Examining the Myths of the
Vietnam War
SESSION 7 (TRANSCRIPT)
War Stories Part II -- The
View From Headquarters
Jim McLeroy: [missing]
To broaden the scope of the examination of the development of
the war chronologically but focusing on four different aspects of
it. The Legislative, Executive, the Military and the Media
aspects and the panelist are Dr. Bob Turner, Dolph Droge, Max
Friedman, and Bill Laurie. Dr. Turner has an extremely impressive
and long resume but rather than read it it is very, very
distinguished -- I am sure you will explain this, he is a
professor and an expert in so many ways on the subject that it is
truly an awesome resume, so I wont to try to read it all
just to give you an idea of his background. Dolph Droge was a
former White House National Security Counsel Specialist and he
was with the Air Force in the Korean War. He has worked for the
US Information Agency in Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Voice of
America, AID and on the National Security Councils of Presidents
Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan. Max Friedman, he is a journalist and
researcher on Vietnam, terrorism and international affairs. He
was a MACV accredited correspondent in South Vietnam for Human
Events and he was inside the anti-war movement for a year and
later testified before the Senate internal security sub-committee
on the extent of subversion and campus disorders. Bill Laurie
spent two tours in Vietnam; first assigned to MACV in 1971 and
1972 as intelligence officer and then from 1973 to 1975 he was a
Defense Attaché attached to the US Embassy, Defense Attaché
Office, but he traveled all over the country and particularly in
the Delta so he is going to [cover the Military aspects]. Dr.
Turner is going to focus on the Legislative influence for about
20 minutes and Dolph Droge on the Executive aspects for about 20
minutes, Max Friedman on the Media for about 20 minutes and Bill
Laurie on the Military aspects for about 20 minutes and I will
keep the time a little bit so we do not run over and starting
with that, then I will turn this over to Dr. Turner for his first
presentation. It is not limited to the subject course but that
would be the general focus.
Dr. Turner:
It is a pleasure to be here. My main function at this program is
going to be tomorrow morning at 8:30 when I have got 90 minutes
and I will tell you a little more about my background at that
point to the extent it is relevant, but the two things I want to
say first; one I am not a war hero, I may be one of the very few
in the room. I went to Vietnam first in 1968 as a journalist. I
came back twice as an army officer but because I had done my
undergraduate honors thesis on the war and had had the good
fortune of when DIA and CIA were getting it wrong on predicting
who is going to succeed Ho Chi Minh and Hanoi. The embassy in Saigon
got interested in me when I was a lieutenant and I did an
extended TDY and then a later tour where I was supposed to be a
Province advisor but in fact they put me back in the North
Vietnamese affairs part of the Embassy, the same shop that
Douglas Pike used to work in. Douglas was a good friend but I
have spent much of my academic career working on the Vietnam
issue from a lot of real ways. I did more than a 100 debates back
in the teach-ins. I was one of the very few students who thought
we are doing the right thing in Vietnam and I debated a lot of
the top anti-war leaders waiting for John ONeil to get back
and do the job right but I was actually in Vietnam when Kerry
made his splash that I followed. The other thing I want to
mention is I am on leave, I am on vacation this week. I am on
vacation because I want to be able to speak candidly and I do not
want anybody going back to my university and say hey this guy
said this and I do not like it because the first amendment even
applies to law professors. Anyway, my job is a hard one, when you
say did we win the war, did we lose the war? Well we won the war
and then we lost the war or as Douglas Pike put it, we snatched
defeat from the jaws of victory. Who is responsible for it? Well,
that depends on what you are talking about. McNamara deserves a
lot of the blame for his incompetence, his ignoring the combined
advice of the JCS and the CIA. Congress deserves a great deal of
responsibility I am going to talk about. The Press deserves a
fair amount of responsibility. I spent some time living in Press
centers and dealing with those guys. I say I was a journalist. I
had a press card. I had a friend who is an editor and he knew of
my interest and so he said would you like to go over and spend a
few months and look around and so forth and so I was not really a
journalist but I had a press card and got to live with them and
eat the cheap skate dinners and everything, so it did give me
another perspective on it. I finally worked in the Senate for
five years and was over there at regular intervals and came out
during the final evacuations. I saw, I was in 42 out of 44
provinces, one time or another in South Vietnam, Laos or
Cambodia, so I saw more Vietnam than most Americans all over
there but my job, while I qualified as an expert infantry man
when I got to Vietnam, it was never as a combat soldier and I saw
people die but it was, I did not do anything heroic and do not
have any hero medals and do not want to be mistaken for any of
the heroes that are in the room.
One of the great
myth of Vietnam, I am actually going to touch on two other myths
of them this morning is that Congress was bypassed in getting us
into Vietnam that somehow LBJ either ignored Congress because
they never declared war or LBJ lied to Congress to get them to
authorize the war. They often tell the same story, you know you
hear the same member get up and give a speech and say we do not
want another Vietnam where Congress is ignored and by the way let
us not give this President another blank check like we did in the
Gulf of Tonkin and you want to say, hey guy, you can play it
either way but you cannot really have it both ways but of course
you know John Kerry can show you again both ways and you can get
nominated to be President. The other one is that the one of the
most important lessons of Vietnam is you never send troops into
harms way without the support of the American people but
the reality is we had overwhelming support of the American people
when we went to Vietnam, it took several years of McNamaras
incompetence to lose it, as I will show you much of the
interpretation of the oppositions of war was mis-founded, that is
to say a lot of the opposition to the war was not doves who
wanted the Communists to win but rather super hawks or serious
thinking people who did not want us to waste a lot of lives for a
no win policy. We will talk about that in just one example. The
original commitment to defend South Vietnam (and I should really
be talking about Indo-China because it was really collectively
done as a commitment to defend South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia)
came in 1955, We re-ratified it in 1955 but it was negotiated in
late 1954 after the Geneva Conference. When we negotiated the
SEATO Treaty, the South East Asian collective security treaty,
the parties are listed on the screen, you all know them I think,
so I would not spend a lot of time on them. This was submitted to
the Senate, it was approved with one dissenting vote by vote of
82 to 1 and Article 4 of the Treaty made it very clear -- We were
making a commitment to defend the people of South Vietnam, Laos,
and Cambodia. The Treaty provided that each party recognizes that
aggression by means of armed attack in the Treaty area against a
party or any territory which the parties by unanimous agreement
may thereafter designate and they immediately designated the
States of Vietnam -- South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia as
Protocol States. Attack on them would endanger its own peace and
safety and agrees that in that event had to meet the common
danger in accordance with constitutional procedures or processes.
So this is a clear United States commitment approved by not only
two thirds of the Senate, by you know 40 something to one, about
98% margin of the Senate overwhelmingly. During that debate
senators said we are committing ourselves to action that may well
cost the lives of large numbers of Americans but we have to do
this because the security of South East Asia is vital to our
security.
There is a very
interesting book called the Irony of Vietnam: The
System Worked. It was written by Leslie Gelb a Democrat
policy planning staffer, the main author of the Pentagon
Papers, New York Times correspondent, hardly a
Conservative, hardly a supporter of the Vietnam War, and Richard
Betts, a professor at Columbia and they note quite accurately
that in early 1955 two senators Mike Mansfield and Hubert
Humphrey, who you will remember later became famous as antiwar
critics, began the Save South Vietnam campaign and Mansfield said
the United States had no choice but to support Ngo Dinh Diem.
Senator Humphrey accused US policy makers, that is, the
Eisenhower administration, of wavering, saying this was no time
for weakness and the fall of South Vietnam would threaten the
rest of Asia. This is in fact the history. John Kennedy -- no
American was a stronger supporter of South Vietnam -- in a
landmark speech to the American Friends of Vietnam in late 1956,
Kennedy said Vietnam represents the corner stone of the free
world in South East Asia, the keystone to the arch, the finger in
the dike and so forth. The whole security in the world basically
would fall if we lost South Vietnam. You talk about
Eisenhowers Domino Theory, well, Kennedy had exactly the
same idea. He was one of the strongest supporters. He was
introduced to Ngo Dinh Diem, both of them of course being Catholic,
through the efforts of Cardinal Spellman, and this was a personal
interest of his. He went on to say the independence of a Free
Vietnam is critical to the Free World in fields other than
military and so forth. Anyway, you are probably mostly familiar
with that speech so I wont read the whole thing.
Now again one of
the greatest myths of the war is that LBJ tricked Congress or
dragged them into war. I have a colleague at UVA who has been
Emeritus for 25 years I guess, quite old, who served on LBJs
Social Security Commission and he said they met with LBJ a day or
two after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. He said the President
spent the whole time lamenting about he did not know what to do.
He was under so much pressure from Congress to do something
decisive in Indo-China and he did not want to go to war but he
did not want to lose a country on his watch either and the tapes
that have now been released show the same thing. LBJ did not want
to go war but he was under all kinds of pressure from members of
Congress indeed. Some of the strongest pressure came from members
of Congress who later were strong supporters of blaming the whole
thing on either LBJ or Nixon depending on whether you are
Democrat or Republican.
I had the
interesting experience of testifying before the House Foreign
Affairs Committee -- it was either in 1987 or 1988 -- on the
origins of the War Powers Resolution. I have written two books on
that statute and I gather that is more books than anybody else
has done with that in the title at least if you do an amazon.com
title [search] and I was sitting next to Paul Finley. He got up
and said -- or rather-- when his turn came he told we had to pass
this -- he was one of the probably the most active Republican
cosponsor of the War Powers Resolution in the House -- he said we
had to do this to stop future Vietnams, to keep future Presidents
from dragging the Nation, kicking and screaming into these
conflicts you know against the wishes of Congress without any
approval and against the will of the people and so forth. When my
turn came I suggested we insert in the record a speech that he
had given in May 1961 in which he said among other things US
combat, he made references to Korea and how we should have
learned in Korea that if you do not make commitments you are
misunderstood and war is the result and he said US combat forces
are the most effective deterrent to aggression, we should
publicly offer them to South Vietnam immediately. No patriotic America
will ever criticize President Kennedy for committing combat
forces to protect freedom loving people from aggression.
Interesting, and then of course in 1973, he says we have to
prevent these future Vietnams against the little Congress out
there because he was a Republican so how dare LBJ take us into
the unpopular war.
