Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Bed Check David Brock's article on the press and Nicaragua in the January 1988 TAS ("Danny Ortega's American Janissaries") falsely accuses Newsweek's Rod Nordland of "keeping house...
...If you had bothered to call Mr...
...To this we are all entitled, but not necessarily to respect and credibility as well...
...politics was welcome but it did not go far enough...
...When I asked him point-blank if he was satisfied with a situation in which the enemy could send in apparently limitless reinforcements through Cambodia and Laos, he said, "Oh, I could show you a pile of cables this thick asking for permission to go into those countries...
...It is true that I am not an admirer of Ambassador Graham Martin, but the term "soft-minded, gullible fool" is Colonel LeGro's, not mine...
...Cecil S. H. Ross Jackson, Mississippi Vietnam Honesty It is my guess that you'll receive a ton of responses to Mark Falcoff's attempt to "be honest about Vietnam" ("Let's Be Honest about Vietnam," TAS, December 1987...
...Nevertheless, it was wrong—although (continued on page 50) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988 7 CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 7) not Westy's responsibility—if, as Bui Diem claims, the government in Saigon was not told of the American landings until after the fact...
...Tragically, General Abrams also directed the Vietnamese attack into Laos---f`LamSon 719'L-that failed in its mission and resulted in the destruction of some of the finest battalions in the Vietnamese Army...
...The "violence and terrorism" that Miss Andrews committed was to trespass an abortuary and pull the plug on a suction machine used to expel fetuses, or as fanatics say, kill unborn babies...
...Whether the Republic of Vietnam could have survived under any circumstances is surely nothing more than a matter of opinion, more or less informed, more or less plausible...
...It is apparent, however, that Mr...
...Diem was unfamiliar with the security situation that impelled the introduction of American troops in 1965...
...He encouraged me to talk the matter over with U. Alexis Johnson, who was deputy chief of mission of the U.S...
...Nordland was permanently stationed in Nicaragua, merely that on his visits there as a foreign correspondent he has been known to have had a more than professional relationship with a reporter for Barricada, the official FSLN daily...
...I have no quarrel with Mr...
...Sadly, Falcoff seems unable to avoid repeating tired old canards: "before Quat knew what was happening, there were 200,000 American troops wreaking havoc in the countryside . . ." Really...
...Cavalry took heavy casualties in the Ia Drang against the best of the North Vietnam Army...
...The resistance to the common sense of blocking the North Vietnamese in the Laos panhandle was not rooted solely in the Army's presumed lack of capability to do it without mobilization...
...Thomas Mullen, Jr, K.M...
...However, as General Westmoreland pointed out to me, in the days immediately following Tet the Joint Chiefs proceeded on the assumption that the time had come to have a general mobilization, which would enable U.S...
...Having said that, I am in full agreement with him that the media people did everything in their power to discredit the Republic of Vietnam, its leadership, and its people before the American public...
...But I don't gather from Mr...
...He favored limited mobilization and placing an American force astride the North Vietnamese logistical corridor in Laos...
...On the other hand, in my subsequent telephone conversation with him, he did admit the existence of countervailing tensions between the political interests of the Johnson Administration and the practical problems of prosecuting a war in Southeast Asia...
...Cuomo denied that he had been caught breaking a rule...
...But for all that, he does not regret the choice of strategy, which from his point of view had achieved most of its objectives by the time he left Vietnam in 1968...
...Nordland, or anyone at Newsweek magazine, to check this assertion, you could have saved yourself the embarrassment of publishing such a falsehood...
...Is this what Falcoff calls "wreaking havoc in the countryside...
...Blowing Smoke In "Cuomo for President...
...However, I do not feel particularly defensive about this fact, for Colonel LeGro has yet to explain why his own view is so superior to that of the others...
...Falcoffs view (as I understand it) that the cry "No More Vietnams" is rhetorical excess applied with abandon to an array of dissimilar situations, and that those who raise the cry have defective understandings of what happened there...
...If Colonel LeGro is right, the others are wrong...
...Asst...
...General Westmoreland heatedly denied that General Taylor had ever favored the "enclave strategy," or that Taylor's views—particularly as regards not only the enclave strategy but the introduction of American troops—as described by Bui Diem (and by indirection, Colonel Schandler and General Palmer) were at all accurate...
...It does seem odd...
...With ample justification, Falcoff applauds Bui Diem's In the Jaws of History...
...Falcoff's essay that he has more than a few "notions" about it either...
...The news of this apparent request, hard on the heels of what was advertised as a devastating defeat for the enemy, deprived the U.S...
...To put an expeditionary force of that size in a small Asian country, complete with tracked vehicles and the huge logistical tail it drags behind it, is necessarily to disrupt that society in important ways...
...forces to go into Cambodia and Laos (much as they were to do under even less advantageous political circumstances in 1970...
