Vietnam: An Epic History of a Divisive War 1945-1975

General Harkins tells me so.

In the mountains, things are rough,

In the Delta, mighty tough,

But the V.C. will soon go,

General Harkins tells me so.

Homer Bigart wrote in a June 1962 valedictory dispatch for the New York Times that unless Diem mended his ways, either US combat troops would have to be committed, or the Saigon government replaced by a military junta. Newsweek’s François Sully was the daddy of them all, a Frenchman born in 1927 who had been around Saigon since 1945. He was by no means universally beloved by colleagues, and was suspected by some of being a communist, but his connections on both sides were impressive. In one of Sully’s last dispatches before being expelled by Diem, he cited Bernard Fall’s view that the politics were far more important than the tactics, yet the US Army was training the Southerners to resist a Korean-style invasion. Marine helicopters, he said, could not provide the Vietnamese with an ideology worth dying for. The piece was accompanied by a photo of Diem’s female militia captioned ‘The enemy has more drive and enthusiasm.’

Neil Sheehan said of the 1962–63 Saigon press corps: ‘We were a pretty serious bunch of guys: we found ourselves in conflict – very serious conflict – with the [US] command. You got pretty angry with the generals’ lying.’ Sheehan marvelled at the courage of some reporters, the cowardice of others: one New York paper’s reporter, he later recalled, ‘wouldn’t leave Saigon – he bribed operators for carbons of other correspondents’ despatches’. Then there were the adventurers, most of whom arrived somewhat later: a British freelancer ‘carried an M16 and killed people. Sean Flynn exulted about what a glorious thing street-fighting was.’ In Sheehan’s first weeks he himself toted a pistol in the field, ‘then I realised this was crazy’. He also stopped carrying a camera, because he decided that if you kept peering through a viewfinder, you didn’t see what was happening around you – and what might kill you.

Sheehan’s generation of reporters enjoyed a notable advantage over most of their successors in the twenty-first-century war-corresponding business: having themselves served in uniform, they were familiar with weapons and military ways. Nonetheless they recoiled from the racism they observed in many American soldiers, exemplified by a special forces colonel who said, ‘You don’t need to know the gook’s language ’cos he’s gonna be dead. We’re going to kill the bastards.’ Several of the correspondents’ group, Halberstam and Sheehan foremost among them, made national reputations in Vietnam, though some Americans, not all of them uniformed, went to their graves believing that the reporters betrayed their country while winning plaudits from media counterparts around the world.

The news story that unfolded on 2 January 1963 started out as a firefight between Diem’s soldiers and the Vietcong, but turned into a far more significant struggle between the US high command and the Saigon press corps, believers against unbelievers. The killing part was unleashed by Lt. Col. John Paul Vann, since mid-1962 senior adviser to the ARVN 7th Division. Vann, a wire-thin stick of ferocious energy and aggression, was weary of inconclusive encounters with the enemy. After US airborne electronic interceptors pinpointed transmissions from the Vietcong regional 514th Battalion in Ap Bac – ‘north hamlet’ – fourteen miles north-west of My Tho, the colonel was thrilled when Harkins’ headquarters ordered him to orchestrate a massive concentration of force to trap and destroy it: two local Civil Guard battalions; an infantry unit heli-lifted by ten American H-21 ‘flying bananas’, or ‘angle-worms’ as the Vietcong knew them; VNAF Skyraider ground-attack aircraft; five Bell Iroquois ‘Huey’ UH-1 gunships; a company of APCs – tracked armoured personnel-carriers; a battalion of paratroopers.

