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| Truth is the first casualty of war |
© 2003 Freely distribute
Contents Updated: Thursday, 10 April 2003
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We are expected to believe that President Bush—who would not be President at all if he had been honest and he, his family, and his party had not gerrymandered the results in Florida—has suddently found a streak of evangelical messiaship and wants to save the world from nasty gangsters whom previous administrations of the US had put into power and kept there for many years. There have been stages of war and duplicity earlier in recent history that have been exposed and which should be a warning to us not to believe warmongers, however credible they might sometimes sound. US leaders have not shunned lying, falsification, fact-juggling and double-dealing to escalate wars to their own nefarious ends. They have habitually trampled on international laws and agreements, the Charter of the United Nations, the US Constitution and elementary standards of human ethics. That sounds quite typical of the present US regime.
Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld might not like it now, but the Charter of the United Nations bears, among others, the signature of the United States. It says:
All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any member or state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.
It does not stop wicked and undesirable regimes from being punished but it brought some order into it by insisting that the UN should approve of it, and that nations should not go about attacking each other because they found each other's leaders odious men. The facts of the US Pentagon Papers, openly revealed in 1971, negate the commitment taken by the US with the other founder-members of the United Nations. Then, it was done under a veil of deception. Now Bush seems scarcely able to hide his contempt for the UN and his hope of sweeping it away, or at least sidelining it as useless. US administrations have typically high-handedly discarded the obligations they undertook to fulfil by signing the UN Charter, and they have unashamedly tricked the American people with plausible lies and propaganda.
The road of war is paved with the big lie, though often the big lie is hidden by a series of littler ones. In the build up of the Vietnam war, the Pentagon Papers showed that the US lied often. The leadership claimed, at different stages:
And so on. Congressman Paul McCloskey, member of the ruling Republican Party, on the floor of the Congress, on 18 February 1971, said:
A reasonable argument can be made that the President's recent decision to employ American airpower in support of South Vietnamese and Cambodian forces in the neutral countries of Laos and Cambodia exceeds his constitutional powers, and is, at best, a deliberate flouting of the will of the Congress.Congressional Record, 18 February 1971
A special report issued by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in May 1970 accused the Nixon Administration of sending American troops into Cambodia without the consent or knowledge of the Congress, thereby usurping the war-making power of the Congress.
A Committee to Safeguard the Constitution, specially set up for that purpose, requested the US Supreme Court to look into the question of the illegal war the USA had been waging for seven years in Indo-china without approval of the Congress, in violation of the Constitution. This appeal was signed by prominent scientists and lawyers, including one-time Attorney-General Clark, Professor J K Galbraith, and also one time US Ambassador to the United Nations, Arthur Goldberg, who had earlier used his gift of rhetoric in the United Nations to justify the US war.
The Washington perpetual oligarchy never hesitates to discard the Constitution, treating it as a scrap of paper whenever its suits them, and they can get away with ignoring it through secrecy and propaganda.
And what about the freedom of the press? No sooner had press action gone against the grain with the publication of extracts of the Pentagon secret report, than the Republican Administration leaders resorted to the mechanism of the courts. The US Administration, through its Attorney-General, started proceedings against the press under Article 593 of the Criminal Code, which carries for each offender the penalty of a 10-year prison term and a fine of $10,000. If the Republican Administration had to backtrack, it was by no means because its members had suddenly been put in mind of the freedom of the press, but merely because they had no other way out, for in this case the Washington bureaucracy ran up against sufficiently influential and powerful forces in the United States with whom the members of the Cabinet had to reckon. These influential people are the ones with the freedom, and usually use it to uphold the Washington fraternity.
The Tonkin Resolution was adopted in August 1964 by 88 votes in the Senate against two. Only two members of the US Congress out of 506 then taking part in the voting in its two Houses found the courage to say no. They were Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, and Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska. At the next election, both found themselves thrown out of the Senate. Concerning the methods used in dealing with the recalcitrants, just after the votes were counted, Morse declared that the results of the polling in his state had been rigged, and demanded an official recount, but this was denied. Now we know it happens and the Supreme Court approves of it. So much for US democracy.
In October 1969, Senator Charles Goodell of New York put before Congress a bill providing for the withdrawal of all US troops from Vietnam by 1 December, 1970. It never happened but in November 1970 the author of the bill lost his seat in the Senate. Among those who campaigned against the Republican Goodell were leaders of his own party, Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, who in this case ignored party solidarity and backed the candidate of the other party. So too for the realities of US democracy.
Addressing the anniversary session of the United Nations in San Francisco on 25 June, 1965, the US President spoke at length about the need to enhance the UN role in the maintenance of international peace and security. A fortnight later, the President announced a new step in the escalation of the war in Vietnam, arising from his order dispatching tens of thousands of US soldiers to the Vietnam theatre of military operations.
At a press conference in May 1967, replying to a question as to how he viewed UN General Secretary U Thant's statement that mankind was moving towards a third world war, the President said:
I don't think it would serve any purpose to speculate about that.