Lets look
briefly at the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Congress has always
declared war by Joint Resolution. The Joint Resolution is a type
of statute. It is passed by both Houses and then signed by the
President. Of course a Declaration of War is a total anachronism
today. It is as much an anachronism as the power given in the
same sentence of the Constitution to grant letters of marques and
reprisal which used to be issued as an authorization to a ship
captain to engage in war and seize, you know, commercial ships of
other countries they are having a quarrel with. While
international law outlawed that practice in the 19th
century and in the 20th century international law
outlawed formal declarations of war or at least the type of
aggressive war with which they were always associated in the
international law. But Congress on several occasions has used
Joint Resolutions and, as early as 1800, the Supreme Court
declared that Congress could authorize hostilities by Joint
Resolution without formally declaring war and this statute said
specifically that the security of South East Asia was vital to
American security and that the Constitution and our obligations
under the [UN] Charter and the SEATO treaty where they are acting
under their constitutional processes as SEATO required, the
United States is prepared, as the President determines, to take
all necessary steps including the use of armed force to assist
any member or protocol state (that included not only South
Vietnam but also Cambodia) requesting assistance in defense of
its freedom. No question that authorized war in South East Asia
and they knew that. During the Senate debate in the Tonkin
Resolution, John Sherman Cooper, the ranking Republican on the
Foreign Relations Committee, had this colloquy with Senator
Fulbright who had introduced the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that was
called the South East Asian Resolution which really was not just
about the Gulf of Tonkin. Senator Cooper: Looking ahead if the
President decided it was necessary to use such forces could lead
into war when we will give that authority by this resolution;
Fulbright responded that is the way I would interpret it. Now
that is pretty clear, Fulbright later played around and so we did
not mean to be authorizing anything like this. He was lying
through his teeth. (Interestingly I was in Saigon on a
Congressional delegation in May 1974 when Fulbright lost his bid
for reelection to get the nomination of his party and I was
having lunch with a bunch of Vietnamese opposition legislators
and somebody brought in a note and they read the note he had been
defeated and everyone in the room cheered, even the opposition
people couldnt stand him.) Russell Long in discussing this
said I think it is time for Hanoi to understand as far as we are
concerned we have declared the war, we did it at the time of the Gulf
of Tonkin incident. Tom Eagleton one of the strongest critics of
the war although the existence of the resolution did not
make the war in South Vietnam any wiser or any more acceptable it
did make it a legitimate war authorized by the Congress.
John Ely, former Dean of Stanford Law School, a debating opponent
of mine of sorts who passed away a couple years ago, very
distinguished, one of the most respected legal scholars in the
country, wrote a book called War and Responsibility and,
looking back on Vietnam, he said as a Constitutional requirement
of Congressional authorization is historically been understood.
Congress does indeed appear -- years of denial and double talk
notwithstanding -- to have authorized each phase of the war.
Examples of early Congressional support; in 1955 they approved
the SEATO treaty with a single dissent. In 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution was passed 88 to 2 in the Senate, unanimously in the
House -- a total vote 504 to 2. LBJ asked for some money for his
activities in Indo-China. On its own Congress more than tripled
the money he asked for. In 1966 when LBJ asked for a $13 billion
supplemental and said specifically I want a roll call vote
because approving this money shows that Congress continues to
support the operation [and] what we are doing in Indo-China.
Three opposed it in the House, two opposed it in the Senate --
overwhelming support. In 1967, a $12 billion supplemental, the
opposition had increased so it was 385 to 11 and 77 to 3 in the
Senate. That is not opposition. That is, you know, the smallest
token opposition. There was overwhelming support for the war
until. and what the until is, is what happened when the John
Kerrys and Jane Fondas of the world started telling
people that the American soldiers were committing war crimes and
we were butchers and we were on the wrong side and Ho Chi Minh
was really just a nationalist and was a guy that people wanted
and we were blocking democracy and human rights and so forth and
when members of Congress started going home and people said why
are you supporting those baby killers and that napalming of
little children and it was very painful because most of them
could not find Vietnam on a map and so they started becoming
anti-war and the big thing that made that possible was of course
when Tricky Dick Nixon was elected President and took office in
January 1969. There was no reason for the Democrats to continue
supporting the war and so immediately it became Nixons war,
whole thing was his fault. He was out there, you know, as he was
running for Governor of California and secretly plotting to
convince Kennedy to send troops to Vietnam but was one of the big
lies that we continue to hear.
Now one of the
other great myths is that the public did not support the war.
Here is a reference to an early 1964 Gallup poll showing a strong
public disapproval of Johnsons handling of the war. Why?
Because people were reading the Communists were gaining and we
were not stopping them. But after Johnson called for a resolution
to permit him and actually used military force against North
Vietnam, his support zoomed to 85%. Here actually is the Gallup
poll. In July his public approval was 42%. In August after the Gulf
of Tonkin incident and the air attacks, it went up to 72%, a
30-point jump of 58% increased in his public approval. I only
know of one comparable job in American history since we have been
keeping polls and that was George W. Bush after 9/11 where he
shot up by a similar, I do not know if it was bigger or less but
it was a similar increase. Later Gallup polls in August 1964 more
than 70% said we were handling the war as well as could be
expected. In the 1965 there are 100,000 plus combat soldiers in Vietnam,
60% of those who had an opinion said it would be more likely to
support a candidate who favored sending a great many more men to Vietnam.
In other words they wanted escalation. September 1966, 60%
favored escalation. In February 1967 there were hundreds of
thousands of Americans tied down in a war, 75% favored continuing
the bombing of North Vietnam. In May 1967, 70% said we are
morally justified in going to Vietnam. By July 1969 well after
the Tet Offensive still almost two thirds approved the way Nixon
was handling the war but that truly misleading because Nixon was
saying I am getting our troops out, so you could have Hawks and
Doves both liking what he was doing. By September 1970, 60%
wanted us to withdraw; by June 1971 by a 2 to 1 margin Americans
felt we have made a mistake in Vietnam that would have not
happened had we fought the war with a serious military plan in
the beginning. It would not have happened had the Press
understood what was going on and told the truth about what was
going on by 1971, because by 1971 we were turning things around.
The only useful thing that Congress did during this period was
the August 1967 Armed Services Committee, the Stennis-Goldwater
Hearings where they brought McNamara up and confronted him and he
tried to say I bombed most of the targets that JCS has given me
and then they brought the JCS up and, twisting their arms
horribly, made them admit that McNamara was lying through his
teeth and a number of the Senators attacked McNamara. And Johnson
had the good sense to replace him at that point -- a few years
too late.
The Tet offensive
was decisive as a public opinion feature. It actually is
interesting. There are three myths of history in Vietnam. The Tet
Offensive, Dien Bien Phu defeat and the Cambodian incursion, all
of them in military sense were victories for the West, that is to
say the Communists suffered several times more deaths at the Dien
Bien Phu than did the French, even if you include the 6000 or
7000 POWs they took. The Tet [Offensive] was a horrible military
defeat for the Communists but the Press in this country did not
understand that. They misled the American people and it became a
tremendous military victory. Cambodia set back the Communists
tremendously and yet again because of Kent State and related
issues it became a defeat. One of the interesting things that comes
out of the 1968 vote for McGovern was of those people who
supported McGovern in the primary in New Hampshire a plurality by
the time of the election had shifted to George Wallace and Curtis
LeMay. You remember LeMay the bomb them back to the Stone AgeSAC
Chief. Javitz in 1966 said it is a fact, whether we like it or
not, by virtue of having acted on the Resolution of 1964, we are
a party to present policy. In 1966 my best friend John Norton
Moore wrote a massive, several hundred page, legal brief
defending the war. The American Bar Association House of
Delegates approved it. Javitz put a big part of it in the
Congressional Record and said there can be no doubt about the
legality of what we are doing and then in 1973, when the public
had turned against the war, he said the War Powers Resolution is
a bill to end the practice of Presidential war and to prevent
future Vietnams. That was a lie. It was part of a con job to
convince the American people that Congress was not responsible,
blaming their anger about Vietnam on the President, we are going
to take care of things. The War Powers Resolution was passed in
November 1973, very unconstitutional, very harmful to US
security. I will talk a little bit about that tomorrow. I would
just note that in the end of 1972, we had the war basically won
on the ground, again I will talk about that tomorrow. Here is a
quote from Stan Karnow noting that the South Vietnamese
government controlled 75% of the territory, 85% of its population
and not all of rest of that was undisputed, that is the
Communists did not completely control all the rest. They had the
war basically won on the ground by the end of 1972. The Chinese
and Soviets were very hesitant about giving further aid to Hanoi.
Hanoi shot up all of its SAM missiles and was totally vulnerable
to B-52 bombings, all we had to do was say misbehave and the B52s
are coming back from Guam, except things change and that is
Congress came along. This is to describe the notes that
Vietnamization worked. My late friend Bill Colby was CIA station
chief in Saigon in the late 1950s, probably was in Vietnam as
long as all but one tiny fraction of 1% of the Americans who were
over there, in very senior positions. Our views on the war were
incredibly alike from similar experiences, we both had traveled
extensively around the Delta in 1968 and in 1971, there was no
comparison in terms of security and he agreed we had it won by
the end of 1972.
In May 1973
Congress passed a law responding to the John Kerrys of the
world, here is the law: :notwithstanding any other provision of
law on or after August 15, 1973, no funds heretofore or hereafter
appropriated may be obligated or expended to finance the
involvement of US military forces in hostilities in or over or
from off the shores of [South Vietnam,] Laos, Cambodia unless
specifically authorized hereafter by Congress. Congress
passed a law saying the United States military can no longer
protect the people of Vietnam that John Kennedy and the US
Congress had promised to protect and also the people of Cambodia.
Galvin Best notes what changed from the time of Truman to Ford
was not the goals of Presidents but the attitudes of Congress. In
early 1975, a new Congressional majority had emerged that was
prepared to use legislative power to end American involvement in
the war. They also note they do not have the secret files yet --
this was written back in 1970s -- but most people seem to believe
that South Vietnam stood a better than even chance of holding on
and so on against North Vietnam if, with two ifs: one if Congress
would continue to approve money and the second if was if Congress
would do nothing to jeopardize the threat of American military
re-involvement to undermine deterrence. In particular Nixon and
Kissinger wanted to hold the option of bombing North Vietnam once
again. In 1974, they should have said May of 1973, Congress
legislated a ban on all future of American military involvement.
They cut military assistance to South Vietnam dramatically at a
time when they needed more money because the oil embargo --
remember the Arab oil embargo -- was driving up the cost of
petroleum several fold, they reduced aid tremendously from only
about two fifths of $700 million or about $280 million actually
reached South Vietnam before they were overrun.
I worked in the
Senate in those last years. I sat in the Senate floor and watched
Ted Kennedy repeatedly get up and say they have got millions of
dollars worth of equipment there. They do not need our money --
and they did. They had helicopters. There is no fuel or spare
parts. They had artillery, just nothing to shoot. It is amazing
how ineffective the howitzer is when you are being overrun by
North Vietnamese, all you can do is pick it up and swing it out,
not very useful at all. We need to keep in mind Ford was almost
powerless, Watergate had brought Nixon down. Ford was an
unelected President, had not even been elected as Vice President
and thus had no credibility to take on a Congress that had the
bit in its teeth. Pham Van Dong, the Prime Minister of North
Vietnam, said the Americans would not come back now even if we
offer them candy. Hanoi sent 21 of its 23 divisions, saving only
the 325th to protect Hanoi, in a conventional military
invasion behind columns of Soviet tanks that could easily have
been blown apart by our air power without any ground combat
involvement and we could not help the South Vietnamese. We sat
back. I was there at the end. I saw the eyes of those people as
we bugged out and left them behind and we know what ultimately
happened. I will talk about this tomorrow but the Communists went
into Cambodia and butchered about two million people, in South
Vietnam at least a 100,000 were executed, at least 500,000 are
estimated to have died as boat people trying to flee their
country, some of them starved, some of them died of thirst, some
of them were raped and murdered as they were being robbed by
pirates but the UN High Commission on Refugees estimated that
about half of the people that fled Vietnam in those little boats
never made it alive to shore.