American intelligence was significantly mistaken about enemy strength in Ap Bac, estimated at 120 guerrillas. In addition to a reinforced company of the 514th VC Battalion, there was also present an over-strength company of the main force 261st, on its way to an operation elsewhere. This was considered an elite unit: women said that if you had to marry a soldier, it was best to choose one from the 261st. Its men were thoroughly experienced, having an average of more than two years’ service, senior cadres as much as five years. The total number of full-time Vietcong guerrilla fighters in the South had more than doubled since the previous year, to fifty thousand, the overwhelming majority in the Mekong delta. Although they relied heavily on captured arms, an increasing volume came by sea. Disguised fishing trawlers from the North delivered 112 tons of arms and ammunition in 1962, and this total would rise steeply to 4,289 tons in 1963–64 – far more than moved down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The 261st Battalion was largely composed of ‘returnees’ from exile in the North. It was led by Hai Hoang, whose real name was Nguyen Van Dieu, a popular commander considerate towards his men. Second-in-command was Tu Khue, tall, gaunt, bald and stern. A company commander, Bay Den, had an unusually smart social background in Saigon: his sister once arrived to see him, poled to the 261st’s camp in a rented sampan. She was appalled to find her brother digging a trench, and begged him to give it all up and come home. Den shook his head: he was committed, he said, and indeed he stayed until killed in action.

The Vietcong around Ap Bac on 2 January mustered 320 fighters, who had been tipped off that an attack by Saigon forces was coming. What John Vann did not know – though he would have welcomed the prospect – was that communist province chiefs had ordered Dieu and his comrades not to pull back as usual when the ARVN struck, but instead to stand and fight. Thus, foxholes and bunkers had been dug along the treeline fronting the hamlet. The defenders were well-armed and ammunitioned, mostly with captured American weapons: .30-calibre machine-guns, Browning automatic rifles, M-1 carbines, .45 Thompson sub-machine-guns. Most of the twelve hundred peasants in the adjoining hamlets of Ap Bac and Tan Thoi fled into the nearby swamps on hearing that a battle was imminent, but some thirty stayed to carry ammunition and casualties. The board was set for Vann’s game to be played.

Who were the human checkers on his side that morning? From beginning to end of the war, South Vietnam’s soldiers took most of its strain, grief and losses. Nothing did more to alienate peasants from the Saigon government than the draft, which stole workers from the paddy fields and made many newly-minted soldiers oppressors of country people in a region that was not their own, and thus to which they owed nothing. There were ghastly tales of ARVN callousness, some possibly true: of two riflemen wagering a pack of cigarettes on who could hit a child riding a water buffalo. In the war’s early years, 1955–59, only twenty-to-twenty-two-year-olds were conscripted, for twelve months. This was then increased to two years, and in 1964 to three. Once inducted, many South Vietnamese never escaped from green fatigues except in a wheelchair or body bag. A common factor between the US and the two Vietnams was that in all three societies, children of privilege were excused from military service. In the South their families paid a bribe, while in the North the offspring of senior cadres were dispatched to higher education abroad. Though the Southern army consumed 15 per cent of the nation’s GDP, its soldiers were paid a pittance. Most were posted to fighting units after five or six weeks’ perfunctory training, assured that they could learn on the job. An officer spoke for most of his comrades when he said: ‘The communists seemed to know why they were fighting, and we did not. Our political training emphasised Diem’s personality but not much else.’

John Vann’s plan for the morning of 2 January 1963 might have won a staff college commendation, had all its human elements acted as programmed. Instead of performing a balletic pincer movement, however, they descended on the battlefield as randomly as toys kicked out of a box. Early-morning fog delayed the infantry airlift, so that Civil Guard troops advancing on foot were first to bump the Vietcong, soon after 0700. When their leaders were shot down, they hugged the earth during a long, desultory exchange of fire. The government province chief, who was personally directing them, refused to order forward his second battalion. Soon after 1000, against Vann’s orders H-21s carrying an infantry company clattered down onto the paddy within easy shot of the ‘Victor Charlies’. Vietcong recruits were told they should not fear helicopters, soft targets made of cardboard pasted to metal frames. That morning at Ap Bac, this must have seemed true: communist fire quickly downed two of the old H-21s and mortally injured a third. A Huey that tried to rescue their American crews was shot full of holes, before toppling alongside the other wrecks.