A few days earlier, the President had told his daughter:
Your Daddy may go down in history as having started World War III.Washington Post 12 May 1967
Hypocrisy and deceit, like bad language in the Sopranos, have become second nature to US leaders. Soon after President Nixon took over at the White House he told the governors of 50 states that he had found a yawning credibility gap between the people, and the government and all echelons of authority. This admission was made soon after Nixon took office. Later the gap, far from being narrowed, had grown so wide that Nixon was impeached and thrown out of office. During the 1968 electoral campaign, the Republicans had promised to end the deadlock in Vietnam. Instead, the Americans were faced with an extension of the war and the invasion of Laos and Cambodia.
The whole world has seen the great gap that lies between the words and the deeds of the US leaders, but US citizens seem to ignore them. Why should the assurances and professions made by Washington leaders be trusted when there is abundant evidence that they lie effortlessly? Should anyone trust politicians who habitually say one thing and do another, especially their own citizens? Should anyone trust men who refuse to recognise international law or the treaties their predecessors have signed?
If these men have deceived their own people in starting the war in Indo-china, where is the guarantee that they will not do so again in the future—that they have not done so in the Iraq war?
The published secret documents from the Pentagon archives expose those who have made lying and hypocrisy government policy, and reveal the depth of the moral degradation of those who hold forth about democracy, peace and justice, but stop at nothing to achieve their sinister ends.
There is a real danger that the pious US Right may perpetrate any crime and fraud. Many people throughout the world find nothing novel in this, but that does not make it any less alarming. The warnings thirty years ago of the dishonesty and scheming of the ambitious US politician and his advisers and backers in the military and defence establishments should have aroused universal indignation against militarism, and the bogus reasons US leaders offer for it.
In a speech made in Kentucky on 9 October 1964, US President Lyndon B Johnson insisted:
I didn't get us into Vietnam. I didn't ring up out there and say, “I want some trouble.”
By then the USA was already deeply bogged down in Indo-china. What was the exact date when the first US “aid” dollars and the first cases of weapons marked “Made in USA” started the lethal flow in the war in Vietnam? Few Americans know. Vietnam was a word they became familiar with only in the sixties when the body bags started being flown in, and the dead were replaced by draftees. In a speech at Memphis, Tennessee, on October 24, 1964, the US President assured Americans:
I want the mothers who must supply the boys, and I want the boys who must die in the wars, to know that no impulsive act of mine, no beat of emotion, is ever going to cause me to do a rash, dangerous, adventurous thing.
The “rash thing” had already been done—and not just a day or a week before these words were uttered. It was not the first lie in the veil of secrecy behind which the war was engineered, nor was it the last.
The first articles and documents of the Pentagon study—what came to be known as the Pentagon Papers—were published by the New York Times on Sunday, 13 June 1971, and then in a number of other big US newspapers.
The American people were shocked by what they learned. Deceit, hypocrisy and double-dealing were what was shown up in the glaring light cast on the secrets of Camelot, Washington style—a propaganda screen for the escalation of military operations. It showed deceit continuing through each administration of whatever political colour. Respected US leaders—their Presidents—did not hesitate to use ignominious methods, and the media covered up for them. It was a complete shock. Many US citizens had to ask themselves if they could believe what the top brains in Washington, including the President himself, told them and if they could believe what was daily being fed to them by the press, radio and TV. Answer: they cannot.
The articles were not chronological. On 5 July 1971, the final New York Times article actually returned to the start in the 1945-60 period to reveal early policy decisions that set the stage and the commitments of the United States to Vietnam. Truman, the head of the first postwar US administration, set himself the task to impress the electorate with the idea that victory in war had placed upon the American people the burden of responsibility for world leadership. US politicians insisted this was their country's destiny. It generated among US mandarins the burning urge to intervene in Vietnam's affairs.
As the young Senator and future US President, John F Kennedy, put it, they wanted “to hang on to the remnants of the empire” (A Schlesinger Jr A Thousand Days 1965). “The empire” was the French South East Asian colonies which could no longer be maintained with French bayonets and was about to collapse. The French generals commanding the last expeditionary corps of the Fourth Republic in Asia were marching to their defeat. It was inflicted on them at Dien Bien Fu in the spring of 1954. It had been almost ten years in the making. On 2 September 1945, following the uprising and victory against the Japanese, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) was set up. The Vietnamese people wanted freedom and independence.
The Truman administration initially rejected assistance to both the French and the Vietminh in their conflict but, on 30 December 1949, decided, after the takeover of mainland China by the communists, to provide military aid to the French against the communist-led Vietminh.
For great power reasons, the American rulers since the War have been unable to tolerate that any country should declare itself free and independent. Americans are proud of the US republic but steadfastly refuse to let anyone have one of their own. The US has contrived by direct intervention or by subversive methods to ensure that every country that has become free of old colonial powers has been subject to the new one—the US Empire. Corrupt kings, megalomaniac generals and upstart politicians were the choices of the US leadership rather than any democratic rule that might risk a vote for socialism.
