The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [192]
In the ongoing conferences in Washington, a larger issue than the fate of Diem and the Nhus occasionally raised its head, as when Robert Kennedy said the primary question was “whether the Communist takeover could be successfully resisted by any government. If it could not, now was the time to get out of Vietnam entirely, rather than waiting.” If it could be resisted under a different government, then we should go ahead with plans for a change, but he felt that basic question “had not been answered.”
Some tried to answer. Field officers who had accompanied ARVN units into combat, and learned in bitterness that American training and weapons could not supply the will to fight, did their best to circumvent General Harkins’ suppression of negative reports and gave their accounts of sorry performance at debriefings in the Pentagon. One in particular, the battle at Ap Bac in January 1963 involving an ARVN battalion of 2000 equipped with artillery and armored personnel carriers, had been expected to demonstrate triumphantly the newly acquired fire power and aggressiveness. Caught under the sudden fire of 200 Viet-Cong guerrillas, the ARVN troops cowered behind grounded helicopters, refused to stand up to shoot, refused orders to counter-attack. The Province Chief commanding a Civil Guard unit refused to permit his troops to engage. In the slaughter three American advisory officers were killed. Ap Bac bared the failings of ARVN, the inutility of the American program and the hollowness of Headquarters optimism, although no one was allowed to say so. Colonel John Vann, the senior American at Ap Bac, was back at the Pentagon in the summer of 1963 trying to inform the General Staff. As Maxwell Taylor was the particular patron of General Harkins and upheld his view, Vann’s message could make no headway. A Defense Department spokesman announced that “The corner has definitely been turned toward victory,” and CINCPAC foresaw the “inevitable” defeat of the Viet-Cong.
Foreign aid officers, too, voiced discouragement. Rufus Phillips, director of rural programs, reported the strategic hamlet program in “shambles,” and made the point that the war was not primarily military but a political conflict for the allegiance of the people, and that the Diem regime was losing it. John Macklin, director of the United States Information Service, who had taken leave of absence in 1962 as Time correspondent to try to help turn the Vietnamese people against the Viet-Cong, resigned after 21 months with his assignment ending “in despair.” The chief of the interdepartmental Working Group on Vietnam, Paul Kattenburg of State, startled a conference with Rusk, McNamara, Taylor, Bundy, Vice-President Johnson and others present by his recommendation that, given the certainty that Diem would not separate from his brother and would get less and less support from the people and go “steadily down hill,” it would be better for the United States to decide to get out now. No one present agreed, and the suggestion was firmly quelled by Rusk, who said that policy should proceed on the assumption that “We will not pull out until the war is won.” Subsequently, Kattenburg was eased out of the Working Group and transferred to another post, predicting as he left that the war could draw in 500,000 Americans and extend into a five- to ten-year conflict.
A Delphic voice spoke out at this moment: Charles de Gaulle proposed a neutralist solution. In one of his shrouded statements, delivered at a French Cabinet meeting but given an unusual authorization for publication verbatim, clearly intended for overseas ears, de Gaulle expressed the hope that the Vietnamese people would make a “national effort” to attain unity and “independence from exterior influences.” In spectral phrases about French concern for Vietnam, he said every effort made toward this end would find France ready to cooperate. His demarche was taken by diplomats, poring over his language, to mean a “neutralized” solution on the pattern