The Atlantic and Its Enemies

12. America in Vietnam

In strange symmetry with his enemy Che Guevara, John F. Kennedy became an icon, film attached. He had been — at least given the infuriating late-fifties cult of Youth — the best-looking President ever, and, like Che, he had had a tragic, mysterious fate. When he was assassinated in 1963, the date — 22 November — became one of the very few that have sunk into the mass memory. The funeral was a very solemn and tragic affair, as the widow, herself a strikingly good-looking woman, veiled in black, held her three-year-old boy’s hand, as with his slightly older sister she walked towards the funeral service in the cathedral. The little boy touched the world as he saluted his father’s coffin. It is, again, an image that has never quite left the world’s retina.

It was a most extraordinary murder, in its way a descant upon the American dream, in the sense that a ‘loner’, Lee Harvey Oswald, product of a (very) broken home, failed volunteer for the military and the CIA and the KGB, acquired a gun, thanks to America’s lawlessness in that regard (he got it by mail order), and, his brain full of confusion, thought of murder. Kennedy rode in an open car through Dallas, Texas. Oswald fired, and killed. He was then himself caught, and was shot by a man with Mafia connections who himself was dying of cancer. There was easily stuff here for an Oliver Stone film, and for contorted conspiracy theories: even the considerable British historian Hugh Trevor Roper set himself up as an expert in ballistics to endorse one of these, as, towards the end of his life, he endorsed a preposterous forgery, ‘The Hitler Diaries’ (he had an addiction to betting on horses, generally unsuccessfully, perpetually needed money, and, in an otherwise distinguished career, made absurd blunders). Few people in the commentating classes could see, as did I. F. Stone, that Kennedy had been ‘an optical illusion’, and the outpouring of histrionic grief that followed upon his death was not equalled until the death of Princess Diana, grasping and manipulative, a third of a century later. But the neon enlightenment cast shadows. The strangest concerned his own family. The corrupt old father, Joseph, had a stroke in 1961 which confined him, fully conscious, to a wheelchair, and he lived for another twenty years. One daughter with depression had a lobotomy that went wrong and made her a vegetable (she too lived on and on). His oldest son had been killed in the war, two others were murdered, and another daughter, Marchioness of Hartington, was killed in a plane crash with her lover, Earl Fitzwilliam. The last son, Edward Kennedy, was lucky to avoid a charge of manslaughter; and the generation further on has also suffered. John F. Kennedy’s own son, the poor little boy of 1963, was killed while semi-trainedly flying an aircraft, carrying his wife (whose family then sued the Kennedys). It was the British writer Malcolm Muggeridge who as ever spoke for common sense with an inspired essay in the New York Review of Books, when he mocked the obituary literature as ‘plaster pyramids’ and showed Kennedy to have been a creation of the new media. Later biographies — Victor Lasky, Nigel Hamilton — left nothing standing of the legend. Besides, Kennedy’s legacy led to disaster.

Johnson was a politician from Texas who, like the fabled Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago, understood how to play Democratic Party games: between them, they had concocted Kennedy’s sliver of a majority in 1960. But Johnson was Texas-machine, on a vast scale, and he had been Roosevelt’s manager; he wanted to go into history as a new version of the great man. Kennedy had already referred to the ‘New Frontier’. What this would mean in practice was a sixties version of the Roosevelt New Deal in the thirties. The federal government would override the separate states and use the Supreme Court to bypass Congress in pursuit of general emancipation; it would spend money, even if that meant bending the constitutional rules, as Roosevelt had done. As things turned out, the deficits that then came up put a huge strain on the world’s financial system, which collapsed in August 1971. This led first to a fourfold and then an eightfold rise in oil prices, with baleful consequences all round. Kennedy began this.

The background was a great shift in American politics. The parties began — in part — to reverse their natures without changing their names. The Republicans were generally speaking Protestant in origin, their leadership East Coast and well off; now, some Republican parts of America, the north-east and its counterparts — migrant territory, such as Illinois — in the Midwest were gradually turning Democrat. The Democratic Party, historically, was a very odd alliance of Northern Catholics and Southern Baptists, whose chief concern was the rights of their generally backward states. Now, the Democrats of the South tended, more and more, to ally with Republicans on many vital matters such as states’ rights — meaning, in this case, racial segregation, and a general fear of the overriding power of the Supreme Court to change states’ ways. The Democrats, though still formally holding southern fiefdoms for some time to come, thus tended towards left-liberalism, and they adopted the Kennedy image, whereas the Republicans, though also divided, acquired what would later be called a conservative wing. In 1964 its candidate was Barry Goldwater, a senator from Arizona, who was made to seem almost ridiculously right-wing though he was no stupid bigot, and was personally a kinder and more upright man than Johnson (in Phoenix, Arizona, he had been good at stamping out corruption and had had a brave career in the air force, over the Himalayas, for instance). Still, he had only managed to win the nomination because the other candidate, Nelson Rockefeller, scored black marks for divorcing his wife of thirty-one years, and Goldwater manoeuvred himself into what appeared to be grotesquely reactionary positions — the abolition of graduated income tax, the bombing of North Vietnam, a denunciation of Eisenhower’s administration as a ‘dime store New Deal’. His electoral ship sank with all hands, though Ronald Reagan found a lifebelt.