US politicians and generals were just cutting their teeth in this policy in the early fifties. The Korean war had been fought to a stalemate, but the corporate barons had noticed in the World War and the following Korean war that war was good for their balance sheets. With the Korean war declared a draw, the US oligarchy worried that military appropriations might go into something foolish like housing, so they looked for a new intervention, and Dien Bien Fu was just what they sought. The political lexicon was enriched with the new word “escalation”, building up tension in the rising stages of the war. This was an escalation of intervention in the affairs of another country, escalation of arbitrary acts using armed force.
In June 1950, Truman issued a declaration ordering a speed-up in the supply of “military aid” to the area, and the dispatch of a military mission. The conclusions drawn by the authors of the Pentagon report on Vietnam tell every American:
The Truman Administration's decision to give military aid to France in her colonial war against the communist-led Vietminh “directly involved” the United States in Vietnam and “set” the course of American policy.The New York Times, 13 June 1971
The succeeding Eisenhower administration pledged to abide by the Geneva Accords of 1954—though it called them a “disaster”—but neverthless approved actions, including the introduction of American troops, that had “a direct role in the ultimate breakdown of the Geneva settlement”.
President Eisenhower said he could conceive of no greater tragedy than for the United States to become involved in all-out war in Indo-china. No one could be more bitterly opposed to such a development than he was.The New York Times, 11 February 1957
In the spring of 1954, as the French military position in Indo-china deteriorated rapidly and the date for the Geneva Conference approached, the Eisenhower Administration twice hinted to France that it was ready to intervene with American forces.The Pentagon Papers
Eisenhower was at pains to convince the American public that the allocation of $400 million to help anti-communist forces in Indo-china was “the cheapest way that we can prevent… a most terrible blow to American interests there.” (So he told a Gubernatorial Congress at Seattle on 4 August 1953.) But for the broad public, the same man was uttering honeyed words about “the supreme duty” of establishing lasting peace in any honourable way. (President Eisenhower's State of the Union Message to Congress on 6 January 1955.)
For the Pentagon generals, who knew their own business and the real aims of the White House leadership, there was no such “supreme duty”. This, too, is borne out by the Pentagon Papers. An aide memoire sent in March 1954 by Admiral Radford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to US Secretary of Defence Charles Wilson, said:
The acceptance of a settlement based upon the establishment of a coalition government in one or more of the associated states (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) would open the way for the ultimate seizure of control by the Communists under conditions which might preclude timely and effective external assistance in the prevention of such seizure.Washington Post, 18 June 1971
An international conference at Geneva was to seek ways of letting the peoples of Indo-china decide their own future, but a totally different kind of activity was going on in Washington's military and political headquarters—feverish preparations for direct armed intervention in Indo-china's affairs.
The Pentagon Papers explains that, in January 1954, the President's Special Committee on Indo-china discussed the dispatch of aircraft and 200 technical specialists to Vietnam. Deputy Secretary of Defence, Roger Kyes, expressed doubt about whether this would put the USA under an obligation to support the French to such an extent that with time the Americans would be involved in large-scale intervention, including the use of American combat units.
Deputy Secretary of State Smith made the rejoinder that “we were sending maintenance forces, not ground forces…” He felt, however, that the importance of winning in Indo-china was so great that if the worst came to the worst he personally would favour intervention with US air and naval forces. In this context, Senator Stennis drew the following conclusion:
I have been impressed for some time that we have been steadily moving closer and closer to participation in the war in Indo-china.Washington Post 18 June 1971
This “impression” somewhat lagged behind the realities. The USA was already fighting! By early 1952, 100,000 tons of US equipment had been delivered to Saigon. In 1953-1954, “military aid to Saigon was running at $1 billion a year” (D F Fleming. The Cold War and Its Origins. 1961).
All that remained was to find moral and legal justification for open war. President Eisenhower, on 10 February 1954, had to issue—again for the public at large—a misleading statement to the effect that no greater tragedy for the USA could be imagined than involvement in the war in Indo-china, and that no one could object in stronger terms than he did to such a course of events. But the Republican President kept mum about the fact that he had long since authorised the military to decide on the course of events.
According to the Pentagon Papers, in January 1951, President Eisenhower had approved a policy-making statement made in the National Security Council on the “United States' objectives and courses of action with respect to South-East Asia.” The Washington Post emphasised that it began with a sweeping statement of “general consideration”, one foreshadowed in the Truman Administration and to be continued in one form or another, as the documents show, by the Johnson Administration.
The so-called “domino theory” was the central pillar of this bipartisan platform, to be relayed from one White House incumbent to another. If Vietnam went, the whole of Indo-china would go, if Indo-china went, the whole of South-East Asia would go. No one would be allowed to go anywhere unless the US gave them the say so. For trying, they would be bombed unmercilessly.