...and now Colonel LeGro...
...If, toward the end of the war, "America's contempt for its erstwhile ally there far exceeded any emotions we might have harbored toward the enemy," as Falcoff asserts—and I have grave doubts that he is correct—such contempt had its source in the media and not in any objective understanding...
...he called it a war of exposed flank, in which mobility rather than territory was the key...
...Falcoffs discussion of the role of the media illustrates this point well...
...Flemington, New Jersey Mr...
...Allow me to contribute my few ounces...
...John Novocilsky's contemptible attack on Joan Andrews deserves no comment, and I would offer none were his mentality not shared by others more able to do harm...
...A new book by Norman Hannah, The King's Failure (Madison Books, 1987), sheds additional light on the matter...
...I have shoes on, and yet I'm not walking," he said...
...Never mind that the North Vietnamese ignored the accords...
...Of course Mario's attempt to storm the American Winter Palace with America's own rules instead of guns was hooted down by the other governors, who recognized the stealing of people's property when they saw it...
...In the context of that plan, General Westmoreland was asked to query his commanders about what they needed, and to forward their consolidated request to Washington...
...As chief of intelligence for the Defense Attache Office, I worked closely with Ambassador Martin during his entire tour in Saigon...
...Even worse, he mimics Johnson's devious personality...
...He expressed some pride and satisfaction at having been able to meet the challenge through Navy patrol boats on the Mekong river system and above all through the introduction of the heli50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988 copter...
...I worked in the Pentagon in 1964 and 1965 as the officer responsible to the Army Chief of Staff (General Harold K. Johnson) for all strategy matters involving Indochina...
...Meanwhile, the North Vietnamese were sending regular regiments into South Vietnam...
...I am surprised that this should seem so out of hand to Colonel LeGro...
...He did not feel, however, that a mobilization of the reserves would have been useful before Tet, because there would have been no place to use them, and once this became apparent, the political pressures to demobilize them rapidly would have grown to intolerable dimensions...
...Binh Dinh Province—on the north-central coast—was in VC hands and the fighting was heavy and continuous...
...My lunch with General Westmoreland, followed by a lengthy telephone conversation several weeks later, helped to clarify a number of points...
...General Westmoreland expressed some amazement that he was not one of those interviewed by the Newsweek project...
...Prof of Government Claremont McKenna College Claremont, California William Tucker's expose of the Mario Cuomo phenomenon in U.S...
...John's Prep, a priest once spotted him with a cigarette...
...I now believe that I was wrong to describe General Abrams's stewardship as radically different from General Westmoreland's...
...Two VC regiments converged on Binh Gia hamlet—just east of Saigon—overwhelming the outnumbered defenders...
...First, Westy did not choose the strategy...
...At the time I wrote my article I was familiar only with the first two versions...
...His description of events immediately after the Tet offensive bears some comment here, since they illustrate the degree to which all of us were (and some of us remain) in the thrall of the so-called prestige press...
...When I asked him, perhaps somewhat indiscreetly, whether he thought he had been used (in the pejorative sense) by the politicians, he denied this...
...President Johnson refused mobilization...
...Colonel Schandler has done so...
...This information was given to me by three independent sources, but I have no first-hand knowledge, of course, about Mr...
...it was imposed upon him by the Commander-in-Chief...
...Second, when I referred to the impact of 200,000 American troops on Vietnamese rural society, I was not repeating "tired old canards"--merely paraphrasing Bui Diem's own, very eloquent description...
...But he got no support from the other chiefs...
...John J. Pitney, Jr...
...If Mario abandons the Shoreham nuclear power plant, he will have to replace it with a coal burner that consumes 500 tons of coal every hour...
...We would never place American forces in Laos...
...The plain fact was that the South Vietnamese Army lacked the firepower and mobility to carry the fight against the NVA...
...For Westy, it was either reinforce with Americans or get out...
...Embassy in Saigon at the time...
...I know what General Johnson was for and against...
...Since General Johnson is dead, others must speak for him...
...General Westmoreland was thus left to carry out his mission under less than ideal circumstances...
...Since this passage bothered General Westmoreland as well, let me emphasize that I certainly was not trying to suggest a picture similar to the one conveyed by Oliver Stone's film Platoon, or anything approximating it...
...command in Vietnam of a vast measure of credibility at home...
...This is a story that should have appeared in the section on the press in The Bad War, though it would certainly have undermined the "not guilty" verdict tendered by Kim Willenson, Walter Cronkite, and others...
...And never mind that we were violating them covertly anyway...
...Everybody's an expert...
...With regard to our contempt for our erstwhile ally at the end of the war, I invite Colonel LeGro to read some of the passages on this subject in Bui Diem's book—or better yet, the interviews with American combat veterans of lower rank, such as appear in The Bad War—before he attributes them solely to my own fevered imagination or that of the media...