[Applause]
Jim McLeroy:
Dolf is going to talk about basically focusing on the Executive
for about 20 minute so we can watch it.
Dolf Droge:
I was on loan to the White House because I criticized President
Johnson. And I had criticized him in a way, which was prompted by
people saying to me, well what can we do about the Vietnam
problem. Then I said President Johnson means well but the
Vietnamese are 2500 years old and if you are going to reach them
you got to understand they can book a voyage on the Titanic and
enjoy the trip. They do not have a problem with stamina under
pressure. They do have a problem with someone who does not
understand them. So Johnson kept saying we are going to win, kept
pushing that moment and pushing that line because he felt that
this was what he inherited from President Kennedy. President
Kennedy as he sat at desk realized the number one situation he
had to worry about was us. He had this as a side show left over
but it did not become a side show under him. It now became a
priority because Eisenhower told him you lose Laos, you lose your
ass. He never mentioned Vietnam. Eisenhower mentioned only the
fact that there in Laos you had this tremendous North Vietnamese
supply run. He also mentioned that the government of Laos was
very shaky and therefore he said I am training White Star teams,
I know that Laos is not a long-term commitment but we have to get
the White Star teams to train the Montagnards so the Montagnards
can pass that on to their kith and kin north of Hanoi and this
was Eisenhowers study of that map of population in
Indo-China. He saw that the teams that were training with the
White Star mission were going to actually be affecting the same
people that lived north of Hanoi, kith and kin. He wanted to do
this on the basis of that is how you hold on to this and he
briefed John Kennedy on this with no uncertain priority. So
Kennedy picked that up, took it for real, went in and accepted
that same commitment in Laos. As he did so, he also looked at
another problem and that was Cuba and Richard Nixon came over
from the Eisenhower administration and presented the Bay of Pigs
plan with the time lock on it. This must be accomplished by April
15, 1961 or we cannot do it at all. Now Kennedy looked at the
plan immediately but now on his desk arrives a 22-page trip
report and that trip report from Edward Lansdale. Lansdale, the
hero of the Philippines and mentor of Magsaysay, has now
gone to Saigon. He has come back from Saigon with his Lansdale
approach and Kennedy not only likes what he reads. He says
I want this man to be my ambassador in Saigon and I want
him found now in this government and he calls McNamara and says
you got a guy name Lansdale. He is working for Defense
Department (actually Lansdale was CIA but he was
sequestered to the Defense Department). McNamara never
heard of Lansdale, he said he will try to find him. Kennedy was
receiving a briefing on the Bay of the Pigs and that afternoon
was a Sunday and Lansdale has been located and comes in with
McNamara. He says to the generals that are there taking the
briefing on Bay of the Pigs, This is my next ambassador to Saigon.
He is the adopted son of President Ngo Dinh Diem. We are going to
have a different time in Vietnam if we can keep the Laos priority
under control. If we can change the whole operation in Vietnam so
we want that this emphasizing the north stays in the North and we
can defend the South if the South knows that, that defense is
coming and Lansdale is regarded as an adopted son by President
Ngo Dinh Diem. So this is the setting. Kennedy is caught
then when the North Vietnamese step up the attack on Laos, got
before television as his first crisis speech. He said Laos a
country of fishers and farmers, not even the National Geographic
could follow this but he had a map. It was on a lazy Susan. It
showed Laos before and then it showed Laos after and it showed an
attack of the measles that had broken out all over Laos coming to
that north east section and this was the big Communist push.
Kennedy also had on his desk ticking with the clock, the Bay of
the Pigs plan that had to be, according to Richard Nixons
timing, April 15 was the end of the possibility of doing what
they ever going to do because of a coordination of assassination
of Castro. On the very morning of the Bay of the Pigs the
training in Nicaragua of those freedom fighters coming up and
everything was closing in. If you want to see this in detail, I
am sure that the specialists in this room have already read it,
but go back to look at this marvelous book. John F. Kennedy,
President John F. Kennedy by Richard Reeves. Richard
Reeves got the Kennedy family to hand him the archives and you go
through the Kennedy presidency week-by-week and month-by-month.
You read memos he got and you read the reactions of the president
and his cabinet and his staff. It is an incredible book and no
holes are barred when Kennedy asked McGeorge Bundy how do we do
this better, McGeorge Bundy said I will send you report. It will
be a memo and he excoriated Kennedy for the Kennedy habits of
taking too much time with journalists, swimming in swimming
pools, fiddling paddle, the whole thing. I mean its a look
at the White House that I do not think any President has ever
before envisioned would be released to the people but
there it is and in the middle of this you see that the Laos
deadline is now pushing Kennedy to the wall and he was already
told the people we will go to war on this issue if necessary to
stop it and he is not just talking about Hanoi now he is talking
about the sponsors in China and the sponsors in the Soviet Union
and then he runs past the dates. He runs past April 15 because he
sent the commitment, put the troops in and responded in Laos but
running past April 15 causes another problem because that was the
date they said could not be changed. What was behind that date?
The Russian pilots had brought MiGs to Cuba. The MiGs were given
to Castro but Russian pilots went home and Castro would send his
pilots to Czechoslovakia to learn to fly those MiGs and they are
back in Cuba April the 16. They are operational in Cuba and that
means the Cuban freedom fighters, the exile movement, is going to
come in with propeller-driver aircraft and when only one flight
is permitted by Kennedy from the aircraft carrier support for the
beach that morning. The trouble is they have miscalculated the
time zone by half hour. So they are going to run an aircraft
sweep from the aircraft carrier over the beach as deserted, but
it is going to certainly tell Castro where he should be. However,
Castro should be dead at this moment because they had an
assassination that would take place at the same time in Cuba. It
was destroyed by a freak accident when a woman sat on the street
porch. You know she was out in the front porch. She was the
grandma. She had beans in the basket. She would sort through the
beans and this was to look for the security patrol as they came
up and down the street when it would stop at a light, in turn cruise
down, cruise back she could inform everybody in the house but the
house was full of the plotters and Kennedy plans for this were
timed on the basis that before the Bay of Pigs landing, Castro
will be dead. It was very early in the morning the security
police came up through a suburb and [stopped] at a stop light and
were looking down this road, anything unusual in this side,
anything unusual on that side and then out of an alley across
from the woman who is the only person who could see this visage
was a mad dog foaming at the mouth, coming out of that alley and
heading right for her. She screamed threw the basket in the air,
the security police noted this as a stoplight, they thought she
had seen them. She ran into the house. They came into the house.
The plot was dead. The plot had been uncovered. This was
described to us by the operative in CIA. This man was the man who
said it would have worked, it was Fitzgerald and he was in a
wheelchair and he sat there in the shadows and he told us what
happened. He said that is something you cannot control, even with
the CIA, a mad dog frightening a poor woman who runs in and
brings the security police on her heels. He is the dad of Francis
Fitzgerald who wrote the great antiwar Vietnam book called Fire
in the Lake which the Vietnamese read and called Fizzle in
the Pond. The rest of the Bay of the Pigs then hinged on the
aircraft carrier sending half hour early that flight on the wrong
time zone and an economy minded officer for maintenance down in Nicaragua.
Because he thought they were buying too heavy a weight motor oil
for the engines of the landing barges, so he got a big bonus
savings by taking the thinner motor oil, only it meant that the
engines ran slower and again they were very late arriving at the
Bay of the Pigs. The Castro Air Force was up not with MiGs at
that time in terms of the past history but now had MiG capability
and they shot out in the sky, all of the propeller driven
aircraft for those exiles and this is why Kennedy then made it so
personal when he said I and I am alone responsible for the total
failure at the Bay of the Pigs operation. Then he told Bobby. I
have never been more popular -- and that was a complete fiasco.
My God, my rating has gone through the ceiling. People support me
totally. I got to get used to this Presidency.
Now you see this
is behind them, his reaction to Vietnam because he is looking at
these things that did not go well now, he is looking at this
question of what to do well and then of course, as the history
moves on, the American public does not see any action in Laos
that forces the withdrawal of those forces, so we got a loaded
deck now and we have got a Vietnam commitment and we have got
Lansdale as the hope of the President and Dean Rusk sitting out
there in the land of the professionals said well you know I am
the Secretary of State so while Kennedy is all wrapped up in
these things I will pick my own Ambassador to Saigon and he
picked Fritz Nolting, a very good man, a Virginia man, but Fritz Nolting
did not have the friendship that Lansdale had. Lansdale was an
adopted son of the President. He called the president
Papa. Lansdale was surprised because this went
through quickly and Dean Rusks choice was made and approved
and Lansdale went back with his team months later but he said by
the time he got there Diem said you must not call me
Papa. It is undignified and he said I stayed
away too long. Lansdale however asked again by Kennedy
would you go back, would you be my ambassador now and Lansdale
knew that this was going to be make or break because now the
question of this whole situation that come to be what the
influence of Brother Nhu, of what is happening in Vietnam with
not only the battlefield situation but the political situation.
[Ton That Dinh] An adopted son of the President, President Diem,
started filling the CIA with information about what was going on
and Brother Nhu bugged the room where all the generals of ARVN
went down to My Tho where they plotted a coup. Brother Nhu had
the tape, played it for the President and said they are going to
have coup at what time: 4 oclock November 1, 1963. Nhu said
fine. We will have our coup at 3o clock. Our coup will
killed the staff of the American embassy, kill the families of
the American embassy and we will let them know with that blood in
the streets that it will be sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem. And
sent Madame Nhu to the American womans club circuit in America
to be there to orchestrate this event, explaining it to the
American people. You havent seen, you did not listen, you
do not support and you constantly conspire. So he was an
invaluable source for us because he was in the room as the
adopted son of the President and he could bring even more than
Lansdale could have got at this stage, so the coup was slated for
three, so then the generals and Ton That Dinh said we will move
then at one and when the coup came -- it started at one -- and
the police chief of Saigon called the President. I am on the
floor eating my lunch under my desk. A tank is on my lawn and is
firing at the shutters. I believe that I have to report this to
you sir and the President said to him, President Diem, it is very
early and hung up. Nhu started checking his sources. Planes came
to bomb the palace, Nhu and Diem disappeared out the back door
and went to Cho Lon and out of the Cho Lon now they were
negotiating to come back. The palace wreckage was there, the
entire city of Saigon walked through the palace, the phone rang.