The mood was now for political change, though, looking back, it is difficult to see quite where the urgency for this lay. The racial problem in the USA was indeed a great blot, and had been seen as such even in the days when the Constitution proclaimed equality. But there was much to be said for taking things carefully, even just applying the existing laws that protected individuals in the Anglo-Saxon manner. Health care was another great problem, and everyone had a horror story, though again there were not really any instant solutions that did not produce further problems of their own. That was not, in the sixties, a fashionable approach. In the first place there was a very powerful emerging weapon, television, which simplified everything, and the ‘conservatives’ did not shine there. Besides, the modern economy, and the American way of easy divorce, had resulted in a growth of what were later to be derided as the ‘soft professions’. The typewriter was already known as an instrument of female emancipation: secretarial jobs. The computer, though in its early adolescence, was even more to be such an instrument, and women were about to abandon the wife-and-mother role in millions. However the sea-change is to be explained, it happened, and Lyndon Johnson was very agile in riding it. He spent, and did so with the blessing of the fashionable economists. Politics was going to be polarized, in a battle between those who depended on public money, and those who paid it.

Johnson was a master at knowing when to cajole, when to bully, when to threaten. His energy was gigantic — working from 6.30 a.m. until 2 p.m. and again after 4 p.m. — and so was his Jupiterian temper. By Kennedy’s standards he was an exceedingly crude man, given to receiving bureaucrats and politicians for interviews on the lavatory, and there were gruesome anecdotes about his behaviour — urinating on his own grave plot while drunk and the like. He announced in Michigan University that ‘In your time we have the opportunity to move not only towards the rich society and the powerful society but upward to the Great Society.’ This was a response to Khrushchev’s ambitious claims, and it became the chief theme of his presidential campaign of 1964. Johnson pushed through a whole set of measures that remade the United States. To Congress in March 1964 he had said that ‘for the first time in our history it is possible to conquer poverty’, as his wife, Lady Bird, urged him to become a sort of Truman and Lincoln and Roosevelt rolled into one. Money was then used almost as a sort of internal Marshall Plan, with 2 per cent of the GDP to be spent, or $2bn per annum. The analogy was with the various New Deal agencies, and the men appointed were almost classic second-generation New Dealers — McGeorge Bundy (from an old Boston family), Robert McNamara from the Harvard Business School, and Walt Rostow from MIT: each one of them versatile and from the very top of academe. Harvard had an enlightened system, by which such brains were supposed (as, at the time, with Research Fellowships at Oxford and Cambridge) not to have to bother with the drudgery of a Ph.D. thesis, a chore for lesser talents (‘Mr’ was the honourable title) and Bundy was not only firmly ‘Mr’, but the youngest Harvard Dean in history. Rostow was an extremely interesting man who wrote a characteristic book of the age, now seeming rather naïve: Stages of Economic Growth (1960). It identified a moment of industrial take-off, when countries saved enough of their GDP to foster investment and thence an industrial revolution, and development economics went ahead, with an assumption that squeezing peasants would mean investment for big industry. This was a period when academics were supposed to have answers, and not just to be an interest group like others; university education was vastly promoted as an engine for progress. It was all rather good politics, in the sense that it made the Republicans appear to be in favour of poverty, which, said Johnson’s rival, Hubert Humphrey, would, if allowed to go on, become hereditary. It turned out, despite his efforts, that that indeed happened, the inheritance being from the lone-maternal side: a later book, by Allen Matusow, had the title How Not to Fight Poverty (1985). As Ronald Reagan later put it, ‘We declared war on poverty, and we lost.’ But such discoveries were a good decade in the future.

Roosevelt had had much trouble with the Supreme Court in the later 1930s. Johnson found that he could get around this, because he had an astute legal ally, Abe Fortas, and he could in effect ‘pack’ the Court. States’ rights were overborne, and so too, on occasion, were the provisions of Congress. But Medicare and Medicaid followed, paying for the elderly and the poor, both becoming much more expensive than any other system of health care, and yet also excluding many millions of people. A Mass Transit Act committed $375m of federal funds to subsidize public transport, particularly railways. A Higher Education Act gave funds for the education of the poor, in 1965, and in 1966 a Demonstration Cities Act gave funds for the abolition of ghettoes; a Housing and Urban Development Act followed, in 1968. Urban transport, landscaping, etc. were to be supported, at first in six cities, then in others. It all meant bureaucratic expansion, the more so when large areas were declared environmentally secured, and the arts (‘National Endowment for the Humanities and the Arts’) came up as well. Under Johnson, the educational spending rose from $2.3bn to $10.8bn and health spending from $4.2bn to $13.9bn. The costs of all this grew hugely, from $5.5bn in 1964-5 to $144bn by 1993. The ‘disadvantaged’ (as the poor, given the odd American addiction to euphemism, were now called) saw their share of overall spending rise from $12.5bn to $24.6bn in the sixties. But it all went together with spending on defence. That had risen tenfold since 1949, reaching $114.5bn by 1979 and running at about 4 or 5 per cent of GNP. America was heading for a great deficit problem, and in the sixties was already producing considerable inflation as the paper dollars were churned out. ‘The Great Society’ ran very sour, and for it all ‘Vietnam’ became the symbol. If it had not existed, it would have had to be invented. It too, despite the legend of JFK, had started with him.

