The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [188]
A successful conclusion was already fading. Discontent was rising around Diem like mist from a marsh. Peasants were further alienated by Saigon’s full-time draft for military service in place of the traditional six months’ service each year allowing a man to return to his home for labor in his fields. In February 1962 two dissident air force officers bombed and strafed the Presidential Palace in a vain attempt to assassinate Diem. American reporters were probing the chinks and finding the short-falls and falsehoods in the compulsive optimism of official briefings. In increasing frustration, they wrote increasingly scornful reports. As one of them wrote long afterward, “Much of what the newsmen took to be lies was exactly what the Mission genuinely believed and was reporting back to Washington,” on the basis of what it was told by Diem’s commanders. Since American intelligence agents swarmed through the country, taking Diem’s commanders on faith was hardly an excuse, but having committed American policy to Diem, as once to Chiang Kai-shek, officials felt the same reluctance to admit his inadequacy.
The result was a press war: the angrier the newsmen became, the more “undesirable stories” they wrote. The government sent Robert Manning, the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, to Saigon for an on-the-spot survey of the situation. In a candid memorandum prepared upon his return, Manning reported that one cause of the press war was that government policy had been to “see the American involvement in Vietnam minimized, even represented as something less than in reality it is,” and he urged a reversal of that policy. Although the public paid little attention, a few became aware that something was going wrong in this far-off endeavor. Dissent began to sprout here and there, small, scattered and of no great significance. The public as a whole knew vaguely that Communism was being combatted somewhere in Asia and in general approved of the effort. Vietnam was a distant unvisualized place, no more than a name in the newspapers.
One individual critic, the strongest in knowledge and status, was Senator Mike Mansfield, now Majority Leader and the Senator most deeply concerned with Asia. He felt that the United States, drawing upon old missionary tradition, was obsessed by a zeal to improve Asia, re-animated by the anti-Communist crusade, and that the effort would be the undoing of both America and Asia. On returning in December 1962 from an inspection tour made at the President’s request, his first visit since 1955, he told the Senate that “Seven years and $2 billion of United States aid later … South Vietnam appears less not more stable than it was at the outset.” He aimed a slap at the optimists and another at the strategic hamlets, in regard to which “The practices of the Central Government to date are not reassuring.”
To Kennedy in person he was more outspoken, saying that the infusion of American troops would come to dominate a civil war that was not our affair. Taking it over would “hurt American prestige in Asia and would not help the South Vietnamese to stand on their own feet either.” Growing more disturbed and red in the face as Mansfield talked, Kennedy snapped. “Do you expect me to take this at face value?” Like all rulers, he wanted to be confirmed in his policy and was angry at Mansfield, as he confessed to an aide later, for disagreeing so completely, “and angry at myself because I found myself agreeing with him.”
Nothing changed. The President sent other investigators, Roger Hilsman, head of State Department Intelligence, and Michael Forrestal of Bundy’s staff, a