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

by David Halberstam

Now it was Rufus Phillips’ turn, and his briefing was doubly important because it was the first informed frontal attack upon the military reporting, and also because it was given by a man who had a particularly good reputation in Vietnam, Lansdale’s own chosen legatee. If Lansdale had been the main figure of the Good Guy American philosophy in the fifties, Phillips was very much in his image. Recruited off the Yale campus by the CIA, he had been a part of the early Lansdale group, and had been in charge of having Vietnamese astrologers predict dark days for the Vietminh and happy days for Diem. In early 1963, as his people in the Delta reported the breakdown there of the strategic hamlet program, Phillips had responded to their warnings, had visited the areas himself, and was horrified. Now, coming before the President, he was admitting the failures of his own program, in itself a remarkable moment in the American bureaucracy, a moment of intellectual honesty. He had known Diem and Nhu for ten years, he said, and they had gradually lost touch with the population and with reality. The Vietnamese now felt that their government had to change, and he agreed. As for General Krulak’s earlier statement that the political problems had not yet touched the Vietnamese officers, it was simply not true; but American officers were under direct orders not to talk to their Vietnamese counterparts about politics, and the Vietnamese knew this. So the testimony of American officers in the fi...