JFK (38 page)

The quotes involving military subjects that are taken directly from this report serve as a reminder of how something novel in 1959 and 1960 has come to be taken as an accepted philosophy, especially now that the Cold War is over and the military and its industrial friends are forced to look for new fields to conquer. Although the following extracts, taken from the section headed “New Roles for the Military,” were written in the 1958—59 time period, they appear to have been for today’s consumption:

This is due, in part to “. . . the growing realization that armies are often the only cohesive and reliable non-Communist instrument available to the fledgling nations” and that “armies. . . are the principal Cold War weapon from the shores of the East Mediterranean to the 38th Parallel (Korea). ”

Then the report drives home its point that the armed forces operate in a never-never land somewhere “between government and populace.”

Later in the report, that same thesis is sounded again: “The maintenance of internal security constitutes a major responsibility of these armed forces. . . .”

The report states: “. . . a key requirement may be direct military action against armed dissidents; consequently, appropriate elements of the army should be equipped and trained for unorthodox warfare.”

It reaches a climax with the following statements of U.S. military policy, concealed in 1959 behind a Third World policy. This affirmative presentation at the White House level shows how thoroughly the new U.S. military doctrine—albeit for other nations, the authors say—followed the teachings of Chairman Mao.
⁶

The report continues and endorses the “Formulation of a Military Creed.” It cites: “the unique responsibilities of the military forces—one might almost say armies—in the development of political stability and national unity” and talks about “the relationship of the military instrument to the state and to civil power.”

This Eisenhower White House Report takes on full color when we recall that Chairman Mao had launched, in 1957—only two years before this report was written—the Great Leap Forward, which was an attempt to decentralize the Chinese economy, such as it was, by establishing a nationwide system of people’s communes.

At the same time, the CIA, augmented by the U.S. Army and the Department of State and assisted by experts from the Department of Agriculture, was working with the Diem government of South Vietnam to establish hundreds of similar communes, then called “Agrovilles” and later “Strategic Hamlets,” in South Vietnam.

And in May 1959, this White House presidential committee had suggested in the same report: “Military equipment and labor can expedite completion of village communal projects. . . . Only thus can an enduring relationship be established among the government, the military, and the people themselves.”

Mao’s doctrine, even in the Great Leap Forward, found itself flowing from the pens of U.S. military officers in the form of revolutionary ideas. The nations they describe are to be sliced up into three distinct entities: the people, the government, and the military. What kind of country is that? They do not say. But their new U.S. military doctrine was thrust upon the emerging government of Vietnam, and their concept of Cold War (peacetime) operations permeated the highest levels of government at the time Kennedy was inaugurated in January 1961.

There is a strangely contrived side to all this. As Mao Tse-tung had said: “The world today is already in a new era of evolution and today’s war is already approaching the world’s last armed conflict. . . . No matter how long this war is going to last, there is no doubt that it is approaching the last conflict in history.”

By the mid-1950s, significant elements of the U.S. military establishment had begun to accept the fact that a nuclear war was impossible and that the Cold War was the best scenario for those who saw some form of warfare as essential to the existence of the nation-state.

In several earlier chapters,
Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace
was cited as a novel of crucial importance. It stated that a nation-state could not survive without warfare, and this work about a top-level study commissioned in August 1963 described an attitude that had begun to surface right after the inauguration of John F. Kennedy.

The members of Kennedy’s inner circle were concerned that no serious work had been done to plan for peace in the world, and such discussions were heard in the Pentagon. The commissioning of the study in
Report From Iron Mountain
illustrates this concern.

The reader will understand that the author, Leonard Lewin, has a perfect right to characterize his work as a “novel.” I have spoken with Lewin at length. He is a well-informed man who was well aware of the situation in Washington as pictured in the Lansdale/Stilwell report in 1959 and its progression into the Kennedy era, with its Pentagon offices filled by Phi Beta Kappas and other men of experience and learning. The most interesting part of both “reports” is the many ways in which they overlap and agree with each other; and, even more important, how they have survived the contrivances of the Cold War and have become thoroughly modern military doctrine.

Chairman Mao predicted all this. Many good strategists in the U.S. military also foresaw it, so they designed the parameters of the new type of military doctrine and a new type of constant warfare that would, for the most part, take place in the territory of relatively powerless Third World nations.