The hapless infantry were going nowhere, stuck on open ground swept by enemy fire. Almost every helicopter in the sky above the battlefield was taking hits, and neither air strikes nor misdirected artillery fire made much impact on the defenders of Ap Bac. From a circling L-19 spotter plane Vann watched in raging frustration as his operation floundered in mud, blood and chaos. Ly Tong Ba, a captain commanding a company of armoured personnel-carriers, refused to advance to rescue the stranded infantry and aircrew: Vann’s histrionics over the radio roused his pride against succumbing to hectoring. ‘I’ve got a problem, Topper Six,’ Capt. Jim Scanlon, the adviser with Ba, radioed Vann ruefully. ‘My counterpart won’t move.’

‘Goddammit, doesn’t he understand this is an emergency?!’

‘He says “I don’t take orders from Americans.”’

Vann bellowed into the handset, ‘Ba! If you don’t get your vehicles across the canal I shall tell General Le Van Ty to sling you in jail!’

The Vietnamese belatedly ordered forward his company, which spent the ensuing two hours struggling to cross dykes and canals: the little captain forever afterwards argued that neither Vann nor Scanlon recognised the difficulties of overcoming the water obstacles. When the M-113s’ .50-calibre machine-gunners finally engaged, several were shot off the exposed steel hulls by Vietcong whose positions were so skilfully camouflaged in the banana and coconut groves that few attackers glimpsed an enemy all day. When one carrier attempted to use its flamethrower, the crew proved to have mixed the fuel wrongly, so that the jet drooped to a trickle. Around 1430 the armoured crabs began to pull back; a further two helicopters were forced down by enemy fire.

Vann’s L-19 made repeated deck-level passes as he strove in vain to identify Vietcong positions, and to energise the stalled ground movements. At 1805 a mass parachute drop from seven USAF C-123s yielded a crowning disaster: the troops landed half a mile off their intended DZ, within easy range of Vietcong in Tan Thoi, whose fire ploughed into them, killing nineteen paras and wounding thirty-three, including two Americans. When darkness fell, the communists still held almost all the ground they had occupied at first light, and experienced no difficulty in slipping away to the sanctuary of the nearby Plain of Reeds.

The guerrillas did not have the day’s fight all their own way, losing eighteen men killed and thirty-five wounded, most to artillery and air strikes. On Saigon’s side, however, three Americans had been killed and five wounded, along with sixty-three Vietnamese dead and 109 wounded. Back in May’s Landing, New Jersey, a seven-year-old boy cried out in excitement as he watched a TV clip of a helicopter door-gunner in action, ‘Look, there’s my daddy!’ Just six hours later, a telegram arrived to report the death of his father, crew chief William Deal, in a Huey outside Bac.

The media experience of next day, 3 January, however, exercised a greater influence on the history of the war than did the battle itself. Paul Harkins, MACV’s supremo, descended on IV Corps headquarters to cheerlead a renewed assault on Ap Bac. He told David Halberstam and Peter Arnett, ‘We’ve got [the Vietcong] in a trap, and we’re going to spring it in half an hour.’ Unfortunately, the journalists knew that the enemy were long gone, and thus that the South Vietnamese ‘assault’ was a pantomime. Harkins’ remark suggested that the general was either a fool or a wilful deceiver – probably the former, because he never looked further into any situation than he wished to see.

A few miles away, matters got worse. Neil Sheehan and Nick Turner of Reuters reached the previous day’s battlefield to find the Southern soldiers unwilling to handle their own and the Americans’ dead: the disgusted journalists themselves loaded the corpses aboard helicopters. Then, as they talked to US brigadier-general Robert York, an Alabaman World War II veteran, artillery support for the new ‘assault’ started to thump in around them, blasting up geysers of mud. York said to Sheehan, ‘Jesus Christ, run for your life, boy.’ They bolted across the rice paddy before throwing themselves to the ground, Sheehan convinced that he was about to die. When the shelling stopped they rose covered with filth. York remained almost pristine, however, having adopted a press-up posture in the dirt. He shrugged, ‘I didn’t want to get my cigarettes wet.’ Sheehan said ruefully, ‘Never mess with a man who’s so calm under fire.’ Fifty rounds had landed in the vicinity, killing four ARVN soldiers and wounding twelve. The enraged infantry battalion commander drew his pistol and shot in the head the young lieutenant acting as forward observer for the artillery.

