We Knew What We Were Doing When We Went Into Vietnam
Fairlie, Henry
We knew what we were doing when we went into Vietnam by Henry Fairlie “It cannot be said that the people were well informed before their commitment to the battle” in Vietnam, wrote James...
...What has come out of the Cuban affair has been a determination to meet the communist para-military tactics of guerrilla warfare, infiltration, sabotage, and so on...
...Even this acknowledgment was made only in an aside when he was trying to rally the country against the steel companies...
...And yet we read how Vietnam is in danger because of guerrilla operations...
...On May 4, in a speech at New Orleans, he talked of the range of the U. S. military commitment, from “the American soldier guarding the Brandenburg Gate to the Americans now in Vietnam.’’ At his press conference on June 14, he said that “a withdrawal in the case of Vietnam, and in the case of Thailand, might mean a collapse of the whole area.’’ Six days later, he declared to an audience of college students: “It is the United States which is making the major effort in Vietnam...
...Then, on August 27, Tad Szulc reported from Washington that the Administration had “formally and pointedlv” absolved the South Vietto connamese army leaders: “A statement underlined the Administration’s emerging policy: to encourage army commanders to intervene in Vietnamese politics...
...and, if one is to place a laurel on the brow which deserves it, one must say that it was Homer Bigart, who for six months in 1962 set a standard for reporting the war in Vietnam which, in the following 10 years, was not surpassed...
...but this was also the thinking, with few exceptions, of the spokesmen of informed opinion...
...No one was being fooled...
...These use of United States troops, if necesassurances could mean the dispatch of sary, to crush the growing Communist American military forces if this were guerrilla activity in South Vietnam...
...He was reporting a On May 11, the very day on which press conference which Dean Rusk Kennedy made his major decisionshad held on May 4, the day after the which included the breaking of the State Department had completed its Geneva Agreements by dispatching own substantial revision of the task 100 additional military advisers and force report: “The Secretary would the escalation of the American innot confirm a report that President volvement in covert warfare by disKennedy had promised to send Ameri- patching 400 members of the Special Forces-an editorial in The New York Times said: “Either the Communists in Vietnam should be condemned [for their infringements of the Geneva Agreements] or the right of anticommunists to engage in similar activities affirmed...
...Historically such undeclared warfare has been hostile to the concept of democracy...
...To accept it as a matter of course is to hand the Communists half a victory without a fight.’’ This was the mood of the country in general, as John Kennedy prepared, at the end of April, 1961, to take the steps by which he would irrevocably commit the prestige and the arms and the men of the United States to the defense of South Vietnam...
...The reporting of Homer Bigart was now reaching its full power...
...Trite as it may sound, the communists must be encountered where they are-at the grass roots...
...were trapped into supporting the American involvement in the war by politicians who kept them in ignorance...
...How It All Started John Kennedy’s first public reference as President to Vietnam was in his State of the Union message on January 30, 1961, when he spoke of “the relentless pressures of the Chinese communists” which “menace the entire area from the borders of India and South Vietnam to the jungles of Laos...
...That impetus was to be maintained, and the Administration’s inclination was known and published, debated, and supported...
...but this was especially true because the reports in the press, by which his words could be interpreted, continued to gather their force, in spite of the attempts at censorship, By the end of June, 1962, Homer Bigart had withdrawn from Vietnam embittered and angry...
...On the following day, Tad Szulc again reported from Washington: “Some officials now believe that the only plausible solution may be to remove Mr...
...Tied to that problem is the fear that Americans are not ready to accept the idea of a long, drawn-out struggle...
...I’ve sent one of the reinforcement groups from my reserve to oppose them...
...Three days later, in a further report, he said that “the communist drive in Laos is viewed here as a prelude to an intensified attack against South Vietnam,’’ and described the struggle in South Vietnam as a “hot war...
...was one of the prob- should be necessary...
...The day after Kennedy publicly stated that he was looking for a change in “the personnel” of the government of Ngo Dinh Diem, James Reston wrote: “It was like the head of a foreign government publicly announcing that the President was pursuing a losing policy, was out of touch with the American people, but might make amends by firing Bobby...
...The war in Vietnam has caused enough mischief...
...The operation, he said, involves a movement of masses of United States equipment, planes, and personnel...
...For communist strategists in Asia, it is a keystone without which empire, wealth, and breathing space cannot be achieved...
...And they have had little success in putting across tactical advice...
...It is a difficult and demanding situation...
...This on-the-spot training of South Vietnamese pilots is a sharp departure from previous practices...
...The news agencies, of course, were represented, as were Time and Newsweek...
...He was stalling and was doing so visibly...
...In both the warning of I. F. Stone and the advocacy of Time there was the same awareness of the size and meaning of the commitment which Kennedy had made...
...a clear implication, in a reference to SEATO, that the United States was embarking on a course in .which it would be likely to have to act alone rather than as the leader of an alliance...
...Two weeks later, in an editorial entitled “Combating Red Guerrillas,” the Times proclaimed: “Without such international action, to quote Mr...
...The free world must increasingly protest against and oppose communist subversive aggression as practiced today most acutely in Southeast Asia...
...Do the American people understand and approve of what is going on...
...The record contradicts them...
...it was on its front page...
...Honest Reporting In March and April of 1962, Kennedy made only three significant references to the war in Vietnam...
...Between the lines of Homer Bigart’s New Yorlc Times dispatches from Saigon,” an editorial in The Nation of April 14 said, “one can read an increasingly urgent note of warning...
...represent a very extensive American commitment...
...The authors of the narrative summary in the Pentagon Papers criticize the Kennedy Administration for consistently thinking in terms of a communist bloc...
...Of course, the attitudes and the actions of these men are of special interest and importance, since it is the politicians who issue the actual orders...
...On August 2, after meetings with Chen Cheng, vice president of the Nationalist Republic of China, Kennedy declared that “the United States is determined that the Republic of Vietnam shall not be lost to the communists for lack of support which the United States can render...
...With all of Southeast Asia watching, the United States stands to win big-or to lose on an equal scale...
...Defoliation chemicals (common weed killers) have been employed largely in attempts to strip leaves from heavy jungle growth near lines of communication...
...An editorial in The Nation of July 14, commenting on the “curtain of lies” behind which events in Vietnam were taking place, said that the fictions were “dissipated almost daily by Homer Bigart,” and asked that the American press “bring these fragments [of truth] to the attention of the American people...
...One is that the anti-communist war in South Vietnam, which has produced the best fighting force in Indochina, is not only, as President Kennedy declared, ‘their war’ but our war-a war from which we cannot retreat and which we dare not lose...
...JFK’s Tough Talk We turn now to the fall of 1961 and John Kennedy’s second series of major decisions...
...It is a situation which the American people must understand and face up to...
...asked...
