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May 30 - June 23, 2025
Lodge reported that Minh and Le Van Kim had told him of the “extreme undesirability” of American advisers going into villages and districts, because they would be perceived as “more imperialistic than the French”
Top administration officials doubted that the measures would cause Hanoi to cease its support for the Vietcong, but they counseled Johnson to approve the plan nonetheless.
to overcome such a challenge alone, it was necessary to increase the matériel and personnel assistance to the NLF and to press the NLF to increase its political agitation and military operations against the Saigon government. Hanoi leaders made these decisions not because they saw a military confrontation involving large-scale units as inevitable but because they hoped a forceful response would prevent such a confrontation from occurring.
On a most basic level, he believed that it was unrealistic to ignore the existence of a rising power in Asia.
Lyndon Johnson and his top aides knew the task before them: to persuade de Gaulle to abandon his plan, or at least delay implementing it until the situation in Vietnam had stabilized. On 3 January, Rusk instructed Bohlen to seek an appointment with the general as soon as possible to convey American concerns and elicit a promise from him to discuss the issue with Washington before proceeding with recognition.
Couve told him that no military victory was possible for the West in Indochina and that France therefore supported the neutralization of the whole region, including Thailand.
McNamara, appearing before the House Armed Services Committee, told members that the situation in South Vietnam “continues grave” but that “the survival of an independent Government in South Vietnam is so important to the security of all Southeast Asia and to the free world that I can conceive of no alternative other than to take all necessary measures within our capability to prevent a communist victory.”
On 18 January, an Agence France Presse (AFP) article that was widely circulated in Saigon said that France planned to use its impending recognition of China to bring about a negotiated settlement in Indochina.
The article equated American actions in the war with those of the Vietcong and North Vietnam and called a cease-fire an essential first step on the road to peace. Lodge was outraged.
However, in recalling the meeting some ten days later (after the junta had been ousted from power), the ambassador wondered about the eagerness with which Minh and the others had wanted to discuss de Gaulle and neutralization.
Doubts about the Minh regime’s determination on both counts (and about the Diem regime before it) had existed since it came to power; now, some ten weeks later, a growing number of Americans in South Vietnam, particularly in the military, were convinced that the commitment was not there and that new leadership had to be found.
In mid January 1964, many of these officials believed that they had found such leadership in the figure of General Nguyen Khanh,
Lodge’s superiors rejected the suggestion, telling him that Franco-American relations had declined to a level where any “approach to [de Gaulle] would be fruitless.” But Lodge was undaunted—after meeting Khanh, he again recommended telling the French president that the United States had reports of “French neutralist plot, French money, and French agents” and that he should cease his activities.
perhaps the surest sign that the American ambassador to South Vietnam was sympathetic to a coup was his decision not to tell the Minh government of his conversation with Khanh.
The two men agreed on the need for the administration to “play stupid” on the developments—Washington, they felt, should “not know of this until the story actually breaks out of Vietnam.”
Though there is little evidence that the Minh regime was “flirting with the French” in a serious way in late January, U.S. policymakers were prepared to believe that it was or that it might in the near future.
“The spurious idea of a neutralized Vietnam will now die,” he assured Rusk.68 Rusk and others in Lyndon Johnson’s inner circle were not so sure.
coup, there were renewed calls for a neutralist settlement to the conflict from two sources that these officials deemed important: the New York Times and the French government.
Reston urged the United States to seek a negotiated settlement to the conflict and claimed that the administration was “actually on record as favoring the neutralization of the whole country, North Vietnam as well as South.” Johnson’s aides assur...
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Privately de Gaulle believed, and had believed for some time, that the concept should initially be confined to the South alone. The Hanoi leadership would refuse to agree to any kind of formal neutralization, he felt certain, and would get support in this position from Beijing and Moscow. This reality did not concern him particularly—the DRV, he believed, would be effectively neutral regardless, in view of the historic Sino-Vietnamese friction and the deepening Sino-Soviet split. Ultimately, Hanoi might gain control of all of Vietnam, but it would take time and would in any event not be a big
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“If the Americans are not too stupid they will put an end to this absurd Vietnam War,” Gaulle told information minister Alain Peyrefitte after a cabinet meeting on 22 January.
When Johnson in a press conference on 1 February appeared to give a qualified endorsement to the notion of a neutralized Vietnam, aides became alarmed, despite the fact that Johnson also said that de Gaulle was hurting U.S. efforts in the region. The remarks could be twisted any number of ways by the press both at home and abroad, these aides thought, and could make the United States appear to support a neutral solution.
If American fear of what Jean Lacouture has termed a neutralist “plot between Paris, Hanoi, and Nhu” predated the coup that ousted the Ngos, and may have helped precipitate it, much the same fear predated the coup that overthrew the Minh junta.