Correspondents do not know where the phone is ringing. Ton That
Dinh picks up the phone, hello it is Diem and its Nhu and
they are calling for help from Cho Lon and he said you MF will
never get a thing from me, I did this to you. Im your
adopted a son because you went so far off the rails and you will
pay now. You are doomed. Big Minh accepted their surrender, then
they went to Lodge. Lodge just learned they were going to kill
the American families. They were going to kill the embassy staff.
All this was on the plan. The General then called a General from North
Vietnam. He would have troops dressed with North Vietnamese
Commando Garb and that was how they were going pass the
responsibility. In the weapons carrier that Big Minh brought with
him were Diem and Nhu. And Nhu needed a fix. He was heavy without
the drugs and he needed a fix and he was denigrating the guard
and the guards wife had died in one of Nhus prisons
and he was getting very angry. In the meantime, the conversation
with Lodge was not going anywhere because Lodge said you need
what? I need a plane in 24 hours Big Minh said, get him out of
here in 24 hours and Lodge said (and only American could say this
to Vietnamese without getting full effective of comedy) well I
could not get a plane in 24 hours and so the Vietnamese went back
downstairs. By this time Nhu had been killed by the guard who had
taken the razzing and then Ngo Dinh Diem was shot, transition was
in and Lansdale was glad he was not there. See, all of this was
Kennedys first year and then he takes over and tries now to
plan for the future but knowing the situation in Vietnam from
that point when Lansdale did not come back. He did not come back
as the Ambassador but he did come back. He said before he died Diem
told me I could not call him Papa any longer. I had
stayed away too long. So now they were checking everything to see
what would happen and Kennedy himself was being begged by Johnson
to go down and settle this quarrel in the Texas Democratic Party
and so the Bay of the Pigs was a failure. Kennedy admitted the
failure, and he never forgot what he still thought was the most
valid part of his briefing. You lose Laos, you lose everything.
Do not lose Laos. Kennedy did not lose Laos but the sadness is he
also never got a chance to work on the infiltration problem, the
Ho Chi Minh trail, anything else that could have been done in Hanoi.
It is history, it is painful history and when Lyndon Johnson came
in, Lyndon showed his cards very early when this coup took place.
Mike Forrestal had engineered the coup on this device. Kennedy
said I would not sign until everybody else signs. Mike called
Kennedy on the golf course and said they have all signed, sir,
and that was a lie. None of them had signed and now he got
Kennedy to sign and then each one called everybody back and said
now you are going to go. Now weve got the green light, so
here comes Lyndon Johnson past these exultant people because the
coup was succeeded, by the way Madam Nhu got a phone call
informing her she was now a homeless person. She was no longer a
wife of the second in power in Vietnam and she was a widow and so
that her life changed there, too. Come to this other scene, you
have got the story. Johnsons walking past Mike Forrestal
and the guys. They called him Vice President Cornpone, that is
their rubric for him, and he knows it and they walked past or he
walks past they say what do you think of it today that coup
worked and Johnson said well, Ah do not rightly know what
may happen next but Ah do know one thing for sure, you fellers
just killed the only two people who could have ordered us to get
the hell out of Vietnam and make it stick, legally they could
make it stick and I think we all have to ponder that and he
went over to his Vice Presidential office and sat down and
thought we got a problem on the agenda. This is the
inside look what a President would see and this is why President
Kennedy joked to Bobby, maybe I should have another disaster to
make my popularity soar but the next thing would be on the
retaliation line of John Kennedy himself because Lyndon Johnson
begged him, you got to come to Texas. You got to help me get this
divided Texas party between Connelly and Yarborough, a
conservative liberal. You got to get it done. So he said he would
go and when he got down to Miami, the Mafia there had the hit out
on him and the Secret Services said simply there will be no
motorcade in Miami a little way until we get the safe territory
in Dallas. So what I am saying to you is this is an intricate
thing but if you go back to the book and you read President
John F. Kennedy, you will get month by month what this man
wanted and the loss of Lansdale in his planning so early really
sealed the fate of what could have been a new policy for Vietnam.
On the other hand this is all from a spectators point of
view because I had been brought from the Voice of America to go
down and cover his press conferences. At the Voice of America we
were broadcasting to Hanoi and we had Hoang Van Chi on the air as
our commentator. Hoang Van Chi wrote the book From Colonialism
to Communism, a case history of North Vietnam. He had opposed
Ho Chi Minh, he knew the whole roster of people there and, for
your information, our effort in Vietnam was registering so highly
with the youths in Hanoi, they say wear black pajamas no longer.
They brought blue jeans off the black market -- the sons of the
elites -- and they played guitars and they sang songs entitled, I
do not want to go and die in far away war for an old man over 60
and all of this was reported there so we re-reported it for the
Vietnamese in the South, we got a lot going for us but it was
still Vietnam -- the eternal mystery. Thank you.
[Applause]
Jim McLeroy:
Okay, thank you, and now Max is going to discuss this from the
standpoint of media influence and chronologically see if he sees
fit.
Max Friedman:
I found out one thing in life, never volunteer for anything.
Never get close to anybody who can volunteer you for anything. I
should have been in another city yesterday but I got volunteered
for this somewhat out of the blue but actually it is something
that Dolf and I and others have been talking about for 30 some
years and what I am going to do is little bit of a show and tell
-- some personal things, some things are rather public and I like
to talk in vignettes because I was only in Vietnam for short time
and Cambodia but I was a journalist here. I covered the Hill and
I was in the news as much as covering it some times and you see
things. If you are happy as a reporter and you see something, you
are interested in the story. If you are lazy or you say it is not
my bailiwick, you pass off to someone else, other guys just do
not do anything with the story and I started out in college in
1965 pro-Vietnam. We had student groups. I had some letters from
the GIs that I used to correspond with and what I noticed was no
matter what the level of GI was, at some point -- Third Marines
over here, couple from other military units -- They were all
saying that they saw the Communist killing the people in Vietnam,
burning their schools, killing the officials. They were doing
really horrible things. These were kids, one was a high school
drop out, one was a high school graduate and one was a college
drop out, so there are three different levels of education. They
are all writing me the same thing to the guy they do not know,
all they knew I sent them some Christmas cards. So, so I began to
study Vietnam. I was lucky I came to American University for the
grad school and I was switching programs so I had people who were
in Special Forces in my class. I had Ken Landen who was a teacher
who was knowledgeable in Thailand and a guy with our group called
the McDowell Luncheon Group of which Dolf was a member and Mike
came in later, Bob. Here we are with a couple of Ambassadors,
Durbrow, Bernie Goh who was SEIKO in World War II in the China
Theater, then worked with Lansdale in Vietnam, a lot of OSS
people and I am hearing stories. When I hear them, Im a kid
from Baltimore, my biggest deal was meeting Whitaker Chambers, a
Soviet spy and Johnny Unitas, quarterback. I began to hear that
there was a real world out there and I was a kid -- the new kid
on the block. I was about 21-22 and I am listening and I always
thought, you know, sometimes you learn more by listening than by
talking and over the years I have come to appreciate who was
sitting there. Admiral Moorer would come in, Arleigh Burke would
come in, Dan Galley would come in, name somebody, Peter XXXX,
serving with the Federal Reserve, who help set up Accuracy in the
Media, and the one thing they had in common was complaining about
the media especially the Washington Post and its coverage
of Vietnam and also New York Times, these are the two big
papers we had here, LA Times we did not get too much. And
you are looking at it -- I am looking it as a student who is
studying this -- and listening to people who had been there and
listening to where they are picking up all things that were wrong
and things that were distorted and usually somebody said,
No, I was there, I saw it, this is not what happened.
Then television came of age in Vietnam and you are seeing what I
would call, they are not sound bites as such but they were
snippets of something going on, lets say a battle scene,
and thats it. There ultimately was not a context of what
else was going around and this was especially true in Tet but
according to most of the reporters the world was collapsing, we
were losing. It turns out to be exactly the opposite of Don Oberdorfer
wrote in his book Tet and Peter Braestrup did in The
Big Picture and I kept thinking I got to get to Vietnam. I
was studying at the college studying anthropology and studying
international affairs. I wanted to go to Vietnam, so I got
involved with a student group which eventually got me over there
in 1970 and I said you know, what is wrong with this picture? Oh,
in between being a student going to Vietnam I also ended up doing
a graduate paper on public opinion on Vietnam. I knew who the
supporters of our policy were. That was not too hard. I did not
know much about the people who opposed it. This is going to be
one of my other talks I think what follows this. But I found so
many people were ignorant of a lot of basic facts of history, of
culture and then you find out that the journalists in many cases
were just ignorant of the history and the culture and the people
of Indo-China than anybody else was. Anybody could really get a
press pass if they got the right letter. Somewhere in the
archives of Saigon is my MACV credentials which I never picked
up. But I got it from South Vietnamese and I went out, I did not
suffer with the culture shock that lot of people did and I did
not hang out in the bars of Tu Do streets. My hotel room was the
Majestic. I spent one night with Jim Parsons, over at the
Intercontinental but we were talking business and I made a job to
talk to the other major journalists including Henry Brazier, Don
Kirk. Met Bob Chaplin over in Cambodia and I listened to them and
they were complaining about the media. Specifically, the visual
media, especially CBS, and I will not mention the name of it but
some of the guys from CBS if they did what they had been accused
of in these rumors and stories, they are really a bunch of
bastards and they treated their own people bad and they treated
the American people badly. All of the people who did the visual
studies do not feel you can go into this in an attempt to make
the analysis but I look at the stories that are saying, I saw
from my undercover work in my testimony of Congress and how did
the media treated me between being unprofessional to being very
professional. I saw some of the same things in Vietnam, then I
saw good reporting and I was reading a lot of the current news
clips out of Pentagon. So I was getting a pretty good spread
while I was out there and I would say, this looks good, this is
interesting, this is B.S., and then when I say, Oh this is weird.
I have never seen this before and sometimes you never see a story
on something again which is what I have on this table.
I began to look
at the way wording was used, and I give you one example, I do not
have the article with me but Michael Parks, from the Baltimore
Sun, did an article around 1971, 1972 and it said US Aircraft
strike only 30 miles from Hanoi. They were going after another
radar sites. While 30 miles from Hanoi sounds like youre
practically on the guys back step except when you take a
map of North Vietnam and you take a ruler and you measure, you
draw a line between Hanoi and where that radar site was and go to
the border with Laos and you go up to where the border would be
with Red China and you begin to convert those inches into miles
and you take that mileage and you stick it using Hanoi would be
Baltimore and that radar site would be Washington DC. It will
turn up to be the equivalent of Washington DC to St.
Louis in US miles. At 30 miles, in that country across the waist
would was really one third the way across the United States, but
the word only really struck me is giving you a
twisted article. If he had said US Aircraft struck at North
Vietnamese radar site 30 miles southwest of Hanoi and left it at
that, that have been a true descriptive article, but putting an
adjective in there, an adverb in there, it made it sound like, oh
were bombing on the back door of the capital and that is
not what happened and you have to watch those words throughout
the reporting. These are color words. I have never been to
journalism school but a lot of my friends have been journalism
teachers and I used to date a woman who was a high school
journalism teacher and she said she would take her students and
tell them cut out an article in the newspaper. Take a pen,
scratch out every adjective and adverb in the article and what is
left is the story. Everything else is irrelevant. It only adds
color to it. It does not add any facts to it. Then she said you
have to go check the facts and make sure they are right.
