The March of Folly (52 page)

Robert McNamara, a prodigy of the Harvard Business School, of “systems analysis” for the Air Force during World War II and of rapid rise afterward to presidency of the Ford Motor Company, was a characteristic and outstanding choice as Secretary of Defense. Precise and positive, with slicked-down hair and rimless glasses, McNamara was a specialist of management through “statistical control,” as he had demonstrated both in the Air Force and at Ford. Anything that could be quantified was his realm. Though said to be as sincere as an Old Testament prophet, he had the ruthlessness of uninterrupted success, and his genius for statistics left little respect for human variables and no room for unpredictables. His confidence in the instrumentality of matériel was perfect and complete. “We have the power to knock any society out of the 20th century,” he once said at a Pentagon briefing. It was this gift of certainty that made two Presidents find McNamara so invaluable and was to make him the touchstone of the war.

No less significant was the man not chosen as Secretary of State, Adlai Stevenson, who because he was thoughtful was seen as a Hamlet, as indecisive, as that unforgivable thing, “soft.” Although heavily favored for the State Department by the Eleanor Roosevelt wing of the party, he was avoided and the appointment given instead to Dean Rusk. Sober, judicious, reserved, Rusk did not share the Kennedy style, but he had the advantage of experience at the State Department and status as current President of the Rockefeller Foundation, and he would never be a challenge to the President as Stevenson might have been. As a staff colonel in charge of war planning in the China-Burma-India theater during the war, he had had the opportunity to learn from the American experience in China, but what he chiefly took from that experience was a pronounced and rigid antagonism to Chinese Communism. As Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs at the time of China’s belligerency during the Korean war, Rusk had firmly and wrongly predicted that the Chinese would not enter, and thereafter felt deeply a sense of responsibility for the losses that followed.

In command of the National Security Council (NSC), with an office in the White House, was McGeorge Bundy of Boston, cool, confident, impeccable, and able to utilize his mental equipment so effectively that a schoolmate at Groton said he was ready to become
dean of the school at age twelve. In fact, he became Dean of Harvard at 34. Although Bundy was a Republican in politics and family background who had twice voted for Eisenhower over Stevenson, this was no deterrent; if anything, it was a recommendation to Kennedy, who wanted connections to the respectable right. With his paper-thin mandate and a majority of only six in the Senate, he believed the problems of his Administration would come primarily from the right, and felt impelled to make overtures. One of the more extreme was his appointment as head of the CIA of John McCone, a reactionary Republican millionaire from California, a disciple of massive retaliation who, in the opinion of the Neanderthal Senator Strom Thurmond, “epitomizes what has made America great.”

Like the President, many of his associates were combat veterans of World War II, having served as Navy officers and fliers, as bombardiers and navigators, and in the case of Roger Hilsman, the new Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, as leader of an OSS unit behind Japanese lines in Burma. Accustomed to success in the war and in their postwar careers, they expected no less in Washington. None of the leading newcomers had ever held elective office. Power and status exhilarated these men and their fellows; they enjoyed the urgencies, even the exhaustion, of government; they liked to call themselves “crisis managers”; they tried hard, applied their skills and intelligence, were reputed “the best and the brightest”—and were to sadly discover, like other? before and after them, that rather than their controlling circumstances, circumstances controlled them: that government, in the words of one of the group, J. K. Galbraith, was rarely more than a choice between “the disastrous and the unpalatable.”

Creeping escalation began in Kennedy’s first ten days in office, when he approved a counter-insurgency plan previously drawn up by the Pentagon to invigorate South Vietnam’s operations against the Viet-Cong. It authorized additional American personnel and expenditures to train and equip a Vietnamese Civil Guard of 32,000 for antiguerrilla activity and to increase the Vietnamese army by 20,000. The President’s approval was given in response to a report by General Lansdale of increased Viet-Cong activity. Although he believed in Diem as the necessary governing figure, Lansdale had found him losing ground, unprepared to fight the kind of contest confronting him, unwilling for fear of yielding authority to institute political reforms. Comprehension was lacking in both his Vietnamese and his American
advisers that tactics other than simple military formations were needed to cope with the guerrilla warfare and propaganda of the enemy. Reading the report, Kennedy commented, “This is the worst we have had yet, isn’t it?”

