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

by David Halberstam

After some protests against the trip by Lodge (resulting in an announcement that McNamara was going to Saigon at Lodge’s request), McNamara and General Taylor left on September 23 for Saigon. One of the things they were to investigate was the possibility of cutting down some of the U.S. aid projects as a symbol of disenchantment with the Ngo family. Inadvertently some of these programs had already been cut off, by a bureaucratic fluke. Though some of the civilians, including Lodge, had argued for it, Kennedy had held the line; he had not been prepared to take this first step until he was more sure that the Vietnamese military was at least one step ahead of him and was ready to replace Diem. But in early September at one high-level meeting the principals had been talking about whether or not to cut off commodity aid, when David Bell, who was head of AID and who was not regularly a high-level player, said rather casually that there was no point in talking about cutting off commodity aid, he had already cut it off. “You’ve done what?” said a startled President of the United States. “Cut off commodity aid,” Bell answered. “Who the hell told you to do that?” asked the President, since this was no small action; it could easily bring down a government. “No one,” said Bell. “It’s an automatic policy. We do it whenever we have differences with a client government.” And so the President sat there shaking his head, looking at Bell and saying, “My God, do you know what you’ve done?” (...