...It is physically-far more than its inaccessible neighbor Laosthe gateway to Southeast Asia’s millions of square miles, which offer vast natural resources, an enormous rice surplus, and elbow room for another 200 million people...
...Could you tell us whether that is correct, and also anything else you have regarding plans for that country...
...Nhu or both brothers through a coup d’etat by Vietnamese army commanders...
...the American military officers were, as Halberstam said, impatient at Vietnamese methods of fighting-and of not fighting...
...On June 16, Halberstam wrote, “if Asian communists...
...the Administration was in fact advertising its actions...
...But the astonishing fact remains that even as American casualties became a weekly, then a daily occurrence from mid-1962 to mid-1963, the American press in general did not consider the story worth the expense of sending its own reporters to Vietnam...
...It concluded: “The possibilities of escalation in Vietnam are not to be minimized...
...Meanwhile, in his July 31 newsletter, I. F. Stone noted the preparations which were being made and Douglas MacArthur’s recent warning to Kennedy against involving the United States in a ground war on the Asian mainland, and added: “There conventional warriors, a quicksand which could absorb a major share of our youth in endless ‘limited’ war...
...The choices will then be humiliating withdrawal, as the size of the challenge grows, or progressively deeper involvement in a stalemate which may not admit of a ‘victory’ in anything less than a decade-some experts say even longer...
...Similarly, on April 14, The New Yorlc Times editorialized: “What amounts to an expeditionary force of thousands of armed agents from Communist North Vietnam, in conjunction with local communist partisans, is engaged in a deliberate and large-scale campaign to ruin and overthrow the Southern Government through sabotage, terrorist raids, assassination and propaganda...
...It is only necessary, at this stage of the story, to demonstrate that the nature of the war in which the United States had become involved, the nature of the involvement itself, the nature of the difficulties which it was encountering, and the nature of the consequences which could be foreseen were not secret...
...He also noted that Mr...
...Addressing the United Nations on September 25, the President said that “South Vietnam is already under attack,” and that if the communists were successful there, “the gates will be opened wide.2’ In the light of these words, again and again defining and hardening the commitment which he was making on behalf of the United States, it was impossible to misread the announcements of actual decisions, even if these announcements were incomplete, obscure, and sometimes even devious...
...We knew what we were doing when we went into Vietnam by Henry Fairlie “It cannot be said that the people were well informed before their commitment to the battle” in Vietnam, wrote James Reston in 1967 in The Artillery of the Press...
...eventually gain their demands in Vietnamnot necessarily a military victory here, but a trip to Geneva and a ‘neutral’ South Vietnam-then the implications are immense, not only for this country’s 15 million people...
...Whether the role of United States airmen already here or on the way might be broadened to include tactical missions was not disclosed...
...On every side he was being urged to do just that, and to do it quickly...
...Finding a Scapegoat The criticism that was being made was not of the rationale for the war, but of the way the war was being fought, and the criticism of the war effort during 1962 became increasingly a criticism of the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem for its corruption and unpopularity and inefficiency...
...In an editorial on September 22 the Times again pointed out that “as President Kennedy has stated, the stakes in Southeast Asia are too high for us to see the war lost...
...In short, what was being proposed was the “Americanization” of the war, or to put it ironically, its “de-Vietnamization...
...This final commitment was made when there was full public knowledge of it in the press, and when the press in general supported it...
...The first was important only because he refused to make a statement...
...The atmosphere in which John Kennedy was moving towards his first significant decision on the war in Vietnam, including the sending of additional American forces, was represented accurately in James Reston’s mention, in The New Yorlc Times on April 7, of “the imperative necessity of organizing the West to confront the new communist empire...
...The first version, from Tad Szulc in Washington, reported the view of the Administration that the South Vietnamese army was responsible for the raid...
...Given the date on which the May 22 issue must have gone to press, the magazine was, quite soon after the decisions had been made, drawing on public knowledge...
...The nature of the program was defined-within the limits of security-by an officia source today...
...But more and more we are being forced to fight the communists on their own terms...
...S. Study of Guerrilla Warfare Stimulated by Asian Experience...
...The following day, an editorial in The New Yorlc Times declared: “Prospects for effective resistance to the Communists are better in South Vietnam than in Laos...
...But while Kennedy was being so “elusive,” to use the description of Theodore Sorensen, the public was still being told what was actually happening...
...On the following United States has given South Viet- day it carried an unsigned report nam assurances of any necessary help which said: “It is believed that Generto permit that embattled Southeast al Lemnitzer on his return to WashingAsian nation to hold out against ton [from a visit to Southeast Asia], communist attack, guerrilla and other- will urge all-out support, including the wise, it was learned last night...
...This passage, resurrected by David Halberstam in The Making o f a Quagmire, is of extreme significance...
...This was the tenor even of Homer Bigart’s final reflections, which appeared in The New York Times July 25: “Victory is remote...
...By the end of 1962, this fiction had become the prevailing orthodoxy within the Administration, within the American press in general, and even within the tightly-knit group of American correspondents in Saigon...
...But the record in the press at the time contradicts them...
...The United States must now make this basic and crucial reassessment: Is the anticommunist struggle, with the Ngo clique in charge, hopeless...
...Indeed, on April 8, in an editorial replying to a protest by Bertrand Russell against the American conduct of the war, it excused the use of napalm and defoliation: “Napalm has been used by the South Vietnamese air force against real or imagined havens of Vietcong guerrillas...
...In his January 15 press conference, he was asked: “Mr...
...This country is now under heavy communist attack...
...The information was available to the American people, or at least those who cared to take an interest, to the leaders of informed opinion, and above all, to the readers of The New Yorlc Times, on whose pages I will again primarily draw for the evidence...
...On May 7, the Times wrote in The reporters were being adequately “The Week in Review” that “Western informed and were doing their job...
...On July 17, The New York Times published a Reuters report under the headline “Test For U. S. Tactics Seen,” which said: “The war between Government troops and communist-led guerrillas in South Vietnam is considered a test of the new United States Army tactics for jungle fighting...
...the second version, from David Halberstam in Saigon, placed the responsibility on Ngo Dinh Nhu, brother of Ngo Dinh Diem...
...and on April 7, The Washington Post carried a report from Saigon by John Griffin of the Associated Press which said: “Months of communist terrorism have mushroomed into open warfare...
...In contrast, The New York Times failed to question what was being done...
...There it is...
...On April 8, both The New Yorlc Times and The Washington Post carried a State Department official’s statement to the effect that the United States “does not intend to let the people of South Vietnam down in the dangerous situation which they are now facing...
...This report was not buried inside the newspaper...
...Any policy is better than no policy at all or a dozen policies operating at crosspurposes...
...a decision to intensify the American covert involvement in combat operations: and a plain statement that one of the purposes of the new arrangements was to expand the American direction and control of military operations...