Lansdale advocated a thorough renovation of the advisory role, which would put experienced and dedicated Americans “who know and really like Asia and the Asians” in the field to work and live alongside the Vietnamese and “try to influence and guide them toward United States policy objectives.” He outlined a program of procedures and personnel. Much impressed, Kennedy attempted to push through the program with Lansdale himself in charge, or alternatively in charge of an interdepartmental Washington task force for Vietnam, but bureaucratic barriers in the State and Defense departments resisted. Lansdale’s program was not implemented, but even if it had been, however sincere and sympathetic, it suffered from the missionary compulsion to guide the Vietnamese “toward United States policy objectives,” not toward their own. This flaw, too, with its implications, Kennedy recognized when he said, “If it were ever converted into a white man’s war, we should lose it as the French had lost a decade earlier.” Here was a classic case of seeing the truth and acting without reference to it.

The American failure to find any significance in the defeat of the French professional army, including the Foreign Legion, by small, thin-boned, out-of-uniform Asian guerrillas is one of the great puzzles of the time. How could Dien Bien Phu be so ignored? When David Schoenbrun, correspondent for CBS, who had covered the French war in Vietnam, tried to persuade the President of the realities of that war and of the loss of French officers equivalent each year to a class at St. Cyr, Kennedy answered, “Well, Mr. Schoenbrun, that was the
French
. They were fighting for a colony, for an ignoble cause. We’re fighting for freedom, to free them from the Communists, from China, for their independence.” Because Americans believed they were “different” they forgot that they too were white.

Failing the Lansdale program, regular personnel were added to MAAG to accelerate the training program, raising its numbers to over 3000, and a 400-man group from the Special Warfare Training Center at Fort Bragg was sent to Vietnam for counter-insurgency operations. This violation of the Geneva rules was justified on the ground that North Vietnam too was infiltrating arms and men across the border.

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Military theory and strategy underwent a major change with the advent of the Kennedy Administration. Appalled by the plans based on “massive retaliation” which the military under Eisenhower had embraced because they promised quick solutions and less expense in preparedness, Kennedy and McNamara turned to the ideas of the new school of defense intellectuals expressed in their doctrine of limited war. Its aim was not conquest but coercion; force would be used on a rationally calculated basis to alter the enemy’s will and capabilities to the point where “the advantages of terminating the conflict were greater than the advantages of continuing it.” War would be rationally “managed” in such a way as to send messages to the opposing belligerent, who would respond rationally to the pain and damage inflicted on him by desisting from the actions that caused them. “We are flung into a straitjacket of rationality,” wrote the formulator of the doctrine, William Kaufman. That was a condition that exactly suited Secretary McNamara, the high priest of rational management. One thing was left out of account—the other side. War is polarity. What if the other side failed to respond rationally to the coercive message? Appreciation of the human factor was not McNamara’s strong point, and the possibility that humankind is not rational was too eccentric and disruptive to be programmed into his analysis.

Prompted by Khrushchev’s challenge of wars of liberation, a byproduct of the limited-war theory emerged: counter-insurgency, which blossomed into the great cult of the Kennedy years with the President himself as its prophet. The no-nonsense men of his Administration embraced the doctrine with muscular enthusiasm. It would show them awake to the new conditions of the contest. It would meet the insurgents on their own ground, deal with social and political causes of insurgency in the developing countries, catch the Communists bathing, as Disraeli once said of the Whigs, and walk away with their clothes.