The defeat at Bac was less militarily significant than – for instance – a 1960 action at Tua Hai in Tay Ninh province, in which the communists also beat a much larger government force. The difference was that at Tua Hai there had been no foreign witnesses, while now the sharpest correspondents in Vietnam were in the bleachers. Sheehan wrote later, ‘We knew this was the biggest story we had ever encountered.’ The dispatches of himself and Halberstam quoted anonymously an American adviser who condemned the Southern showing on 2 January as ‘a miserable damn performance’, at a moment when Harkins was still insisting that Bac was a victory. Few people, including the general, doubted that the dismissive words came from John Vann, and he demanded the colonel’s head.

MACV finally decided that it would be more prudent to allow this galvanic but famously indiscreet officer to complete his tour in March as scheduled. Vann’s influence on the war would thereafter wax and wane until its dramatic termination almost a decade later, but in 1963 he played a critical role in providing authoritative briefings to Sheehan, Halberstam and others about the bungling and pusillanimity that characterised Southern operations, and the deceits practised to conceal these. The colonel warned Maj. Gen. Bruce Palmer that Harkins was allowing himself to be duped by Saigon’s officers, who routinely assaulted objectives they knew to be untenanted by the enemy. It was nonetheless the Harkins version that Maxwell Taylor and Robert McNamara chose to believe. Frances Fitzgerald later wrote in her influential history Fire in the Lake: ‘The United States had … made the Saigon government into a military machine whose sole raison d’être was to fight the Communists. The only difficulty was that the machine did not work.’ The ARVN was not an army ‘but a collection of individuals who happened to be carrying weapons’. This was an overstatement, but contained a core of truth.

The Ap Bac affair prompted extensive media comment. Arthur Krock wrote in his syndicated column on 9 January: ‘No amount of US military assistance can preserve independence for a people who are unwilling to die for it.’ Richard Hughes, a Hong Kong-based Australian veteran who wrote for the London Sunday Times, said that he saw clear parallels with US follies in China after World War II. The best the Americans were promising, he said, was a ten-year war to preserve a ‘reactionary, isolated, unpopular’ regime. The only way out, he suggested, was for the Saigon government to admit communists to a coalition.

Within Vietnam, word spread swiftly about the fiasco. A Vietnamese officer wrote that Ap Bac ‘greatly hurt ARVN morale’. Ly Tong Ba, who rose to become a general, later denounced Neil Sheehan, ‘who only wrote articles filled with malicious arguments and inaccuracies’. He also argued that his own adviser on the ground at Bac, Jim Scanlon, was as ‘terrified’ of Vann as of the Vietcong, which prompted him also to paint a false picture of events. The press coverage was seized upon by MACV officers, and by others who deplored ‘negative’ reporting, as highlighting the difficulties of fighting a war covered by a media which recognised no obligation to favour ‘our side’ – meaning the US and its South Vietnamese client – as had been the patriotic duty of every correspondent in World War II, when the press was additionally constrained by censorship.

It remains as difficult now as it was then to see virtue in Gen. Harkins’ attempts to deny the real state of affairs. The maxim obtains for all those who hold positions of authority, in war as in peace: lie to others if you must, but never to yourselves. MACV’s chief could make a case for talking nonsense to Halberstam and Arnett, but he was peddling the same fairy tales in top-secret cables to Washington. Nonetheless, a valid criticism persists of the media’s coverage throughout the war: the critics got bang to rights the shortcomings of the Diem regime and its successors, but gave nothing like the same attention to the blunders and horrors perpetrated by the communists. Halberstam, Sheehan and the rest conscientiously and sometimes brilliantly fulfilled their duty, to tell what they saw and heard; Saigon’s apologists, exemplified by Time magazine, destroyed their own credibility by denying unpalatable realities. The South was only half the rightful story, however. Much of the media showed itself ignorant of or blind to the tyranny prevailing in the North, which was inflicting worse hardships on its own people.