So, I specialized
in three or four things, one was terrorism in Vietnam. I did a
lot of interviews with North Vietnamese, defectors of Viet Cong,
defectors, prisoners of war, a couple of prisoners of war in
Cambodia, lot of survivors. I interviewed one of Maos
bodyguards in Taiwan and Maos secretary from 1930. I am
hearing these incredible stories, some of which I could verify
from other sources. I am saying this is not coming through in lot
of the major media. I will say the Washington Post had
very good writers in Vietnam, a couple of them today I think it
has gone totally off the deep end like Bob Kaiser but
Kaisers writings and Osnoes and some of the others
were good because if you compare them to other writers over a
period of time and they were saying basically the same
assessments whether it is negative, neutral or positive, you are
seeing some consistency, there you see some good analysis that
these few people who were staying there, such as Henry Brazier
who got to cover South East Asia and have been there for
years. I mean read their analysis pieces and they would usually
go and do a big story on a topic and they do it very
comprehensively. You could look at that and then see how
developments were going along over time and how they were, the
fact that we could drive on the road during daytime in the Delta
and there was a sideline in November 1970. I thought it was
pretty unique because according to some of the Press you could
not do this. The Cambodian operation had wiped out most of the
Communist forces and its supplies. We were not getting hit
anywhere. We did not get hit in the Central Highlands. I could
see that for myself. I could see the rice fields which was not a
story that was really told by most reporters that the agriculture
program with the miracle rices was spreading wealth throughout
the Delta, fertilizer was coming in, South Korean fertilizer,
which increased the yield and the rice types, IR-8, -12 and -16
were increasing the yield per hectare and I know what happened in
withering of rice to see what it was like. It is hard work but
the people were getting not only a subsistence crop but they were
also getting the cash crop, one they could sell as surplus and
they were buying roto tillers and I think that lot of you may
have seen those little Japanese long aluminum tube motors they
use on boats. One of the Vietnamese or one of the American
advisors are telling us, you see the Vietnamese are very
innovative, they were actually very good capitalists. They took
those motors and apparently they could reverse it, put current on
it and turn the tube upside down and use it as a draw pump so
they could take water from one level in a rice paddy up to
another one. They did not have to use suitcase or try to bring
water in from a canal. They could actually just pump it from an
area to area as they had a need for it, as they had it developed.
I saw the rice paddies. I was not too keen about walking. A lot
of something called land mines I think but I got out there and
you could see what was growing. If you go to the market and see
the crops and in one case we were down somewhere in the way down
the Delta almost in Ca Mau and it was at a site that everybody,
all the journalists, went to and this is one case where I was
able to take writings from four other journalists and compare to
what I had seen myself in my own notes. Four of the five
journalists including myself were positive about what we saw,
only Ralph Blumenthal from the New York Times was negative
and he interviewed the husband of the woman that always featured
in his story because Communist party graveyard was next, I do not
think anybody knows what this was, it is a graveyard, it goes
back to early 1920s and it was a very well kept and we asked them
why is the graveyard kept like this, these are your enemies. She
said we respected dead about who they are, this is pure
Vietnamese culture coming in and since my interpreters were
called white shirts, government officials, people are not going
to say bad things about the government and government officials,
but the interpreters were the brother of a friend of mine from
the Embassy here, I know I can trust them but I had to say, all
right -- you know I spent 900 years in college, I had learnt
something in anthropology -- so I said all right. I said to the
woman, since the government has reestablished control down here,
what improvements have you seen in your life. You never talk with
men, talk to the women, they know the gossip, they know the
economy, they control the economy and she did something which was
great. She says my kids go to school here. They did not go to
school when the Communist were here. She says they built a bridge
between our hamlet and another hamlet so you get into a central
market that was put on a concrete pad from market spaces and she
says normally the women who were pregnant would have to be taken
up to the Provincial Hospital which could be on Soc Trang or My Tho
or someplace like that. She said now we have a closer in hospital
for maternity, so we did not have to worry about somebody getting
sick or ill, or not even getting to medical care and then she
said what I thought was very funny. I have this affinity for pigs
for some reason. She said the Viet Cong used to tax my pig 300
pi, Vietnamese piasters, which is almost a dollar. She said the
government does not do that, and I said she is thinking like a
housewife, how do I save my money for various things and I was
impressed with that statement because again she is telling me
something that she is seeing that is, I would say, nonpolitical
in the general sense that she is talking about the way her life
has changed. Im not asking her who she voted for, if she
liked the governor or province chief or anything else and I am
asking her something very basic and I notice that some writers
could do this, some writers did not. If they asked her what do
you think about the government troops that are stationed over
here, what do think whether the security situation. Thats
man talk. Woman talk is a lot more informative and then she did
say something which was neat, she said would you like some soda,
she had little concession stand in her house. She pulls back a
curtain and she gets bottles of soda and she said would you like
ice and I am sitting here, in the middle of Delta, I do not see
an ice maker around here. She takes a cloth off of this table and
there is a block of ice on the rice chaff, chips up a piece,
takes a chaff off, puts it in the glass and we had iced soda.
That woman is thinking. That woman is smart. Also, there had to
be a generator or refrigerator unit around there in order to make
that ice. So she was buying the ice to use to serve cold drinks
to people. You got basic capitalism. Grass roots capitalism at
work and she is smart enough to do it and she is going to make a
living while her husband was the blacksmith across the road. I
did not see all that in the other writings, I saw positive
writing and three of the other four of those who wrote,
probability is the same house. Bluemental, across the street with
the husband, did a totally negative article and I found that when
I came back, I was clipping the papers and looking at that, and
said, oh, I was there. I checked my notes, you know, there were
three good writers, leave myself out, and one who is negative,
and I said why is this guy negative? It turned out a lot of the New
York Times writing was negative. A few guys were good who
apparently, as Joe xxxx was telling us, was being edited back at
the New York Times office and in one case, he produced his
carbons. Jim Lucas, I think it was called him on the carpet about
that piece and the reporter said that is not what I wrote that
was in the paper, this is what I wrote. They changed it back at
the editorial office and that really pissed off a lot of people
to find out that, people who tried to be honest in the field were
being edited and twisted back home. We also saw that in lot of
the editorials. Lot of editorials had no relationship to reality
which is why, in 1974, Graham Martin, the Ambassador came here,
had a private meeting with Kathleen Graham to talk about what was
going on in Vietnam and what was being written in Washington
Post and she changed those editorials and that was on
September 1974.
One journalistic
coup in my life that I am proud of was when Bob Mueller was the
aide-de-camp to Ambassador Martin when he came up on the Hill in
1974, I was working for a Congressman and sitting in a hearing,
saw Bob and asked where have you been? Im working for the
Ambassador in Vietnam, would you like to meet the Ambassador? I
said sure. So we talked and he was a nice guy and I told Bob, I
write for Human Events newspaper. Bob says would you like
an interview. He says the Ambassador does not give interviews to
any newspaper in United States because he hates them, you do not
trust him, they distort what he says. I got the exclusive, he was
exclusive. I got another one later on and it was interesting that
an ambassador would not talk to newspaper reporters. He did talk
to U.S. News and World Report, he had one interview there
but he had seen so much of distortions of what was going on. You
guys saw, I mean you guys were in the field, you know what you
were accomplishing might in terms of his work who looked at some
civilians were doing, we know guys like Tony Sestero was doing in
the civic action programs. You were not seeing that the later on
after Tet and one of the things that is really striking, the way
you want to look at the news is, there was a German reporter, I
think his name was Jules Simonetta, who spoke to us at an
Accuracy in Media meeting many years ago, he said when he first
got to the Vietnam in about 1967, they were covering atrocities
all the time, but, after a while, the editors did not want
atrocity stories. There is nothing new, the same atrocity day
after day, week after week but that was the war. That was the
terrorism that these people had to live with, just like people in
Israel had to live with it. So after 1968, after the Hue
massacre, you do not see hell of a lot on atrocities. They had Dac
Son and there was one called Duc Duc, the orphanage up North,
they just dropped off.
I promised the
guys before I give you some stuff you had not seen before because
I hope you have not been seen this. These are around 60 some
thousand names of South Vietnamese who had been kidnapped. We did
the title in English, says list of civil servants, cadres and
civilians of the Republic of Vietnam abducted by the Communists
since 1954. Names, addresses, birth dates, ages, I think it was
like the streets where they lived, I will let you know. When you
look at this later, let me know if any of you have seen this
book, I think it is 64,000 or such, I got to check it. I am
pretty sure it is around 1971. It says, since 54, I think it is
may be pre-Tet. Some of the print is very small but we will look
at that. How many of you have ever seen the names of somewhere
around 4000 victims of the Hue massacre. Has anybody here have
ever seen it?
Audience:
No.
Max Friedman:
You are going to see right now, names, ages.
Audience:
The count is 3000.
Max Friedman:
4000.
Audience:
4000.
Max Friedman:
The total figure they think was 8000.
Audience:
Vietnamese would read this off for you.
Max Friedman:
Okay. I have got the atrocity photographs here, I mean the
military made them available, Cambodians made them available.
After all we did not see atrocity photographs in the newspapers.
Lets see, I got 120 of them. I think they say you know
leave them laughing, but I am not leaving yet, I will give you
something that is funny. This is Vietnam Courier from June 1972
and there was a big debate, that Jane Fonda said we were bombing
the dikes in North Vietnam and their culture in this book and a
couple of geologists left this for saying this _______ So here is
an article on page 15 and the title says Vietnamese dykes bombed
by American aircraft. Well there it should be a lot of feminists
out there who are very mad at this title because they spelled
dikes D-Y-K-E-S. Somebody did not do a good
editing job on that.
Audience:
1954 to 1973.
Max Friedman:
To 1973.
Audience: 1954
or before 1973 is argumentative.
Max Friedman:
Here is one for Bob, since Bob is a law professor, a long time
personal time, an old time friend, and I respect him. How many of
you here know that there were court decisions ruling that the war
was legal. Okay. I am an inveterate clipper and I use these in
debates and people, the antiwar people, have no idea what the
hell they are talking about. The war is illegal. No, it
wasnt illegal. There was a case in Brooklyn and the
headline says Viet War Ruled Constitutional, which
was July 1st 1970 for the Orlando case. Tonkin
Resolution held declaration, US court of Military Appeals gave
judicial sanction yesterday to the Johnson administration
contention that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was tantamount to a
Declaration of War, Washington Post, June 22, 1968. There
is another ruling in July 1969 in Kansas. The Federal District
Judge rules yesterday that the military action in Vietnam is a
war in quotes, even though a solemn Declaration of
War has not been pronounced by Congress. Its called the Averett
case and there are others in here too, so there are series of
articles about the legal issue. There were legal cases, case law.
