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An extraordinary aspect of the decision-making in Washington between 1961 and 1975 was that Vietnamese were seldom if ever allowed to intrude upon it. Successive administrations ignored any claims by the people who inhabited the battlefields to a voice in determining their own fate: business was done in a cocoon of Americanness. Frederick ‘Fritz’ Nolting, 1961–63 ambassador in Saigon, once cautioned defense secretary Robert McNamara that it was ‘difficult, if not impossible, to put a Ford engine into a Vietnamese oxcart’. The secretary professed to agree – but went ahead with doing that anyway. There is a great line in David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest about Vice-President Lyndon Johnson’s awed reaction after seeing McNamara, Rusk, Bundy, Schlesinger, Rostow and the rest of the Kennedy Round Table gathered for the first time. He rushed off to tell his friend and mentor Sam Rayburn, speaker of the House, about this brilliant group, only to be deflated by the droll response: ‘Well, Lyndon, you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I’d feel a whole lot better if just one of them had run for sheriff once.’ Or knew some Vietnamese.

When McNamara visited Vietnam with Max Taylor, a Vietnamese eye-witness wrote that most of the secretary’s questions were directed to the advisers present, rather than to those doing the fighting: ‘Some [US officers] looked like naughty … students in front of an austere principal … In one exchange that greatly embarrassed a Vietnamese intelligence officer and his American counterpart, McNamara asked how many of our secret agents were working in the enemy’s ranks.’ The answer was none, which remained the case until late in the war. The CIA did not contrive a wiring diagram of the communist leadership until 1969.

As well as military advisers in the field, the administration received plenty of advice from gurus back at home. The Cold War spawned a proliferation of think-tanks, committed to provide both technological studies and intellectual underpinning for strategy, above all nuclear deterrence. The Advanced Research Projects Agency, familiarly known as DARPA and created in 1958 following the shock of the Soviet Sputnik launch, conceived a range of counter-insurgency techniques, almost all of which proved fanciful, and was also begetter of the chemical defoliation programme that deployed Agent Orange. The Santa Monica-based RAND Corporation was a non-profit-making body which received large funding from the air force. It employed smart people, but showed a predisposition to ride with policies already espoused by those who paid its bills.

McNamara was an unsurprising enthusiast for its work, much of which reflected the systems analysis he favoured. When the British academic Professor Michael Howard visited Santa Monica, he was impressed by the brainpower on site, but wrote later of his unease that RAND ‘seemed like a monastery inhabited by clever theologians, who were quite remote from the real affairs of the world … The Randsmen seemed to be falling into the error of assuming that everything connected with war could be quantified.’ Howard was especially dismayed to hear them earnestly debating how quickly the city of Los Angeles could get humming again after a nuclear war.

With the coming of Jack Kennedy, RAND’s chiefs realised that counter-insurgency was becoming big business, and in 1961 dispatched their first emissary to Saigon. During the years that followed, the corporation played a significant advisory role. Almost nobody among its eggheads questioned the rationale for US engagement: fired by missionary zeal, they simply sought to figure out how their country could best win this thing. Analyst Alex George said: ‘There were no pacifists at RAND.’ In the early 1960s most of their research was done in Santa Monica, because few staffers wanted to relocate to Saigon.

In justice to the Kennedy administration, in those days a significant number of South-East Asian leaders, notably including Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, shared or professed to share its belief that the defeat of Vietnam’s communists was critical to regional stability. So did some key allies. The British government regarded the US position in Indochina as precarious, but foreign secretary Lord Home minuted, ‘I hope the Americans can hold on.’ Whatever had been Britain’s reservations about the commitment, now that Western prestige was staked, winning seemed to matter. Malaysia’s prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman urged Sir Robert Thompson, who had played an important role in orchestrating the defeat of his country’s communist insurgency, ‘You must go to Vietnam and help hold my front line.’

Some Americans derived encouragement from Britain’s successes in suppressing nationalist guerrillas, though British officers were coy about acknowledging the ruthless means employed to achieve these. They behaved less brutally in their colonial wars than did the French, but their methods in Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, Aden were not for sensitive stomachs. RAF aircraft broadcast chemical herbicides and later defoliants onto crops in guerrilla-dominated areas. In 1952 the British communist newspaper the Daily Worker published a photograph of a Royal Marine brandishing the heads of two Malayan terrorists, about which public distress did not abate when it was officially explained that these souvenirs had been recovered for identification purposes. There was plenty of bombing of villages. And somehow, the British contrived to seem to prevail.

