JFK (15 page)

Another common misconception is that the CIA acts by and for itself. This is not quite true. It is an “agency”. It carries out the orders of others, as their agent. The CIA is the opening probe, the agitator or facilitator. In many respects it operates something like a law firm. It seldom if ever makes plans. It always acts in response to some other initiative. Right behind it comes its strong and ever-present allies, the rest of the government infrastructure, along with the willing support of the entire military-industrial and financial community.

IT WAS January 8, 1954. Dwight Eisenhower had been President of the United States for one year and was presiding over a meeting of the National Security Council with twenty-seven top-echelon national security advisers in attendance. When the subject turned to U.S. objectives and courses of action with respect to Southeast Asia, the President—our foremost World War II military commander—said, as recorded at the time, “with vehemence”:

It must be added here that one of the great weaknesses in the approach to South Vietnam taken by the United States in those early days was an oversight that continues to this day. It has been the failure to recognize that the piece of real estate historically known as Cochin China but that we call South Vietnam was not, and never has been, a sovereign nation-state. It has never truly governed itself, despite the fact that Indochina has a history of thousands of years. This significant failure of perception made all attempts at “Vietnamization,” while the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to the north was held by Ho Chi Minh, little more than words. A new country was being created and being asked to fight a major war, both at the same time. That was impossible, as we learned too late.

At the time of Eisenhower’s comment, the indeterminate region of “South” Vietnam was under French military control, and the French army was at war with Ho Chi Minh and his “Vietminh” government. During that period and under those conditions, there was no way that the Vietnamese of the south, without a government, without leadership, and without an army, could have fought for their independence against the Democratic Government of Vietnam, which we ourselves had armed so well after World War II.

Eisenhower made a powerful and correct statement of policy, but he seriously overlooked these basic facts of Vietnamese history. Eisenhower wanted “to get the Vietnamese to fight” their war for their own country. He wanted to “Vietnamize” the war. President John E Kennedy made essentially the same statement nine years later when he issued one of the most important documents of his administration—National Security Action Memorandum #263—of October 11, 1963, saying that the Vietnamese should take over “essential functions now performed by U.S. military personnel . . . by the end of 1965,” thereby releasing all U.S. personnel from further duty in Vietnam.

By 1963, the people of South Vietnam had a little more experience with self-government than they did in 1954; but with the death of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu on November 2, 1963, even that small beginning suffered a serious setback. South Vietnam had never had the tradition of being a nation. Most of its rural populace had no concept of, or allegiance to, a government in Saigon, other than memories of the one hundred years of French rule, which they loathed.

This serious oversight was not limited to Eisenhower and Kennedy. In an extract from his book
Counsel to the President
, which first appeared as “Annals of Government: The Vietnam Years” in
The New Yorker
magazine in May 1991, former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford makes many similar remarks. He has written: “. . . our objectives in Vietnam depended more on the capabilities of our allies in Saigon than on our own efforts.” There was no one closer to the policy and thinking of our six “Vietnam era” presidents and their key advisers than Clifford. All of these presidents, three Democrats and three Republicans, made two serious mistakes in their Vietnam policy:

1. They seriously overestimated the ability and character of this either nonexistent or very new Diem government of South Vietnam, and
   
2. Perhaps the most serious oversight of all was that not one of these six presidents ever stated a positive American military objective of that war. The generals sent to Saigon were told not to let the “Communists” take over Vietnam, period. This does not constitute a military objective.
   

Clifford asked himself those questions when he wrote: “First, can a military victory be won? And, second, what do we have if we do win?” These are meaningful questions, especially coming from the man who served as secretary of defense under President Lyndon Johnson in 1968.

What Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy meant in their comments is clear enough under conventional circumstances, but their views made little sense given that the South Vietnamese were not a nation. Even when Ngo Dinh Diem had been established as the president of South Vietnam, in 1954, he had no governmental structure, no armed forces, no police, no tax system, etc. We aided Diem. We aided his subordinates. We armed and fed his troops—whoever they were. We provided billions of dollars in aid, but doing all those things does not make a government that can stand on its own feet in the face of a skilled and dedicated adversary that wanted to create a free Vietnam.

Ngo Dinh Diem was himself part of the problem. Perhaps Lyndon Johnson said it best, in 1961, during an interview in Saigon with Stanley Karnow, author of
Vietnam: A History:
“Shit, Diem’s the only boy we got out there.” Diem had been born in 1901 in the village of Phu Cam. He was not a native of Cochin China, but was from the vicinity of Hue. He was a Catholic, a staunch nationalist, and an anti-Communist.

In 1933, he had been minister of the interior in the Bao Dai government under French colonialism. After the Japanese had been defeated in 1945 and driven from Indochina, Diem was active against the French. In 1950 he left Vietnam for exile in the United States and lived at the Maryknoll Seminary in New Jersey, where, among other things, he washed dishes.