Now they may only have been up to Federal District Court, they
never got to the Supreme Court, but I am in the legal field and
if you get a case that is sitting there, you know that may only
represent a Federal Circuit, that case rules in that area until
there is another case which overrules it or affirms it as a
precedent case. So I never really saw a tremendous amount of
writing by journalists on the legal issues. I know that one, was
it the American Bar Association, had a section that did papers or
book put out.
Bob Turner:
This is a very thick 200 or so page memo that has been written by
several people primarily John Norton Moore. [unintelligible]
Max Friedman: So there was a lot
of thing that they just did not see out there and these other
articles. . . . Its interesting if you read the Style
section of Washington Post. There is a lot of gossip in
there and lot of society but every once in a while they say
something they sometime wish they hadnt said. This is about
Nick Rowe. July 1972, he said how one escaped prisoner of war
planned and they are talking about Rocky Versace being killed and
how Nick got out and in the last paragraph of that, actually two
paragraphs, Rowe says he had faked his identity for four years
until the Viet Cong found him out. Ironically, a peace group
trying to find out if he was dead or prisoner sent Hanoi a copy
of his biography, after that he was put on the execution list for
lying and in the last paragraph he said how was devastating for
him to sit in the Viet Cong prison camp and have them reading
through war speeches from the Congressional Record.
The antiwar
movement was not stupid. Tom Hayden and the others down there
were not stupid, posed a pacifist and antiwar and all talk was
garbage which I will talk about it in a while but according to
military intelligence, people I talked to and to people in the
FBI and the congressional communities there were specific groups
in the United States who were tasked to give the Communists
information on the American military personnel, specifically
POWs. There is no way in hell that these people were looking for
something to find whether Nick was dead or alive. They were
probably given a list that said find out who this guy is and when
they did, Nick paid for it, so did a lot of other guys. They
would go to the high schools, especially if any information of
where the guy was born, where he lived, was put in the paper.
They would go into the cities and checked public records, high
school books, etc., especially if they came from small towns
where they had one source, one high school. They passed it on to
the Communists and Communists would evaluate who the prisoner
was.
Another case
which I know of was that of Dick Dudman. Richard Dudman from the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch was left. He wasnt a bad writer but
he was almost definitely an ideological left, Elizabeth Pond from
Christian Science Monitor was pretty neutral, pretty good
writer and Mike Morrow from Dispatch News, very far left. They
got captured in Cambodia and Dudman writes, hes talking
about 16 days with the Viet Cong from North Vietnamese that for a
couple of week or so they did not know what was going to happen
to them. Their press cards have been taken by the VC who was
aiding the North Vietnamese and they were sent to Hanoi and here
is what happened to the people inside. The Communists checked
those names against the list of journalists who could be trusted
or not trusted. They saw Ponds, Christian Science
Monitor, they probably did not like her, Mike Morrow, they
knew they could trust and dispatch the news, Dick Dudman, big
writer from the St. Louis Post Dispatch, writes critical
of the Americans, pretty well about us, let him go, but they gave
him a royal treatment, they took around for a week or so in
Cambodia, in Vietnam and then let them go.
Other guys were
not so lucky and that is one thing where you have to realize that
as a journalist you have a responsibility. One of the guys from
Iraq said it so beautifully, I cannot think of his name but he
was a tall guy, he was riding in a tank or an APC, on one of the
roads going to Baghdad. They spotted some Iraqis in the bushes
with rocket launchers and rifles. They told the gunner that some
Iraqis over there are getting ready to shoot us and he said our
guy blowed them away. So the moderator -- and they are on MSNBC
or CNN said -- how do you feel as a journalist getting involved
in a war and he said I am an American first and journalist
second. Joe Galloway said the same thing and I am not sure that a
lot of the journalists, in fact I know for sure, that some of the
journalists, small portion in the Vietnam were not pro-American. Dispatch
News, Liberation News Service, probably others just
did not want us to win. They did not want to write positive about
what was going on. I mean if a guy like me can go there for five
weeks in Vietnam then on to Cambodia, to see these tremendous
changes in agriculture, land reform program, building generators,
transportation, marketing and talk to people and see how life has
changed, why cant these guys do the same thing instead of
saying we are losing this, we are losing that, people do not
support Thieu, the popular uprising -- which there never was a
popular uprising in South Vietnam with Communists. Because, if
you knew the Vietnamese people, Buddhists do not support
Communism. They do not support something that is godless. They
may not like Thieu, may not like Big Minh or Ky or anybody else,
but they do not want somebody who is godless and thats
important because they will take the lesser of two evils then
somewhere one of these books I have a from the Vietnamese who is
a refugee here now said we made a mistake. Even though we
did not like Thieu in the war, we made a mistake by not fighting
against the Communists to win.
Most journalists
are not going to tell you this. I think a lot of journalists
never got out to meet the Vietnamese people. Those here in this
room, especially the guys in the Special Forces, Jim Kerns, who
is not here today. Jim said something that was great, besides
telling Senator Kennedy go to hell. He said, I think said this
during the Amnesty hearings. He said besides the fact that I
responded to your brothers you would bear any price,
any burden. He said, when I was out with the Vietnamese, I
spent a year with them. He said I talk with them, I trained them,
I fought with them. I helped them give birth to their kids, I
patched up their wounds and I buried their dead. He was saying
that he knew the Vietnamese people, Mike knew the Vietnamese
people, Dolf did, Bob, you know this, all of you here, there is
something we knew the Vietnamese people, I think we had a lot of
respect for them, especially those who were some of the really
good South Vietnamese forces. We saw the sacrifice. The
Cambodians, you would not believe the crap that they were trying
to fight with, looked like World War I museum. Another militiaman
I interviewed over there and I say something on a personal level.
My grandmother lost her family in the Holocaust in Europe. They
had lived in a place called Lemburg and they were all wiped out
at either Belsen or Auschwitz. I remember the Hungarian
revolution in 1956 and I felt really helpless. I cannot standby
and not do something. My religious training, my being an
American, having grown up in the 1950s. Were real good
people. We do things for other people that other people
cant do and if I can do a good job or be a good journalist
in telling what I see. I wont to tell you you got to
believe it, if anything else we got to convince in what I did. I
am going to do a best job I can do. You judge my work and make up
you own mind. I am not going to lie to you. I have not distorted
anything to you. I am just going to try to be honest journalist.
I said I was part of the good journalism school. I feel that the
guys I knew who were in 30s and 40s couple of Pulitzer Prize
recipients were guys who learned on the street and on their feet,
they had a knack. They went out and they learned how to dig for
news. I had a background in science, in anthropology, archeology
and geology. I am taught how to do a research plan. I know that you
have this comparative information, you got to try to figure out
what you want to do, you got to go up and check your sources and
sometimes you get off your ass and get out on the field and go
get the information and I look what I write now, things that
Ive written in the past, I look at how accurate it was and
I am satisfied with what I did. I can say, Ive got a clean
conscience.
[There are] a lot
of guys from Vietnam today who have blood on their hands as
journalists. They betrayed the American forces there, they
betrayed the civilians there, they betrayed the South Vietnamese,
Cambodians and Laotians and they betrayed the American people.
And yet these are guys you see as talking heads and leaders of
various newspapers and columnists, editors and it just really
pisses me off that they had been able to basically monopolize the
news for so many years which is one reason we set up Accuracy of
Media which gives somebody a challenge to bring in something else
on a professional level. So what I have here are their writings
and some of my writings, like it is some of the documents which
you had never seen before, I got them off a book shelf in the
South Vietnamese Embassy, I am a book keeper, it is in print, got
an extra copy, thank you. But I sat down and I have read this and
I think that I can say the majority of the journalists in Vietnam
were good. I think the smaller the paper, the better the
journalists, because they did not have an ideological axe to
grind. They did not have a boss behind them, who said you got to
write like this, or, you cannot write about that. They said, you
go out to be a journalist, chose to be a reporter. The bigger
ones, you have a lot of ideology, CBS was the furthest left of
all. ABC, NBC, I cannot think of the individual names now. You
know, if you met some reporters and read their material. I did
not know whether they were good or not. Sometimes with Tom Sayeed,
Daily News, was pretty good and a couple of other guys, so
I have been always looking at regularly because I knew they could
even produce one of the unique piece, would give you a story on
something you had not heard before and that is important. You
know Susan Sheehan specialized in womens affairs in
Vietnam, and I thought that was pretty good, because I was
covering womens affairs, but when you got into television,
you got into a really dirty game and I think that the American
television, the Primadonas, were a disgrace, the cameraman
were brave, the back up guys were brave, they did not get the
glory and they also did not have any influence on what was being
produced, so you could say that Vietnam was a tremendous test to
the American media and as an institution, an industry, I think it
failed, sometimes not because of journalists fault but sometimes
by not preparing their people properly in the history, language,
culture. Many of them by having an ideological bias. I mean some
of these papers had views were like Pravda. The United
Sates is always wrong, the United States had no good modes in the
world, United States should not be a superpower, which is
something they share with the UN and then if something goes
wrong, in effect the government, you did not do this, you did not
do that. No, the media has a moral responsibility to report the
truth or at least to make a damn good effort to report the truth
and in many areas they failed.
I am thinking
that embedded reporters in Iraq changed this. My son was over
there and he had a tremendous respect for those reporters because
they were with the troops 24 hours a day. They shared the same
conditions. They were in the same fire. They saw what was going
on, the good and the bad and they understood. I love Greg Pelham
and ____ for Fox, to me these are sort of the Ernie Pyles of
Operation Iraqi Freedom. They were with the Grunts and they
understand the Grunts and you have CNN (Corrections Never-Never),
Fox has done pretty good, MSNBC sometimes has really good people
but you could see it in the ratings. You see the people are
leaving a lot of traditional television news and they are going
to cable, there got to be a reason and what one of them says
the name you can trust, you know they trust
themselves and tell you what they want you to know, once in while
you are getting a good story but it has got to be consistent over
time and it is got to be accurate, you got to be able to check it
and see what is going on. What is going on in Iraq today is very
haunting in that you read some of the military journalists, you
are going to get a hell of a lot more information about what the
military is doing at the grass roots level, especially AUSA
Magazine, they had a great issue back in November of what the
various teams they had and they had a geological team drilling
wells, some other guys with US Geological Survey in water works,
they gave them drills and they would go from town to town and
about spend two weeks after they are setting up a permanent water
drilling. I know a little about geology and they were saying they
were not going through the close to surface aqua crest, they were
drilling down deeper so you have a permanent source of water for
those villages and they would move on and Rabbi Huerta up in Mosul,
learned Arabic, became buddies with the Mayor of Mosul, I think
it is the one of those who is just killed, and Terta wanted
supplies, talk the Mayor there, and they said yeah, what you
need. He built the school for the Mayors son and they
became buddies. Interestingly a Jewish rabbi who was a Chaplain
at West Point and the Muslim Mayor of Mosul were friends but they
were working together with a common good. In most of the civic
action groups, they all did this. You do not see much in the
papers today and I am really disappointed in the major press. What
can I do, dig stories somewhere but mainly it is up North, you
know take anything down in the south, the British had Basra but
Americans are elsewhere, the Americans are to the West of Baghdad
and we are doing a hell lot of stuff in the cities, and you still
do not see it and I have to say why? They are not interested in
these stories, they do not know if stories exist, they told not
to cover them, only cover the bombings and atrocities and the
accidents and not to cover the boring day-to-day improvements in
the electricity and training of the police and the restoration of
the generating system and the water systems and the oil systems.