A policy-making statement by the US Administration at the time said:
South-East Asia, especially Malaya and Indonesia, is the principal world source of natural rubber and tin, and a producer of petroleum and other strategically important commodities… Furthermore, this area has an important potential as a market for the industrialized countries of the free world.Washington Post 18 June 1971
These were the motives behind the US conspiracy against the independence of the people of Indo-china, not saving the world from whatever gave US industrialists nightmares. Before US soldiers set foot on Vietnamese soil, it had been considered possible to use the remnants of the old colonial regime for these purposes:
Here are the main objectives of “special war” and “Vietnamisation”, later to be fully developed. The army commanders were invited to submit their opinion. The “army's stand” was:
Seven US divisions or their equivalent, with appropriate naval and air support, would be required to win a victory in Indo-china if the French withdrew and the Chinese Communists did not intervene.
The Pentagon did not consider this to be too hard a nut to crack. In fact, the prospect was tantalising, considering Indo-china's wealth and strategic location. Was any account taken of the attendant risks? Yes, the National Security Council said in one report:
The US should recognise that it may become involved in an all-out war with communist China, and possibly with the USSR and the rest of the Soviet bloc, and should therefore proceed to take large-scale mobilisation measures.Washington Post 18 June 1971
Evidence of the readiness to go all-out also came from the stand taken by the second man in the White House, then Vice-President Nixon, who on 16 April 1954, told the American Newspaper Editors' Association that the US Government was to take a “sober” view of the situation and send its armed forces to Indo-china. There is good reason to assume that the future President of the USA was taking even more vigorous action behind the scenes. According to the Chicago Sun-Times (17 June 1971):
The unpublished portion of the top secret Pentagon history of the Vietnam war covers the period in 1954 in which President Nixon played a key role in the debate over dropping the atomic bomb and committing US troops… It was during the Eisenhower Administration that the US moved to the verge of a major intervention, a full decade before Johnson took the fateful step.
In the spring of 1954, as the French were being surrounded by the communist-led Vietminh at Dien Bien Fu, Admiral Arthur W Radford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reportedly sought authority to use tactical nuclear weapons to break the seige.
It was widely assumed at the time that Nixon and the late Secretary of State John Foster Dulles supported Radford… During that period, US Navy planes, equipped with tactical atomic bombs were in the air off North Vietnam, poised to strike at the Vietminh.
But President Eisenhower called them off at the last minute, reportedly after seeking the advice of General Matthew B Ridgeway, the Army Chief of Staff, who warned that a successful military intervention might require several hundred thousand US troops.
An item in the Philadelphia Inquirer on 24 June 1971 shows that Admiral Radford had also drawn up a plan for Operation Vulture, which provided for a strike by 60 B-29 bombers from a US base near Manila.
Besides the readiness to run the risk of a big war, the plans implied the need to condition public opinion at home and in the allied camp. One of Dulles's telegrams in April 1954 stressed that the USA was doing its utmost…
…to prepare a public, congressional and constitutional basis for united action in Indo-china.Washington Post 18 June 1971
The convocation of the Geneva Conference on Indo-china proved to be the main stumbling block. Perhaps no other negotiations in the diplomatic history of the USA had so upset Washington as this conference, until the UN refusal to approve the US war on Iraq. US war planes were already on patrol in the skies of South-East Asia, prepared to obliterate Indo-china, while preparations were being made in Geneva to talk of peace for the Indo-chinese. So the US had to aim its heavy-calibre diplomatic guns at the conference to kill it off or neutralise it.
The Government of the United States… takes note of the agreements concluded at Geneva on July 20 and 21, 1954… declares with regard to the aforesaid agreements… that it will refrain from the threat or the use of force to disturb them…Statement by the Under-Secretary of State at the
Concluding Plenary Session of the
Geneva Conference 21 July 1954
The President ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to prepare “a long-range program for the organisation and training of free Viet forces”.Philadelphia Inquirer, 24 June J971
The Eisenhower Administration's decision to intervene in South Vietnam's affairs and to undermine North Vietnam led to the US Government's assuming a direct role in ultimately torpedoing the 1954 Geneva Agreements on Indo-china. This conclusion, obvious to the world, was brought home to the Americans by the New York Times on 13 June 1971, from the Pentagon Papers.
On 18 June 1971, the Washington Post carried a summary of the principal documentary evidence concerning US diplomatic activity during the Geneva Conference of April-June 1954. Secret operations were already being conducted during the Geneva conference. US Secretary of State Dulles was the chief architect of the policy to torpedo the Geneva Agreements. Dulles was the architect of the “roll back communism” policy and the “massive retaliation” strategy. The newspaper articles illustrated clearly the hypocrisy of bipartisan US foreign policy, whose proponents vindicated the escalation of the war because the Geneva Agreements was ineffective.
The French expeditionary corps at Dien Bien Fu was facing defeat. Just before the conference opened, Dulles tried to induce London to mount an Anglo-American intervention. In his memoirs, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden), then Britain's Foreign Secretary, describes Dulles's moves.