The Vietnam problem had emerged in the first place from the collapse both of France and of Japan. There had been other, similar cases — similar, at least, in the sense that they all looked the same if you judged things with the wrong criteria, as, increasingly, number-obsessed American managers, with no particular knowledge, were inclined to do. The European empires in Asia had collapsed, but the American record in the area had not been bad — not at all: Japan, Taiwan and South Korea were starting to flourish, and, in the Philippines, American military intervention had quite successfully put down a Communist rebellion. The British had done the same in Malaya, had in fact had a legendary success in doing so. Why Vietnam was different is still an interesting question. For a start, it was not a unity, but until 1954 a French colony, acquired in the later nineteenth century, as a sort of failed stepping stone to China. The complications even began with the name. The French had called it Annam, a Chinese word meaning ‘conquered place’; Cochinchine, as the south was known, came from a Portuguese word that was itself a misreading of the Chinese characters for ‘Vietnam’. The French also used Tonkin for the northern part, and stressed the divisions, so as to rule more easily; and there were two associated countries, Laos and Cambodia, the whole being known as French Indo-China. Indian and Chinese influences had shaped the country, and Buddhism of various types reigned, but Catholicism had also been brought to bear. There was even a Moslem minority, the Chams, who spoke a language that was the link between the version of Thai spoken in southern China and Indonesian. There was rice, there was rubber, and the geography, from the great Mekong Delta in the south to the mist-swathed mountains of the centre, was very varied. Much of the trade was in the hands of the Chinese minority, who had a symbiotic relationship with river pirates who managed to develop a religious sect all their own. The French managed things easily enough in the days when they had the machine-guns and the Vietnamese did not. There was even an emperor, supplying picturesque legitimacy to the French presence. Then the Vietnamese acquired machine-guns.

They also acquired, and again courtesy of French lessons, a leader of genius who had much the same understanding as Mao had had, as to how technique from the West could be used to subvert the West. The Comintern had its adventurers, men and women who went from language to language and country to country stirring up trouble. Ho Chi Minh was the strangest. He started out with the usual twixt-and-between origins of so many Comintern stalwarts: his father, son of a concubine, nevertheless a mandarin; his schooling, from a French Foreign Legionary with a foul temper; an escape, as stoker, to France, where there was a spell of market-gardening, and then London, where he assisted the great Escoffier in making pastry for the Savoy. In the First World War the French shifted 100,000 Annamites to dig trenches, and Ho picked up Marxism from two Hungarian-Jewish brothers who ran a hostel. The French socialists split in 1920 as to whether they should link up with the victorious Communists in Russia. Ho attended the conference that decided in favour, and signed the document. Then it was the Oriental Workers University in Moscow, where the Comintern taught its people how to take over countries, what were the levers of real power. Ho then moved east — Bangkok as a Buddhist monk, Hong Kong as a cigarette-seller. There, the police picked him up, and he had to be released when appeal was made on his behalf by a prominent British left-wing figure, Sir Stafford Cripps. In 1941, when the Japanese invaded Vietnam, he walked back in. This extremely thin, ascetic, chain-smoking figure with his TB and malaria, his multiple pseudonyms (of which Ho Chi Minh was one, and meant ‘bringer of light’) soon met another clever product of French Marxism, Vo Nguyen Giap, who turned out to have a superb talent for underground warfare. In May 1941, in a small hut, with bamboo tables, they staged the ‘eighth plenum’ of the Vietnamese Communist Party. Ho, chairman, sat on a wooden box and drafted the introductory statements, which are not inflammatory reading. The new organization, essentially popular-front Communist, had the name Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh, or Vietnamese Independence League. It was shortened to ‘Vietminh’ and was then known as ‘Vietcong’.

In 1945, when the Japanese collapsed, Ho Chi Minh could claim quite simply to be the leader of a nationalist resistance. Giap had organized resistance cells among the peasantry, five to a cell, and, in accordance with the usual practice, did not reveal cells’ existence to other cells. They just took their orders from an unknown source — that committee meeting in a bamboo hut. Having used non-Communists in the resistance, Ho and Giap set about eliminating them when the Japanese surrendered (including all Trotskyists, who had illusions that there might be a ‘native’ revolution independent of Moscow). Ho knew very well that help from Moscow would be decisive, but here, as a pawn in Moscow’s game, he needed to be careful. After all, the French were far more important, as potential allies, than any Vietnamese Communists and until 1947, when the Communists were expelled from the Paris government, Ho was required to co-operate with the French. They were very clumsy, not appreciating that their end of empire was upon them, and Ho gained allies. In 1949 China became Communist, and help was forthcoming from that quarter. It gave the Vietminh a commanding lead. By 1952 the French were facing an extremely difficult war, with brittle allies and uncertain American support; in May 1954 they lost a final battle at Dien Bien Phu, in the north. No doubt if Ho had been left to his own devices, he would have gone on to conquer the south. However, in 1954 the Soviets, anxious to spare France in case she signed up to the European Defence Union, pushed for negotiations at Geneva, and a South Vietnamese state came into existence. Ho’s North Vietnam established itself in the usual way, with a million refugees, mainly Catholic, fleeing from collectivized agriculture and the one-party militarized state. There were 100,000 executions.