...Yet again, on March 22, the day before John Kennedy’s press conference, Trumbull had reported: “South Vietnam, regarded here as the key of Southeast Asian defense against communist aggression, has become a testing ground for new United States guerrilla tactics designed for fighting in tropical jungles...
...Could anyone doubt the meaning of that...
...Admin- trum...
...The First Casualty The mission of General Taylor was reported by Robert Trumbull...
...On March 16, the Times published an unsigned report from Washington that Robert McNamara had publicly stated that “United States military . training personnel in South Vietnam have exchanged fire with communist guerrillas...
...the correspondents corn municated their impatience...
...that General Taylor did not look favorably on the sending of United States combat troops at this time...
...The final commitment was being made: the war was being “de-Vietnamized” and so “Americanized”: a process which would be painfully put into reverse six years later, after a terrible price had been paid, as the “Vietnamization or “re-vietnamization” of the war was begun...
...this scorn was to become a mark of his reporting...
...Devious, Yes...
...What Diein Wanted Meanwhile, on April 12, The Washington Post had carried a report from Saigon by Warren Unna which mentioned that Ngo Dinh Diem had publicly expressed the need to “include an additional 20,000 to 30,000 in forces within the year,” and went on: “He was not giving away any military secrets, because apparently the U. S. had already agreed to equip 20,000 additional men...
...On November 4 E. W. Kenworthy reported from Washington: “Officials said it was correct to infer...
...Vietnam’s borders are wide open to sanctuaries which cannot be sealed off, not only the border with North Vietnam, but also the unpoliced Laos and Cambodian frontiers...
...This is the first document in the Pentagon Papers which explicitly states that the “modest program’’ envisaged in the original “Counterinsurgency Plan” which President Kennedy had inherited from the Eisenhower Administration was to be used as the basis for a change, not merely in the degree but in the character of the American effort to defend South Vietnam...
...Equally important would be the psychological victory over the communists’ real enemy, the Americans, in an area where the Americans have staked out a line...
...On the evening of September 29, 1961, Ngo Dinh Diem, in a meeting with Frederick Nolting, United States Ambassador in Saigon, and Admiral Harry Felt, the commander-in-chief of United States forces in the Pacific, made the “rather large and unexpected request” for “a bilateral defense treaty with the United States...
...A mood was being created in which the actions against Diem could be taken...
...threat elsewhere in Southest Asia...
...It can do no good, as we seek first to identify and then to explain and finally to learn from the error, to imagine that we should look only to the actions of the politicians and their advisers...
...Whether or not this request provided the impetus which the compilers of the Pentagon Papers attribute to itthere seems to be at least equal evidence that the deteriorating situation in South Vietnam, which was being fully reported by Robert Trumbull in the Times, provided impetus enough-the next six weeks were to be occupied by an exhaustive review of American policy, including the muchpublicized mission of General Maxwell Taylor to Saigon, and culminating in the decisions which Kennedy made sometime in the two weeks before November 22, 1961, when National Security Action Memorandum No...
...Through its pages, informed public opinion could also know, could also understand, and could support it or not...
...The Americans, traditionally impatient, are instinctively attempting to gain a greater behind-thescenes role...
...He connamese discloses that President Kennedy knew and approved of plans for the military coup d’etat that overthrew President Ngo Dinh Diem...
...Here a real shooting war is going forward between communist guerrillas and defenders of freedom...
...He concluded : “The situation from there [in Saigonl is a mess, recommending silence...
...His reports before he left remained as penetrating and fierce as evcr...
...It does not include, the source added, the use of United States ground combat units...
...February 14: An editorial which said that “there should...
...The issue remains in doubt because the Vietnamese President seems incapable of winning the loyalty of his people...
...During the spring and early summer, Halberstam continued to report the doubts of American military officers about individual operations and about the capability of the South Vietnamese forces, but he remained firm in his conviction that the war must be fought and won...
...This was, it should be added, a cover story...
...February 12: A report from Jack Raymond that officials in Washington “feel that there is a mounting danger that more United States servicemen will be killed in what are now openly described as United States military operations...
...That the overthrow of Diem would mean, as it also reflected, the “Americanization” of the war was made clear in an editorial in The New York Times on September 6: “The lessons of the present crisis are plain...
...How we fight that kind of problem which is going to be with us all through this decade seems to me to be one of the greatest problems now before the United States...
...I need only add that a necessarily rapid and selective examination of the files of The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times has persuaded me that very little would be gained by assembling more corroborative evidence from their pages...
...This was a direct reference to the only important new decision which JFK had authorized in the Counterinsurgency Plan...
...Indeed, two days later, the Times looked again at the details which were “slowly emerging from reticent Administration sources about the expanded American participation in South Vietnam,” and proclaimed in an editorial: “These new arrangements...
...Americans have given their solemn word that they will stay to win here: if they fail, the word will be out throughout this region that Americans are paper tigers, and no little country will want-to be on the wrong side of China...
...During the flurry of activity, no one doubted that important decisions were in the making...
...The following day, an editorial in The Washington Post declared: “There is reason to think that South Vietnam is the real target of the southward push by the Communists . . . . The United States has a major interest in the defense of Vietnam, not only because of the vast amounts of economic and military aid (which only recently has been turned to the all-important guerrilla training) but also because American prestige is very much involved in the effort to protect the Vietnamese people from communist absorption...
...If it turns out they are not enough, do they imply an obligation to do still more, to become completely committed...
...The United States, in short, has passed the point of no return-short of victory-in South Vietnam...
...Tad Szulc continued: “The prevailing view here remained that President Diem’s rule might still be saved if he and the army joined to oust Mr...
...On September 1, the day before Kennedy first spoke, Tad Szulc wrote of “this delicate undertaking-in which the pragmatic American version of Florentine intrigue is pitted against the oriental mandarins of the Saigon regime...
...It was this general authorization of American involvement in covert warfare which was important...
...Let us see...
...Going in with Both Eyes Open In an unsigned report from Saigon, which appeared on the front page on November 9, the Times said: “The United States Air Force has begun a huge supply and training program here to strengthen South Vietnam’s defenses against intensified communist guerrilla operations...
...When fast action is needed, it is the United States air power that does the job...
...Five days later, he summarized his conclusions: “Like it or not, the future of Southeast Asia almost certainly depends upon beleaguered South Vietnam...
...The New York Times continued in its militant mood...
...It was soon to learn, from its own correspondent in Saigon, how extensive...
...If this is impossible, it is suggested the next step may be a decision by the United States to end its association with the regime and place in the army all hope for stability in the country...
...This clear statement, typical of many others at the time, is a vital piece of evidence, because it was at just this moment that John Kennedy was personally insisting that his administration should give its urgent attention to the development of counterinsurgency forces...
...Eleven years later, in its summary of the Pentagon Papers, The New York Times said of these early decisions: “President Kennedy made his first fresh commitment to Vietnam secretly...
