More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 8 - May 30, 2025
(The story in the New York Times was so similar to the briefing then being given at the Pentagon by Lieutenant Colonel John Vann that though Vann had been out of Vietnam for several months and had not talked to me, serious thought was given to court-martialing him.)
the more he read the more he was reminded of the depth of the division in his Administration and the failure of his policy in Vietnam, and he would, in turn, rant against the reporters in Vietnam.
McNamara accepted Lodge’s estimates that we could not succeed with Diem, and got major new doubts about the regime and major new pressures against it into the report
(Repression for repression’s sake was permissible, but repression which hurt the war effort was regrettable.)
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,
...more
He knew Vietnam was bad and getting worse, that he was on his way to a first-class foreign policy problem, but he had a sense of being able to handle it, of having time, that time was somehow on his side. He could afford to move his people slowly; too forceful a shove would bring a counter shove. It was late 1963, and since 1964 was an election year, any delay on major decisions was healthy;
There was always time. The date of the McNamara-Taylor report was October 2, 1963.
At almost the same time General Duong Van Minh, the most respected military figure in the South, a man close to the Lansdale group since the early days when he had helped fight the banditlike Binh Xuyen sect, contacted Lou Conein, an old friend of his, and asked if they could talk.
Two fingers were missing from one hand, and stories were told all over Saigon as to how those fingers had disappeared, in what noble or ignoble cause; reporters who knew Conein well and liked him and whose phones were always tapped referred to him in their own code as “Three-Finger Brown” after a baseball pitcher named Mordecai Brown. The American command in Saigon despised him;
(which confirmed a Hilsman-Sarris estimate made a month earlier that the generals would not move immediately unless pushed from below by junior officers).
Ironically, Harkins was an old family friend from Boston, which made Lodge wary of being openly critical of the general’s reporting, so he tried simply to by-pass him
it was no longer a question of a coup, but of which coup.
October 6 Kennedy had wired Lodge telling him that although the United States did not wish to stimulate a coup, it did not wish to thwart one either,
Now, on October 30, he reported back to Taylor that he doubted a coup was coming.
into the 20th Century politically . . .” Bundy was still not satisfied with the Lodge answer. He cabled once more suggesting that the United States could control Vietnamese events, that he was not suggesting the betrayal of the plotters but perhaps a delay until there were better chances of success. But it was too late, the final plans were in motion. On November 1 the Saigon embassy and CIA predicted in their early reports to Washington
(when the coup did take place, MACV called up the embassy and asked to have the cable killed).
His name was Lyndon B. Johnson. He had hated the coup against Diem from the very beginning. All this talk about coups. Cops-and-robbers stuff, he said, coups and assassinations. Why, he and Ralph Yarborough had their differences down in Texas but they didn’t go around plotting against each other, murdering each other.
Even Tshombe—Johnson was a not-so-secret admirer of Tshombe, who, after all, alone among all those Africans, was willing to say he liked us and disliked the Communists.
Johnson would turn to a friend and say, in an almost mystical way, that the assassination of Kennedy was retribution for the assassination of Diem.
John McCone had lent CIA specialists on nuclear weapons to Stennis, to help him make the case against the treaty—McCone
that particular country? rather than, Was the loss of that country worth a nuclear confrontation? Was it worth a major American land war?
He was above all unsure of himself in foreign affairs, more suspicious of the world around him and of enemies than his predecessors.
“I am not going to lose Vietnam,” the new President answered. “I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.”
He invited the White House people, not just Bundy but many of them, to lunch, a friendly swim first, then everyone was marched over to the swimming pool, stripped down naked in a tiny dressing room, with the result that Robert Komer was so nervous that he dove in with his glasses on, and the rest of the swim was devoted to diving for Komer’s glasses.)
He had escalated the number of Americans there to 16,900 at the time of his death, with more than 70 dead (each dead American became one more rationale for more dead Americans);
He had deepened the commitment there, and he had, in a way, always known better. He had preached, both in his book and in his speeches, about the importance of political courage, but his Administration had been reasonably free from acts of courage, such as turning around the irrationality of the China policy. In this most crucial area the record was largely one of timidity.