On 11 April 1954, Dulles informed Eden that US aircraft carriers had already left Manila and were on their way to Indo-china. This psychological pressure verged on downright provocation was designed to stampede Britain into the gamble. Britain's Tories were not keen on a colonial expedition in South-East Asia, because they had their hands full elsewhere. At the same time, London had undoubtedly received news from Washington of how badly Dulles and the Pentagon were in need of a show of “allied solidarity” to ensure US Congressional approval of open war. The Washington Post said:
Dulles had trouble rounding up allies, especially the British.
In his reports on his talks with Eden, Dulles did not consider it necessary to conceal his sarcasm over the fact that the UK stand was evidence of increasing weakness. Dulles summed it up as follows:
The British seem to feel that we are disposed to accept present risks of a Chinese war and this, coupled with their fear that we would start using atomic weapons, has badly frightened them.Washington Post 18 June 1971
Anthony Eden notes, in The Memoirs of Anthony Eden (1960), that even Churchill, a crafty and cautious old colonialist, had concluded that Britain was being required “to assist in misleading Congress into approving a military operation, which would in itself be ineffective and might well bring the world to the verge of a major war.”
The whole point of the rabidly anti-communist Dulles was to keep the world constantly on the brink (“brinkmanship”). Dulles and the apostles of the US corporations who backed him were ready to do anything to prevent independent governments from being installed in office for fear that they would chose communism instead of US capitalism. Frankly, Dulles and subsequent Washington cognoscenti simply do not understand what democracy means, either that or they are not democrats but autocrats. The world must do as the US leaders say. The Geneva Conference did not suit Dulles because he saw it only as a means of “opening the Communists' way to power” in Indo-china by the route of independence.
Having failed to torpedo the Geneva Conference through “united military action”, Dulles concentrated his efforts on trying to reduce the possibility of the conference calling for free elections (Washington Post 18 June 1971). Again he failed. He then lost all interest in the conference and left Geneva.
The Geneva Conference ended with the signing of armistice agreements between the governments of France and the Vietnamese government, with a declaration affirming the commitment not to station foreign troops in Vietnam, and with a date set for general elections—July 1956—to allow the people of Vietnam to express their will within the framework of a single, peaceful and independent state.
At the time, Dulles expressed his unhappiness at the impending outcome of the Geneva Conference (Washington Post 18 June 1971). He sent a telegram to various American diplomats then struggling with the problem stressing that since it was undoubtedly true that…
…elections might eventually mean unification of Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh, this makes it all the more important that they should be only held as long after a ceasefire agreement as possible.
So, his policy was to frustrate the Geneva Agreements. To excuse torpedoing the agreements, the US representatives refused to sign the final declaration, but a declaration issued by the USA said that, since these Geneva Agreements had been signed, the USA “will refrain from the threat or the use of force to disturb them”.
The USA continued to step up its activity in Vietnam.
A few days after the signing of the Geneva Agreements, the National Security Council under President Eisenhower declared that these agreements were a calamity (New York Times, 5 July 1971). In late summer 1954, the US President had approved a plan of action envisaging fresh steps in direct US intervention in Vietnam's internal affairs in violation of the Geneva Agreements. A Colonel Landsdale, a CIA agent, was sent to Vietnam to organise sabotage, acts of terrorism and subversion.
American diplomacy steadily implemented Dulles's idea of throwing a veil of “common Western interests” over the intervention in Indo-china. In September 1954, Dulles's incipient plan for “united action” by America's partners led to the establishment of SEATO. In October, the President ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to:
Prepare a long-range program for the organisation and training of free Viet forces.
At the same time, despite French objections, the USA decided to install the Catholic, Ngo Dinh Diem, as head of the Saigon regime, and to move “emperor” Bao Dai out. As the Philadelphia Inquirer pointed out:
Diem's rise with US help almost caused a break in American relations with France. But the American Secretary of State continued his support for Diem, which ultimately helped to drive France out of Vietnam altogether in 1955.Philadelphia Inquirer, 24 June 1971
Despite the recognition of the instability of Premier Diem's regime, his lack of support and his ineffectual measures to help the peasants, a decision was made to back him. The US blocked the elections scheduled in the Geneva Accords by encouraging Diem's refusal to hold them. The fear was that elections would lead to unification of the two Vietnams under Ho Chi Minh. But American aid—almost entirely for security with minimal funds for community development, social welfare, health and education—did not curb the Vietnam insurgents.
Dulles and Diem formulated a platform, according to which the Geneva decisions for a general election in Vietnam in July 1956 were incompatible with keeping the country divided or turning it entirely into an American protectorate. No honest election in Vietnam would have produced a result that suited them. The CIA had warned Eisenhower in advance that Ngo Dinh Diem could not hope to win the elections. The US Administration had no hesitation in approving Diem's decision to call off the “elections, which had been agreed upon in the 1954 Geneva accords” (Chicago Sun-Times, 25 June 1971).