...His achievements are impressive...
...In a television address on July 25, the President warned the American people of the dangers of the situation in Berlin, linking it to the “challenge in Southeast Asia, where the borders are less guarded, the enemy harder to find, and the dangers of communism less apparent to those who have so little...
...Vietnamese in turn are wary of Americans playing too great a role and of giving them too much power...
...The following day it published a “news analysis” by Wallace Carroll, the substance of which was summarized in the headline: “Kennedy Turns to Power...
...In the April 23 Newsweek its tenacious correspondent, Francois Sully, said that the deaths of two more American soldiers “underlined for every American the reality of United States involvement in the Vietnam war...
...On April 28, at a dinner in Chicago of the Democratic Party of Cook County, he repeated these figures, and added: “Now our great responsibility isto be the chief defender of freedom, in this time of maximum danger...
...In its editorials at the time, in the columns of its commentators, even in some of its reporting, it was abreast of John Kennedy as he made his decisions, and even ahead of him now and then, and in this it represented the press in general...
...Very few people-a George Ball within the government, an I. F. Stone outside it-foresaw the consequences of the early American involvement in the war...
...But I’m afraid dinner may be a little noisy.’ ” On April 14, Alsop again wrote from Ben Tre, saying that his visit to “the young colonel” had been “pretty excitingand decidedly pleasing, too, since the good guys have been coming out on top for once...
...There are a good many which I think can most usefully wait until we have had consultations with the government - which will be one of the matters Vice President Johnson will deal with...
...Throughout the period when the prestige and the arms and the men of the United States were committed to the war in Vietnam, some “vigorous and properly inquiring” reporters in the field and some “vigorous and properly inquiring” commentators at home told what was happening as it happened...
...President, are American troops in combat in Vietnam...
...and the clear statement by James Reston that “the United States is now involved in an undeclared war in South Vietnam...
...As he sought to justify the commitment of American troops, Kennedy increasingly linked the war in Vietnam to the idea that the United States was engaged in a global war against communism...
...His Hopes of Arousing World Opinion Give Way to Need for Physical Might...
...On October 3, 1961, The New York Times carried a UP1 report of a statement by State Department spokesman Joseph Reap saying that the United States was “taking urgent measures to help South Vietnam combat an increase in communist guerrilla activity...
...it can only cause more if the legend is allowed to persist that an innocent people and an innocent press (think of that...
...Inside, an editorial declared: “General Taylor’s expert appraisal should be of great usefulness in reaching the fateful decisions that are looming if communist aggression in Southeast Asia is to be stopped...
...On August 3 1, 1963, Halberstam again reported: “The United States appears to be moving deliberately toward a confrontation with the Ngo family government...
...The Administration is right in deciding against American combat forces at the present time, but if the situation becomes increasingly critical, a new and even more difficult appraisal will have to be made...
...and three days later he pressed home his reading of the military situation in a report under the headline: “Reds Still Win in South Vietnam...
...A curious position in light of the Times’ previous editorials...
...The nature of the American error in Vietnam, as we begin to try to understand it, will prove to be of great complexity...
...With the decisions of 1961 the President had made his major commitment...
...Since the publication of what are called the “Pentagon Papers,” his statement has been so reinforced in the public mind that it now has the life of a myth...
...On October 12, reporting the decision to send General Maxwell Taylor to South Vietnam, Jack Raymond wrote: “The Administration is understood to be ’seriously considering two types of additional military assistance . . . . One of the plans calls for sending combat units to strategic points in Southeast Asia...
...This can only be interpreted as a blanket approval for the decisions which were in fact taken...
...In its October 11 issue reporting a visit which Robert McNamara had just made to South Vietnam, Life said: “Our policy henceforth will be to interfere in Vietnamese politics...
...to which Kennedy replied: “I think the American people understand and fully support the struggle...
...A week later, he said that “the United States has assumed moral responsibility for a harsh and drastic military measure...
...On the same day, The New York Times pronounced in an editorial: “The United States’ problem is how Vietto encourage Vietnamese forces interested in constitutional change, without using the sanction of withdrawing aid for the struggle against the Vietconga sanction that would risk the loss of that struggle...
...From that moment, Homer Bigart was to report what he saw, as he saw it...
...and the reason for this failure was that they, like almost everyone else, were fundamentally agreed that the line against the “communist bloc” had to be held in Southeast Asia...
...This was a confession that the Administration’s policy, and the paper’s own editorial stance, were bankrupt...
...In his March 23, 1961, press conference, John Kennedy bid the American people to confront the dangers in Laos, but he made only two passing references to South Vietnam...
...Three weeks after the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, in which he had collaborated, John Kennedy was himself assassinated...
...The young colonel turned to his large table full of guests with a brilliant, mildly teasing smile...
...This was an accurate report as the two weeks of decision began...
...In his State of the Union message on January 11, 1962, Kennedy described the communist subversion in South Vietnam, “where the foe is increasing his tactics of terror-where our own efforts have been stepped up,” as “a war of attempted subjugationand it will be resisted...
...He wriggled: “The problem of troops is a matter-the matter of what we are going to do to assist Vietnam obtain its independence is a matter still under consideration...
...Kennedy gave the one-syllable reply: “No...
...The size of what was being contemplated was widely understood and its meaning seemed to be emphasized when he reported on October 30, that an American officer, on a “training patrol,” had been shot in the leg, “the first reported casualty in actual military operations in South Vietnam...
...Its use has certainly killed innocent peopleas other weapons have done...
...We will find no evidence that the people were not “well-informed.’’ At his April 21 conference, John Kennedy emphasized the guerrilla activity of the communists in South Vietnam at the same time he underlined the legitimacy of the government there: “Now, there’s been an election in [South] Vietnam, in which 75 per cent of the people, or 80 per cent, endorse the government...
...The echo promptly came from The New York Times in an editorial on October 6: “The communist insurrection in Vietnam, directed and regularly reinforced from the North, assumes ever-increasing proportions, and may soon reach the stage of large-scale warfare...
...Quotations such as this are worth recalling because, both in their apprehensions and in their prescriptions, they accurately reflect the mood of informed public opinion at the time...
...The tendency is depressing to the Americans...
...Yet few persons would question their necessity...
...Intentionally or not, the direction in which such reporting pointed was to the “deVietnamization” and “Americanization” of the war...
...On December 20, 1961, Jack Raymond had already reported in The New York Times that “United States military men were understood today to be operating in battle areas with South Vietnamese forces that are fighting communist guerrillas...
...The authors of the narrative summary in the Pentagon Papers say: “Although it is hard to recall that context today, Vietnam in 196 1 was a peripheral crisis...
...Two weeks later, the Times published a report from E. W. Kenworthy under the extended headline, “U...
