The nationwide security situation continued to deteriorate. The NLF, impatient to see the back of the regime, intensified its campaign of terror, while Southern army morale grew shakier by the day. Because David Halberstam’s grim reports were so widely read, MACV and Washington worked ever harder to rubbish them. Secretary of state Dean Rusk personally contradicted an August 1963 dispatch that described the communists gaining ground in the Mekong delta. Harkins itemised details that he asserted were untrue. In September the general cabled Maxwell Taylor at the White House: ‘From most of the reports and articles I read, one would say Vietnam and our programs here are falling apart at the seams. Well, I just thoroughly disagree.’
Yet the record shows the young turks, Halberstam and Sheehan prominent among them, were far more correct in their assessments, both military and political, than was MACV. There were more and more such episodes as one in September, when in broad daylight the Vietcong overran a government post in the delta almost without loss, because the provincial VC had infiltrated two of its men into the garrison. They killed six defenders, seized six prisoners and thirty-five rifles, blew up bunkers and watchtowers before withdrawing. That autumn, according to Frank Scotton, ‘it was apparent that many cultured city-dwellers’ – attentistes, as those folk were known who waited upon events rather than precipitating them – ‘anticipated a change of government’. Diem’s time was almost up. It remained only to be seen whether the communists, the Buddhists or his own generals pulled the plug. And what Washington decided to do about it all.
3 KILLING TIME
The countdown to the murder of President Ngo Dinh Diem started on 23 August 1963, when a top-secret cable to the State Department from Lodge demanded to know whether Washington would support a coup. A positive reply was drafted and sent to Saigon over a weekend when Kennedy, Rusk and McNamara were out of town: its authors were Averell Harriman, Roger Hilsman and Michael Forrestal. If Diem refused to make reforms and sack his brother Nhu, they wrote in the name of the US government, ‘We are prepared to accept the obvious implication that we can no longer support Diem. You may tell appropriate military commanders we will give them direct support in any interim period of breakdown … Ambassador … should urgently examine all possible alternative leadership and make detailed plans as to how we might bring about Diem’s replacement if this should become necessary.’
On Monday morning, when Kennedy returned to the White House he was disturbed by the insouciance with which this momentous directive – for such the cable was – had been dispatched, by middle-ranking officials. He consulted with McNamara and Taylor, who equivocated: they would prefer that Diem stayed, albeit without Nhu. If the generals decided otherwise, however, the US should support an interim military government. Kennedy finally decided not to recall the weekend telegram: it would be left to Lodge to determine policy. The ambassador later claimed to have been ‘thunderstruck’. His entirely reasonable interpretation of the Washington cable was that he was now mandated to precipitate Diem’s fall.
On 2 September the US president, answering a question about Vietnam in a CBS interview with Walter Cronkite, said that the Saigon regime needed to gain more support: ‘with changes in policy and perhaps in personnel I think [the government] can win. If it doesn’t make those changes, I would think the chances of winning would not be very good.’ Kennedy appealed for more help – practical help – from America’s allies: ‘It doesn’t do us any good to say, “Well, why don’t we all just go home and leave the world to those who are our enemies.”’ He added that ‘the only people who can win are the people of Vietnam’. Some historians have interpreted such words as indicating Kennedy’s acknowledgement that Americans could not achieve what Vietnamese would not do for themselves; that he was pointing towards an exit. This seems fanciful: he had his own presidential re-election race to win, which might conceivably be lost in South-East Asia, just as Korea doomed Harry Truman in 1952.
Events now accelerated. The North Vietnamese were probing for any means of separating Diem from the Americans. To this end, Hanoi embarked on a dog-leg dalliance with Saigon, via Polish and French intermediaries, which soon became known to the Kennedy administration. The most ignoble aspect of Washington’s mounting interest in a coup was the impetus provided by fears that Diem or his brother Nhu might be contemplating a deal. Bernard Fall, who commanded a readership among decision-makers because he was known to have good contacts on both sides, reported that, in the event of a meaningful North–South dialogue, Ho Chi Minh would accept a delay to reunification – a ‘decent interval’, to use a phrase Fall did not employ, but which would become the focus of many future Indochina peace efforts. In truth, the exchanges had little chance of an outcome: Le Duan was interested only in achieving a communist Vietnam, while the Ngos laboured under the delusion that they held good cards – an imminent prospect of military victory and their own indispensability to the Americans. The mere fact of contacts between the two sides nonetheless set alarm bells ringing in Washington. The Saigon regime’s willingness to parley reflected increasing animosity towards its paymasters.
President Kennedy’s friend Charles Bartlett claimed later that the Saigon regime’s flirtation with the North was the principal reason for the decision to dispense with Diem. He quoted the president as saying, ‘Charlie, I can’t let Vietnam go to the Communists and then go and ask [American voters] to re-elect me. Somehow we’ve got to hold that territory.’ Nonetheless, Kennedy allegedly added, ‘But we’ve got no future there. [The South Vietnamese] hate us. They want us out of there. At one point they’ll kick our asses out of there.’ This reported conversation seems credible. Kennedy’s private attitude was coloured by the bad faith shown by the communists about implementing his administration’s Laos neutralisation pact; there seemed likewise no prospect of Hanoi proving an honest partner in any coalition settlement for Vietnam.
American alarm increased when France’s president Charles de Gaulle took a hand. This lofty, profoundly anti-Anglo-Saxon nationalist repeatedly urged that the US should disengage, allowing Vietnam to be neutralised. Washington believed that de Gaulle’s remarks reflected jealousy about France’s displacement from a region that had once been its property. Fredrik Logevall has written: ‘American planners would spend much time discussing the French leader’s actions and ideas, but only in terms of how best to counter them. The substance of his argument was not closely examined, then or later, partly because it was anathema to American officials, and partly because they were convinced he had ulterior motives.’
Walter Lippmann warned in his column on 3 September: ‘If there is no settlement such as General de Gaulle proposes, then a protracted and indecisive war of attrition is all that is left.’ The veteran commentator, who in those years wrote more about Indochina than any other single issue, believed that the best to which the US could aspire was a Titoist outcome, whereby a unified Vietnam became communist, but not a tool of China or the Soviets. Lippmann implicitly argued that Ho Chi Minh could not be defeated on the battlefield, and that the best alternative might be to woo him with dollars. This was implausible: there seems no more reason to believe that Le Duan, a Robespierrian ‘sea-green incorruptible’, could have been bribed into running a moderate, humane government had he been granted suzerainty over a unified Vietnam in 1963, than he did after 1975. But that does not diminish the validity of Lippmann’s thesis, that the Americans could not prevail by force of arms.
On 13 September the NSC’s Chester Cooper wrote from Saigon to his old CIA colleague John McCone saying that he thought a diplomatic rapprochement between the Diem regime and Hanoi, involving expulsion of the Americans, was on the cards. Here were gall and wormwood, which made the administration even less inclined to discourage Lodge from inciting Saigon’s generals to intervene. The ambassador had no hesitation about exploiting the authority delegated to him by the White House to instigate a change of government, though this