Krauss’s Failure
Clifford Krauss is a former CFR fellow who worked many years for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. For the former, back in 1992, he reported on the various conspiracy theories about the John Kennedy assassination. Which was, of course, right after Oliver Stone’s film JFK came out. He is now more or less a freelance writer and contributor in the MSM.
His latest for Graydon Carter’s Air Mail is a rather belated review of a book by Jack Cheevers called Kennedy’s Coup. This is about the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem in early November of 1963. Having read much on this subject from reliable sources, I am not about to read almost 700 pages from a writer who clearly—from the very title of his book-- had an agenda. As we shall see, the overthrow of Diem was really the work of Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. Also, the sub-title says it was this event that caused America’s descent into Vietnam. Another ridiculous statement, which we shall also review later.
II
What is so odd about Krauss’ review is this: the Cheevers book has been out since February. A journalist is supposed to review a book close to its release date, not half a year later. But the Cheevers book had not done very well and was not making much headway in the MSM. So editor Graydon Carter at Air Mail approved this belated notice by Krauss. Which is sure to heighten the visibility of the book.
Krauss begins his review by saying that today, 63 years later, Kennedy remains an enigma. Not so.
Far from being an enigma, from recent scholarship Kennedy has now fully emerged as a man opposed to the policies of his predecessors—namely Dwight Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles and Richard Nixon. He declared that separation with his speech on Algeria in 1957. There, he condemned American support for the French effort to maintain their North African colony. Kennedy became a hero in Africa. (Muehlenbeck, p. 123) Quite naturally, the White House did not like it. But as author John Shaw noted in his book about Kennedy in the Senate, that speech made JFK the new leader for the Democrats on foreign policy.
As a senator, Kennedy did not think America should bail out France at Dien Bien Phu. In 1954, he went up against Vice President Nixon, who was the point man for the administration on this issue. Kennedy thought it was useless to try and prop up a collapsing empire, especially since Nixon was actually proposing the use of atomic weapons to salvage the siege.
Concerning Vietnam, as Newman, Peter Scott and Fletcher Prouty said many years ago, Kennedy was strongly opposed to the commitment of any American combat troops into the theater. And he was opposed from April of 1961. This continued throughout the year: Kennedy vetoed five more requests by the end of summer. (Gordon Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, pp. 54-55)
The Taylor-Rostow report had recommended sending in 8,000 combat troops. Kennedy was so aghast at this proposal that he recalled copies of the report so it would not jetstream into the media. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, second edition, p. 138) At a November 1961 meeting, President Kennedy and his brother Robert presented a formidable phalanx to those who wanted to push for sending in combat troops. As John Newman notes:
Kennedy turned down combat troops not when the decision was clouded by ambiguities and contradictions in the reports from the battlefield, but when the battle was unequivocally desperate, when all concerned agreed that Vietnam’s fate hung in the balance, and when his principal advisors told him that vital US interests in the region and the world were at stake. (p. 140)
III
With NSAM 111, Kennedy did send in thousands of advisors, but he never backtracked on the issue of combat troops. Kennedy knew that John Kenneth Galbraith, ambassador to India, opposed any American military commitment to Vietnam. So after NSAM 111 was issued, he sent Galbraith to Saigon to render a status report on American involvement, which was decidedly negative. In April of 1962, when the ambassador was in Washington, Kennedy sent him to see Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. JFK then asked Galbraith to put his ideas in writing. McNamara got the message. This was the beginning of Kennedy’s withdrawal program. (Newman, p. 235)
To enact this new policy, McNamara went to the military leaders in Vietnam and requested a withdrawal schedule. He prefaced this request by saying, “It is not the job of the US to assume responsibility for the war but to develop the South Vietnamese capability to do so.” (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 120) General Harkins, the commander in Saigon, was shocked. And the military stalled on this for months on end. Kennedy had chosen a diplomatic solution in Laos, and he was now leaving Vietnam.