...It concluded fiercely: “The present situation is one that brooks no further stalling...
...This is a question Washington will face when the effects of the present program become evident a few months from now...
...In an editorial on October 27 it said that, if the International Control Commission “now declines to identify what is occurring in South Vietnam as the aggression that it is, [it] should also absolve both Saigon and Washington from any further obligations to observe the Geneva Accords-including the limitations they impose on domestic and foreign military forces and armaments in the South...
...One may end the story there...
...On the same day, a New York Times editorial said that “the new moves are sufficient to represent a deep United States involvement in saving South Vietnam...
...No one doubted it...
...If it failed 10 years ago to understand the significance of what its own reporters were saying, it seems unjust for it to turn around now and say it was deceived by the politicians...
...The cost is large, but the cost of Southeast Asia coming under the domination of Russia and Communist Chiria would be still larger...
...acknowledged that the dispatch of On May 2, Carroll Kilpatrick re- troops to South Vietnam was being ported in The Washington Post that considered, and the following day The “President Kennedy yesterday held New Yorlc Times declared in an his fourth National Security Council editorial: “An important defensive meeting in 10 days on the deterio- role for the United States in Southeast rating situation in Laos...
...Once again, one must avoid the trap of looking too closely at the details of this decision, and then demonstrating that all these details were not known or published...
...What was being concealed...
...We believe he is correct in this attitude...
...This reporting was of a high standard, and insofar as the newspapers in the United States published the reports of the AP and UP1 correspondents in South Vietnam, their readers had the opportunity to be as accurately, if not as fully, informed as the readers of The New York Times, who were served in succession by Robert Trumbull, Homer Bigart, and David Halberstam...
...The Administration’s “general interest in doing something about counterinsurgency warfare ,” says the narrative summary in the Pentagon Papers, had provided an impetus to the decisions taken in late April and early May...
...a straightforward acknowledgment that American combat troops might at some time have to be overtly introduced...
...the press and the Administration were joined in preparing it...
...February 16: A report from Homer Bigart that “the United States officials lifted a ban on propaganda flights by American air crews imposed after the death of eight Americans Sunday in the crash of a leaflet plane...
...This was exactly the attitude which lay at the core of the presidential program as it was authorized later in the day by John Kennedy...
...If one reads only the Pentagon Papers, it seems to have been a secret decision...
...The importance of the Newsweek report and the New Republic editorial is that they make it clear that everyone had all the information necessary to judge the size and the meaning of what was being planned...
...he gave more than one hint that he was aware of the size and the length of the involvement which was being undertaken...
...An informed source said that several hundred United States pilots and other personnel would come to South Vietnam on a ‘training mission’ in the stepped-up aid program...
...If there is considerable division within the United States mission over the success of current programs,” he wrote on May 5, “there is little division over the immense extent to which the United States has committed its international prestige...
...President, there are reports that you would be prepared to send American forces into South Vietnam if this became necessary to prevent communist domination of that country...
...Too many Americans, especially American journalists, who now perceive that their judgment Henry Fairlie is an English journalist and author of The Kennedy Promise...
...If it is, Washington will have to use its influence to bring about a change in regime...
...This report appeared even before the decision had been formalized...
...Walter] Rostow again, ‘those against whom aggression is directed will be driven inevitably to seek out and engage the ultimate source of the aggression they confront.’ A time of decision on this alternative may come for both the United States and South Vietnam as part of the new anti-guerrilla campaign described by Mr...
...Free world forces...
...On August 25, 1963, Hedrick Smith reported from Washington: “Officials here are moving to the conclusion that Ngo Dinh Nhu...
...Putting the Squeeze on Diem One day after forces of the government of South Vietnam had raided a Buddhist pagoda and arrested 100 Buddhist monks, The New York Times carried the front page headline: “Two Versions of the Crisis in Vietnam...
...February 27: A report from Tad Szulc in Washington that “the view here is that the guerrilla war in the swamps, rice paddies, and mountains of Vietnam may be as long as 10 years,” and one must notice this repeated emphasis, communicated by the Administration, that the ‘war might last a decade...
...In the course of his report, Kenworthy said that “there is one card the Communists do not hold-time,’’ and he casually men- tioned that according to The New York Times, “no publicity” had been given to the fact that the United States recently sent to South Vietnam 100 men from its Special Forces Organization in Okinawa...
...On April 16, he reported that “another indication of the deepening American involvement in’ South Vietnam’s campaign against the communist guerrillas was the arrival in Saigon today of a Pentagon study group that included Allen W. Dulles...
...There was good reason not to believe the President, since the nature of the American involvement was being clearly reported...
...There was a sharp rattle of gunfire, not too far away...
...Above all, it should be...
...and, in its issue of the same date, Time reported that, “since the United States role, technically, is to instruct government- pilots, Vietnamese trainees accompany the American pilots on bombing and strafing missions against the Communist Vietcong...
...It would require the authorization of Congress...
...Specifically, it said of the dispatch of the additional military advisers and the Special Forces: “No publicity was given to either move...
...During the next 15 months, the decision as to whether to send American combat troops to Vietnam“combat troops,” that is, as John Kennedy defined them-was to be deferred by the fiction that it was only the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem that was impeding the already massive American effort...
...The Communists control about 80 per cent of the area’s villages...
...It is a struggle this country cannot shirk,” words which could hardly be clearer or stronger...
...and it was equally clear to informed opinion that the country where that covert warfare would be practiced, where the counter-guerrilla forces of the United States would be engaged, was South Vietnam...
...Why is South Vietnam so important in the struggle between communism and the free world...
...Neither in its reports nor in its editorials is there the slightest evidence that, when John Kennedy made his truly major commitment of the prestige and the arm and the men of the United States to the defense of South Vietnam in the fall of 196 1, The New Yorlc Times did not know what was being determined, did not understand it, and did not support it...
...Guerrillas Gain Despite Aid to Loyal Forces by U. S.” The importance of Bigart’s reporting was that he was alerting informed public opinion to the reality of the situation...
...In short, the Post was inciting the Administration to act more secretly, more often...
...remembered that, apart from Time and Newsweek, the main source of regular information about the war in South Vietnam which reached the American people was the reporting of United Press International and the Associated Press...
...Halberstam and the others formed close relationships with some of the American military officers in the field...
...There thus remains an urgent need to strengthen Vietnam’s political institutions as well as to continue the kind of military assistance and training that will make guerrilla warfare unprofitable for the Communists...
...More important than the actual decisions were: a conscious and explicit hardening of the American commitment...
...However, they do not act in a vacuum, and they rarely act without a wide measure of popular support, whether spontaneous or manufactured...
...There is nothing simple about it at all...
...The United States is said to be determined to put in what it takes to win...
...The other plan calls for a sizable special mission, such as the one that was sent to Greece in 1948...