Again I see some of Vietnam coming back and it can hurt. I can
see this getting involved in politics, the politicians are making
statements based on what they are getting out of the news media.
When John Kerry said in his speech in the Senate that only
3000-5000 South Vietnamese might suffer reprisals if the
Communist won. He got that from a Communist group who was putting
out propaganda and media repeated it, they never challenged it,
they never covered the book I did with the Senate where they came
across the Communists of Vietnam. They gave Douglas Pike study on
the Viet Cong organization some coverage. They gave Steve Emersons
[?] book none, which was a tremendous main study on terrorism.
Anything like this they basically did not report. The New York
Times never contacted me in my life. Washington Post
never contacted me in my life. Washington Times contacted
me once and they screwed the story up and I had to threatened to
sue them before they did it and half assed summary piece and I
would just say, you can tell to your people, the audience, you
can come up and look at what I have here and apply to your
knowledge of the situation.
I have a lot of
stuff on the 202,000 political prisoners in South Vietnam.
Reporters did not go out to measure the jails and find out they
could only hold around 20 to 35 to 50,000 including some of the Chieu
Hoi camps but that was the figure that was put out by Bella Abzug
aand the other lefties in congress and repeated in the news. In
April 1975 I am looking for 202,000 South Viet Cong political
prisoners to come out of jail and you you never saw a piece. You
never saw a comment on it. You never saw anything about these
missing people in South Vietnam. They were written off, you never
heard anything about the Hoi Chanhs, who were on the
assassination list and there were nearly 200,000 and never heard
anything about the 8,000 North Vietnamese ralliers who would be
shot immediately. To this date, I have not seen one piece in a
paper on the fate on the Montagnards, other than the revolt. or
the Hoi Chanhs who were taken out in the boondocks and killed. It
even on the Deseret studies in 1982, 1983 on the people coming
back from the re-education camps. The figures were around 83,000
killed at that time. We did have a second study for the Ford
Foundation and Deseret study. You do not see anybody writing
about this and that is where the media is still failing on Vietnam.
By putting aside its history, that is what it is saying, you
know, this is past, you got to move on to the future. It is up to
guys like you. You may not be an historian, you still have
stories to tell and the educational program, was it Mike [R J]
from the North Carolina, thats the way to go. Get your
facts together, get your presentation together, you go out and
you tell the people what you saw and what you know and once you
get into the educational system, once you get on to the internet
which is now the best weapon we got going and you guys are seeing
what went on with Winter Soldier, that Scotts doing and
youve got the Swift Boat association people both political
group and the nonpolitical group. You are now reaching more
people, I had it in my column went out on a Thursday, I got a
call Friday from San Diego from a friend I had not seen in 30
years, Bruce Kesler for personal reasons. He saw it on
Scotts web site, called Scott, Scott gives this phone
number, he calls me, and this is about 9:30 in the morning and he
says hello Max, this is Bruce Kesler. Where do the hell you have
been for 30 years. I am trying to find you and now Bruce is
running my life and which is why I am here. We got tools and we
have got people here with the experience who are finally speaking
out and it is going to be recorded and the next job is to get it
out into the mainstream to the educational systems, get the
Vietnamese to start writing their stories, to tell it not just to
the Vietnamese communities, you tell it to the American
communities and what they are going to say is, thank you.
[Applause.]
Jim McLeroy:
I will make a quick announcement. We are going to continue with
Bills presentation. At 1:15 precisely at 13:15 that is . .
. . Okay just remember 1:15, 13:15 is the conference call with
David Horowitz. [Administrative items and a break in the
taping]
Bill Laurie: One
more minute, Steve, it is going to be short and sweet to the
point.
What we are going
to cover here on the military aspect is the how the military part
of systemic whole and was influenced by the legislatures,
influenced by the news media, or at least the policy options, the
strategic and tactical options were affected by the pressures on
the Legislature, the Executive Branch and by the Press, public
opinion, news media. Generally, what we can say with certainty
and this is going to surprise the American public but as the
policy options narrowed, the military options expanded because as
our previous speakers have said, the indigenous VC were no longer
a strategic threat in South Vietnam. A lot of guys were there in
the early 60s, VC units here, VC units there, make no mistake
about it. They were tough guys, they did a great job of being bad
guys, no question but the indigenous VC were not winning the war,
nor, contrary to popular opinion did the North Vietnamese
Communists think they could win the war. We were in a three phase
protracted warfare. Dennis Moore used a wonderful phrase
the multiplicity wars; You had your low level
guerillas, you had your regional forces and then you had the big
guys, regulars, two of them in Vietnamese. They, by Hanois
doctrine, were to win the war. Nobody in this country paid
attention to what was in Vietnam and what the Communist
themselves said despite the fact that anybody could have picked a
book and read it in 1960. Bernard Fall translated Truong Chinhs
primer for revolt and he laid out the map exactly what the
Communist were going to do and they say we cannot win with
guerillas. That is simply revolutionary foreplay. It is all it
is. They are like picadors in a bull fight, they cut, bleed,
harass and weaken the bull and when the bull is sufficiently
weakened, then at the same time they built up their regular
forces with modern weaponry, forget the bobby traps, forget the
mine fields, they were horrible things, they killed people but
war is a cruel mistress, you have to kill enough to win the war. Normandy
beachhead was saturated with mines and that did not stop Allied
Forces. I do not think from my perspective -- it may differ from
a lot of you -- because I had language training because I worked
everyday, all the time with the Vietnamese and a lot of time I
was head quartered in Saigon but I ended up being TDY in 18
different Provinces, 7th ARVN Division, 9th
ARVN Division, 21st ARVN divisions, Soc Trang, Tra Vinh,
Ca Mau, all over the Delta. Off duty hours, I could not get
enough of Vietnam. I lived in a Vietnamese dimension in society,
I talked with Vietnamese people, I talked with Cambodian people
down in the Delta. I wanted to learn. I could not get enough of
it. So my perspective is somewhat someone who went beyond the
cultural barrier and sees the American involvement as someone who
is not an American almost, in fact I was an advisor and talking
with some of the advisory teams in the Delta and we would be
complaining and moaning about the incredibly stupid strategy and
we started talking about those Americans and then it
would dawn on us and I would say, wait a minute, were
Americans, but we looked at America as almost an alien
force.
We got off on the
wrong foot from the beginning. I am going to start bashing
McNamara again, never understood in a clinical sense, I do not
mean feel sorry for or empathize and all this nonsense. I mean
understands clinically and strategically what the hell is going
on in South East Asia, which was a tinderbox, we did not
understand the importance of time, you give these guys time to
build up and Douglas Pike is one of the very few authors who have
ever stated that the Communists were not just destroying, they
are building this massive organization in the rural areas. You
look at a line and black chart of the communist organization, it
defies the explanatory part of the all with the most
sophisticated computer scientist, it is an incredible
administrator, political psychological manipulation machine. Far
more sophisticated than we had. In that respect we were not
fighting and they always say, well we are fighting backward
guerillas. I mean to tell you. Functionally speaking, there were
far more sophisticated than the allied forces, so I would like to
a draw distinction between we, in so far, I do not want to
discriminate between the Washington side of the fence and the
people were on the cutting edge. Often I heard this said before
and I have repeated again, I do not know who authored it but if
we would have taken the line and block chart in Vietnam and
turned it upside down, there was American advisory teams and
American forces in the field saying here is what we need and here
is what we want you Washington and US Embassy to get rid off. I
am not sure the history would not have taken a different course.
It is not a joke, I do mean it. Rather than Washington dictating
through CINCPAC, through the Embassy and then all away filtering
down, no, you talk, we talk, US never happened that way. How do
we get out from the bad start. McNamara did not understand
anything about South East Asia. Here we had this moderate nation,
the paradox is that the situation in South East Asia was that of
so called leadership in Washington as a plague was to a village
in the Europe in the 1500s. It was clogged by miasmas and humors
and witch doctors would cure us and not only did they not know,
they would not listen. Bernard Fall, Jean Larteguy, two people
who knew so much about South East Asia, tried to talk to the US
Embassy staff in the early 60s and they said do not create this
huge American presence, here this is a fragile traditional
society, youll rip it apart. Send people who give a damn,
tell them why they should give a damn and some people said, well,
you know you just cannot do that, why, they were people who gave
a damn and under proper leadership we would have had it. I think
the military was complicit and there is a paradox here and I
think that we always hear that the military failed in Vietnam. I
think the military got better and I am not excusing as early
shortcomings but the military improved in doing its job far more
than the news media did in doing its job or the United States
government did in doing its job. We can go into that later.
The US Military
went over there unprepared for Vietnam; nothing new, we
werent ready for Korea, and we were not ready for World War
II. The United States paraphrased the Cindy Lauper song
just wants to have fun. We didnt want to go
war. We wanted to have fun and I do not mean that in a
discouraging manner, that is what life should be where people
just go to work, make their pay check, come home and have fun,
but we were not ready for it at all. The United States Military
went over there focusing too much on what we call Phase II
protracted warfare, we have got battalions and regiments out
there and we got to kick their butts, which incidentally is
exactly what Giap was doing. Giap says the primary purpose in any
war is to destroy, to annihilate the enemys main force
units. So, we went over there chasing around and doing a good job
paradoxically against the main force units, we were not stopping
them but because you had this Phase I activity going on in
recruitment, in training, in building this organization, it kept
on growing. A wonderful analogy is trying to mop the floor before
you fix the leak. One of the things this insurgency was dependent
upon was the Ho Chi Minh Trail. No Ho Chi Minh Trail, no war in
South East Asia, and that a mistake is often made in [calling it]
the Vietnam War, there was one in Laos and there is one in
Cambodia, there was the one in the Republic of Vietnam and there
is a border war in Thailand that smoldered on for decades.