Saigon, the Southern capital, was then a backwater of French colonial architecture, with its Hôtel Caravelle on the rue Catinat, where Graham Greene talked Pascal to despairing French officers in the stink of rotting vegetation in the marsh heat. It was not at all well organized, and there were battles of some depth between Buddhists and Catholics, while protection rackets pretended to be religions, and the drugs trade flourished. The picture was further confused because there were still French influences, and the refugees from the North made everything difficult. Some wished to take land, and that opened up a dimension of the Vietnam imbroglio which made it, for some academics, romantic: like Cuba, Vietnam was supposed to be having a ‘peasant war’. This was a situation well understood by Ho, perhaps via Mao, but certainly through his Comintern background. It was not so much a matter of class confict between poor peasant and rich peasant, but between poor peasants and their creditors; besides, within and between villages there were generally deeply felt and sometimes hereditary grievances that could be exploited by Communist guerrillas who knew the ground. By the later fifties, guerrillas from the North were infiltrating the South, carrying out attacks on landowners and government servants. As ever, the Communists presented at least an organization, whereas the Saigon regime, preoccupied with internal fighting, was helpless; it appealed to the Americans.

Kennedy’s advisers, in 1960, were unanimously in favour of giving help and in 1961 7,000 Americans appeared, giving instruction in ‘statebuilding’, i.e. teaching the Vietnamese to be democratic in the American manner. Beefy, gold-braided Americans now had to deal with the South Vietnamese ruler, Ngo Dinh Diem, and found him very difficult: an austere, chaste figure, given to lecturing them about a fashionable French Catholic substitute ideology, ‘personalism’. He had taken over the insufferable loftiness of the French higher administrative style, and he had worked out that the way to avoid awkward questions was to talk and talk. He talked and talked, and the power at court was his sister-in-law, who banned divorce. Still, the Americans had had to deal with tiresome Asiatics in the past; these were not to get in the way. Strangely enough, it was only Johnson who had his doubts: ‘I don’t think it’s worth fighting for and I don’t think we can get out.’ De Gaulle (‘a rotten country’) also advised him against going in, but the academic advisers were all adamant.

This had been successfully — very successfully — done elsewhere in Asia, most obviously in the case of a Japan that was now lifted off on an extraordinary trajectory that would make her a world economic power, but also with South Korea and Taiwan. Colonization was not part of the programme: on the contrary, the American ambassador was expected to be avuncular and helpful, not domineering, and as a sign of this the embassy itself was not much protected — easy access and no bombproof windows. ‘Hearts and minds’ programmes taught English and showed Hollywood movies; a famous photograph showed a very slender Vietnamese boy wielding a baseball bat almost his own size at the behest of a protein-stuffed and well-intentioned soldier. Dollars flowed into Vietnam; so did advisers with the latest wisdoms of political science (in 1966 they staged a constitutional convention, as the country fell to pieces around them: some of the people present had even designed three constitutions and Samuel Huntington immortally remarked upon the ‘consensus-making bodies… viable institutions for power-sharing which would gradually lead to the legitimation of the entire governmental framework’). In all of this, security of body and soul naturally came first, and the Vietcong would have to be contained and defeated, the Americans helping where necessary. But some means to gain the peasants’ loyalty was also of elementary importance.

At the time, influential writers were saying that the central problem of ‘Third World’ countries was the great imbalance in land ownership — huge estates, downtrodden peasants. The peasants, dirt-poor, could not buy anything, so native industry did not develop; the rich just imported goods via some comprador class. Such was Sicily in the nineteenth century, such was Latin America in the twentieth (Barrington Moore is an outstanding writer on these subjects). The answer was for governments to intervene and give land to the peasant. Japan and Taiwan had had land reforms, for political reasons, and these were thought to have been successful, in that societies with an element of equality had emerged. There was much more to this story than met the eye. The most successful agriculture was practised (outside the great empty plains of America) in England, which even in 1930 had more land under the cultivation of great estates than Tsarist Russia in 1916. But in the decolonizing era, landowners were an obvious target for expropriation, and the contented, picturesque peasant made for good propaganda. In South Vietnam the growers of rice for export had thrived in the French period, and they were influential in Saigon. That they were Catholics, and the peasants generally not, mattered; the prevalence of the Chinese minority in the whole trade also mattered; and sometimes there was not even a language in common between lord and peasant.