...He went on to say that the United States agreed with a statement which Ngo Dinh Diem had made the day before to the effect that “it is no longer a guerrilla war we have to face, but a real war...
...Two days later, the Times carried a report from Jack Raymond, its correspondent at the Department of Defense, saying: “A basic decision to send troops, including combat units as well as training personnel, has been made...
...Perhaps, above all, he will have to take into account the state of public opinion, including informed opinion, at the time: for at no moment, as the commitment was made, were the American press or the American people in the dark about what was being done...
...One or two Communist companies are moving toward the town,’ he said...
...An Associated Press report carried by The New York Times on May 12 gave an account of a speech which Vice President Lyndon Johnson had made in Saigon, and added: “Among measures which Johnson did not announce, but which were reported by informed sources, is an expansion of the United States Military Advisory Group to about 1,650 men...
...Only the United States has the power and the determination...
...There Asia must...
...still have a chance in South Vietnam, and every effort should be made to save the situation...
...As he again prepared the public mind for them, Kennedy strengthened the tone of his language...
...But Rusk did lems discussed at yesterday’s National promise help ‘across the specSecurity Council meeting...
...few questioned its desirability . The Press Discovers the War On March 9, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy wrote formally to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and CIA Director Allen Dulles: “In view of the President’s instruction that we make every possible effort to launch guerrilla operations in Vietminh territory at the earliest possible time, would you report to the President as soon as feasible your views on what actions might be undertaken in the near future and what steps might be taken to expand operations in the longer future...
...February 23: An editorial which said: “As the Kennedy Administration is now taking care to let Americans know”-a significant admission-“the United States is involved in a struggle that will be long and brutal...
...the United States is ready to initiate action that might lead to the overthrow of the government...
...and Bigart was not alone...
...The second was significant only because, the President still refused to admit that American troops were in combat...
...Even within Southeast Asia, it received far less of the Administration’s and the world’s attention than did Laos...
...This clear declaration of the American national interest in winning the an isolated episode, but proof of a pattern in which its strong qualitiesanticommunism, stubbornness, resilienceare no longer enough...
...Bigart and Halberstam Until late in 1963, The New Yorlc Times was the only daily newspaper in the United States to have a resident full-time correspondent in South Vietnam...
...It concluded that “the battle is not yet lost in South Vietnam...
...On May 5, at another press conference, he received the first direct question: “Mr...
...They all joined in their diagnosis of the situation and in their prescription of the remedy until Diem was at last overthrown and assassinated...
...In its May 22 issue, The New Republic editorialized: “The decision on May 14 to send in nearly 100 of the specialists in irregular warfare who have been trained at Fort Bragg may prove a most fateful one...
...Roger] Hilsman...
...Only one week before, on March 16, The New Yovlc Times had carried an article from Robert Trumbull, its correspondent in Saigon, in which he wrote: “South Vietnam is embroiled in a war with communists in which the casualties are far greater than in the more publicized hostilities in Laos...
...and the sentence suggests that the writer was confusing the additional military advisers with the members of the Special Forces...
...If the United States cannot or will not save South Vietnam from the communist assault, no Asian nation can ever again feel safe in putting its faith in the United States...
...That was, according to the accounts in the Pentagon Papers, the meeting at which John Kennedy made the first of his decisions, based on the original report from an interagency task force headed by Roswell Gilpatric of the Defense Department and the Associated Press account of the same meeting said that “the problem / of providing additional SUP- can troops to South Vietnam if that port for Ngo...
...He also said: ”We will remain here until we win,” a remark which was to haunt him...
...In its issue of the same date, The New Republic carried an article by Denis Warner, “Diem’s One-Family War,” which said: “The flashes of lightning in the Laotian sky ought not to distract our attention from the thunderclouds gathering in South Vietnam, where American policies are to be heavily tested in the lifetime of the new administration...
...This was now to become one of the persistent themes in his reporting and in that of other correspondents...
...In a sense, it was an appropriate beginning...
...On October 21, 1962, shortly after his arrival in South Vietnam, David Halberstam had written, “Despite all the American aid, this is not yet an American war...
...Americans may now resume scattering President Ngo Dinh Diem’s Chinese New Year message...
...The reference to “the decision of May 14” was clearly a reference to something which the author assumed the readers had already learned of elsewhere...
...The New Republic commented that “if these Americans are under fire, they will presumably have the freedom to shoot back...
...The truth is more interesting than lies,” Randolph Churchill was fond of saying when he talked of his profession as a journalist...
...Mr...
...The Making of an American War If there was a conspiracy afoot, the conspiracy was hardly secret...
...it was abetting the Administration in the very secrecy for which, with the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the Post would later blame the Kennedy Administration...
...Referring to the dispatch of the American troops, Newsweek added: “Undoubtedly they would come under fire...
...brought about this week’s crackdown on Buddhists...
...On January 1, 1962, on his way out of South Vietnam, Robert Tmmbull reported from Hong Kong that “numerous techniques hitherto unseen in South Vietnam are being inaugurated or are about to be used,” and he mentioned defoliation and the movement of South Vietnamese troops into combat by American helicopters flown by American pilots...
...Believable, No...
...In its March 31 issue Time spoke of Ho Chi Minh’s “blood feud against South Vietnam,” which was then generally acceptable vocabulary...
...On November 7, an editorial in The New York Times said that “following the return of his special emissary, General Maxwell Taylor, President Kennedy is reported to be leaning against the dispatch of regular United States combat units to South Vietnam...
...Time is running perilously short,’’ commented Newsweek in its September 2 issue...
...Lies are simple...
...One must point out that this editorial was based on public utterances of two senior members of the government...
...has already shifted to the On May 4, when the “Program of beleaguered South Vietnam regime of Action” on which Kennedy would President Ngo Dinh Diem...
...Yet, when this same newspaper published its version of the Pentagon Papers, Hedrick Smith quoted from the narrative summary: “Our complicity in this overthrow heightened our responsibilities and our commitment...
...Fateful Decisions How much of this was known at the time...
...We will look first at the manner in which he personally prepared the public mind to accept them, and then at the manner in which the press communicated them to the American people...
...John Kennedy sought to obscure, even to deceive...
...Devious he may have been...
...This concluding sentence is an exact summary of the effort which was being made at the time by the Kennedy Administration to use the offer of increased assistance to South Vietnam in order to persuade Ngo Dinh Diem to carry out the political reforms which the American advisers in his country, military as well as civilian, believed to be necessary...
...boring country...
...If one reads the press at the time, one is left in no doubt that the actions of the Administration were widely known and generally supported...
...Moreover, he had fixed on it in a routine report of an actual meeting of the National Security Council...
...In the past, all South Vietnamese military pilots were sent to the United States and the training took 18 months...
...And the third, which came at an April 11 press conference, was noteworthy because he at last mentioned the fact that American soldiers had been killed...
