NOT IN NOAM: 11/22/COUP> THE VIETNAM WAR On May 10, John Newman writes that the Joint Chiefs of Staff responded to Gilpatric’s request for their recommendations two days earlier: On that date they delivered a resolute and emphatic recommendation for sending U.S. combat troops to Vietnam. This unique and startling memo deserves a detailed examination here. The Chiefs now argue that if the administration decided to keep Southeast Asia out of the Communist “sphere,” U.S. forces should be “deployed immediately” to South Vietnam, so that they would not be subjected to the kind of combat situation existing in Laos. The Chiefs recommended that a decision to “deploy suitable forces” be made…. In order to accomplish their plans the Chiefs recommended: amazon/JFKs-War-Natio…/…/ref=pd_sim_kstore_1… President Diem be encouraged to request that the United States fulfill its SEATO obligation, in view of the threat now posed by the Laotian situation, by immediate deployment of appropriate U.S. forces to South Vietnam…. NSAM-52 was implemented on May 11, 1961 following LBJ’s departure, and after a review by JFK one week later, received final approval on May 19. While it did approve the U.S. objective of preventing Communist domination of South Vietnam, it approved only a further-sanitized version of the Vietnam Task Force report which had removed from it any mention of support for agreements to be reached between LBJ and Diem. (Events proved LBJ was freewheeling in South Vietnam and that his goal — working with interventionists in the national security establishment — was to get Diem to request the introduction of U.S. combat troops under the guise of “training,” as well as complete U.S. funding for a 100,000 man increase in the South Vietnamese army. The number of U.S. troops envisaged by McGarr in-country, and Lansdale in Washington, was two “battle groups,” i.e., 16,000 combat troops.) NSAM-52 did commit the U.S. to sending 400 U.S. special forces troops to South Vietnam in a bonafide training role, but expressly forbade their use in combat. It was a resounding defeat for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who wanted a military “foot-in-the-door” that would make it easier for the United States to commit forces to a combat role once they were in-country. Meanwhile, LBJ, freewheeling in Saigon, had foolishly declared Diem “the Churchill of Asia,” and had written an after-action report that equated saving Diem with saving Vietnam, and which melodramatically stated that if Vietnam fell, the U.S. must inevitably surrender the Pacific and take up defenses on its own shores. John Newman writes that “the scheme engineered by McGarr, Lansdale, and the JCS, brokered by Johnson, and acquiesced in by Diem” was the last straw for President Kennedy. He was now fully alerted to the large numbers of Southeast Asia interventionists around him within his “support structure,” and had become increasingly skeptical, and resistant, to such recommendations. On August 11, 1961, in the midst of the Berlin Crisis, NSAM-65 was issued, stating that the United States would provide equipment and training assistance for a modest increase in the South Vietnamese army from 170,000 to a total of 200,000 men. Meanwhile, with the southern Laos supply route open to the Viet Cong, increasing areas of South Vietnam continued to fall to the Viet Cong insurgency. On October 11, 1961, a critical NSC meeting was held in which the State Department’s U. Alexis Johnson presented a paper advocating the views of Maxwell Taylor, Walt Rostow, the Southeast Asia Task Force, and the JCS — in favor of U.S. military intervention. Johnson’s paper proposed a total SEATO force of 22,800 combat troops, with 11,000 of them American. Their proposed deployment was to be immediate. NSAM 104 was issued by JFK that day, directing that Maxwell Taylor assemble a task force and travel to Vietnam for an assessment visit. (It did not approve the recommendations for combat troops in Johnson’s paper.) Taylor’s entourage arrived in South Vietnam on October 18th, and returned to Washington on November 2. Taylor’s trip constituted the pivotal event leading to the most important decision JFK made on Vietnam during his presidency. John Newman wrote: “In picking Taylor to lead the mission, Kennedy chose a man whom he judged to be an expert in unconventional warfare, an intellectual who quoted Thucydides, and the one general he thought shared his own views and that he could, therefore, trust to carry out his bidding. Kennedy did not want to send combat troops to Vietnam and intended to use the Taylor trip not only for elbow room, but also so help strengthen his case against intervening.” In spite of JFK’s attempts to manage the results of the trip before Taylor’s team left the U.S., he did not receive the recommendations he wanted. After removing from Taylor’s own draft of his proposed operating instructions all references to studying intervention, command relationships, and CIA operations in Vietnam, JFK inserted the following instructions, which