Thousands of people were killed by Communist insurgents, many of
whom were trained in Hanoi beginning in 1962 [1954] -- fact. We
went over there not knowing and we should have known that the
people should have done their jobs, the leadership should have
told us, they should have read the books. They should have
understood the enemy. There is a trajectory to this. If it is bad
now, it is going to get worse because it is the dynamic with the
revolutionary machine is growing. Once it is interrupted, and you
can only interrupt it effectively by dealing with what Dennis
Warner called the multiplicity of wars, youve
got to hit the phase I, low level guerillas, youve got to
deal with the regional force and youve got to deal with the
main force. We never did it. A little bit of an over
simplification there but the general statement is true. McNamara
again, there is a beautiful line in a book called Straw Giant
by Arthur Hadley. Remember, McNamara, he is the Secretary of
Defense. He had no qualification for the job a great bean
counter, they should have put him in an accounting office and
said Bob this is _____ and he said yes _____- went back and
formed a policy. Arthur Hadley said, the Vietnam war is difficult
for Bob McNamara because it is about people and ideas and he is
weak in those areas. The whole war was people and ideas. The
whole bloody war. Ideas in Vietnam, ideas in Laos and people who
thought those ideas in those countries and in the United States.
Last night we had a presentation over the phone and some of us
were gritting our teeth because we did not agree with some of
them but one thing that was critical and there was the Colonel
citation and what is called Dic Van and that is propaganda
in the enemy camp, undermine the resolve at home. McNamara,
nobody understood that. We did not show up, the United States
Government, and that was their job, they put us out there, they
never showed up for the propaganda war and people think
propaganda is like lying -- no. Clinically speaking propaganda is
listen, all you want to do is see how I think, why I think and
explain my reason, so perhaps you consider the validity of what I
think. The United States government never showed up and people
can argue back and forth, well what we did is, we did that. I
look at my experience. I did not go to Vietnam until 1971. I did
not start learning anything of substance about Vietnam until I
went to Fort Benning. I just spent five years on a college campus
and when I got to Fort Benning some of our instructors were
former advisors, guys who had been to Vietnam and I know I was
going. I wanted to know everything I could. I was not going to be
hero at that time and things scared me to death and I mean scared
me and I did not want to die but I did not want to do anything
stupid and get somebody else killed because I did not know if I
will be able live with that, so I tried to learn everything I
could. Not out of fear, I was not trying to be a hero or anything
I can say. By then I thought it was a hopeless cause, I thought
ARVN wouldnt fight, everybody supports VC, it is just as
horrible, just un-winnable, quagmire and a few months later I am
outside the My Tho City where the Seventh Division which just
slammed an NVA regiment to try to attack Tho San District town in
the daytime and the advisor, who I was talking to, had a pressure
bandage on his arm, blood seeping out, and he is laughing. He
said we are kicking their butt, he did not say butt
but we are going to keep the language clean. This does not
jibe, not only did I not hear this in the United States, I never
would have imagined it could exist because ARVN wont fight,
the VC are so tough, and all the Americans, of course,
theyre all torturing people, all on drugs and they [just]
want to get out of this place and here this advisor going, man,
we kicked their butts and it was then -- and I took it personally
because I had tried to learn, I read the news, and all
that stuff. You people lied to me over here. The whole giant
information machine lied to me. I didnt like that. Anyhow,
from the perspective that I had, and, again working with the
Vietnamese people all the time, the military, sitting in the rice
paddies with the RF/PF, nothings going on, chewing the fat,
talking with them. What is your life like? What do you think? I
could not get enough of that and I looked at the American
presence, all this bloody money coming in, where is that saying
where Larteguy and Bernard Fall said send people who give a
damn, for get your money, show you care and as Jim Morris
said in his book, War Story, which I recommend to
everybody, he said if you dont give a damn about the South
East Asian people, Montagnards and Vietnamese alike, you do not
belong in this country. I do think in the recommendation, had I
been in charge, I would said hey, I want to see every American is
going to South East Asia after they have gone through Basic, AIT
and any other course you can name, you are going to have a two
week cram course on this country and this people and what is
going on. You know that the little MACV card 10 rules of
behavior for Vietnamese? I do not know what was like when
some of you guys were there, but by the time I was there, I was
frankly disgusted with the flesh pots and the behavior and of
some Americans, not all. Not all by a margin, but it was so
visible and it was so offensive to me personally as an American,
and I was not career Army, that I told people and I almost got my
butt in a sling when I told a captain he was a disgrace to the
uniform -- Im only a lieutenant -- I chewed him out, you
know, pay attention to this, you are a guest in their bloody
country. Yeah, I know we are running the war and everything else.
Had I been in charge, I would have that in my command emphasis
and I would have told my MPs, if you see one American pushing
around the Vietnamese, you tell him, he is going to break rocks
at Leavenworth, not just because he violated, you know, some
military order. He is a bloody traitor. He is contributing to the
enemy. They were students and there were kids in Vietnam, this is
fact and because of how they saw SOME, underline some
anyone is listening in the future most Americans behaved very
well in Vietnam but that some muddied the water so much
that some of these kids out there saw the whorehouses, the
obnoxious behavior and they said, you know what, Im going
to join the VC or they would not help the allies.
Now I know from
speaking Vietnamese, if you sit down and chew the fat with these
people, youd get a lot of information that you would not
otherwise get. Theyd been, especially the rural people,
that have been treated like crap for all their life, French,
Japanese, Mandarin, if you showed, if you sit down and talk with
them, bounce their kid on your lap, drink their rice whisky with
them, youd find out a lot of things, a lot of things. My
life may have been saved by one lady when I went through a hamlet
one time and she indirectly said it is not happy here and I never
heard anyone say that, life in Vietnam was tough. But I never
heard anyone say, and she said in the familiar sense, Khong
co vui o day, Ong Oi and she said Ong oi which
means old buddy kind of a thing. I thought may be she is telling
me something. I was not sure when the red light went on and I
very quietly and calmly turned around and walked away.
The United States
Military did not understand even though again there were people
that could tell them, I think one of the iron laws of Vietnam was
lessons learned and all that stuff went up maybe two levels,
maybe, sometimes only one and even if it went up two levels it
died there. We did not have any continuity with them. What did
Bernard Fall said, we were not in Vietnam 11 years, we were in Vietnam
one year [eleven times]. In Thailand where they had their Phase I
war beginning to bubble up and start, the Thais put together what
was called a Communist Suppression Operation Command, CSOC, under
a very capable Saiyut Koedphon in 1965. The United Stated did not
put CORDS together until May of 1967 and CORDS should have been,
had those people in Washington, I do not say we, I do not
consider the people here part of they. Had they done that and
they had learned and spent two weeks reading Bernard Fall, spent
another week talking to Vietnamese, listening to them, some of
them are bloody smart, we would have said, hey now we see how
this is working, now we see what is going on here, now we see the
dynamic. We need CORDS now. We need to train people to be
administrators now and if you want to do it on a cheap, then
dont bother because you are putting Spec Four Jones and Ha Si/Binh
Si Nhut Nam on the line. You are asking them to risk their life
and some of them are going to die and if you cannot give a 100%
effort in Washington, DC, then dont bother. That is
criminal negligence in my opinion.
Part of it again
was this Ho Chi Minh Trail, we often talk about it, everybody
knows but -- okay, right. -- The quest to go in to block the Ho
Chi Minh Trail goes back to 1961. The Joint Chiefs of Staff said
any concept which deals with the defense of South East Asia that
does not include all of or a substantial portion of Laos is from
a military standpoint unsound. What is needed is not the
key phrase here-- spreading out of our forces throughout South
East Asia but rather a concentrated effort in Laos where a firm
stand could be taken saving substantially all parts of Laos, at
the same time protect Thailand and the borders of South Vietnam.
No Ho Chi Minh Trail, the aorta is cut off and the insurgency is
over with. The Communist have since admitted that. They have said
We were scared to death in Hanoi that Johnson would give
permission to Westmoreland to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail and
wed be in deep doo-doo. In 1962 the Thais,
they live in the neighborhood, maybe they have something to say,
they said lets go in on an multi-lateral joint operation to
cut, block and hold the Ho Chi Minh Trail. This gives you also an
onus, not just military, it is the propaganda war. Here is the
Laotian agreement. North Vietnam signed it. We have taken all our
forces out of Laos. Here are 15 NVA POWs we have in Laos
and we should have turned the pressure on Hanoi and said when are
you going to stop lying and we should have told the rest of the
world that and, if the rest of the world did not like it, we
should have said shame on you. Here is a list of 1500 people who
were assassinated in Vietnam last month. Some were impaled. Some
were impaled on stakes. Some were disemboweled. Some of them had
their head cuts off. You people want to let this go on? If you
do, that is your problem, not ours, were good guys. It
never happened. Paradoxically those are military -- even though I
think a lot of should be said that is critical of it -- the
military began to learn and has accomplished miracles. The bad
guys were really good at being bad guys. South Vietnam was ready
to fall in 1965. The battle of the Ia Drang was truly a turning
point in history, truly. First Cav elements literally took the
water buffalo of history and turned him around and made him go in
another direction. Had it not been for the First Cav at the Ia Drang,
South Vietnam would have fallen that year. In all probability, in
fact, in Hanoi -- in Hanoi they said, this is the year we are
going to win and, by the way, they sent NVA regulars down Ho Chi
Minh Trail before the Tonkin resolution.
The United States
military started to wise up. We had CORDS and out of that. . . .
Rich Webster was on a mobile advisory team. We were finally
getting down and training these RF and PF and one of the problems
the South Vietnamese had was leadership. That was not a 20th
century country. You go out in the rural areas and sure they had
District Chiefs, sure they had Province Chiefs, but they did not
have this societal machine that was assembled in North Vietnam
with brilliant propaganda and total societal control and that did
not exist at all. When the MATs went to work on the advisory
teams actually South Vietnamese, in my point of view, they
overcame their inferiority complex, because again the bad guys
were great, they were really good at being bad guys and too many
people watch army movies or military movies and they do not
realize it is an art form, lethal, disgusting what every
you want to call it, but it is an art form, and you do not get
good until you have been blooded.
Steve Sherman:
Weve got cut it short.
Bill Laurie:
Okay, I am sorry. When we went in there, we had let the situation
get out of hand, now you have got to send main force American
units in there, now your time is against this. We do not have
time to train the South Vietnamese to let them learn, let them, in
fact, get blooded. Now it is emergency time. When we finally were
forced into Vietnamization it was way too late, we did not give
them enough time. Up until 1968, I think only 5% of RVNAF,
Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces -- every one says ARVN, that is
the Army -- there was Marine, there was Navy, there was Air
Force, there was Biet Dong Quan, RF, PF, National Field Force
Police, all these elements of RVNAF and they were finally getting
new weapons and, again, people do not understand if you never
shot, you do not realize that if it was one against one and one
guy has on M1 carbine and the other guy has got an AK, the guy
with the AK has got the advantage. So it was only then we started
to modernize them. Part with the reason for delay in
Vietnamization was, again, McNamara. Westmoreland went to
McNamara and said I need more equipment, supplies, training aids
to make the South Vietnamese self-sustaining.
Steve Sherman:
Well continue again tonight.
Bill Laurie:
Okay. give me two more sentences and then I will go. McNamara
said no. Westmoreland went to McNamara and said we need to inform
the American people on a the people-to-people program, let them
know who the Vietnamese are, the South East Asians are, the
Montagnards are, McNamara said no.
Steve Sherman: To be continued.
Bill Laurie: To be continued.
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