An Australian surgeon who served as a civilian volunteer down at Vung Tau wrote later: ‘It seems fair to say what is usually left unsaid, that if the economic aid to South Vietnam had not been prevented by the activities of the Vietcong, the people of the country which today is war-torn and unhappy would have been well-fed, in better health and better-educated.’ Frances Fitzgerald concluded her powerful 1972 account of America in Indochina with an expression of yearning for North Vietnamese victory, for a moment when ‘“individualism” and its attendant corruption give way to the discipline of the revolutionary community’. American officials, she wrote, might attribute this to the triumph of brainwashing by ‘hard-core Communists’. Not so, she asserted: ‘It will simply mean that the moment has arrived for the narrow flame of revolution to cleanse the lake of Vietnamese society.’ Here was a view of the war that seems as delusional at one end of the political spectrum as was that of Gen. Harkins and his kind at the other.

2 THE BUDDHISTS REVOLT

Throughout the spring of 1963, the credibility of the Diem government drained away as surely as Vietcong morale and strength rose, impelled by a surge of excitement after the victory at Ap Bac. In the 261st Battalion, its history records, ‘there was much singing’. COSVN broadcast a new slogan: ‘Emulate Bac!’ The battle provided an important boost to the ‘forward’ faction in Hanoi, which argued ever more insistently that the season for caution had passed; that in the South, the prize lay ripe for taking. Michael Burleigh has written of US policy-making: ‘Seldom has an imperial power put its prestige behind a more suicidal group of puppets than the Ngo Dinh clan.’ Even as the security situation deteriorated, in May the Saigon regime adopted an initiative that set its wagon careering downhill towards the final wreck. Vietnam’s Buddhist priesthood had always resented the favouritism shown by the Ngos towards their fellow-Catholics. On 8 May 1963, when worshippers assembled in Hue for the 2,527th birthday of the Buddha, a Catholic army officer sought to enforce an old decree banning them from displaying their flag. Several thousand Buddhists gathered outside the local radio station to hear a broadcast by prominent bonze Thich Tri Quang. The station director suddenly cancelled the transmission, saying that it had not been approved by the censors. He also telephoned the army, which dispatched to the scene a troop of armoured cars. When the Buddhists ignored an order to disperse, the soldiers opened fire. A woman and eight children died in the ensuing melee.

This gratuitous, murderous folly prompted weeks of anti-government demonstrations in many cities, Buddhists being joined by thousands of students. It was subsequently claimed that the protests were communist-orchestrated. Plainly they suited the NLF and Hanoi: cadres may have encouraged the bonzes. Beyond doubt, however, what took place represented a surge of spontaneous anger against the regime, which refused to apologise for the deaths in Hue, or to punish those responsible. Diem sat on his hands, ignoring warnings from Washington, while his brother Nhu embarked on a programme of repression.

Frank Scotton said: ‘Most of the bonzes were victims of their own wishful thinking about the possibility of representative government, but the Buddhist crisis was not just about politics. For Diem to have made a grand gesture of reconciliation, he would have had to go up against his own younger brother, and he couldn’t bring himself to do that.’ Reporter Marguerite Higgins described Quang, foremost among the rebellious monks. Far from being a passive, meditative figure, she said, ‘deep, burning eyes started out from a gigantic forehead. He had an air of massive intelligence, total self-possession and brooding suspicion.’ A Southern officer wrote: ‘The [Buddhist] crisis was like a great fire, uncontrollable and raging quickly. It had a strong negative effect on the morale of officers and enlisted men … I knew that it was impossible to maintain Diem’s government. My only hope was that power would fall into the hands of a new, competent and loyal leadership.’