His ability to drive men to a program and policy beyond what they themselves considered wise was considered a national asset, since the men he was manipulating were largely old tired conservative Southern congressmen who headed committees and thus blocked progress.
Time had been closing off options relentlessly since 1945 and 1946, when it would have been easy to have a political settlement, a favorable one, with the United States dealing from strength, but ever since those days, the possibility had steadily diminished as the other side, the Vietnamese Communist forces, had become progressively stronger and the United States had become increasingly committed to the idea (then hardly part of its global outlook) that Vietnam was vital.
Johnson did not suffer from a poor education, he suffered from a belief that he had had a poor education.
they decided to do a joint CIA-Defense intelligence survey of the situation, which they felt was very bad; at least they ought to serve the President with as honest an evaluation as possible. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff blocked it, they wanted to control their flow of information;
Above all, there was no real investigation of what kind of a deal might be worked out with Hanoi and the Vietcong, what neutralization might mean.
Dean Rusk hated to challenge the military on its needs and its requests because he feared a State-Defense split such as had existed between Dean Acheson and Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, and he would do almost anything to avoid it.
And then the faltering admission that on reflection they knew very little about him.
Rusk interjected at this point: “I wouldn’t make the smallest concession for moral leadership. It’s much overrated.”
(who else in that chic egalitarian Kennedy period, when they were pushing so hard to improve public education and get an education bill passed, sent his children to public schools?).
Neither could have foreseen Vietnam and what it would do to Rusk, making him virtually unemployable, making him, because of his decision to ride it through, the prime target for its critics, or the second prime target after Johnson.
he startled everyone by giving very strong testimony (“If I were a Negro I think I might rise up”)—one
McCarthy, who loved to mix theology and politics, shook his head and said no, not Calvin; Calvin had only written down his philosophy, he had not inflicted it on others.
Rusk, McCarthy said, was Cromwell to Dulles’ Calvin.
in the Dean Rusk family the values would change, would be less conservative: a son would work for the Urban League and would be part of the anti-Whitney Young movement because Young was too moderate; a daughter would marry a Negro.
In the sixth grade young Dean was told by his teacher on the first day of school that he must wear shoes the next day, they were trying to stop hookworm. Dean went home with the message to his mother. Since shoes were scarce in the Rusk family, Mrs. Rusk wrote a note saying that the teacher ought to look after her end of the job, which was educating, and Mrs. Rusk would look after her end, which was feeding and dressing the children; Dean returned the next day barefoot, and proud of it.
Dean was very good in school, though once he lost in a spelling bee because when he came to the word “girl,” he spelled it “gal.”
(both his grandfathers had fought in the Civil War, though on the Confederate side, and later when he had to fill in his security forms and was asked to list any relatives who had tried to overthrow the government of the United States, he would put down both their names).
To make it in America, to rise, there has to be some sort of propellant; sheer talent helps, but except in very rare instances, talent is not enough.
The most lasting memory of those Oxford years was a belief that the best-educated and most elite young men of England with their Oxford Union had given Germany the wrong impression, signaling that England would not fight;
Studies by Lloyd Warner, the sociologist, showed that Americans had never had such a sense of purpose, usefulness, of being needed, as in the war, and Rusk was a good example.
The group was in effect the forerunner of the National Security Council, and the problems it faced were very tough: whether or not to let some Dutch marines back into Indonesia; where to divide Korea as the Russians came pouring through—it was Rusk who, checking with old maps, picked the 38th parallel.
As Secretary, he brought this sense, this lack of jugular instinct back into the government, a lack of willingness to fight with the sharp young Kennedy people, or Harriman, or Defense, or any other force.
But in Rusk’s emulating Marshall in every way, there was a difference, and it was a crucial one: Marshall had become Secretary after a full and distinguished career. He did not need to raise his voice, he was George Marshall.
It turned out that one of the Rusk children had scarlet fever; the family was quarantined and Rusk had been up most of the night washing sheets, never complaining, never asking for help. Lovett was appalled—my God, Dean, we have lots of people around the department just for things like that.
