[The following appeared as a post on the moderated
Vietnam newsgroup, soc.war.vietnam. It is reprinted here by permission
of the author. Unfortunately, the footnote markers dropped out of
Nguyen's paper when it was posted to the newsgroup; I have however
retained the end notes and bibliography as he wrote them. Except for
a light spellcheck, I haven't edited this in any way. I think it's an
interesting viewpoint by a native of the country he's writing about.
-- Dan Ford]
By Nguyen Ky
Phong
Vietnam War historians and students of history often wonder
what would happened to the out come of the Vietnam war had
President Kennedy survived his term and carried out his
policy regarding America's effort in Vietnam.
Could Kennedy have extricated The United States out of
Vietnam's quagmire? Or better yet, under Kennedy policy,
could the USA have turned things around and shored up the
perilous situation during the year 1960-1962?
Kennedy's premature death brings about a lot of wonders as
to what the Vietnam war might have been had the president lived
through his term. Regardless what Kennedy might have done, the
military and political situations in Vietnam during his tenure
was precarious, to say the least. This article sets out to examine
the losing situations of the Vietnam war under president Kennedy.
Kennedy's First Year vis-a-vis the Situation in South
Vietnam
When John F. Kennedy assumed the presidency on January 20, 1961,
the political and military situation in South Vietnam (SVN) have
begun to deteriorate. The situation was not so deteriorated to
the point of being alarmed, but it warranted an immediate
attention from the new administration. A few months before
Kennedy took over SVN from Eisenhower, there were two political
turmoil occurred in Saigon. On November 11, 1960 ARVN paratroops
officers attempted a coup on Ngo Dinh Diem. They almost made it
had the leaders not wavered on their resolutions and direction of
the attack. Prior to this discontent by military commanders, on
April 1960, 18 prominent South Vietnamese politicians openly
signed a manifesto calling for president Diem to carry out
reforms and distance himself from his family members whose acts
of nepotism were so obvious. And one day before Kennedy's
inauguration, North Vietnam (NVN)'s military arm, the National
Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLFSV) came into
existence with a ceremony in a jungle in Tay Ninh Province.
Aside from those political dissensions, the military
situations in South Vietnam on the first year of Kennedy
administration, in regard to the Viet Cong's capability of open
attacks, presented a pessimistic view. Viet Cong forces were
getting bigger, their areas of operation wider and they were
bodacious with their operations. So ominous the military
situation that the monthly report from The United State Army
Pacific Command warned: "The activities and effectiveness of
South Vietnam forces were not sufficient to show a net gain or
effectiveness in the struggle." Worse, the Pentagon in
Washington and MACV in Saigon did not have the total picture of
the situation because South Vietnamese commanders--and a few
conspiracy American military advisors--concealed the unwelcoming
truth. Said a CIA report, "Concealment of existing situation has
became so ingrained in some officials that they tend to reject
any facts which do not fit their optimistic evaluations." They
lied about the situation with a stream of shining lies--as
commented by the main character of author Neil Sheehan in his
John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam.
It's not that the South Vietnamese soldiers refused to
fight. It's their commanders who either were too cowardly to lead
them into battles, or were told not to engage in any chancy
confrontation. It was reported that military commanders were
quietly ordered by Diem not to engage with communists if the
engagement incurred casualties. It seemed Diem only wanted to use
the Armed Forces to protect his regime, not fighting the
communists. While the Armed Forces were vacillating, waiting for
a direction from their commander in chief, the Viet Cong, with help
from NVN, bolstered their arsenal and manpower. Weapons were both
acquired from captured SVN's Armed Forces and supply from the
North; manpower was enhanced from local recruiting and
infiltration or covert repatriation of units that moved to the
North in 1955.
In the spring 1961 while Kennedy busily took inventory of
world's political and military affairs as he came to the office,
in South Vietnam the VC relatively had an easy time to build up
their strength.
Kennedy's First Acts to Salvage the losing situation in
SVN.
Kennedy had been to Vietnam as a junior congressman. There in
Saigon in 1951 he questioned minister Donald Heath why America
had to ally to the desperate effort of a French regime to hang on
to the remnants of an empire. And why the South Vietnamese had
to fight to keep their country a part of France. Of course,
Kennedy's question irritated Heath and the French
commander, General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny. But back then, as
an unprivileged outsider to foreign policy secrets, Kennedy did
not know that American had to please the French in Indochina in
order to entice them to go along with American policy in Europe
(like inducing France to join the European Defense Community).
Now, as president, Kennedy would have ample time to find the
answers for the questions he posed fifteen years ago--and more.
Would the native Vietnamese fight along the side of Americans to
hold off the advance of communist in Southeast Asia? Would
economic aid alone enough [suffice?] to help the South Vietnamese? If the
U.S. was to engage in SVN, how long, how much, and how far should
the U.S. engage? Whatever the dimension of help, and the
proximity of being an ally to SVN, Kennedy was undoubtedly
willing to defend "the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast
Asia," and that the U.S. won't abandon its offspring.
But Kennedy did not have time to think, or to have the
leisure of having just one "Vietnam" to worry about when he
assumed the Commander in Chief's baton: 1961 was
an offensive year for communism in around the world. Laos, Cuba,
the Soviet Union, Congo, and more important, Khrushchev's
bellicose speech in which he promised Soviet support for "War of
national liberation" ... the mess in Vietnam was just one of many
problems Kennedy had to deal with. Kennedy, however, found time
to act on Vietnam. But to act independently and with a rational
mind is one thing; to act because one is compelled to is another
thing. Kennedy was compelled to act on Vietnam's matters.