When Duong Van Mai returned to Saigon from Washington that autumn, she found that her family, and especially her mother, had become bitterly hostile to the government because of its assault on the faith to which an overwhelming majority of Vietnamese professed adherence. On 10 June David Halberstam wrote: ‘The conflict between the South Vietnamese Government and Buddhist priests is sorely troubling American officials here … [who] are deeply embarrassed … and frustrated in the face of persistent questioning by individual Vietnamese, who ask: “Why does your Government allow this to go on?”’ Americans were perceived as literally calling the shots.

Next day, Western media organisations were alerted to attend a protest in Saigon. Few took heed, however, because its nature was unspecified. On the morning of the 11th, at a busy intersection, an elderly Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc disembarked from a car in orange robes, adopted the lotus position on the street, then sat motionless surrounded by a large crowd while another bonze poured petrol over him. Duc himself struck a match and flicked it at the pyre, then allowed flames to consume and shrivel him. Throughout the process another bonze proclaimed through a megaphone: ‘A Buddhist priest burns himself to death! A Buddhist priest becomes a martyr!’ At this and other such ghastly human sacrifices it was noticed that signs, placards and denunciations were in English: the intended audience was not Vietnamese.

The only Western journalist who had troubled to turn up, Malcolm Browne of AP, wrote later: ‘I could have prevented that immolation by rushing at him and kicking the gasoline away … As a human being I wanted to. As a reporter I couldn’t … I would have propelled myself directly into Vietnamese politics. My role as a reporter would have been destroyed along with my credibility.’ Yet Browne assuredly altered the face of South Vietnamese politics by photographing the scene, just as the Buddhists had intended when they alerted him. His devastating images were ‘pigeoned’ to Manila, then wired around the world. Madame Nhu fuelled outrage with her televised depiction of the event as a ‘barbecue’. She shrugged: ‘Let them burn, and we shall clap our hands.’ Browne said that he never forgot the overpowering scent of joss sticks mingling with that of burning flesh. The perpetrators, well satisfied with the attention secured by their grisly gesture, displayed Duc’s heart in a glass case.

Americans responded with stunned incomprehension. Lt. Gordon Sullivan, an adviser with a Ranger group who chanced to be in Saigon, said, ‘The whole thing changed. This was something new. We didn’t know people did stuff like that.’ The Washington Post editorialised on 20 June 1963: ‘Of course the communists will exploit Buddhist grievances. And why not? It is Mr Diem’s regime itself that is gratuitously serving communist purposes by policies that are morally repugnant and politically suicidal.’ US ambassador ‘Fritz’ Nolting still maintained that this was the least bad Saigon government the US would get, and the CIA’s Colby agreed. In Washington, however, national security adviser McGeorge Bundy and the State Department’s Roger Hilsman took a bleaker view. So did Henry Cabot Lodge, who arrived in Saigon at mid-August to replace Nolting, whose ‘appeasement’ of Diem was deemed discredited.

The new envoy was sixty-one, a Republican grandee from Massachusetts with long experience of diplomacy and the Senate, who had run as vice-presidential candidate on Nixon’s ticket in 1960. Arthur Schlesinger wrote: ‘The president has a habit of designating “liberals” to do “conservative” things, and vice versa.’ Lodge’s appointment was a classic example of this: he was a big figure, bound to seek to play a big role, more proconsular than ambassadorial. If he subsequently misplayed or overplayed his hand, blame rightfully lay with those who appointed him.

On 21 August, after Diem imposed martial law in response to the continuing storm of protests, Nhu’s forces assaulted Saigon’s principal Buddhist sanctuary, the Xa Loi temple. They arrested four hundred monks and nuns, including Vietnam’s eighty-nine-year-old patriarch. Henry Luce’s Time suppressed condemnatory dispatches from its own correspondents; Bill Colby shared his friend Nhu’s contempt for the Buddhists, as did Harkins. Yet despite the imposition of rigorous press censorship and a stream of mendacious government statements, most Americans, including ambassador Lodge, recognised that the president’s brother was rampaging out of control.

