The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [467]
Kennedy beseeched his subordinates to tell him the hard truths about whatever issue he faced. In Vietnam, however, the truth disappeared like the Communist Viet Cong soldiers, firing a volley or two, and then fading away into the vast jungles. Everyone from the ambassador to the military to the CIA put forth self-serving versions of what was happening. What these scenarios shared, for the most part, was a malignant optimism, based largely on not facing what had to be faced.
In January 1963, General Paul Harkins, the head of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), proposed to fulfill McNamara’s pledge to end American involvement by late 1965, not by phasing out American military operations but by dramatically increasing support, including doubling the air force’s role. When Paul Kattenburg, a perceptive and daringly candid Foreign Service officer, addressed the Ex Comm meeting on August 31 about his Vietnamese experience, with most top officials present except for the president, he came away with the feeling that “they didn’t know Vietnam. They didn’t know the past. They had forgotten the history. They simply didn’t understand the identification of nationalism and Communism, and the more this meeting went on, the more I sat there and I thought, ‘God we’re walking into a major disaster.’ “By October, the Pentagon had begun the self-deluding process of winning on paper what they were not winning on the ground, concluding that the South Vietnamese were making “progress” against the Viet Cong, though the hard statistics suggested the opposite.
For the president, much of the discussion had a tiresome familiarity. In 1954, three years after Kennedy had visited Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem had become the first postcolonial leader of South Vietnam. Conservative Catholic Americans felt a special affinity for the prime minister. A man of the deepest Catholic faith, Diem had lived in the United States in his years of exile. He had spent years at a seminary in New Jersey and was a daily communicant.
One of Kennedy’s seminal insights during his 1951 trip to Asia was how dangerous politics was in much of the world, and how often assassination stalked those who ascended to power. Diem’s own elder brother, a provincial governor, had been murdered by the Viet Minh. Diem himself had almost been killed in 1962, and the scent of blood was never far from the palace.
Diem was no tailor of democracy who could sew the many peoples of South Vietnam into even a patchwork quilt of a country. Diem trusted few beyond his two brothers, Ngo Dinh Nhu, his political counselor, and Ngo Dinh Canh, who ran the northern regions. The brothers established the Can Lao Party, a secret society that dominated the country’s economic and political life. Ambassador Elbridge Durbrow described it in 1959 as “an authoritarian organization largely modeled on Communist lines.”
After nearly ten years in power, Diem had come around to where he began, a Catholic mandarin isolated not only from his own people but also from the Americans who thought him in part their creation. On July 11, a Buddhist priest immolated himself in front of the Cambodian embassy in Saigon, protesting the repression of his co-religionists and the deaths of eight Buddhist demonstrators who had sought to display the Buddhist flag. This was an act of moral witness that transcended all logic, all the nuances of policy and procedures, and created its own imperative. Diem’s support in Vietnam had been eroding since almost the day he assumed office, but it took this immolation and the Buddhist civil rights protests to make the men in Washington realize that