The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

In August this reporter did a major survey of the deteriorating military situation in the Mekong Delta. I had been called by two friends who were senior advisers to Vietnamese divisions and who were appalled by the collapse of the ARVN and the appearance of formidable new Vietcong battalions sweeping almost without opposition throughout the Mekong Delta. My story was published and told of big new beefed-up battalions of 600 and 1,000 men, very well armed with captured American weapons. The article suggested that the war was being lost and that the high-level optimism about the Delta was comparable to the French optimism that preceded their debacle at Dienbienphu. The story staggered the President, who was an avid newspaper reader, and who took journalists seriously. He asked the military to comment on it, and word was sent through channels from Taylor to General Krulak to General Harkins that this was particularly important, that it was bad enough to be taking heat because of the Buddhist crisis, but if the President thought the war was going poorly as well, the whole game might be over. (The story in the New York Times was so similar to the briefing then being given at the Pentagon by Lieutenant Colonel John Vann that though Vann had been out of Vietnam for several months and had not talked to me, serious thought was given to court-martialing him.) The assignment was given not to MACV’s intelligence section, but to its most gifted general, Dick Stilwell, who thereupon, wi...