The nationwide security situation continued to deteriorate. The NLF, impatient to see the back of the regime, intensified its campaign of terror, while Southern army morale grew shakier by the day. Because David Halberstam’s grim reports were so widely read, MACV and Washington worked ever harder to rubbish them. Secretary of state Dean Rusk personally contradicted an August 1963 dispatch that described the communists gaining ground in the Mekong delta. Harkins itemised details that he asserted were untrue. In September the general cabled Maxwell Taylor at the White House: ‘From most of the reports and articles I read, one would say Vietnam and our programs here are falling apart at the seams. Well, I just thoroughly disagree.’

Yet the record shows the young turks, Halberstam and Sheehan prominent among them, were far more correct in their assessments, both military and political, than was MACV. There were more and more such episodes as one in September, when in broad daylight the Vietcong overran a government post in the delta almost without loss, because the provincial VC had infiltrated two of its men into the garrison. They killed six defenders, seized six prisoners and thirty-five rifles, blew up bunkers and watchtowers before withdrawing. That autumn, according to Frank Scotton, ‘it was apparent that many cultured city-dwellers’ – attentistes, as those folk were known who waited upon events rather than precipitating them – ‘anticipated a change of government’. Diem’s time was almost up. It remained only to be seen whether the communists, the Buddhists or his own generals pulled the plug. And what Washington decided to do about it all.

3 KILLING TIME

The countdown to the murder of President Ngo Dinh Diem started on 23 August 1963, when a top-secret cable to the State Department from Lodge demanded to know whether Washington would support a coup. A positive reply was drafted and sent to Saigon over a weekend when Kennedy, Rusk and McNamara were out of town: its authors were Averell Harriman, Roger Hilsman and Michael Forrestal. If Diem refused to make reforms and sack his brother Nhu, they wrote in the name of the US government, ‘We are prepared to accept the obvious implication that we can no longer support Diem. You may tell appropriate military commanders we will give them direct support in any interim period of breakdown … Ambassador … should urgently examine all possible alternative leadership and make detailed plans as to how we might bring about Diem’s replacement if this should become necessary.’

On Monday morning, when Kennedy returned to the White House he was disturbed by the insouciance with which this momentous directive – for such the cable was – had been dispatched, by middle-ranking officials. He consulted with McNamara and Taylor, who equivocated: they would prefer that Diem stayed, albeit without Nhu. If the generals decided otherwise, however, the US should support an interim military government. Kennedy finally decided not to recall the weekend telegram: it would be left to Lodge to determine policy. The ambassador later claimed to have been ‘thunderstruck’. His entirely reasonable interpretation of the Washington cable was that he was now mandated to precipitate Diem’s fall.

On 2 September the US president, answering a question about Vietnam in a CBS interview with Walter Cronkite, said that the Saigon regime needed to gain more support: ‘with changes in policy and perhaps in personnel I think [the government] can win. If it doesn’t make those changes, I would think the chances of winning would not be very good.’ Kennedy appealed for more help – practical help – from America’s allies: ‘It doesn’t do us any good to say, “Well, why don’t we all just go home and leave the world to those who are our enemies.”’ He added that ‘the only people who can win are the people of Vietnam’. Some historians have interpreted such words as indicating Kennedy’s acknowledgement that Americans could not achieve what Vietnamese would not do for themselves; that he was pointing towards an exit. This seems fanciful: he had his own presidential re-election race to win, which might conceivably be lost in South-East Asia, just as Korea doomed Harry Truman in 1952.

