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

by David Halberstam

“Correct” relations between the United States and Diem should be maintained, along with the search for contacts for what was termed “alternative leadership,” something Lodge badly wanted and was already gearing up to do. The request was typical of the policy and the frustrations and divisions and dishonesty of it all; it said in effect that the United States should look elsewhere for leadership and away from Diem even though the war was being won, and that the war was the only important thing. It was an assessment that the civilians would live to regret, since it would later appear that they had switched governments and helped topple a government which was still winning the war. They knew that this judgment was false, but they had never challenged it, because of their own previous wishful thinking, because of their inability to control their own bureaucracy, and because, above all, of a belief that telling the truth to the American people was unimportant. They—both Kennedys, Rusk, Lodge, Harriman, Hilsman, Trueheart, Forrestal—knew the war was being lost, but they never got it down on paper or into their own statements, or into their briefings with congressional leaders. A lie had become a truth, and the policy makers were trapped in it; their policy was a failure, and they could not admit it.