In May of 1963, at the Sec/Def meeting in Hawaii, McNamara finally received withdrawal schedules. He said they were too slow. (ibid, p. 126) But McNamara began outlining a plan to withdraw the first thousand advisors by the end of 1963. The next step was the McNamara/Taylor trip report in the early fall. That report was secretly written by General Victor Krulak and Colonel Fletcher Prouty, under the supervision of Robert Kennedy. (Newman, p. 408) The Kennedys were not going to allow any room for error in their plan to withdraw. But William Sullivan of the State Department did try to extract the withdrawal plan. JFK and McNamara demanded it be placed back into the report. (ibid, p. 411)
The president realized there was resistance to withdrawing all advisors by the end of 1965. But he repeated a mantra he had declared back in November 1961. Then, after NSAM 111 had been formulated, he said that once policy is decided, those on the spot must abide by it or get out. (Newman, p. 146) He now said pretty much the same: everyone must sign on and implement the actions in the new policy, and this must be conveyed to all subordinates. (ibid, p. 412)
Kennedy’s withdrawal was then embodied in both NSAM 263 and the underlying McNamara/Taylor report. NSAM 263 authorized the first thousand advisors to return by the end of the year, and the report stated that all would be out by the end of 1965. This was formalized on October 11, 1963. Kennedy did not backtrack from this withdrawal program in the little time he had to live--even after the Diem overthrow. For instance, on November 14th he said his goal was to bring Americans home. (Goldstein, pp. 95-96)
IV
As many writers have conclusively demonstrated, Vice-President Johnson knew what Kennedy was doing in Vietnam. He did not agree with it. Once Kennedy was killed, he almost immediately began to change the policy of withdrawal to one of escalation. This began at the first Johnson meeting about the issue on November 24th. (Newman, pp. 458-62) Then with NSAM 273, Johnson allowed for direct American intervention in OPLAN 34A operations—swift boat attacks against the north. (ibid, p. 463) These led to the August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident and LBJ’s declaration of war against Hanoi. But this had all been planned out in advance. And Johnson picked Mr. Sullivan to lead his planning group in December of 1963. (Truth is the First Casualty, by Joseph Goulden, p. 87)
The new president also made it clear to McNamara that he thought it was foolish for him to have made statements about withdrawing. In February of 1964, LBJ said to his defense secretary, “How in the hell does McNamara think when he’s losing a war, he can pull men out of there?” He even wanted McNamara to take back the statement that 1000 advisors would be coming home in December. (Virtual JFK, by James Blight, p. 310) In March, he called in the Joint Chiefs to map out an air and sea war against the north, embodied in NSAM 288. (David Kaiser, American Tragedy, p. 308) What Kennedy had not done in three years, Johnson now did in three months.
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was written in May, three months in advance of the incident, and Johnson carried it around with him. (Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History, p. 361) As Edwin Moise has shown, the schedule for intervention was also written up in advance. (Moise, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War, pp. 26-27) In March of 1965, the largest bombing campaign in history, Rolling Thunder, began. At about this time, Johnson broke Kennedy’s taboo of committing combat troops into Vietnam. And by the end of the year, over 180,000 were in theater.
This switch in policy led to an eventual 540,000 combat troops sent to Vietnam: 58,000 perished. The latest estimates are that three million Vietnamese were killed. There was not one combat troop in Vietnam on the day Kennedy was assassinated.
Why go through what is well-established history to our readers? Because in Krauss’ Air Mail article praising the Cheevers book, he writes, “There is some evidence that Kennedy hoped to begin withdrawing American troops if he were elected in 1964.” In the face of the above record, this is a preposterous statement. First, there were no troops in South Vietnam in 1963. They were all advisors. But, more importantly, Kennedy’s program of withdrawing advisors was not going to begin when he was reelected in 1964. It had begun in April of 1962. One can trace it prior to that with Galbraith’s mission to Saigon. Kennedy’s program on withdrawal had been formulated for at least 17 months before his death. And it was in progress at the time of his assassination. As authors like Newman and David Kaiser make clear, JFK never thought that Vietnam was part of America’s national security sphere—after all, it was 9,000 miles away.