National Security Council document NSC-5809, dated 2 April 1958, contained Eisenhower's secret directive to work for an overthrow of the popular system in Vietnam and the establishment of a single puppet state. Eisenhower and Dulles were doing their utmost to support the Diem regime, despite the fact that the CIA assessment of the situation in South Vietnam led to the conclusion that the prospects of setting up a solid regime were insignificant, and that in the course of the year ahead the existing situation was more likely to worsen. The Chicago Sun-Times said Washington was impressed by the way Ngo Dinh Diem managed “with unexpected efficiency” to put down “a number of dissident Buddhist sects”.
The US ruling caste in Washington succeeded to a large extent in concealing all this from most Americans. Elsewhere governments were far from happy. A note sent from the USSR to Great Britain—the joint conveners of the Geneva Conference—on 30 March 1956, noted that the present threatening situation in South Vietnam could not have arisen but for the intervention on the part of “a certain power” which had taken part in the Geneva Conference and which although it did not sign the Geneva Agreements on Vietnam, had nevertheless undertaken the obligation not only to refrain from violating the Geneva Agreements, but also to regard any violation of the said Agreements as constituting a grave threat to international peace and security. The note went on:
The acts of the South Vietnamese authorities designed to prevent the holding of a general election in South Vietnam in July 1956 are being openly supported, weapons are being supplied and military personnel are being trained for a so-called “campaign against the North” for the purpose of starting a new war in Indo-china…
All states that had participated in the Geneva Conference had committed themselves to do their utmost to promote a settlement of the Indo-china problem in the interests of peace. At the time, Senator Lyndon B Johnson seemed to be a critic of the administration, and declared (The New York Times, 7 May 1954):
American foreign policy has never in all its history suffered such a stunning reversal… We stand in clear danger of being left naked and alone in a hostile world.
The extent of Johnson's hypocrisy was revealed ten years later, when he issued his orders sending tens of thousands of American boys into the war against the peoples of Indo-china. As soon as the baton of bipartisan power passed from the Republicans to the Democrats, with the election of President John F Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson became the country's Vice President, he was ordered by Kennedy to go to South Vietnam to negotiate with Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon. That was in 1961.
What was the state of the Vietnam business when John F Kennedy moved into the White House? On 1 July 1971, the New York Times described developments in the Kennedy administration, 1961-63, but another source reveals that secret operations were already being conducted in Vietnam.
In 1961, a Washington corporation, Helioaircraft, servicing airlines in South Vietnam, made a lucrative offer to an American pilot named Smith, which he accepted. Within a few months, Smith was passed on to another private company—Aviation Investors—which was listed as being in the service of Saigon's civil airline. But Smith had earlier flown planes on airlines in the Congo, and his experienced eye at once noted that the corporation's civilian label was no more than camouflage.
What was it trying to hide? Soon Smith learned that the business in which he was taking a hand was designated by the code name of Operation Haylift, and that it was being directed by the CIA. Its purpose, as Smith himself subsequently told, was to airlift South Vietnamese agents to North Vietnam for subversive operations—blowing up railway lines, bridges, etc. Smith said:
At first, they used a C-54 for runs over the North. When this was lost they switched to four C-123s, all unmarked, and used them for recon runs and drop missions over the North.
This was told in a book by a US journalist, Joseph C Goulden, published in 1969, Truth is the First Casualty. The Gulf of Tonkin Affair—Illusion and Reality (1969), echoing the maxim of U Thant, then UN Secretary General:
In times of war the first casualty is truth.
Goulden says that Smith was a pseudonym for a man whom the author met through Senator E Gruening in 1968. It reveals that the US aggressive action against Vietnam has a longer history than many had imagined. The tissue of lies used to cover up the war was just as long.
The Pentagon Papers indicated that Kennedy shifted the direction and involvement of the Vietnam strategy from the “limited-risk gamble” of the Eisenhower administration to one of “broad commitment”. The underlying objective was still to prevent communist domination of South Vietnam. While Kennedy resisted pressures to commit ground-combat units, the number of troops was increased, initially by 500 on 11 May 1961, but up to 16,000 by the end of his 34 months in office. He also approved of covert operations involving American military advisers. None of these commitments were disclosed to the public.
In taking these steps, Kennedy ignored the advice of the intelligence agencies, which was “conspicuously more pessimistic (and more realistic)” than other senior advisers. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, advocating a range of combat operations, estimated “a good chance of… arresting things and giving Diem a chance to do better and clean up…” The administration chose a greater commitment against South Vietnamese independence. Here is how one newspaper puts it:
Upon taking office in January 1961, Kennedy was confronted by reports from the US Embassy in Saigon that Diem was in danger of being overthrown because of his repressive policies and the toleration of corruption at the top of his government… In March 1961, the Central Intelligence Agency, in a national intelligence estimate warned that the Viet Cong were gaining “control and influence over increasing areas of the countryside”. The CIA said Diem was growing progressively weaker.Chicago Sun-Times, 25 June 1971
What choice did Kennedy make? It was in no sense a way of reducing the US intervention or “preparing for a US withdrawal from Vietnam”, as some historians and politicians in the American liberal camp subsequently insisted. The Chicago Sun-Times said:
Kennedy sought to bolster the regime by authorising funds to increase the South Vietnamese army by 20,000 men and the civil guard by 32,000.