...In the first big actions involving Americans, the Marines of the 3rd Division battled battalions of the VC main force in the Bantangan Peninsula and troopers of the 7th U.S...
...General Abrams, contrary to Lewy, made no important changes, other than to preside over the disengagement of American forces and to increase the attention to training of the Vietnamese forces...
...There is no doubt whatever that had the United States fulfilled its obligations and kept President Nixon's promises, the Republic of Vietnam would have survived the NVA offensive that began with the assault on Phuoc Long in December 1974 and ended in Saigon in April 1975...
...We in plans and operations pressed hard for its adoption, while the logisticians said it couldn't be supported without mobilizing Army reserves, especially the logistical units that would have to man the support system all the way from Bangkok through northeast Thailand to the Mekong...
...It may be, indeed, that under some circumstances such disruption is a price well worth paying for a larger goal...
...It was a tactical mistake of grand proportions...
...Westy, and Abrams who followed, had to make the best of it, fighting the North Vietnamese and VC main force with major American formations and assisting the Vietnamese with the pacification program...
...Theirs is only the latest sorry variation on a theme running through all history: the envy and malice of little souls embarrassed by the examples set by the great ones...
...The ensuing political uproar must surely have had some impact upon the Administration's decision to change course...
...It just so happened that we were changing MACV commanders at the time...
...Second, like any experienced commander, Westy would have preferred a strategy that would have isolated the battlefield and permitted him to take the offensive...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988 51...
...The reference to the Laos panhandle raises an interesting point...
...Contrary to what Colonel Herbert Schandler says, as quoted by Falcoff, General Johnson opposed mining Haiphong harbor and bombing Hanoi...
...158), Robert Caro quotes one of LBJ's college classmates: ". . Dean Speckcame by, and he said: 'Lyndon, you know we don't allow smoking on campus.' `I'm not smoking, Dean Speck.' `Well, Lyndon, you've got your pipe in your mouth.' `Yes Dean Speck, and I've got shoes on my feet, but I'm not walking.' I nearly died laughing . ." It's bad enough that Cuomo advocates the disastrous policies of LBJ's Great Society...
...To protect the public from such a dangerous person, the judge sentenced her to five years in solitary confinement in a maximum security prison...
...TAS, January 1988), William 'flicker tells a revealing story about the governor's character...
...General Palmer has done so...
...Here is a book that illuminates the growth of the independence movement as few others have, and it gives us a penetrating look into the fractious politics that fatally inhibited the leadership of war-torn Vietnam...
...Is this being honest about Vietnam...
...We called this the "Tchepone Plan," and he saw it as the fundamental requirement for success: isolating the battlefield...
...He specifically denied that he was pursuing a war of attrition, except in the conventional sense in which all wars are, ultimately, contests of endurance...
...That is not true...
...His campaign to swindle LILCO's investors of their property by forcing abandonment of the Shoreham nuclear power plant and a LILCO bankruptcy is plumbing the depths of deception...
...Finally, the characterization of Graham Martin is far off the mark: "Poor Ambassador Martin," a deluded fool who believed to the end that defeat could have been avoided if we had "done what we said we would do...
...If the assertion is not true, my apologies to Mr...
...Hannah, a retired foreign service officer, now reveals that Ambassador Averell Harriman had apparently made a commitment to the Soviets that under no circumstances would American troops enter Laos, in exchange for certain other kinds of restraint on Moscow's part...
...As General Westmoreland pointed out, in Vietnam, Mao's three-phased war occurred disynchronically—instead of consecutively, sometimes all three phases were underway at the same time...
...William E. LeGro Colonel of Infantry US...
...Long Island's appetite for electricity has increased by 920 megawatts these past fifteen years...
...Invading Cambodia did not come up during my time in the Pentagon...
...In fact, the Army staff itself was divided...
...I leave it to the reader to decide who is the terrorist in this case: Miss Andrews or the sadist who imposed such a sentence upon her...
...Further, after the destruction of the VC main force units in the 1968 Tet offensive, the entire battlefield strategy of the enemy changed, which required a corresponding alteration on our part...
...When Cuomo was a student at St...
...He was no soft-minded, gullible fool...
...In late 1964 Bien Hoa airbase—just a few miles from Saigon—was mortared...
...In the far north only the cities and the main highway were in government control...
...nor has he ever had anything other than a professional involvement with either Sandinistas or contras...
...Mario hasn't given up...
...Neil Sheehan of the New York Times got wind of this through a leak, and printed the story in his paper as if it were Westmoreland's request, rather than a response to orders from Washington...
...Our approach, therefore, had to be more flexible...
...It was probably this—not the 1962 accords—which caused the political leadership to turn down the suggestions from the military to which Colonel LeGro makes reference...