Diem knew the complications, but his Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) was ragtag and his writ hardly went beyond Saigon. Efforts at land reform went slowly and badly, and the Vietcong, launching guerrilla attacks, made matters far more difficult. Peasants were herded into agrovilles and had to walk for hours to reach their plots; there was much bribery in the sale of, for instance, rat poison, and it was sometimes difficult for peasants to stop squatters from occupying their land. Surrounded by barbed wire, but badly defended, the peasants became demoralized, and the Vietcong knew how to exploit the situation. One of their first acts was to murder people who had the peasants’ confidence, such that, leaderless, they would be an open target. The reform programme, never enthusiastically pursued, was largely abandoned, and in Long An province only 1,000 tenants out of 35,000 received any land at all; many were expected to buy it whereas the Vietcong ‘gave’ it. Diem, surrounded by relatives — half of his cabinet — hardly knew what to do, beyond keeping the old system going, however bad, on the grounds that anything else would have been worse. The rural scene would no doubt have got better, as peasants moved to towns, reduced overpopulation and sent money home, as happened in happier climes. That was not to be. As the journalist Neil Sheehan says, ‘the Americans… were not gaining the communities of controlled peasants they sought. They were instead fostering temporary encampments of peasants motivated as never before to support the Vietcong.’

How were Americans to deal with assassins, clutching an old rifle, waiting for hours in ambush, their feet rotting in the rice paddy slush? Guerrillas who moved with great cunning to terrorize peasants in their huts? There were very good American officers, and one such was Lieutenant-Colonel John Vann, who had made his mark in Korea, and went to Vietnam as adviser — a man of enormous energy, a good organizer and brave without being foolhardy. He knew only too well what was going wrong in Vietnam. He had to deal with a Colonel Huynh Van Cao in the Plain of Reeds, the north-western corner of the Mekong Delta. It was close to the Cambodian border, where the Vietcong had sanctuary, and was a vile place to fight — swamp, waist-high reeds, clumps of bush and woods, stretching over two provinces. There were concrete blockhouses at the bridges, with rusting barbed wire, among fields of sprouting sugarcane, with canals, ditches and, in the season, a steady downpour. It was easy enough for the Vietcong to hide, where necessary in the water, breathing through a hollow reed; and they could come and go, noiselessly, on flat-bottomed boats. They would wait patiently, suddenly emerging to fire. The Saigon government had in effect lost the southern delta, and the northern delta, with its 2 million people, supplied much of the country’s food.

Colonel Cao had written a novel and talked windy French ideology; the French had not trained Vietnamese officers until late in the day and the soldiers, paid ten dollars per month in Saigon piastres, were not enthusiastic for the cause. On night patrol, for instance, they would cough, to warn Vietcong to keep away. If trouble came, American air power would be used, and the peasantry suffered from such indiscriminate firing. Vann became especially angry when a battle went hopelessly wrong at a village, Ap Bac, in the eastern part of the Plain of Reeds, early in 1963. The Vietcong had suffered from American helicopters in particular, but wished to show the peasantry that they had not been beaten. They had studied the situation, and worked out that, if they aimed in front of a passing helicopter, they would hit it; and they used captured American machine-guns. Now, holding a well-camouflaged zigzag line along irrigation ditches, which had small embankments and a dike on the outer edge, they threatened the South Vietnamese positions. On that side, what could go wrong, did — artillery firing inaccurately, American helicopter pilots resenting direction by South Vietnamese, landing in the wrong place, there to be shot to pieces; armoured vehicles pushed across impossible swamp; napalm dropped on peasant straw huts; Colonel Cao going into a huff and refusing to fight at all. A total of 350 Vietcong defeated four times their number, at that with fighter bombers, and five helicopters were lost. Reuters and Associated Press had been present to see the mess, and John Vann, in private, briefed them. He had been especially dismayed at the remoteness and serenity of the senior Americans — General Paul D. Harkins, swagger stick, gold braid, impeccable uniform, playing the part in a Hollywood movie about the Pacific war; the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, extraordinary two — dimensional energy, suit, writing down every figure he could in a little notebook for transfer into some machine that would mathematize everything (and produce the inevitable conclusion that the United States would win).

By 1963 much of the countryside was ungovernable, unsafe to travel in, and the Americans’ support encouraged the Catholics in charge of affairs to act high-handedly. In the summer, surrealism supervened. To the Catholics, the Buddhists were backward and absurd — a dozen and more squabbling sects, 750,000 monks who were, strictly speaking, parasitical. Their involvement in the sectarian protection rackets was dangerous, and they had links with the Vietcong. The Diem regime tried to control the Buddhists; a 73-year-old monk adopted the lotus position, arranged his saffron robes, covered himself in petrol, and struck a match. His example was followed, and Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu — wife of the president’s brother and adviser — clapped her delicate little hands in glee at the ‘barbecue’. Ugly episodes followed — the police manhandling protesting nuns, students, even young girls from school, some of them children of well-placed officials. That summer, there were further self-sacrifices by monks, and into this stepped forceful Americans, their patience barely under control. The ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, talked to the generals, and Diem was killed after a coup led by Duong Van Minh and despite an American safe-conduct. When, three weeks later, Kennedy was killed, his wife received a barbed letter of condolences from Madame Nhu.