In March 1961, Kennedy approved a plan of the Joint Chiefs of Staff which gave the military command more leeway in dealing with the “hot war situation”, bypassing the US Ambassador in Saigon. It sanctioned direct military intervention in Vietnam's affairs.
So, as we saw, in May 1961, Vice-President Johnson was sent to Vietnam to “encourage Diem to request US ground troops” (Chicago Sun-Times, 25 June 1971). At first, Diem refused, but then went along and in October made the request suggested by Johnson. The Pentagon Report is clear—the “South Vietnamese request” for US military intervention was the result of direct pressure from Washington.
At the time, General Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow also visited Saigon and returned with full plans. The Boston Globe testifies (22 June 1971):
As early as 11 May 1961, President Kennedy had approved programs for covert action which had been recommended by a Vietnam task force. Among the actions were:
- Dispatch of agents into North Vietnam.
- Aerial resupply of agents in North Vietnam through the use of civilian mercenary air crews.
- Infiltration of special South Vietnam forces into South-East Laos to locate and attack communist bases and lines of communication.
- Formulation of “networks of resistance, covert bases and teams for sabotage and light harassment” inside North Vietnam.
- Conduct of overflights of North Vietnam for the purpose of dropping leaflets.
The US President ordered “anti-guerrilla ground action, including the use of United States advisers, if necessary”, against some strong points of the insurgents. The word “adviser” in this context is a euphemism for US professional soldiers who directed operations and increasingly participated in them. They are sometimes called “special forces” and this was the start of the US “special war” against the Vietnamese. The Boston Globe (22 June 1971) says by early 1961 there were 1,000 US soldiers in Vietnam. General Maxwell Taylor advised the President to send in 8,000 US soldiers. The paper says that “Kennedy did not mention the Taylor recommendations for a US task force or whether the United States was considering one”, but concludes:
President Kennedy stepped up covert actions against North Vietnam and increased the number of advisers to 16,000 men before he was assassinated in November 1963.
On 1 July 1971, the New York Times published three of Taylor's reports on the results of his visits to Vietnam. These reports contain the flat recommendation to send US troops to South Vietnam, and support the need to use the threat of aerial attack to put pressure to bear on the legitimate Vietnamese Government.
In its final form, the policy of intensifying the US intervention in South Vietnam's affairs was set out in a joint report submitted to President Kennedy on 11 November 1961, by Defence Secretary McNamara and Secretary of State Rusk, both of whom argued that it could prove necessary to send in troops of the USA and other SEATO members. They insisted that the maximum numerical strength of the US forces required for use in South-East Asia did not exceed 6 divisions, that is, roughly 205,000 men. The report was submitted on the eve of the important National Security Council meeting at which, the Washington Post said on 2 July 1971:
Kennedy, in essence, accepted the Rusk-McNamara recommendations for a fateful step into direct involvement in the war.
It was under the Kennedy Administration that the organisers of the Vietnam venture finally realised that it was no longer possible to maintain the flimsy Diem regime in Saigon. According to the Pentagon's study, the Kennedy administration, despite its disavowal, “knew and approved of plans for the military coup d'etat that overthrew” the government on 1-2 November 1963. Many historians and eye-witnesses of these events had long since expressed the opinion that US intelligence under the Kennedy Administration had taken a hand in preparing the coup which led to Diem's overthrow and murder. This was confirmed by the secret papers published in the Chicago Sun-Times on 23 June 1971. The study indicated that:
Our complicity in his overthrow heightened our responsibilities and our commitment.
At least two officials recommended disengagement, but the decision was made because of the failures of Diem to control the country, manage the war effort and achieve popular support through political, economic and military reforms. And Washington was upset by Diem's favouritism to Catholics and that his promise of conciliatory actions toward Buddhists, whom he persecuted, was repudiated by repeated brutalities. This was a “watershed” period for the United States, when the Vietnam policy could have been reconsidered, even to the point of disengagement, as the Pentagon Papers note.
These Papers say that in the summer of 1963 leading Washington official circles were sharply divided in their attitude towards Ngo Dinh Diem, “with the State Department urging his ousting and the Pentagon insisting that the United States stick with him”. The newspaper wrote that a decision was finally adopted against Diem. The papers also showed that Kennedy and his chief advisers were closely connected with the moves which led to Diem's downfall on 1 November 1963.
At the National Security meeting in Washington on 17 September 1963, Kennedy decided to exert growing pressure on Diem (Chicago Sun-Times, 23 June 1971). To justify this attitude to the Saigon rulers, a rumour was circulated to the effect that Diem's brother, Nhu, was inclined to negotiate with the DRV on neutralising Vietnam. The same National Security Council sitting decided to send Defence Secretary McNamara and General Taylor to Saigon. The two men reported to Washington on 2 October, and soon Diem was removed and, with his brother Nhu, killed in the course of the military putsch.
