The March of Folly (53 page)

Laos was the mouse that roared. In this landlocked upland country lying lengthwise between Vietnam and Thailand, with a population believed to number hardly more than two million, another Communist specter was abroad. This was the Pathet Lao, the nationalist-Communist Laotian version of the Viet-Minh. Because Laos touched China at its northern border and opened onto Cambodia in the south, it assumed in foreign eyes extraordinary importance as a corridor through which Ho’s and Mao’s Communists would pour, on some awful day of Red advance. Without deeply disturbing the easygoing life of the Laotians, sovereignty swayed among multiple rivals, of whom the leading figures were the legitimate ruler, Prince Souvanna Phouma, a neutralist in cold war politics; his half-brother, another Prince who was leader of the
Pathet Lao; and a third claimant, who was the American client and had been in place for a while, installed by CIA manipulations, and had subsequently been ousted.

Because the half-brothers were negotiating a coalition which could have neutralized their country and left the Pathet Lao in control of the mountain passes, Laos suddenly became during the Eisenhower-Dulles period a small oriental Ruritania, “a vital factor in the free world,” a “bulwark against Communism,” “a bastion of freedom.” American money and matériel inundated and bewildered the parties. Briefing Kennedy before his inauguration, Eisenhower promoted the country to primary domino, saying, “If we permitted Laos to fall, then we would have to write off the whole area.” He advised that every effort be made to persuade SEATO members to join in common action, but contemplated “our unilateral intervention” if they did not. Since Laos was rough in terrain and unreachable by Pacific-based sea and air power, clearly no place for effective combat, Eisenhower’s astonishing remark, in contrast to his resistance to active intervention in much more accessible Vietnam, suggests that Laos had some peculiar faculty of bemusing men’s minds.

In one of those minor frenzies that periodically craze international relations, the situation by 1961 had reached a crisis of complex cabals. Coalition in Laos threatened to become a casus belli. The Geneva Accord was invoked by Britain and France and a fourteen-nation conference re-convened at Geneva. In Washington all-day meetings ran late into the night at the White House. Kennedy, still sweating from the Bay of Pigs fiasco only days before, was determined to show that America meant business against Communism and to avert an outcry on the right if coalition should succeed. He authorized movement of the 7th Fleet to the South China Sea, helicopters and combat units to Thailand and alert of forces in Okinawa.

When advised by General Lyman K. Lemnitzer, the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, that if China and North Vietnam interfered they could be contained by nuclear arms, Kennedy was shocked into a less inflated view of the issue. He decided to accept neutralization and the return of Souvanna Phouma and sent the veteran diplomat Averell Harriman to Geneva to arrange an agreement to that effect. The solution was feasible because it was acceptable to both the Soviets and the United States and because the Laotians preferred to be let alone rather than to fight. While neutralization blocked intervention, it also had a negative effect: by leaving the Pathet Lao in place, it raised doubts in the local SEATO nations of the firmness of America’s commitment
against Communism in Asia. Loudly professed, these doubts made a great impression on the next visitor, Vice-President Lyndon Johnson.

Johnson was despatched in May 1961 to Taiwan, South Vietnam and the SEATO neighbors to reassure the region of American support. The Vice-President’s interest in and experience of foreign affairs were minimal. When forced to pay attention as Senator and Majority Leader, he adjusted his attitude to fit conventional cold war orthodoxy. Although foreign affairs were not for him a major concern—Johnson’s major concern was the advancement of his own career—the cold war dogma organized his impressions and reactions. His public pronouncements were addressed to the lowest common denominator of the public, as when in Saigon he announced that Diem was “the Winston Churchill of Asia.” Less fatuous, his report to the President was manfully interventionist. He was ready for the United States to shoulder the burden of responsibility for Asia. “The key to what is done by Asians in defense of Southeast Asia’s freedom,” he wrote, “is confidence in the United States. There is no alternative to United States leadership in SEA. Leadership in individual countries … rests on the knowledge and faith in United States power, will and understanding.” While his words may show a profound ignorance of what leadership rests on in Asia, they perfectly express the sense of omnipotent capacity with which the United States emerged from World War II. We had crushed the war machines of Germany and Japan, crossed oceans to do so, restored Europe, ruled Japan; we were a Paul Bunyan straddling two hemispheres.