The South Vietnamese now fell back, often enough, on passivity, expecting the Americans to do everything. One immediate consequence was an overloading of the American machinery: for instance, security had been left to the South Vietnamese, and a suicide car-bombing at the embassy in Saigon killed twenty and wounded 126, mostly Vietnamese, in summer 1965. Not even the glass had been reinforced, or covered with plastic. As Vietcong authority grew, so too did the number of Americans. By the spring of 1965 the South Vietnamese were taking $500m per annum, but this somehow did not give them a workable government. As William Bundy, a foreign affairs adviser, said, the government was ‘the bottom of the barrel, absolutely the bottom of the barrel’. There was even briefly a nonagenarian in charge. The problem as regards Buddhists continued — they sacked the American library in the city of Hue, for instance. It was not until the summer of 1966 that the Buddhist movement was (bloodily) crushed, but in towns and cities such as Hue it was the Vietcong that profited from the resulting hatreds. Meanwhile, South Vietnam became memorably corrupt. Import licences for cement were such that the entire country could have been paved over; theft from the PX was gigantic, even involving a computer worth two million dollars. Inflation had wrecked government salaries, so that corruption became the only means of survival — a provincial chief, with a family, could not survive on $200 per month, and there were networks of black-marketeering, involving wives, often enough, such that the Vietcong could obtain anything they wanted. Some Americans understood the situation well — Vann’s associate, Douglas Ramsay, who spoke the language, acquired the locals’ confidence, became a target for the Vietcong, and survived seven hellish years in their prison cages. The guerrilleros’ grip on the countryside was such that the roads to Saigon were mined, again and again, and Vann himself rode around in an unmarked pick-up, without ostensible defences.

The Saigon government considered just abandoning the five north-central provinces, more or less difficult to hold, given the enemy’s safe supply road through Cambodia. In black pyjama-suits, the Vietcong could even infiltrate American airbases and use mortars against them, knocking out a dozen planes; at the end of 1964, undetected, they encircled Saigon and planted a bomb in an American hotel for officers on Christmas Eve. The bombers had perfect intelligence, had had South Vietnamese uniforms, had even studied how these soldiers smoked. A little later they brought off a similar coup against an airbase at Pleiku. Against such an enemy, the American tactics of bombing and aerial machine-gunning from gunships were ineffectual, or even made the problem worse, because peasants, their homes wrecked, would support the Vietcong.

Johnson could not quite understand the passions that went into the Vietnamese resistance: why could Ho Chi Minh not just be bought off, with some enormous project to develop the Mekong Valley (1965) in return for concessions to end the war? He would have, with great reluctance, to increase the American commitment. In August 1964 he profited from an incident of naval attack in the Gulf of Tonkin to take authority for the war — Congress gave it, with few serious dissidents — and was determined to Americanize the war altogether: ‘power on the land, power in the air, power wherever’. On 8 March 1965 came a decisive moment. The Marines landed at Da Nang, on the central coast, and heavy bombing began against the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a network of tracks through the jungle. Overall, the plan was to bomb North Vietnam in such a way as to show Ho Chi Minh that he must give way, and three times the weight of bombs used in the Second World War was duly dropped — 6 million tons. On the other hand, Johnson was very anxious to spare civilians, and every Tuesday he held a lunch where he himself specified the targets and bomb weights. Quite often — sixteen times — he ordered pauses in the bombing, hoping that the North Vietnamese would come to terms as, in the end, the North Koreans had had to do. There were seventy-two ‘peace initiatives’. None had any effect. The American ambassador in Moscow at one stage sent a letter inviting negotiations, and it was returned unopened.

By the middle of 1965 there were 50,000 American troops on the ground, who had been well-trained for the wrong war, and the military authorities said they needed many more. By November 1965 there were 250,000. Soon there would be half a million. Their arrival transformed the country. A colossal effort was made, with extraordinary ingenuity in engineering, to build a base at Cam Ranh Bay, 200 miles from Saigon, with six panoramic jet bases, carefully protected from infiltration. The Mekong Delta was dredged, to create a 600-acre island used as a secure camp site; six deep-draft harbours were rapidly set up, the pieces, prefabricated, towed across the Pacific. The base had forty ice-cream plants, and enormous deep-freeze facilities, such that on alternate days the electricity in Saigon was shut off. All the Americans’ food was flown in, and the enormous PX arrangements (at Cholon, on the scale of Bloomingdale’s in New York) meant that there was an equally enormous black market in stolen American goods of all sorts. Saigon itself became disgusting — heaps of uncollected rubbish, dogs and cats rooting in them; rats and stray dogs everywhere; drug-dealers, whores, GI bars, refugees pouring in from the stricken countryside. By 1971 the Pentagon said one third of the men were on drugs.