But Johnson did not see it that way. He was a much more dyed-in-the-wool Cold Warrior than Kennedy was. Just consider what he said to his biographer, Doris Kearns:
Everything I knew about history told me that if I got out of Vietnam and let Ho Chi Minh run through the streets of Saigon, then I’d be doing exactly what Chamberlain did in World War II….[it] would shatter my presidency, kill my administration and damage our democracy….I believed the loss of China had played a large role in the rise of Joe McCarthy. And I knew that all these problems, taken together, were chickenshit compared with what might happen if we lost Vietnam. (Blight, p. 211)
This was the difference between the two men. Comparing the loss of Vietnam to what Neville Chamberlain did with Hitler at Munich? That somehow the loss of Saigon would lead to another Red Scare, one that would dwarf McCarthyism? No such thing happened when Saigon did fall, did it? The overthrow of Diem did not cause America’s descent into Vietnam. It was the difference between Kennedy and Johnson. Which is what Krauss is trying to camouflage by using the Cheevers book.
V
In relation to the actual overthrow of the Nhu brothers, the article greatly underplays what was happening in South Vietnam under the Diem regime by 1963. This had been presaged by the choice of Ngo Dien Diem by John Foster Dulles as the president of this newly formed country of South Vietnam back in 1955. Ho Chi Minh was a man of the people: he dressed in togas, his hair looked cut with scissors, and he spoke mostly in French and Vietnamese. Diem wore Brooks Brothers suits, spoke English, was a Catholic, and got American-style haircuts.
But further, since he was appointed, he never had the support of the public. It is common knowledge that he maintained power through elections rigged by Colonel Edward Lansdale. As Seth Jacobs notes in his biography of Diem: “He never cultivated any rapport with the peasants or the bourgeoisie of South Vietnam, indeed he seemed uncomfortable dealing with anyone outside his family.” (Jacobs, Cold War Mandarin, p. 2).
Foster Dulles did not mind any of this. In arguing with the French, who strongly opposed Diem, Dulles said: “In that part of the world, there was no such thing as a coalition government, but one-man governments.” (Trapped by Success, David L. Anderson, p. 117) In fact, in 1955, General Lawton Collins did a tour of Vietnam for six months and concluded Diem was the wrong man. He recommended that Eisenhower withdraw support for him. (Anderson, p. 91) Collins was correct. But he was outmaneuvered by Dulles and Lansdale. Once Collins failed, America arrived at the point of no return with Diem, his brother Nhu and Nhu’s wife Madame Nhu.
How correct was Collins? The proof was in the pudding:
Diem would tolerate no opposition. He was paternalistic, suspicious and rigid. And he had a low opinion of the morals and motives of most of his fellow countrymen. With the assistance of his brothers Nhu and Ngo Dinh Can, he managed what could only be termed a police state. (ibid, p. 131)
That is being mild. Ngo Dinh Can ran a wide web of informants, agents and assassins out of Hue and as far south as Phan Thiet. In Saigon, Nhu did the same. Plus, Nhu and Can operated a system of bribery and corruption, called the Can Lao, to issue lucrative privileges like import-export licenses. (ibid, p. 132) Further, in 1956, a presidential decree outlawed any political opposition. About 20,000 peasants were now being held in detention camps. Diem also banned local village councils in lieu of appointees. Which was unprecedented in Vietnam. (Jacobs, p. 90) What made the appointees worse is that they were largely Catholics--when the vast majority of Vietnamese were Buddhists.
To top it off, the bulk of American aid to Saigon was to the military. (Anderson, p. 133) Plus, Diem had cultivated a relationship with professor Wesley Fishel of Michigan State. (Jacobs, p. 10) Fishel was a combination academic and government consultant. Michigan State’s president, John Hannah, was interested in using MSU to aid in government programs. Diem and Dulles used both men to advise and supply technical support for public administration and police organization.
And the police were brutal. Many who were detained for being communists were beaten up, had their legs broken, and women were raped. In 1959, Diem passed a law which brought back the guillotine. Traveling military courts in the countryside were authorized to behead suspected Vietminh. (Goldstein, p. 51) Diem and Nhu also used the infamous “tiger cages,” which were located off the southern coast of Vietnam.