“I recommend,” Johnson continued emphatically, “that we move forward promptly with a major effort to help these countries defend themselves.… I cannot stress too strongly the extreme importance of following up this mission with other measures, other actions, other efforts”—presumably military. With realism he was not always to retain, he advised that the decision “must be made in full realization of the very heavy and continuing costs in terms of money, of effort and of United States prestige,” and that “At some point we may be faced with the further decision of whether we commit major United States forces to the area or cut our losses and withdraw should our other efforts fail.”

He warned, “There is no mistaking the deep and long-lasting impact of recent developments in Laos … which have created doubt and concern about the intentions of the United States throughout Southeast Asia.” With no experience of Eastern habits of speech that conceal a kernel of substance—or sometimes no substance—under
voluminous wrappings of form, Johnson took all he was told at face value, urging that it was of “the first importance” that his mission “bear fruit immediately.” He proposed that the “real enemies”—hunger, ignorance, poverty and disease—be combatted by “imaginative use of American scientific and technological capacity” and concluded, “The battle against Communism must be joined in Southeast Asia with the strength and determination to achieve success there—or the United States must inevitably surrender the Pacific”—here he threw away 6000 miles of ocean together with Okinawa, Guam, Midway and Hawaii—“and pull back our defenses to San Francisco.”

It was a mixed bag of characteristic American ideas. The simplistic either/or about defeating Communism or surrendering the Pacific probably did not influence the President, who was out of sympathy with his Vice-President and vice versa. But the doubts of America’s steadfastness that so affected Johnson raised the issue of credibility that was to swell until in the end it seemed to be all we were fighting for.

Credibility emerged in the Berlin crisis of that summer when, after a harsh and intimidating meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna, Kennedy said to James Reston, “Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place.” But Vietnam was never the place, because the American government itself never totally believed in what it was doing. The contrast with Berlin was only too plain. “We cannot and will not permit the Communists to drive us out of Berlin either gradually or by force,” Kennedy said in July, and he was ready in his own mind, according to associates, to risk war, even nuclear war, over the issue. Despite all the protestations of equal firmness, Vietnam never received a comparable status in American policy, while at the same time no American government was ever willing to let it go. It was this split that tortured the whole endeavor, beginning with Kennedy himself.

Berlin provided another lesson in the fact that “the essential point,” in the words of Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze, “was that the value to the West of the defenses of Berlin was far greater than the value to the Soviet Union of taking Berlin.” His observation might have suggested that the value to North Vietnam of gaining control of the country for which they had fought so long was far greater to them than the value of frustrating them was to the United States. They were fighting on their own soil, determined to be at last its rulers. Good or bad, unyielding firmness of purpose lay with Hanoi, and because it was unyielding was likely to prevail. Neither Nitze nor anyone else perceived the analogy.

In South Vietnam “The situation gets worse and worse almost week by week,” reminding him of Chungking, the correspondent Theodore White wrote to the White House in August 1961. “The guerrillas now control almost all the southern delta, so much so that I could find no American who would drive me outside Saigon in his car even by day without military convoy.” This matched the “gloomy evaluation” of General Lionel McGarr, now chief of MAAG, who estimated that Diem controlled only 40 percent of South Vietnam and that the insurgents immobilized 85 percent of his military forces.

White’s letter further reported “a political breakdown of formidable proportions,” and his own puzzlement that while “Young fellows of 20–25 are dancing and jitterbugging in Saigon nightclubs,” twenty miles away “The Commies on their side seem to be able to find people willing to die for their cause.” It was a discrepancy that was beginning to bother other observers. In closing, White asked, if we decided to intervene, “Have we the proper personnel, the proper instruments and the proper clarity of objectives to intervene successfully?” “Clarity of objectives” was the crucial question.

