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

by David Halberstam

For a brief moment after Diem’s death, Vietnamese officers were able to report honestly about what had happened in the war, what the situation was. The embassy was staggered under the impact of what was coming in from the field; the situation was far worse than it had expected, even in some of the more pessimistic quarters. There was, it turned out, no strategic hamlet program in the Delta to speak of; in many areas where the embassy had been reasonably confident, it turned out there had been few incidents precisely because the Vietcong totally controlled an area and did not need to launch any attacks. (As the reports came in, the Harkins-MACV line would immediately change to accept negative aspects of the reporting and claim that it had been going very well until the coup, but since then, the government had completely fallen apart and the war had started to go badly.)