As the reader can see, whatever Dulles constructed in South Vietnam, it was not in any way a democratic republic. It much more resembled an American-backed fascist dictatorship. And it did not evolve positively. It got worse.
VI
This was the awful situation John Kennedy was faced with in 1961. The Saigon administration was the kind of Third World regime he disdained. Kennedy favored nationalists like Patrice Lumumba in Congo and Achmed Sukarno in Indonesia. Diem was the kind of leader JFK scorned, e.g., the Shah of Iran. Diem’s regime was weakening due to a growing nationalist and communist opposition which began in the countryside. Since Diem and Nhu had no positive message, they had to resort to more repression. In fact, Diem was so bad that the authors of The Ugly American modeled their mythical country of Sarkhan on Vietnam. But Diem survived assassination and overthrow attempts. (Jacobs, p.3)
The problem was that Diem resisted American advice to legitimize his regime. Ambassador Elbridge Durbrow wanted him to start a land reform program, which could have weakened the Vietminh in the countryside. He also wanted Diem to allow more freedom of speech and press. Diem did not allow newspapers to publish the names of independent candidates. A public meeting law disallowed candidates from speaking to groups of more than five people. Durbrow also urged him to allow opposition figures into his cabinet. And most of all, he wanted him to get rid of his brother Nhu—who was universally detested in Vietnam since he helmed the brutal security forces. Diem did little or nothing in regard to any of these. (Jacobs, p. 105, p. 113)
To show just how fascistic Diem and Nhu were, consider the case of Dr. Phan Quang Dan. Under criticism, Diem finally allowed him to run for the assembly. Even though Diem ordered 8,000 of his ARVN troops to dress in plain clothes and vote against him, he still won by a margin of 6-1. When the assembly was convened and Dan went to his seat, Nhu had him arrested on charges of fraud. (Jacobs, p. 114)
After digesting the above, consider what Krauss writes:
…if the Kennedy administration had obsessed less about Diem’s shortcomings and more on a patient promotion of security, and reforms and economic assistance for South Vietnam’s rural population there might have been a different outcome.
If you give short shrift to Diem’s massive shortcomings and leave out that Diem resisted the reforms, then you can write the above.
Realizing the Viet Cong were making progress in the countryside, Diem offered two initiatives: first, the collective argovilles and second, the strategic hamlet program. The first ruined the individual farm system. (Jacobs, p. 122) The second wrecked villages and did not work tactically as security. (Goldstein, p. 105)
There were two events under President Kennedy which led to the overthrow of Diem. These were the appointment of Henry Cabot Lodge to replace Frederick Nolting as ambassador, and the disastrous decision by Nhu to raid the Buddhist pagodas in major cities on August 21st. Kennedy had little to do with either of these.
As James Douglass notes, Lodge was not Kennedy’s choice as ambassador. Kennedy picked his friend Edmund Gullion, who was in Congo at the time. (Douglass, p. 151) Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who was an undiluted hawk on Vietnam, vetoed that choice. And that is how Lodge came into the picture. Krauss mentions Lodge in passing twice--which is inexcusable. In describing the infamous coup cable of August 24, 1963, Krauss notes the State Department cabal of Mike Forrestal, Roger Hilsman and Averill Harriman who were behind it. But he leaves out Lodge, who had all the indications of being a part of the scheme. Krauss also leaves out the fact that Kennedy was tricked into going along with the cable. Since he was not in Washington, they lied to him and said John McCone had signed on, when he had not. And as John Newman notes, that was not the only deception in getting approval for the cable to be sent. (Newman, p. 357)
The cable essentially said that Lodge was to tell Diem that Nhu must go and, if he refused, key military leaders were to be informed that America could not offer continued support unless those steps were taken quickly. (ibid, p. 354) In Saigon, when Lodge got the cable, he decided not to go to Diem as instructed. He went directly to the military. (ibid, p. 359)
When Kennedy got back on Monday and discovered he had been snookered, he was enraged. He shouted, “This shit has got to stop!” Forrestal offered to resign. But Kennedy told him he was not worth firing; he now owed him something. (Douglas, pp. 164-65) Contrary to what Krauss writes, Kennedy did try to stop the action. In the PBS series, Vietnam: A Television History, Lodge said that JFK got in contact with him afterward and told him to cancel the cable. But in reality it was too late. The generals now thought they could dispose of Diem and Nhu.