Then, on May 7, 1953, Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York arranged for a luncheon visit to the U.S. Supreme Court Building and introduced Ngo Dinh Diem to Justice William O. Douglas, Sen. John F. Kennedy, Sen. Mike Mansfield, Mr. Newton of the American Friends Service Committee, Mr. Costello of the Columbia Broadcasting System, and Edmund Gullion and Gene Gregory of the Department of State. There Ngo Dinh Diem discussed Indochina for about an hour and answered questions, chiefly from Douglas and Kennedy. Diem had been introduced to this distinguished group as a “Catholic Vietnamese Nationalist.” An account of this important luncheon meeting is to be found in
Foreign Relations of the United States
,
1952–1954,
vol. 13.

With reference to President Eisenhower’s comment before the National Security Council on January 8, 1954, relative to “[getting] the Vietnamese to fight,” it may be noted that during this May 7, 1953, meeting Ngo Dinh Diem himself may have initiated that theme. According to the official account, “He thought that the French military understood the problem better than the French civil government. In any case, the French could not beat the Communists and would have to rely on the Vietnamese to do it. They could not get the Vietnamese to undertake the task, however, unless the Viets had more freedom.”

At no time did Diem, or anyone else, suggest what could be done to arrange for “the Viets [to have] more freedom.”

Diem left the United States in 1953 and continued his exile from Vietnam in a Benedictine monastery in Belgium. On June 18, 1954, Bao Dai asked Diem to become premier in his government. Diem arrived in Saigon on June 26, 1954, met Lansdale on June 27, and formally assumed that office on July 7, 1954. After an election campaign carefully orchestrated by the CIA and Lansdale, Diem became president of South Vietnam on October 1954.

Another thing we must remember is that we had been aiding the French from 1946 up until their defeat by the Vietminh at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. In other words, we had been helping the enemy of the South Vietnamese people right up until a few months before we installed Ngo Dinh Diem as the new president of this previously nonexistent country. It seems strange that President Eisenhower would want to “Vietnamize” the war in January 1954, six months before the new government, under Ngo Dinh Diem, had been established and during a period when we were still aiding the French. Such factors had a great impact upon the actions of this emerging country during the period of the Vietnam War.

This oversight, not only on the part of Eisenhower and Kennedy, but also on the part of most Americans, seriously handicapped both countries during the thirty years of American support of the Vietnamese and their warfare in that piece of real estate. Something had to be done to create a viable government and to coalesce the populace before it could act on its own behalf. This is where all of our best intentions failed so badly. Even in America, more than a century and a half elapsed between the landings at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock and the battle with the redcoats in Lexington and Concord. During that time those early settlers evolved into Americans, and were not simply an aggregate of English, German, Irish, and French people.

Despite this critical oversight, that was the commander in chief speaking during that important National Security Council meeting of January 1954 to the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the individual chiefs of each of the military services, among others. That was his policy.

President Eisenhower could not have expressed his views on the subject of a “Vietnam War” more forcefully. He knew that we did not belong there. Yet less than a month later, on January 29, 1954, many of the same officials who had been at that meeting, including the vice president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the director of central intelligence, ignored the President and made plans to get on with the business of making war in Indochina.

In the words of Dr. Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower Professor of War and Peace at Kansas State University:
²

In the south, Vietnam was under French control simply because there was nothing else for that area. The French used Bao Dai as their puppet-in-command; but he reigned from the Riviera and was seldom in Vietnam. Finally, in mid-1954, when the United States took the initiative to install Ngo Dinh Diem as president of the newly established country of South Vietnam (i.e., south of the 17th parallel), that piece of real estate began to have a government, at least in name.

Diem had no congress, no army, no police, no tax system—nothing that is essential to the existence of a nation. At the same time he had a strong, skilled, and experienced enemy—Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnamese army. For this reason, many of the requests made upon the Diem government during the period from 1954 to 1963 were quite unrealistic. But this fact never seemed to occur to the leaders of our own government or to those who tried to carry out liaison with Diem’s government, as though it were, and had been, an equal member of the family of nations. We shall see this problem arise throughout the decade that followed.

Lest there are still some among us who believe that the President runs this country, that the Congress participates effectively in determining the course of its destiny, and that the Supreme Court assures compliance with the Constitution and all federal laws, let them witness this action, and the results of this blatant disregard for all elements of government, as we find it on the record.

Among those at the January 8, 1954, meeting of the National Security Council, when the President made his views known so forcefully, was Allen W. Dulles, director of central intelligence and brother of the secretary of state. There was no way that Allen Dulles could have misunderstood those words of President Eisenhower’s. There was no way that any of the others at that meeting could have misunderstood or have had any question whatsoever about “how bitterly opposed” the President was to placing U.S. troops in Indochina. But this is not how things work when modern underground warfare is involved. This is not how the CIA and its counterpart, the Soviet KGB, have waged their worldwide invisible wars. Nothing whatsoever has ever deterred them from the essential business of making war.