The London government was uneasily and sometimes guiltily conscious of its status as co-chair of the original Geneva Accords, and thus dismayed by the rising number of advisers dispatched to Vietnam, in breach of the terms. In 1961 the British ambassador suggested that the US might get away with upping the number by a hundred, only to be peremptorily informed that eight thousand were coming. Prime minister Harold Macmillan, loyal as ever, agreed to make no fuss, and expressed relief that there were no plans to commit American combat troops. His people nonetheless urged the State Department to be discreet about the build-up, and thus had to swallow a new snub in December, when Washington said that it had decided not to be bound by some clauses of Geneva.

The British continued to vacillate about how far they themselves were willing to engage alongside the Americans. They retained a proprietorial view of South-East Asia; believed they understood counter-insurgency; devoutly wished for the communists’ defeat. They opposed a 1962 proposal for a conference to neutralise Vietnam, like Laos, because Diem’s position seemed so weak. Harry Hohler, British envoy in Saigon, wrote hawkishly in January: ‘[A]ny solution of the Vietnam problem that does not crush and eradicate the Viet Cong will simply hand South Vietnam over to the Communists,’ an outcome that he considered would be ‘disastrous to British interests and investment in South-East Asia and seriously damaging to the prospects of the Free World containing the Communist threat’.

Nonetheless, the British were underwhelmed by the Americans’ management of South Vietnam’s affairs, and bewildered by the strife between the CIA, State Department, US Army and successive ambassadors. The Americans, meanwhile, resented meddling on their patch – Ed Lansdale, especially, was impatient of advice from a bunch of ex-colonialist losers. He, like the Pentagon, was dismissive of a proposal favoured by the State Department, to invite the British Army to commit some training personnel. Instead ambassador Nolting told his UK counterpart that President Diem would merely appreciate some advice from Robert Thompson on police and organisational issues. At that time, with a Tory government in power at Westminster and Kennedy in the White House, if the Americans had requested military trainers they would probably have got them, which might have proved the thin end of an embarrassingly thick wedge. As it was, the war effort merely acquired Thompson. His experience, together with the advice of a small British mission, had one significant effect: the CIA acknowledged the importance for intelligence-gathering of a police Special Branch, which they persuaded the Vietnamese to replicate. Otherwise, while Thompson was sometimes granted audiences in Washington and Saigon, he exercised little influence on big issues.

That winter of 1962 there was a brief surge of optimism among Americans that the regime was doing better. The Australians agreed to open a jungle warfare school. Prominent pundit Denis Warner explained the rationale to his fellow-countrymen: ‘Why is Australia getting involved in the Vietnam war? Partly because we think a Communist victory there would threaten the rest of Southeast Asia and jeopardise our security and partly because of the need to convince the Americans that we are more than paper tigers … It’s a sort of life insurance cover.’ The premiums got steeper: in 1969 the number of Australians serving in Vietnam peaked at 7,672, of whom five hundred died.

While Washington strategy advisers came and went, one arbiter remained for seven years a constant. The man who would play a role in the making of America’s Vietnam tragedy second only to that of Lyndon Johnson was among the more unlikely knights at the court of Camelot. Robert McNamara was forty-four when in 1961 he first entered his huge Pentagon office, 3E 880. He never seemed to have been young and feckless: administration sophisticates whispered in mockery that he practised the Twist at home in front of a mirror, lest he embarrass himself when making a dancing debut at the White House. This former star of Harvard Business School and wunderkind boss of Ford Motors had risen from a humble Californian background by brainpower and unremitting, humourless toil. McNamara’s character recalls a line about a numerate British statesman: ‘He uses figures as if they were adjectives.’ When this former Eagle Scout took his loved ones hiking on weekends, he was alleged to slide-rule what his children and tiny wife Margy should carry in their rucksacks. He accepted the defence job because he was irresistibly attracted by the opportunity to exercise power. Outside the family, he was a cold man who could scarcely be called a moral one: in 1961 he endorsed the fiction of the strategic ‘missile gap’, and made shamelessly baseless attacks on his predecessor Thomas Gates.

McNamara’s office became a dynamo room: for programming a missile build-up; expanding the army in response to the Berlin crisis; promoting new weapons systems. During the October 1962 Cuban drama, it was McNamara who conceived the US Navy blockade. He seemed devoid of self-doubt, and believed that a good decision should also be a fast one. His obsession with control caused him to deplore loose talk: he waged war on military leakers, and sought himself to preside as the sole public voice of America’s armed forces.