Kennedy, Johnson, and their advisers were convinced that a military solution was needed in Vietnam, and when the Diem and Minh regimes expressed doubts about such a solution, or at least appeared incapable of pursuing one effectively, the United States aided in their overthrow.
“General de Gaulle’s argument is unanswerable unless we are able to persuade ourselves that the civil war can be won,” Walter Lippmann asserted in his syndicated column on 4 February. “The official American view is that we have to say unreservedly that the war will be won and refuse to think about what we shall do if it cannot be won.”
De Gaulle was in fact “rendering us a signal service” by unbolting those doors, Lippmann continued. The general was suggesting a way to save Southeast Asia from Chinese domination, by way of political moves that could be initiated and diplomatic bargaining that could be undertaken.
General de Gaulle has not proposed a plan. He has proposed a line of policy and a mode of thinking which we cannot afford to dismiss lightly.”74 Dismiss it lightly is, of course, precisely what America’s Vietnam policymakers had done.
Neither man wanted to go to the election as the one who either made war or lost Vietnam.
But though the strategy worked—Johnson and his advisers succeeded in keeping the war from becoming a major issue in domestic politics in the months leading up to polling day—only by the most tortured logic can 1964 be called an “off year” in Vietnam.
As late as December 1964 the administration could convince most Americans that it envisioned no dramatic escalation in the American involvement in the war (even many informed observers were ready to believe this), whereas secretly a general consensus had been reached already by the spring that major escalatory moves would in all likelihood have to be undertaken by late in the year or early in 1965.
It was the year in which key voices in American society, including the Senate Democratic leadership and editorial writers and columnists at various newspapers across the United States, came fully to question the necessity and wisdom of a full-fledged American defense of South Vietnam.
As it turned out, these would be the last best efforts at peace—by the end of February 1965 the best chance for a negotiated settlement had passed.
The military history of that year is a story of almost unrelieved decline in the GVN's fortunes and the ARVN's will to fight, a story of growing war-weariness and attachment to “neutralism” (meaning, in this context, a swift end to the war on whatever terms) among the peasantry and many in the urban areas of the South.
began in February to speak of the very real possibility of a third coup engineered by neutralist forces committed to an immediate end to the war.
decision makers in Washington were more committed to the war effort than the mass of the South Vietnamese they were ostensibly working to help.
Even Nguyen Khanh, the new leader of the GVN, would in time fall out of favor with American officials for failing in their eyes to be vigorous enough in prosecuting the war.
Khanh would learn that his ability to win broad-based domestic support would be directly linked to his ability to preserve a degre...
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More significant Khanh readily agreed to two key policy changes—one civilian and one military—consistently vetoed by the Minh regime. First, he agreed to the placement of more American advisers in subunits of the GVN.
advice in choosing members of his cabinet. Second, the new leader reversed Minh’s policy of strictly limiting the number of U.S. military advisers in the bottom levels of the armed forces.
To British, Australian, and French officials, for example, the coup was a disastrous development, not only because of the tumult it generated throughout the governmental structure in South Vietnam, but because of what they saw as Khanh’s grave shortcomings as a leader.
“it seems increasingly probable that the very qualities which make Khanh attractive to American soldiers and politicians render him unpleasing to a very great many Vietnamese.”
The second striking aspect of this American optimism in the immediate postcoup period is how fleeting it proved to be. By mid February, less than three weeks after the new government had taken over, it was starkly clear that the coup had not slowed enemy advances in the field or stemmed the growth of neutralist sentiment in South Vietnam.
unless there is a marked improvement in the effectiveness of the South Vietnamese government and armed forces, that the South Vietnamese have at best an even chance of withstanding the insurgency threat during the next few weeks or months.”
So minimal was the government’s presence in many provincial areas that the Vietcong was the first to inform the populace of the coup on 30 January.5
the CIA's Saigon station, which, in a series of remarkable reports of its own, described a situation that had reached a crisis point. The South Vietnamese population was apathetic, the station warned, with ever greater numbers leaning to the NLF.
Lyman D. Kirkpatrick, a top CIA official in Saigon, reported that he was “shocked by the number of our people and of the military, even those whose job is always to say that we are winning, who feel that the tide is against us.”
Nes was convinced that Vietnam was embroiled in a civil war and that the United States was backing a side that was unlikely to ever win a lasting victory. Khanh’s lack of political experience, Nes told Briton Robert G. K. Thompson over dinner a few days after the coup, together with the inevitable chaos caused by a second coup so soon after the first, made the outlook especially grim.
These realities led Nes to an uncomfortable conclusion: Charles de Gaulle’s position on the war might be the only viable one, at least absent a major American escalation.
“my reading of developments over the past year and recent experiences here lead me to fear that General de Gaulle may be right
As a result, the United States would be “naive in the extreme” to believe that any number or quality of U.S. advisers could successfully alter, in a reasonable period of time, the attitudes and patterns of thinking of senior Vietnamese military and political officialdom.