...In itself, this is a major accomplishment...
...and it always is...
...New Republic as Prophet As for the dispatch of the additional military advisers and the members of the Special Forces which the Times later said was given no publicity, Newsweek had already said in its May 15 issue: “President Kennedy may send American combat troops to bolster South Vietnam defenses against outright Communist attack”, and then a week later it reported, accurately if incompletely, the actual decision which had been taken...
...56-in which he said the President had decided that “it is important that we anticipate now our possible future requirements in the field of unconventional warfare and paramilitary operations...
...However, it was said that he probably would recommend the dispatch of more Army specialists in anti-guerrilla warfare t o . . . train Vietnamese troops, communications and transport specialists and army engineers to help the Vietnam government to combat its flood problems...
...and, indeed, it can still be won by the proper use of all resources, American and Vietnamese...
...It is a fair commentary that some American intelligence activities and covert operations classified under that title have been inept and too much in the public eye...
...But what is worth remembering is that a journal such as The New Republic does not have day-to-day political reporters...
...1 1 1, which formally continued them, was signed and distributed...
...This figure came straight out of an April 28 task force report...
...torial regime, . . . Should the situation deteriorate further, Washington may face the alternatives of ditching Ngo Dinh Diem for a military junta or sending combat troops to bolster the regime...
...What is needed, as the tragedy is at last played out, is not moral exhortation but political exegesis, not accusations of turpitude but explorations of error...
...The object of this study has been to tell, not the story of the events, but the story of the public knowledge of them...
...In this passage, at the very beginning of the flurry of activity which was to yield the President’s decisions, a distinguished political reporter had fixed on the central point in those decisions: the Administration’s willingness to resort to covert warfare...
...One can surely raise the question of how far it is possible to go without destroying many aspects of democracy...
...From its correspondents at home and abroad, The New Yorlc Times was receiving and publishing the clearest evidence of what was being done...
...The real reporting of the war had started, In its issue of six days earlier, Time had said, in an account of an engagement near Duc Hoa, that “not only South Vietnamese soldiers were being employed” and gave the name of an American soldier who had been killed in the action...
...The stakes are sizable,” he wrote on March 11...
...and this was exactly the justification in the presidential program itself...
...In committing itself to the defense of South Vietnam, the United States has also committed itself to the support of President Diem...
...But The New York Times had been disclosing this fact at the time, and it was clear from the reports of both Halberstam in Saigon (who referred to “highly informed diplomatic sources”) and Tad Szulc in Washington, to say nothing of those of Hedrick Smith, that they were receiving their information from the Administration, its officials, and its advisers, which was accused, seven and a half years later, of having acted in secret...
...U. S. base his decisions was all but com- officials believe that the chance for an pleted, The Washington Post carried a effective stand against the Commureport by Marguerite Higgins of the nists in South Vietnam is far better New York Herald Tribune: “The than that in Laos...
...This account also appeared on the front page...
...be no concealment of the possibility that what we are doing in South Vietnam may escalate into a major conflict...
...The following day Chalmers ‘This was in fact the advice which the Roberts, also in the Post, was even Joint Chiefs of Staff, of which Lyman more explicit: “The United States will Lemnitzer was then the Chairman, give what amounts to across-the-board gave on May 10 in their formal help to South Vietnam, now that the recommendation to Roswell Gilfocus of communist attack appears to patric...
...This week,” Halberstam reported on July 7, “American officials were talking about South Vietnam’s government with the same cool tone that reporters formerly used...
...the resettlement, by force if necessary, of thousands of Vietnamese families,” and added: “No one should expect this operation to pass without charges of American complicity in allegedly evil acts...
...From the earliest days of 1961, many people within the Administration and without it were awake to the fact that the threat to South Vietnam presented a peculiarly difficult problem...
...He had only to be removed, and all would be well...
...A March 1 editorial in The New York Times said that the “intensified struggle” in South Vietnam was “a situation from which the United States cannot now withdraw...
...S. Considering Sending Troops to Help Vietnam,” and it accurately reflected some of the most significant proposals which were at that moment being reviewed, and which Kennedy later authorized...
...On June 28, McGeorge Bundy sent a memorandum to Robert McNamara -National Security Action Memorandum No...
...he had done his home work...
...that does not mean that he was believed...
...Under the headline, “Kennedy Cuts Weekend for Crisis Talks with Rusk,” E. W. Kenworthy reported in The New Yorlc Times May I , that “in the two-hour meeting of the expanded National Security Council held at the White House yesterday [April 291 informed sources said, the situation in South Vietnam was considered at length along with the more immediate crisis in Laos...
...Most observers here believe that Americans will give a signal to key elements of the militarv...
...but he did not succeed...
...Rather, it was that even those newspapers and news magazines which were publishing the facts from their correspondents in the field did not try to make coherent sense of them...
...The date was mistaken, but that hardly matters...
...The same day, The New York Times Magazine carried an article by Leo Cherne in which he said: “Among the hot spots in the Cold War today, one of the hottest is South Vietnam...
...Most of us-inside the United States or beyond it-accepted the fundamental political assumptions on which the first commitment was made...
...The escape from this bankruptcy was to be found in the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem, and it was not only The New Yorlc Times that was pointing in that direction...
...The ineffable Joseph Alsop, reporting from Ben Tre in the Kien Hoa Province of South Vietnam on April 1 1, was ecstatic at the discovery of another war to report: “The blackpajamaed Vietnamese ranger lieutenant saluted smartly after making his whispered report, and ran out into the night...
...In an April 27 editorial on South Vietnam, it said: “One pertinent response to the Cuban affair is the examination of para-military capabilities...
...The United States’ new military approach, including its own increased commitment, would involve dispatching to key points highly mobile regimental combat teams, equipped with helicopters and other support aircraft...
...From Berlin to Bien Hoa During the summer of 1962 John Kennedy spoke openly of the presence of American forces, still refusing to admit that they were in combat, even though they were being killed...
...And he quoted these words without any acknowledgment that, at the time, The New York Times had been advocating just such an expansion of the American commitment, so that “their war” would become “our war...
...and, once there are even a few well-publicized casualties, the prestige of the United States will have been for all practical purposes committed irrevocably to the Diem cause...
...This was a pertinent remark, for if there was any sense in which it can be said that the American people at this time were “not well-informed,” it was not that they lacked the facts...
...This report appeared on the front page of the newspaper, under the headline, “U...
...failed at the time, are today anxious to exonerate themselves by pretending that the necessary information was not available...
...There it all is-the story of the war as it was in fact to develop-written at the beginning, written from public knowledge, and written with a political judgment which is impressive...
...visions of ultimate victory are obscured by the image of a secretive, suspicious, dicta...
...The last two of these, in particular, must be regarded among “the best and the brightest” of their profession...
...My purpose is to demonstrate that there is no warrant for either the myth or the original statement...