McNamara told the Senate in September 1961: ‘There is no true historical parallel to the drive of Soviet Communist imperialism to colonize the world … [No dictator] has ever been so well organized, possessed so many instruments of destruction.’ He was unafraid of telling outright lies in the cause of countering the Soviet menace – a habit that would eventually destroy his reputation. Testifying to Congress, he reeled off data that was hailed as evidence of his extraordinary powers of recall: Lt. Gen. Fred Weyand, however, observed that many of the secretary’s ‘facts’ were simply wrong. Although a committed Cold Warrior, in the first year of the administration he opposed a penny-parcel commitment in Vietnam: ‘We would be almost certain to get increasingly mired down in an inconclusive struggle.’ Alternatively, if the US made a big troop commitment, ‘the struggle may be prolonged and Hanoi and [Beijing] may intervene overtly … Success will depend on factors many of which are not within our control – notably the conduct of Diem himself.’

But then McNamara changed his mind. In May 1962 he paid his first visit to Vietnam. Paul Harkins, the fantasist who commanded MACV, hosted the trip. The general was given an advance list of the defense secretary’s questions, so that he had time to frame plausible answers, founded on statistics such as McNamara loved, though wholly fanciful. Harkins asserted that American aid was empowering the Diem regime to defeat the communist insurgency, though even as the secretary was being briefed at Binh Duong, an ARVN convoy was attacked nearby, five men killed. While he toured the northerly base at Danang, the Vietcong blew up a troop train ten miles away, killing twenty-seven people and wounding thirty. McNamara told young UPI reporter Neil Sheehan, ‘Every quantitative measurement we have shows that we’re winning.’ He did not perceive that the ‘quantitative measurements’ were being pulled out of the air by Harkins, of whom Sheehan wrote later: ‘He willed himself to believe what he wished to believe and to reject what he wished to reject.’

McNamara’s admirers respected his aloofness as reflecting impartiality and incorruptibility: he was even touted as a possible 1964 running mate for Kennedy. Hanson Baldwin, the respected military commentator, wrote a piece in the Saturday Evening Post headed ‘The McNamara Monarchy’, describing the new defense bureaucracy. But the secretary’s enemies, many of them uniformed, deplored his hubris. He developed an ill-founded belief that he understood the military. James Reston later wrote shrewdly in the New York Times: ‘He has the sincerity of an Old Testament prophet, but something is missing; some element of personal doubt, some respect for human weakness, some knowledge of history.’ Between 1961 and 1967, McNamara nonetheless wielded greater influence on Vietnam policy than any of his fellow-countrymen save successive presidents.

The main thing those Americans who really knew about Vietnam knew was how little they knew. Military adviser Gordon Sullivan had volunteered, terrified the war would be over before he could get to it. The twenty-five-year-old lieutenant from Massachusetts landed in country after a six-week Vietnamese-language course which taught him a few staple phrases. He found Saigon ‘idyllic, just a sleepy town on the river: no bomb-screens, Filipino band music blaring across Tu Do. It wasn’t easy to be an adviser in those days: I had a radio, but there was nothing on the other end of it’ – from beginning to end of the war, US advisers were chiefly valued by the Vietnamese for their power to magic artillery and air support through a handset. Sullivan’s incoming group was warned: ‘Remember that you guys aren’t even supposed to be here.’ He landed at a two-bit airstrip near the Cambodian border, which boasted a wrecked H-21 beside the runway and a sign by the control tower announcing that it stood two feet above the water level in the dry season, two feet below in the wet. The officer who drove a jeep up to collect him greeted him with ‘Hi Sullivan. Do you like eeny-weenies and cocktail onions? Our team chief gets a fresh shipment every two weeks.’

In the months that followed, the lieutenant and an NCO drove all over the delta with a huge crate of medicines which they dispensed in the villages, between inspecting strategic hamlets. Looking back on the craziness of their wanderings across a region already teeming with Vietcong, Sullivan reflected: ‘It was an adventure … There was no logical reason why we survived.’ He ‘tried to reach out to the Vietnamese’, but they seemed to function on a different voltage. Another adviser, Lt. Col. John Paul Vann, told Frank Scotton soon after the latter’s arrival in country: ‘Hell, I don’t even know what is going on across the river at night.’ Special Branch officer Capt. Phan Tan Nguu said of his relationship with CIA counterparts, ‘I only told the Americans what I thought they needed to know.’

An important 1962 Pentagon war game, SIGMA I, estimated that half a million US troops would be needed to defeat the communists. A subsequent SIGMA II examined an air-war option, and concluded that no amount of bombing would deflect Hanoi. The conflicting evidence and projections put before the policy-makers caused the various factions in Washington to box the compass with rival proposals, repeatedly changing their minds. Throughout the Kennedy era Pentagon brass favoured bombing the North – and opposed the commitment of ground troops.