a rousing “halftime” speech for the benefit of the general and his staff officers at the White House, Johnson said, “Abe, you are going over there to win. You will have an army of five hundred and fifty thousand men, one of the most powerful air forces ever assembled, and the invincible Seventh Fleet of the U.S. Navy offshore. Now go over there and do it!”

General Abrams, good soldier that he was, remained silent as he reached out to shake the President’s hand. In the rear of that room, however, another army general, a member of Abrams’s staff, a man who had been with him during WWII, spoke up. “Mr. President,” he said, “you have told us to go over there and do 'it.’ Would you care to define what ‘it’ is?”

LBJ remained silent as he ushered the general and his men out of the Oval Office. That, in a nutshell, is the story of the military role in that long, terrible, winless war. We had no “objective,” that is, no reason to be there.

For General Westmoreland, the man who served during those hectic years of the Johnson escalation of the war, the objective of the war became the “body count”—the number of dead “enemy” reported in a given period of time. A related objective was “enemy strength estimates”—the number of enemy troops calculated to be in the field. It was assumed that if the body count was going up, the strength of the enemy must be going down. The more “bodies” that could be counted, the closer we were supposed to be getting to victory.

Few men, if any, had more experience with the inner workings of Vietnam policy, at the Washington level, than Lt. Gen. Victor H. Krulak. He served as special assistant for counterinsurgency and special activities on the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy years, 1962–63. He was my immediate boss in SACSA for all of that period. The general was a rare and gifted man who might well have been appointed commandant of the Marine Corps had President Kennedy lived.

He left the Pentagon in 1964 to serve as commanding general of the Fleet Marine Force Pacific, with responsibility for all marines in the Pacific Ocean area. That was in itself an oddly structured assignment. His immediate boss in Honolulu was Adm. U.S.G. Sharp, commander in chief Pacific; yet the commanding general over the marines fighting in Vietnam was Gen. William Westmoreland, who had an ambassador and a senior CIA station chief looking over each of his shoulders in Saigon.

Some years later, General Krulak wrote in
First To Fight
: “I saw what was happening [in Vietnam] as wasteful of American lives, promising a series of protracted, strength-sapping battles with small likelihood of a successful outcome.”

With this in mind and drawing upon his considerable combat experience in World War II, which included those final heavy battles on Okinawa, Krulak came up with a strategic plan designed to achieve “victory” in Vietnam. With this plan in hand, he flew to Saigon to present it to General Westmoreland. Westmoreland was unable to concur with Krulak’s plan. So Krulak returned to Honolulu and presented the plan to Admiral Sharp, who liked it and directed Krulak to take the plan to Washington to present it formally to the U.S. Marine Corps commandant, Gen. Wallace M. Greene.

General Greene approved the plan and made arrangements for Krulak to present it to Robert S. McNamara, secretary of defense. Krulak knew McNamara well from his long service with the Joint Staff in the Pentagon. McNamara agreed with the plan, but then did something that uncovers the real source of power with respect to top-level decisions affecting activities in Southeast Asia during the sixties.

McNamara suggested, “Why don’t you talk to Governor Harriman?” Averell Harriman, formerly ambassador to the Soviet Union, was then serving as assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs. I might add that Harriman comes as close to a model for the power elite as I can think of—with one qualifying exception: He lived a most public and ostentatious life. But perhaps that was a role he was chosen to play by his peers.

Harriman graciously invited General Krulak to join him for lunch at his elegant home in Georgetown. Following their luncheon, Governor Harriman invited the general to present his strategic plan for achieving victory in Vietnam. When he got to the climax of the plan, which recommended “destroy the port areas, mine the ports, destroy the rail lines, destroy power, fuel, and heavy industry,” Harriman stopped him and demanded, “Do you want a war with the Soviet Union or the Chinese?”

Krulak later wrote, “I winced when I thought about the kind of advice he was giving President Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk.”

And, Krulak sums up, “We [the USA] did not have the Washington-level courage to take the war directly to the North Vietnamese ports, where every weapon, every bullet, truck, and gallon of fuel that was prevented from entering the country would ultimately contribute to the success of our arms and the preservation of our lives in South Vietnam.”

I know General Krulak to be a dedicated American and a tough, battle-hardened marine. He did not stop with this rebuff in that drawing room of Governor Harriman’s home in Georgetown. The commandant of the Marine Corps arranged for Krulak to meet with President Johnson in the White House to discuss the same strategic plan.

About this rare event, Krulak writes: “His first question was ‘What is it going to take to win?’”

In response, Krulak listed:

• 1. Improve the quality of the South Vietnamese government. . .
  
• 2. Accelerate the training of the SVN forces. . .
  
• 3. We have to stop the flow of war materials to the North Vietnamese . . . before they ever cross the docks in Haiphong. . . .