...The press had woken up to the fact that a real war was being fought in South Vietnam...
...concern...
...Perhaps even more emphatically, this was the attitude of The New York Times itself on the following day, when it declared in an editorial: “It has to be recognized that the United States is not likely to be able to diminish its role in Southeast Asia in the near future...
...The meeting of the National Security Council which formally considered the recommendations was held on November 15, and its proceedings were accurately and adequately reported two days later by E. W. Kenworthy...
...The Ngo regime is more capable and determined than the government of Laos and commands tougher, betterled, and better-trained forces...
...people understood the dangers to Southeast Asia which exist there...
...istration officials said the situation in Kennedy already has increased miliSouth Vietnam has been SO overshad- tary, assistance and authorized other owed by the civil war in Laos that few unspecified measures of help...
...It was altogether clear from such reports in which direction the American It was at this point, in his May 5 , people were being pointed by the 196 1, press conference, that Kennedy Administration...
...This was, and it was perceived at the time to be, a most significant emphasis, giving the imprecise and ill-understood commitment to the defense of South Vietnam the same character as the precise and wellunderstood commitment to the defense of West Berlin...
...On January 8, The New York Times published the first report from Homer Bigart: “Communist terrorists have killed two Americans and captured a third in the Saigon area in the last three weeks...
...The combat teams would be deployed to strengthen these instructors [the military advisers], but they would be prepared to engage in direct combat operations as well...
...During the next two years, the actions of his Administration merely built on it: gradually introducing more and more arms, more aircraft, and more men into South Vietnam, moving the men deeper and deeper into embattled areas and combat operations, struggling more and more fiercely to wrest the control of the military operations from the government of Ngo Dinh Diem and his commanders, until at last it connived in Diem’s overthrow by a military coup...
...On the same day David Halberstam reported from Saigon that “key Vietnamese have long waited for Washington to give an indication that it had had enough of the Nhu family...
...The consistent brilliance of the reporting of Homer Bigart preceded the erratic brilliance of that of David Halberstam...
...On April 23, just after the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs, The Washington Post carried this report by Chalmers Roberts: “At yesterday morning’s session of the National Security Council, a sadder but wiser President was discussing yet another facet of the problem: what to do about the Communist Vietminh infiltration into South Vietnam...
...There is nothing simple about Vietnam...
...A Washington Post editorial proclaimed on April 1 1 : “South Vietnam is clearly the major target of the Communist Vietminh in North Vietnam...
...February 19: An unsigned report from Saigon that at a press conference given by Robert Kennedy there, a British correspondent had asked, “American boys are dying out here...
...How could the meaning of what had been decided be made clearer...
...In a further report three weeks later, he kept up the pressure: “Americans are running into basic political problems at the Presidential Palace...
...the truth is complex...
...On August 4, Time noticed the same preparations and supported them: “The United States has made a major decision: South Vietnam must be defended at all costs...
...A Decade of War Throughout February, 1962, Kennedy refused to publicly admit that American troops were in combat, but his answers and statements became increasingly, hard to believe, not least because, during this single month, The New York Times carried the following reports and comments: .February 5: An Associated Press report from Hung My that one American helicopter had been shot down and a second had been hit while taking part in an operation...
...On January 11, the day after Max Frankel had reported from Washington that the Administration “foresees a long and bitter struggle lasting many years, without dramatic victory or resolution,” Homer Bigart wrote that “the crucially important area of the upper Mekong delta, which controls the southern approaches to Saigon, has been heavily infiltrated by communist guerrillas...
...The story of the events-of the manner in which the United States became embroiled in a war whose magnitude was far beyond that which anyone intended or contemplatedwill require from the historian the most patient research, the most disinterested interpretation of the facts, the most severe self-discipline in refusing the advantages of hindsight...
...Even in his own words, the direction was clear enough to make a political judgment...
...It had now become one...
...When that is done, they will drop a New Year message on President Kennedy...
...South Vietnam, he continued, had “fallen into the status of a mendicant,” but his conclusions represented the prevailing orthodoxy: “United States aid has succeeded over more than six years in keeping South Vietnam out of Communist hands...
...He then added: “It would not be limited to rear-area training...
...and the words, banal as they were, should be remembered...
...Not much was happening in have shifted from Laos to that neigh- the dark...
...There was always sufficient knowledge within the public realm on which to form a political judgment, and that is all the information which a democracy requires...
...We are prepared to meet our obligations...
...But if Chalmers Roberts had doubts, The Washington Post itself did not...
...As we pursue the story, therefore, into the period in which the action in South Vietnam became at least as important as the decisions in Washington, I will call into evidence primarily the reporting and editorials of The New Yorlc Times, but will reinforce these, now and then, with evidence of able reporting in Time and Newsweek and of the editorial comment and political reviews which throughout this period remained consistently alert to the meaning of what was being done...
...Kennedy’s first major decisions on the war in Vietnam were made in late April and early May of 1961...
...On March 25 he reported that the United States was “quietly supporting an irregular army called the Sea Swallows, led by an expatriate Chinese Roman Catholic priest,” and went on: “Legally, United States military aid cannot be given to an irregular force...
...United States-Vietnam relations have entered a new, delicate, and extremely tense state, in the view of qualified observers here,” David Halberstam reported as early as February 1 5, 1963...
...Each clay he addressed himself to the possibility that its outcome would be a decision, “positive or negative,” as to whether American combat troops, “in either a combat or a support capacity,” would be sent to South Vietnam...
...Again and again, in his routine reports, whether he was telling of an individual action or an extensive operation, he emphasized the covert character of the American involvement...
...Kennedy feels the American people does not yet realize the kind of undeclared war we are in today, but maybe the public understands more than he thinks...
...If it is to be successfully met, military contingents from the SEATO countries, including the United States, may well be required...
...and he said that it could not be refused by the American people...
...Commanders of South Vietnam’s military forces in the Mekong River delta have developed a tendency to avoid contact with large forces of Vietcong guerrillas,” Halberstam reported on March 1. “In addition, United States military officials feel that escape routes for the Communists have been left open so that military operations could be avoided...
...Fighting in Vietnam and Laos Shows Need for Countering the Strategy Set by Mao for ‘Liberation’ Conflicts...
...But one cannot read these three successive statements, made in the course of two weeks, without acknowledging that the President was publicly pointing out the direction in which his administration was at that very moment determining to move...
...The day after the AP story, Robert Trumbull reported from Saigon in The New York Times: “Both Vietnamese officials and Americans here expect that any troops that would be brought in would be assigned to training duties...
...be envisaged for an were reports that the United States indefinite time if this area is to be was stepping up its military aid to protected from communist aggression South Vietnam and that urgent con- carried out through direct or indirect sideration was given to the communist military action...
Vol. 5 • May 1973 • No. 3