At this stage, the Americans’ tactics were simple enough. As Sheehan rightly said, men of limited capacity, who knew their limits, would just go on doing what they knew they were good at; anything different would bewilder them. General William Westmoreland was one such. He replayed the Korean War. ‘Operation Rolling Thunder’ went ahead, with huge quantities of explosives dropped on what were known as ‘free zones’. Westmoreland gave press conferences at which he outlined the stages in which the war was supposed to come to an end — in this case, quite precisely, November 1968, while McNamara busied himself with his mathematics on the subject, and his deputy, Cyrus Vance, established an air-mobile cavalry division, with Huey gunships, firing rockets from side-pods. In November 1965 there were already battles of some scale with North Vietnamese regular soldiers who had come down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and, given the patience and ingenuity with which these troops waited in ambush, with Soviet weaponry, the battles were testing for the Americans. Their firepower could reduce fishing villages to rubble but there was nothing they could do to prevent the Vietcong from reoccupying the rubble, and there were grotesque episodes in which tactics of attrition were used in rice paddies, complete with ‘Zippo jobs’ on thatched village huts that could be ignited with a flick of a cigarette lighter. There was not much, either, to be said for the use of herbicides (‘Agent Orange’) to destroy vegetation, and hence cover for the enemy. Immense areas of forest were destroyed every year — in the whole war, 12 million acres, together with 25 million of farmland. B52s, in waves of three apiece, would attack a ‘box’ of two miles’ length and 1,100 yards’ breadth, with huge bombs, dropped at will. The aircraft also never flew lower than 3,500 feet, and thus were unable to pinpoint their targets.

Even the army Chief of Staff complained how ‘indiscriminate’ had been ‘our use of fire-power… I think we sort of devastated the countryside. ’ By 1966, there had been 2 million refugees and Saigon itself rose in population from 1 million to 3 million — rubbish cities, impossible to patrol or govern, except through mafias, of which the Vietcong were obviously one (Samuel Huntington remarked that ‘in an absent-minded way the United States in Vietnam may well have stumbled upon the answer to wars of national liberation’ — i.e. clear out the peasants who were then thought to be their principal support). All in all, up to 1974, there were 1.16 million civilian war casualties, at least half of them by US action from the air. By the time of the January 1973 ceasefire, an area the size of Texas had received three times the bomb tonnage dropped on Europe in the Second World War (though the air force complained that it had been forbidden to touch essential targets — Hanoi itself, or the port of Haiphong, or the Red River dykes, the collapse of which would have destroyed the country).

The North Vietnamese put up an extraordinary effort. They faced an exceedingly difficult situation, in that their Soviet and Chinese patrons were at odds — the ‘Sino-Soviet split’ which had the two sides bombarding each other with insulting messages and at one stage even produced combat over a disputed border. The Vietcong inclined towards the Chinese, and from them acquired, in 1962, 90,000 rifles and machine-guns. There was a prodigy of effort involved in the Ho Chi Minh Trail which brought weaponry to the guerrilleros in the South. At first the trail had been primitive, but in 1964 a railroad was constructed: in 1964 10,000 soldiers had gone south every month, but by 1967, 20,000. The Trail became a very elaborate network, with tunnels and several branches; it supported 170,000 North Vietnamese troops in the South. The heart of the military problem, for the Americans, was that they had to move out in small groups, probing for a much larger Vietcong force that would withhold fire — in May 1968, at Hue, even with 500 Americans set against 20,000 Vietcong in difficult country. Besides, the weakness of their allies meant that Americans had even to do small-scale patrol work. Now, they also had to undertake what resembled a frontal war, as the North Vietnamese came in via the tunnels or through Cambodia. There were set-piece battles in the absurdly named DMZ (‘demilitarized zone’).

Giant bombing raids were astonishingly ineffective, against North Vietnamese troops that could continue with slender resources — a mere fifteen tons every day — and the entire electricity supply of North Vietnam was only a fifth of that in Alexandria, Virginia. The dockers in the North learned how to cope with the threat of bombs, and imports from China more than doubled between 1965 and 1967 (to 1.4 million tons): barrels of oil went by barge along the canal network. The attrition campaign in effect damaged the Americans more, in that they lost 700 aircraft by the end of 1967. The Americans compounded their own problems by sending draftees home after a year, which meant a constant influx of inexperienced and, in the end, very reluctant young men, and it was remarkable enough that they did not run amuck, as such soldiery could easily have done. Of course, they resented the local people (‘staring at us as if we were from Mars’, said one) and there was a celebrated incident in March 1968 when at a village called My Lai peasants were killed by American soldiers, enraged at the endless obstinacy and guile of the enemy. McNamara had been obsessed with his ‘bottom line’, in this case dead enemy. The corpses were supposed to be counted, so ambitious soldiers gave him them. There was even an absurd system for spotting concentrations of urine below in the jungle, and many peasants died therefrom. One consequence was what gave Huntington his preposterous looking-on-the-bright-side. There were 2 million refugees in the cities, especially Saigon, by 1967. The Hao Hoa sect-gang did a deal with the Vietcong in order to operate a black market in the products distributed under the aid programmes: tractors were simply bartered. Meanwhile in Saigon Westmoreland presented multicoloured charts for the press, some of which was beginning to adopt derision. He defended the tactics with an all-American metaphor: that the alternative was like using a screwdriver to kill termites: if you overdid it you brought the house down. It was all an invitation to revenge, even suicidal revenge. The Americans had scotched their snake, not killed it, and it bit back.