Events now accelerated. The North Vietnamese were probing for any means of separating Diem from the Americans. To this end, Hanoi embarked on a dog-leg dalliance with Saigon, via Polish and French intermediaries, which soon became known to the Kennedy administration. The most ignoble aspect of Washington’s mounting interest in a coup was the impetus provided by fears that Diem or his brother Nhu might be contemplating a deal. Bernard Fall, who commanded a readership among decision-makers because he was known to have good contacts on both sides, reported that, in the event of a meaningful North–South dialogue, Ho Chi Minh would accept a delay to reunification – a ‘decent interval’, to use a phrase Fall did not employ, but which would become the focus of many future Indochina peace efforts. In truth, the exchanges had little chance of an outcome: Le Duan was interested only in achieving a communist Vietnam, while the Ngos laboured under the delusion that they held good cards – an imminent prospect of military victory and their own indispensability to the Americans. The mere fact of contacts between the two sides nonetheless set alarm bells ringing in Washington. The Saigon regime’s willingness to parley reflected increasing animosity towards its paymasters.

President Kennedy’s friend Charles Bartlett claimed later that the Saigon regime’s flirtation with the North was the principal reason for the decision to dispense with Diem. He quoted the president as saying, ‘Charlie, I can’t let Vietnam go to the Communists and then go and ask [American voters] to re-elect me. Somehow we’ve got to hold that territory.’ Nonetheless, Kennedy allegedly added, ‘But we’ve got no future there. [The South Vietnamese] hate us. They want us out of there. At one point they’ll kick our asses out of there.’ This reported conversation seems credible. Kennedy’s private attitude was coloured by the bad faith shown by the communists about implementing his administration’s Laos neutralisation pact; there seemed likewise no prospect of Hanoi proving an honest partner in any coalition settlement for Vietnam.

American alarm increased when France’s president Charles de Gaulle took a hand. This lofty, profoundly anti-Anglo-Saxon nationalist repeatedly urged that the US should disengage, allowing Vietnam to be neutralised. Washington believed that de Gaulle’s remarks reflected jealousy about France’s displacement from a region that had once been its property. Fredrik Logevall has written: ‘American planners would spend much time discussing the French leader’s actions and ideas, but only in terms of how best to counter them. The substance of his argument was not closely examined, then or later, partly because it was anathema to American officials, and partly because they were convinced he had ulterior motives.’

Walter Lippmann warned in his column on 3 September: ‘If there is no settlement such as General de Gaulle proposes, then a protracted and indecisive war of attrition is all that is left.’ The veteran commentator, who in those years wrote more about Indochina than any other single issue, believed that the best to which the US could aspire was a Titoist outcome, whereby a unified Vietnam became communist, but not a tool of China or the Soviets. Lippmann implicitly argued that Ho Chi Minh could not be defeated on the battlefield, and that the best alternative might be to woo him with dollars. This was implausible: there seems no more reason to believe that Le Duan, a Robespierrian ‘sea-green incorruptible’, could have been bribed into running a moderate, humane government had he been granted suzerainty over a unified Vietnam in 1963, than he did after 1975. But that does not diminish the validity of Lippmann’s thesis, that the Americans could not prevail by force of arms.

On 13 September the NSC’s Chester Cooper wrote from Saigon to his old CIA colleague John McCone saying that he thought a diplomatic rapprochement between the Diem regime and Hanoi, involving expulsion of the Americans, was on the cards. Here were gall and wormwood, which made the administration even less inclined to discourage Lodge from inciting Saigon’s generals to intervene. The ambassador had no hesitation about exploiting the authority delegated to him by the White House to instigate a change of government, though this proved a tortured process. It was hard to urge into action the influential soldiers whom he addressed – generals Duong Van Minh, Tran Van Don, Le Van Kim, Tran Thien Khiem. The CIA’s Colby, who hated Lodge and strongly opposed action against a Vietnamese national leader who was as devout a Catholic as himself, wrote later: ‘There was an almost total absence of consideration and evaluation of the personalities who might succeed Diem, beyond generalised references to “the military”.’ The South Vietnamese officers were not unreasonably hesitant about deposing Diem unless or until they were sure their own hand was strong enough, which required unequivocal American backing. They knew that they could expect nothing on paper from the embassy, but were unwilling to risk their own necks merely on the verbal assurances of Lou Conein, who hereafter acted as covert liaison officer between Lodge and the army chiefs.