What made the situation all the worse was Nhu’s supervision of the strategic hamlet program in the countryside and his persecution of the Buddhists in the cities. Again, Krauss just glides over these two immense factors. As Newman writes, the former program was Diem and Nhu’s idea, carried out by American money. The vast majority of Vietnamese were ancestor worshippers, and this program removed them from their creed. It also wrecked the prior political order. It ended up being counter-productive, a boon to the communists. (Newman, p. 339)
But the Buddhist uprising, caused by Diem’s brother Can, was the immediate cause of the November overthrow. Can’s decision to allow a catholic celebration holiday and ban a Buddhist one was a terrible, fateful decision. (Newman, p. 340) In the city of Hue, Buddhists protested. They were attacked by rifle fire, armed vehicles and grenades: seven were killed, fifteen injured. (Douglass, p. 129)
This was the beginning of the end for the Diem regime. Buddhist leaders met with Diem demanding an end to religious persecution and that his government accept responsibility for the tragedy. Diem agreed to investigate but called the Buddhists fools about religious freedom guaranteed by the constitution since he was the constitution. (ibid, p. 133) Thus began a series of mass demonstrations in Hue, which Nhu assaulted with tear gas. But the effects of it were so powerful that some thought it was mustard gas. (Newman, p. 341)
This led to the shocking television immolation of Thich Quang Duc on June 11. Madame Nhu called this a barbecue and said if there were another—and there were several—she would bring the gasoline and “we shall clap our hands.” (ibid, p. 343) This televised event, and her reaction, turned Diem and Nhu into international pariahs. In August, Nhu authorized raids of Buddhist pagodas throughout South Vietnam. The State Department sent a cable to the acting ambassador, “If Diem does not take prompt and effective steps to reestablish Buddhist confidence in him, we will have to re-examine our entire relationship with his regime.” (Newman, p. 343)
It specifically was due to the Buddhist crisis that General Tran Van Don got in contact with Lucien Conein, the acting CIA station chief. In his message, the general stated that Diem’s failure to take responsibility for the Buddhist uprising allowed it to become a national issue. The military had to act so as not to benefit the Viet Cong. (Newman, p. 347)
By autumn, things got so bad that Nhu was faking coups and negotiating with the north. But Nhu was playing the latter card against Washington. He knew that Hanoi wanted all Americans out first. (Edward Miller, Misalliance, p. 306; Douglass, p. 190) Kennedy understood what was going to occur. And, in a private mission, he tried to get Diem out through his friend Torby Macdonald. But Diem would not leave. (Douglass, p. 167)
When the coup did arrive in early November, it was Lodge and Conein who were the Americans managing it. As Jim Douglass notes, Diem was desperately calling Lodge during his attempt to escape. He did not know that Lodge was in contact with the coup plotters through Conein. (Douglass, pp. 208-10) This was why many, including Lyndon Johnson and Senator Richard Russell, held that it was Lodge who had Diem and Nhu killed. (See transcript of May 27, 1964 White House conversation) As a result, Kennedy was going to fire Lodge. But Dallas intervened. (Douglass, p. 374)
The most ludicrous aspect of Krauss’s article is when, reading Cheevers book, he says he wanted to “grab Kennedy by the shoulders and say, ‘Jack, you know better. Don’t do it!’ Well I wanted to grab Krauss by the shoulders and say, “What is wrong with telling the whole story Cliff? Because Graydon Carter would not print it? Then don’t write it!”
The underlying idea that Vietnam could be saved by the Nhu brothers is pure science fiction. If 540,000 American combat troops, the seventh largest air force in the world, and the US Navy could not save Saigon, then surely the collapsing brutal government of the Nhu brothers was not going to either. Kennedy understood this and was getting out. Which would have saved the lives of 3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans. For some reason, Krauss does not want you to know that.