In the early hours of the morning of 31 January 1968 two ancient vehicles drove up to the American embassy compound, and nineteen men jumped out, to plant explosives in the wall. The guards shot back, but one of the Vietcong managed to reach the embassy building itself, and got in. The shooting went on all night, until, finally, one of the diplomats killed the infiltrator. The Vietcong had prepared very thoroughly — smuggling the explosives in rice lorries, and using, as agent, a chauffeur who had worked for the Americans for years. Nor was this the only attack: the radio station itself was seized by fourteen men who had been training for three months, and there were lesser troubles all over Saigon, the worst when the Vietcong broke into the house of the chief of police, shot him, and slit the throats of his wife and six children. Another police officer, who had been godfather to one of the children, caught one of the men, held a gun to his temple, and fired. The young man’s face, freezing at the very moment of death, made one of the most famous photographs of the war. The godfather’s reputation never recovered from this characteristic photographic lie (the photographer later ‘apologized’). These attacks and many more like them were called ‘the Tet offensive’, and it counted as a humiliation for the Americans. By then, opposition to the war had been building up inside the United States. It was based largely on conscripts’ unwillingness to go to a Vietnam the scenes of which were nightly shown on television. ‘Tet’ was the Vietnamese New Year, which began in February, and the American generals had previously been very optimistic: but for the Vietcong to be able to attack so widely, and to reach targets that were not only spectacular, but also happened to be within easy reach of television cameras, appeared to be a tremendous coup.

But the reality was different. In the first place, there was a classic piece of fraud. A truce had been arranged for the New Year, for the sake of the ordinary people, and it was broken; many Americans were celebrating, and firecrackers masked the sound of gunfire. Besides, the attacks, however spectacular, all failed, with heavy loss of life to the attackers, and there was no popular uprising. General Frederick C. Weyand, near Saigon, had expected the truce to be broken, had prepared for an attack, and fended it off easily. In the north, on the border, 6,000 Marines held a base at Khe Sanh for seventy-seven days of battle, and this was presented as another version of Dien Bien Phu, the great French defeat in 1954. But the truth was that the Marines, in holding the place, lost on average three killed and twelve wounded every day, whereas the Vietcong casualties were much heavier, and in any case the essential problem at Dien Bien Phu had been the failure of the French over supply, whereas at Khe Sanh the C123 transports had no such problem. The ‘Iron Triangle’ north of Saigon was notoriously difficult to defend because of the relative freedom of approach roads for an attack, and the Americans had done well in the circumstances. Qualified observers have since said that the Vietcong’s southern element was dealt a tremendous blow by their losses, and that, thereafter, the North Vietnamese regular army predominated.

The curious aspect was that the American media presented Tet as a terrible failure. Newsweek talked of ‘the agony of Khe Sanh’ and Walter Cronkite on CBS referred to it as a ‘microcosm’ of the South Vietnam ‘problem’. Later on, Vietnamese Communists themselves admitted that Tet had been a disaster — 60,000 killed, as against 10,000 Americans and South Vietnamese (though also 14,000 civilians). Two American writers, very hostile to American intervention, Don Oberdorfer and Frances Fitzgerald, note that Tet was a failure, though of course very spectacular. Why did it have such an effect on American educated opinion? It did, and the role of the media was analysed in extraordinary detail by Peter Braestrup. Part of the problem was purely technical, in that getting a ‘story’ out meant seventy-two hours over thousands of miles: satellite broadcasting was still in a very early stage. Accordingly, journalists in Saigon — 464 of them, tending to repeat each other — were best placed to send out film of the various troubles in the capital, and as one of Braestrup’s informants said, ‘the networks see no harm in running a stand-up piece… by a guy who has just come in the country two days earlier’. The many positive aspects were ignored — the fact, for instance, that there had been no South Vietnamese defections. Was a central problem the fact that the American military did not know how to ‘manage’ the news? Westmoreland himself breathed confidence, and came across as a buffoon.

A war started between the media and the White House, and there were grand defections, including John Kenneth Galbraith, high priest of the Rooseveltian New Deal, and even Senator J. William Fulbright, who had done much for the spreading of democracy under an American aegis. The younger generation of the Johnson team broke off, and Johnson himself became demoralized, sometimes breaking down in tears. McNamara himself broke off, and went to head the World Bank, though his ministrations did not make a positive difference in all but two of the economies he treated. The fact was that Johnson’s nerve had already been badly weakened by the failure of the ‘Great Society’. He had been overawed by the grand Galbraiths and McNamaras; now they were making him take the blame.

The disaster was clear: America was losing, and doing so at much cost. There were to be nearly 50,000 battle deaths, over 150,000 cases of wounds severe enough for hospital, and over 2,000 missing. Two million Americans saw service in Vietnam but even then it was a selective business: conscription (‘the draft’) was theoretically universal, but in practice seldom hit young men who could ask for deferment on grounds of education, and education was a very broad church. The army took a dim view of homosexuals and exempted them: there were volunteers for that. Blacks and the working classes (and the inevitably enthusiastic Virginians) were disproportionately represented in the draft, which took 100,000 men for Vietnam in 1964 and 400,000 in 1966. There were protests across the land, and the universities, though not in truth much affected, were in ferment. Demonstrations and the media desertions caused collapse in Johnson, whose hopes for the reputation of his presidency were smashed. In March 1968 he made a dramatic announcement on television that he did not intend to run for President again.