Thus, in the process of stamping out “Communist-inspired subversive insurgency” or other bogeymen foes, millions of defenseless little people were murdered, as though some monstrous Malthusian bulldozer had been mindlessly set in motion to depopulate Earth. Classic examples of this was the massive slaughter in Cambodia, the Iran-Iraq war, and subsequently “Desert Storm” and other related hostilities in the Middle East.

It just happened that Kennedy put a man he had never met, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, on the Cuban Study Group after the Bay of Pigs disaster. Taylor had been the chief of staff of the U.S. Army when the Mutual Security Program report was written. No man was better prepared to further that philosophy. It was written in accordance with his guidance. He believed and endorsed this new doctrine that members of his army staff had developed.

The Cuban Study Group was the source of the report that had been given to the President on June 13, 1961, that in turn became National Security Action Memoranda #55, #56, and #57 on June 28. They hit the Pentagon like a thunderclap and caused a muffled roar from the State Department and the CIA. General Taylor was their author. (I have acquired a copy of the original work, and these documents will be discussed in detail in chapter 15.)

Shortly thereafter, General Taylor moved into the White House as military adviser to the President. This created a rather anomalous situation. President Kennedy had just sent NSAM #55 to the incumbent chairman of the JCS, General Lemnitzer, saying that he wanted his advice on Cold War matters, then he placed General Taylor in the White House for practically the same purpose. That October, the President sent General Taylor to Vietnam for a military report on the situation there. One year later, in 1962, Taylor was made chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where he remained until 1964, when he left to become ambassador to South Vietnam.

THIS IS THE STORY of a people who endured war for thirty years, who were driven from farm and home, and who had no way to get food, water, and the other necessities of life other than by banditry.

As veteran bandits they became good fighters—so good that we credited their success to Ho Chi Minh, to General Giap, to Mao Tse-tung, to the Soviets, and, at times, to our own doves. They fought to eat, to live. Some called them the Vietcong. In their own country they were know as the “dangerous brothers” rather than the enemy. They were terrorized refugees in their own homeland, the beggars, the people of a ravaged land.

If a person were to fly over the hills of Indochina, he might be reminded of the Green Mountain State of Vermont. He would see similar lush, rolling hills that pull a blanket of green up one side, over the top, and down the other. But the Vermont hills were not always that way, not always peaceful; read Kenneth Roberts’s great book of our own Revolutionary War,
Northwest Passage
. To the early American war heroes and to the British invaders, Vermont was a nightmare, a green hell. So, too, was Vietnam to the American GI and to the CIA’s underground warriors.

Glorified in the pages of
National Geographic
magazine as the home of the carefree, naked, little brown man, Vietnam has for centuries been considered one of Earth’s garden spots, a place where man had only to exist to live comfortably. Deep in the forest on the mountains, the Rhade (Rah-Day) tribesmen have lived for hundreds of years. They grow crops. They raise chickens and pigs. They have been lumbermen. They lived easily with the French for generations and managed to coexist with neighboring tribes, because they were strong. The Rhade are a closely knit, self-disciplined group.

After the great defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu by the Vietminh army under General Giap, the French lieutenant of police left the Rhade area, taking with him his family and his few belongings. In his place a Rhade corporal took over the police powers, and things continued about the same, except that European-style law and order ended. The village elders, or Huong-ca, resumed their political functions under their own traditional council.

The French padre stayed only a few more months. When he departed, European religion and medical care went with him. Then the French overseer at the lumber mill took off, and work there stopped, for with him had gone the European economy. With the cessation of the only real income-producing enterprises of the area, contact with the outside world was severed almost entirely. Now and then a Chinese trader would come with his few coolies, bringing salt, cloth, blades (axes, knives, machetes), and news. But the Chinese merchants, too, came less frequently. The Rhade farmers had to work all the harder to produce the extra provisions that the elders would have to take to the central village over the mountain to trade for necessities.

In a country where tall grasses and bushes shoot up about as fast as they can be cut down, it is nearly impossible to grow a crop in the fields. A field that has been standing uncultivated abounds with such a thick cover of grasses that the tiny sprouts of seedlings can never grow. These tribesmen farm by cutting, slashing, and burning the forest to get to cleared earth and luxuriant soil. They have learned from their forefathers to kill the trees at the margin of the forest and then, hurriedly, to plant their scant seeds in this new, bare ground. If the farmer diligently fights the inroads of the grasses and weeds, he may have a farm for several years. But if he turns his back, the grasses take over. This battle is eternal.