On January 27, 1961, after reading a report from the famed
CIA operative Edward G. Lansdale, Kennedy reportedly commented,
"This is the worst one we've got, isn't it? You know, Eisenhower
never mentioned it. He talked at length abut Laos, but never
uttered the word Vietnam." Whatever he saw from the report it
must be urgent. For two days later, Kennedy approved a
counterinsurgency plan in which operations "will probably require
may circumvention of the Geneva Accords." With that approval, the
American chips were down in Vietnam, so to speak.
From there on, a series of military and economic actions were
issued by Kennedy, began with National Security Action
Memorandum-28 (NSAM), to stem the advancing VC offensive. On
April 20, one day after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the
Vietnam Task Force was established with the order to come up with
measures to prevent communist domination of Vietnam. On April 29,
Kennedy approved a plan to send 400 U.S. Special Forces to
Vietnam to help train Vietnamese Special Forces. The month of
May saw a sweeping commitment from Kennedy to the Republic of
Vietnam with the issuance of NSAM-52, and NSAM-55, 56, 57 in the
month following month. On August, Kennedy authorized fund to
help increase SVN Army from 170,000 to 200,000 men. And on
October, Kennedy authorized an Air Force covert operation,
code-named Farm Gate, to train SVN Air Force.
Up until the end of 1961, Kennedy would do anything,
listen to any clear-minded rationale for a winning strategy in
Vietnam. Kennedy, however, did not intend to commit ground
troops. He heard all the pro and con arguments to send troops to
Vietnam, but he held firm on the decision not to commit ground
forces. As Secretary of Defense McNamara announced on his first
meeting with the military commanders in Honolulu on December 16,
1961 in regard to Vietnam plan, that (c) We have the authority
from the President; (d) Money is no object; [but] (e) The one
restriction is [that] combat troops will not be introduced.
Kennedy, in McNamara' swords, "repeated his doubt about our
military involvement in South Vietnam."
Vietnam 1962: The Battlefield Situation and the Problem of
False Intelligence
1962 greeted the Vietnam Task Force with an
inauspicious news. The consensus assessment from major
military commands and the National Intelligence Estimate
from the CIA agreed that Viet Cong operations were continuing at
a high rate, and there was nothing to indicate the trend might be
reversed. Forbidding predictions and comments pertinent to
military situations in Vietnam were dreadful for those
responsible for Vietnam. "The year of 1962 decided the fate of
Laos, and perhaps of all Indochina; Vietnam's year of decision
is 1962," reads a report from USARPAC (United States Army,
Pacific Command). Indeed, taken together, Laos and Vietnam
proved to be a major headache for Kennedy and his planners in
1962. In Laos, intelligence indicated that there were at least
15,000 regular NVN troops in and around the vicinity of the
Plain of Jars (after the war, in 1982, communist Vietnam admitted
that they had two divisions, the 336th and 396th, in Laos at the
time); in Vietnam, the VC had up to 20,000 men at their disposal.
And while the SVN government was deciding what to do with their
200,000-man-Army, and while the U.S. government deciding a
"proper course of action," the VC attacked outposts and
provincial military bases at will.
At the second Secretary of Defense Conference in Honolulu on
January 15, 1962, there were two items of discussion on the agenda
that deserve to be mentioned. One item was about the surging [upsurge?] of
hard-core VCs and their capability of attacking in force
strengths of 1000 to 1,500 (regimental size) to places of their
own choosing. The other item was the precarious state of the
local/regional Self Defense Corps--they could neither fight nor
kept their equipment from being captured by the communists. The
conference ended with plans and tasks assigned for the Self
Defense Corps. Yet, no one at the conference bothered to inform
the Secretary of Defense that the SDC could not accomplish the
tasks assigned. Meanwhile, back in Washington, Kennedy endorsed
another military program applicable to Indochina in the form of
NSAM-124. And with all the irony, Kennedy plan was, too, elusive
as a goal. At the third SecCon on the following month, the whole
session was bogged down by the disagreement by various
intelligence authorities on what was the real strength of VC
forces. In short: what was the enemy Order of Battle? And the order of
battle is the sin qua non of any war plan. It's hard to fight a
war without knowing how many men the enemy has.
The second month of 1962 witnessed an important effort of
the U.S. in dealing with the situation in Vietnam. In February,
the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) was to [be
supplemented with] Military Assistance Command
Vietnam. In military parlance, a command response to the
secretary of defense via its "parent" unified command. It also
meant the commander of MACV would have under his disposal other
military components of the Armed Forces such as Air Force and
Marines and Army. With the new command in place, the first order
it received was to solve the intelligence problem on enemy's
order of battle. [MAAG continued as the agency that provided
training and advisors to the South Vietnamese military and
government--DF] In May, at the fifth SecDef conference, MACV
solved the intelligence problem--but not without arm-twisting and
intimidation and compromise between those involved with the
estimate. In what turned to be the most bizarre episode of the
Vietnam war, intelligence information regarding enemy's order of
battle was never agreed upon. Even Secretary McNamara, who
received and approved the figure on May, 1962, was not being
truthful with his thought regarding the matter long after the war
was over.
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