were markedly different from the six paragraphs he had removed form Taylor’s draft: In your assessment you should bear in mind that the initial responsibility for effective maintenance of the independence of South Vietnam rests with the people and government of that country. Our efforts must be evaluated, and your recommendations formulated, with this in mind. While the military part of the problem is of great importance in South Vietnam, its political, social, and economic elements are equally significant, and I shall expect your appraisal and your recommendations to take full account of them. According to Newman, JFK then emphasized his desires by planting a bogus story in the New York Times, including the following statement — which was manifestly untrue, as everyone in the national security establishment who read it knew: Military leaders in the Pentagon, no less than General Taylor himself, are understood to be reluctant to send organized U.S. combat troops into Southeast Asia. Pentagon plans for this area stress the importance of countering Communist guerillas with troops from the affected countries, perhaps trained and equipped by the U.S., but not supplanted by U.S. troops. Imagine President Kennedy’s dismay, then, when in spite of his overt and covert instructions to Taylor, his favorite general formally recommended immediately introducing 8,000 U.S. combat troops to South Vietnam under the cover of a “flood relief task force.” In his book The Best and the Brightest, author David Halberstam wrote: “General Taylor failed to live up to his reputation as an intellectual and original thinker, and his report abandoned concepts of a counterinsurgency in favor of conventional warfare, and with some window-dressing, advocated a Korean War-style strategy [i.e., a large, conventional U.S. military force].” Taylor was employing the same “foot-in-the-door” approach that Arleigh Burke had written about to Admiral Felt (CINCPAC) earlier in the year — namely, that if we can get President Kennedy to make some commitment of combat troops now, we can build them up more easily later on to the force levels we really need, because the basic commitment will already have been made. Andrew Krepinevich has written: “…while admitting that the ‘new’ Communist strategy of insurgency bypassed the Army’s traditional approach to war, Taylor offered all the old prescriptions for the achievement of victory: increased firepower and mobility, more effective search and destroy operations, and if all else failed, bombing the source of the trouble (in thought if not in fact), North Vietnam, into capitulation.” Taylor’s recommendations were first discussed at an NSC meeting on November 4, 1961, two days after his return to the United States. Great skepticism was expressed by those present that the U.S. could easily withdraw combat troops after they had been introduced, even if they had gone to South Vietnam under the cover of flood relief. A caustic exchange occurred the next day, November 5, between President Kennedy and JCS Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer. Notes taken at the meeting, on file at the LBJ Library, reveal that after Lemnitzer defended the action proposed by Taylor, and painted the adverse consequences of not doing so in rather apocalyptic terms, the following exchange took place: The President asked how he [Lemnitzer] could justify the proposed courses of action in Vietnam while at the same time ignoring Cuba. General Lemnitzer hastened to add that the JCS feel that even at this point the United States should go into Cuba. This exchange revealed the lingering (indeed, festering) animosity over the Bay of Pigs debacle, and also highlighted the extent to which the 35th President had become isolated within his own national security bureaucracy. Kennedy had now been pushed into a corner by his own national security establishment over the Southeast Asia problem, and had to fish or cut bait. On November 22, 1961 (ironically) the final version of NSAM-111 was promulgated, and it was the principal position on Vietnam made by JFK during his presidency: it authorized no combat troops for South Vietnam, and no ultimate guarantees to save Vietnam from Communism. In place of these two objectives that had been demanded by the interventionists, JFK approved a significant increase in American advisors and equipment. John Newman has written: There Kennedy drew the line. He would not go beyond it at any time during the rest of his Presidency. The main lesson of this climactic event is this: Kennedy turned down combat troops, not when the decision was clouded by ambiguities and contradictions in the reports from the battlefield, but when the battle was unequivocally desperate, when all concerned agreed that Vietnam’s fate hung in the balance, and when his principal advisors told him that vital U.S. interests in the region and the world were at stake.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Nov 2014 02:06:04 +0000
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