...There was one other, however, which came not in the form of a letter to the editor but an invitation to lunch—by no less a person than former MACV commander General William C. Westmoreland, in New York City on December 10, 1987...
...He arrived at his first governors' conference armed with two experts who explained how utilities could be seized by the state at their assessed value...
...In The Path to Power (p...
...Had I chosen to discuss the ambassador's role at greater length I might have used somewhat stronger language, as do his former aides in The Bad War...
...She added to this heinous offense by refusing on grounds of conscience to promise not to repeat the act...
...Nordland and the Barricada reporter know for sure...
...Arlington, Virginia Mark Falcoff replies: Colonel LeGro may be as surprised as I was to see that there was no "ton of responses" to my article...
...Army (Ret...
...We soldiers who advocated theplan were told by the political leadership that the United States would not violate the 1962 accords on Laos...
...General Westmoreland told me onthe telephone that when he met with Secretary McNamara even before assuming command in Vietnam, he warned him that we were taking on a very formidable task which would require a long time, and that only by getting the American people emotionally involved in the cause would it be possible to sustain their support over the period needed to bring the war to a successful conclusion...
...If there is one thing Long Islanders agree on, it is that Long Island will smother in the ashes and poisonous sludge resulting from the burning of three-quarters of a million tons of coal every sixty days...
...Bombs exploded in Saigon and Tan Son Nhut...
...It is my clear recollection that General Johnson never supported Ambassador Taylor's so-called "enclave strategy" for precisely that reason...
...Indeed,one of my points in the article is that, partly as a result of Vietnam, today any Third World people which sides with the United States is automatically delegitimized by the liberal political community...
...The political leadership was opposed to it...
...Conventional wisdom has it that after the Tet offensive, Westmoreland asked for 200,000 more men...
...That very day the same judge sentenced two accessories to murder to four years, not to be passed in solitary confinement...
...General Westmoreland likened the Vietnam war to the American Civil War...
...First of all, I did not attribute the strategy employed in Vietnam by General Westmoreland exclusively to Guenter Lewy, but cited Colonel Herbert Schandler, and General Bruce Palmer...
...The most important was that my characterization of a difference in strategic conceptions between him and General Abrams was, at best, a vast oversimplification...
...I also described the views of two generals no longer alive, but both of whom played a crucial role in the inter-service and inter-administration debates on strategy, General Harold K. Johnson, then army chief of staff, and General Maxwell Taylor, ambassador to the Republic of Vietnam...
...Obviously these two "common criminals" got a different kind of justice than Joan Andrews...
...Mario Cuomo's war against utilities started shortly after his election...
...Simply to declare that one is the leading authority on what General Johnson thought is not enough...
...Falcoff begins with a badly flawed premise: that General Westmoreland "insisted the war be fought along conventional lines he knew from World War II: the war, in effect, became one of attrition . . ." That is a bad rap on two grounds...
...CORRESPONDENCE Bed Check David Brock's article on the press and Nicaragua in the January 1988 TAS ("Danny Ortega's American Janissaries") falsely accuses Newsweek's Rod Nordland of "keeping house . . . with a woman reporter for Barricada...
...Here's the eerie part: there's an identical story about the young Lyndon Johnson...
...Robert Rivard Chief of Correspondents Newsweek magazine New York, New York David Brock replies: I never wrote that Mr...
...Nonetheless, in the particular case of Vietnam, the cultural misunderstandings and mutual dislike were there, though perhaps not as apparent at the rarefied level of the Pentagon or the U.S...
...I have checked again with my sources who have reaffirmed the story to me, but only Mr...
...The school forbade smoking, not carrying a lighted cigarette—and the priest had not actually seen him taking a puff...
...The situation was critical and worsening...
...McNamara seemed uninterested in this line of analysis, which is coherent with my own characterization of the Johnson Administration's effort to fight the war on the cheap, as a kind of sideshow that would not disrupt the Great Society...
...But those stopped at General Wheeler's desk [the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff], and at one point he just told me to stop sending them, because they weren't going anywhere...
...Nordland's after-hours activities...
...Denied these options, he and his able staff developed a counterinsurgency plan that, together with significant contributions by Vietnamese forces, so crippled the Viet Cong that the Communists had to deploy regular forces from the North...
...Before summarizing some of the points made at that lunch, let me respond briefly to those raised by Colonel LeGro...
...but to pretend it did not occur in the particular context of Vietnamese politics is to omit an important aspect of the war...
...Nordland does not even live in Managua and never has...
...high command...
...Herbert Jaffe Association of Investors in New York Utilities Freeport, New York More on Joan Andrews In his remarks on Joan Andrews (Correspondence, TAS, January 1988), John Novocilsky displays a sense of justice that would delight Torquemada and Hitler...
...Relying on Guenter Lewy, Mr...
Vol. 21 • March 1988 • No. 3