Uncertain, Kennedy despatched the first and best known of an endless series of upper-level official missions to assess conditions in Vietnam. Secretary McNamara was later to go no fewer than five times in 24 months, and missions at the secondary level went back and forth to Saigon like bees flying in and out of a hive. With Embassy, MAAG, intelligence and aid agencies already on location and reporting back, Washington’s incessant need of new assessments testifies to the uncertainty in the capital.

The mission of General Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow in October 1961 was prompted nominally by Diem’s request for a bilateral defense treaty and the possible introduction of American combat troops to which so far he had been averse. A surge in Viet-Cong attacks and fear of infiltration across the Laos border had raised his alarm. Though ambivalent, Kennedy, seeking credibility in Vietnam, was for the moment in favor of increased effort and wanted affirmation rather than information, as his choice of envoys indicates. Taylor was obviously chosen to make a military estimate. Handsome and suave, with piercing blue eyes, he was admired as a “soldier-statesman” who spoke several languages, could quote Polybius and Thucydides and had written a book,
The Uncertain Trumpet
. He had commanded the 101st Airborne Division in World War II, served as Superintendent of West Point, as Ridgway’s successor in Korea, as Chief of Staff during the last Dulles years. Out of sympathy with the
doctrine of massive retaliation, he retired in 1959 to become president of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York. This cultivated figure was a natural attraction for Kennedy, but for all his repute as an intellectual general, not a brass hat, his ideas and recommendations tended to be conventional.

His fellow-voyager Walt Rostow (named for Walt Whitman) was a fervent believer in the American capacity to guide and develop the underdeveloped world. A hawk in the cause of halting Communism before the word “hawk” came into use, he had already proposed a plan calling for the introduction of 25,000 American combat troops. As a target selector in the European war, he had emerged as an enthusiast of air power, although post-war surveys on effectiveness of strategic bombing had found the results uncertain. Rostow was a positivist, a Dr. Pangloss who, as described by a fellow-worker, would advise the President on learning of a nuclear attack on Manhattan that the first phase of urban renewal had been accomplished at no cost to the Treasury. When because of left-wing activity during his student days his security clearances were frequently held up, Kennedy complained, “Why are they always picking on Walt as soft-headed? Hell, he’s the biggest Cold Warrior I’ve got.” That he would find reasons for going forward in Vietnam was a foregone conclusion.

Accompanied by officials of State, Defense, Joint Chiefs and the CIA, the mission visited South Vietnam for a week, 18–25 October, and retired to the Philippines to compose its report. This document, together with “Eyes Only” cables from Taylor to the President and annexes and supplements by individual members of the mission, has defied coherent summary ever since. It said something of everything, combined yes and no, pessimism and optimism, and on the whole, with many qualifications, argued that the program to “save South Vietnam” would be made to work only by the infusion of American armed forces to convince both sides of our seriousness. It recommended the immediate deployment of 8000 troops “to halt the downward trend” of the regime and “a massive joint effort to deal with Viet-Cong aggression.” It quite accurately foresaw the consequences: American prestige, already engaged, would become more so; if the ultimate object was to eliminate insurgency in the South, “There is no limit to our possible commitment (unless we attack the source in Hanoi!).” Here, both in statement and in parenthesis, the future military problem was formulated.

The report contained other formulations equally basic if less well judged. Without having viewed the enemy’s terrain or industrial base,
Taylor reported that North Vietnam was “extremely vulnerable to conventional bombing.” Rarely has military judgment owed so much to imagination.

In referring to Hanoi’s role as aggressor across an “international boundary,” the report picked up the inventive rhetoric that marked the Vietnam affair throughout its duration. The Geneva Declaration had specifically stated that the partition line was “provisional” and not to be interpreted “as constituting a political or territorial boundary.” Eisenhower had specifically recognized it as that and nothing more. Yet like “vital” national interest, “international boundary” was one of the inventions by policy-makers used to justify the case for intervention, or even to convince themselves that they had a case. Rostow had already used it in his speech at Fort Bragg. Rusk used it three months after Taylor in a public address in which he went further than anyone to speak of “external aggression” across “international boundaries.” By repeated usage, the transformation of partition line into international boundary became the norm.