The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [183]
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