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

by David Halberstam

At a high-level meeting on August 31, McNamara emphasized that the most important thing was to reopen channels of communication with the Diem government; Rusk talked again of the need to regird the anti-Communist forces, to get rid of the Nhus, and to prevent Diem from striking against his top military officers. At the meeting the burden of the case against the regime was borne by Paul Kattenburg, the young State Department officer who had worked in Vietnam for many years in the fifties. He was at this point chairman of the Interdepartmental Working Group on Vietnam and more than anyone in Washington knowledgeable about the country. The Vietnamese people loomed large in his assessments, and he had a real feeling for the fabric of the society there. He had once believed there was a right way to make our policy work; now he felt Diem was hopeless and had begun to doubt that it could be done at all. When Rusk suggested that there was no chance of the coup now, Kattenburg was not so sure, he thought it was almost too soon after one very inflexible policy, and that more time and more gestures were needed. He quoted Lodge as saying that if the Americans tried to live with the Diem regime, with what Lodge termed its sense of false promises, its bayonets on the streetcorners, then the United States would be forced out in six months. Then Kattenburg summed up; he had known Diem for ten years and the story had always been the same, one disappointment after another, always Diem had f...