Stimulated by Lansdale’s report, the President read the treatises of Mao and Che Guevara on guerrilla warfare and assigned them for reading in the Army. At his order, a special Counter-Insurgency Program was established to inculcate recognition “throughout the United States government that subversive insurgency (‘wars of liberation’) is a major form of politico-military conflict equal in importance to conventional warfare.” The doctrine was required to be reflected in the organization, training and equipment of United States armed forces and civilian agencies abroad so as to ensure programs for prevention or defeat of insurgency or indirect aggression with special
reference to Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. On discovering that enrollment at Fort Bragg was fewer than a thousand, the President ordered its mission expanded and the green beret of the Special Forces restored as a symbol of the new program. His Special Military Representative, General Maxwell Taylor, propagated the gospel, as did other disciples, including even Robert Kennedy out of his expertise as Attorney-General.

Papers on doctrine and methods poured from Walt Rostow, the voluble professor from MIT who held the number-two post at NSC. Speaking on guerrilla warfare at the graduation exercises at Fort Bragg in June 1961, he brought the “revolutionary process” in the Third World under the American wing by calling it “modernization.” America, he said, was dedicated to the proposition that “Each nation will be permitted to fashion out of its own culture and ambitions the kind of modern society it wants.” America respects “the uniqueness of each society,” seeks nations which shall “stand up straight … to protect their own independence,” undertake to “protect the independence of she revolutionary process now going forward.” Thomas Jefferson himself could not have better expressed America’s true principles—spoken here by one who consistently advocated their contradiction in practice.

Although the doctrine emphasized political measures, counter-insurgency in practice was military. Since it was not held in great favor by the military establishment, which did not welcome elite commands or intrusions into regular routines and regarded all this emphasis on reforms as getting in the way of its proper task of training men to drill and shoot, counter-insurgency in operation did not live up to the high-minded zeal of the theory. All the talk was of “winning the allegiance” of the people to their government, but a government for which allegiance had to be won by outsiders was not a good gamble.

What, in fact, did the United States and Diem have to offer an apathetic or alienated population? Flood control, rural development, youth groups, slum clearance, improved coastal transport, educational assistance were among the American-sponsored programs, all worthy but not of the essence. To successfully counteract the insurgents, counter-insurgency would have had to redistribute land and property to the peasants, redistribute power from the mandarins and mafias, disband the security forces that were filling Saigon’s prisons—in short, remake the old regime and pledge it to a cause, as Lansdale was to say, “which makes a stronger appeal to the people than the Communist cause.” Diem and his family, especially his younger brother Ngo
Dinh Nhu and Mme. Nhu, and their fellows of the governing class had no such intentions, nor indeed did their American sponsors.

The United States was still demanding reform as a quid pro quo of American aid, as if meaningful reform that could “win the allegiance” of the population were something that could be accomplished in a few months. It took some 25 centuries in the West, with a much faster rate of change than in the East, before government began to act in the interest of the needy. The reason why Diem never responded to the American call for reform was because his interest was opposed. He resisted reform for the same reason as the Renaissance popes, because it would diminish his absolute power. American insistence on his need of popular support was mere din in his ears, irrelevant to Asian circumstances. Asia presumes an obligation of citizens to obey their government; Western democracy regards government as representing the citizens. There was no meeting ground nor likely to be one. But because South Vietnam was a barrier to Communism, the United States, impervious to the obvious, persisted in trying to make Diem’s government live up to American expectations. The utility of “perseverance in absurdity,” Edmund Burke once said, “is more than I could ever discern,”

With a crisis erupting over the threatened “loss” of Laos, the Joint Chiefs in May 1961 recommended that if Southeast Asia were to be held from the Communists, sufficient United States forces should be deployed to deter action by North Vietnam and China and to assist training of the South Vietnamese for more active counter-insurgency. At the Pentagon discussions began of “the size and composition which would be desirable in the case of a possible commitment of United States forces to Vietnam.” This was contingency planning, while attention that summer was focused on Laos rather than on Vietnam.