The Philadelphia Inquirer, which published some of the Pentagon papers on 24 June 1971, relating to the period when the coup was being prepared, concluded that through that coup the Kennedy Administration had finally shelved plans for a cutback in the American military presence in Vietnam, although the paper's analysis suggests that President Kennedy had intended to use these plans for domestic political purposes in connection with the forthcoming 1964 Presidential campaign.
Consequently, towards the end of Kennedy's term in office, the continuity of the bipartisan US line in South-East Asia, designed to violate the 1954 Geneva Agreements and extend direct US military intervention in the affairs of Vietnam and other states in Indo-china, had become most pronounced. Characterising the bipartisan policy on Indo-china, the New York Times (18 June 1971) drew the following conclusions:
That the Kennedy Administration, though ultimately spared from major escalation decisions by the death of its leader, transformed a policy of “limited-risk gamble”, which it inherited, into a “broad commitment” that left President Johnson with a choice between more war and withdrawal.
That the Johnson Administration, though the President was reluctant and hesitant to take the final decisions, intensified the covert warfare against North Vietnam and began planning in the spring of 1964 to wage overt war, a full year before it publicly revealed the depth of its involvement and its fear of defeat.
The Boston Globe has a telegram from General Taylor to President Kennedy which is a glaring example of how insistently the architects of the intervention sought to conceal the truth from the American people and the world. Sent from Saigon in November 1961, it said:
My view is that we should put in a task force consisting largely of logistical troops for the purpose of participating in flood relief and at the same time of providing a US military presence in Vietnam… To relate the introduction of these troops to the needs of flood relief seems to me to ofter considerable advantage in Vietnam and abroad. It gives a specific humanitarian task as the prime reason far the coming of our troops.
Subsequently, US politicians and generals invented many other pretexts and verbal screens for acts violating the Geneva Agreements, the rules of international law and humanitarian standards. General Taylor was neither the first nor the last to do so.
Still, in a telegram to Washington, Taylor found it necessary to inform the President about some of the inevitable consequences, if his recommendations on the dispatch of 8,000 US ground troops to Vietnam were accepted. These included the danger of some of the US strategic reserves being pinned down “for an uncertain duration”, and the impossibility of resisting fresh pressure to reinforce the task force, if it should prove to be inadequate, the unlimited nature of any possible new commitments, including an attack on Hanoi, growing tensions and the threat of “escalation into a major war in Asia” (Boston Globe, 22 June 1971).
Nothing of these apprehensions and doubts was said to the American people. And the new man in the White House, who took the place of the assassinated John F Kennedy, had good ground to assume that whatever new decisions and steps the Administration took in Indo-china, he too could rely on the barrier of secrecy and official untruth. At the same time, Johnson took special care to present the Republican Party before the masses as being equally responsible for the Vietnam policy as his own, Democratic Party. That is why he never tired of repeating that his policy vis-a-vis South Vietnam accorded with the pohcy formulated by the Eisenhower Administration in 1954. (President Johnson's statements of April 23 and June 2, 1964.)
Q. Mr President, Representative Laird of Wisconsin declared that the Administration is preparing to move the Vietnam war into the North. Is there any substance to this claim?
A. I know of no plans that have been made to that effect.President Johnson's news conference, 2 June 1964
[The United States' policy is] to prepare immediately to be in a position on 72 hours' notice to initiate the [previously recommended] “Retaliatory Actions” against North Vietnam, and to be in a position on 80 days' notice to initiate the program of Graduated Overt Military Pressure against North Vietnam.National Security Action Memorandum 288, 17 March 1964
The early stage of the Johnson Administration was marked by a fact which left its stamp on all the methods he used to camouflage the escalation of the war. The year Johnson took his first decisions on Vietnam was also an electoral one—1964. Johnson must have realised that it would have been an unforgivable blunder to ignore the slogans of peace. That is why, among the electoral catchwords churned out by the White House machine and designed for public consumption, Johnson found this formula highly attractive:
Our one desire—our one determination—is that the people of South-East Asia be left in peace to work out their own destinies in their own way.
He would repeat it, word for word, on many occasions, as he did in Washington on 10 August 1964, and on 13 March 1965. New catchwords would be invented and fresh efforts made to bring out the Administration's “peace-making” in contrast to the extremism of its rivals, among them Goldwater and Nixon. The military intervention conveyer belt would continue to operate with inexorable momentum.
The secret papers of that period described the goings-on in the President's oval room at the White House and in the Pentagon staff rooms. On 21 December 1963, Secretary of Defence McNamara's aide memoire, The Vietnam Situation, was placed on President Johnson's desk. It began with these words:
The situation is very disturbing. Current trends, unless reversed in the next 2-3 months, will lead to neutralisation at best and more likely to a communist-controlled state… We should watch the situation very carefully, running scared, hoping for the best, but preparing for more forceful moves if the situation does not show early signs of improvement.The New York Times, 13 June 1971
It is this aide memoire which first outlined the new plan for extending US military operations in Vietnam in every direction, including the escalation of subversive operations against North Vietnam. The latter are to be designated as Plan 34-A and to serve as the main script for the war up until August 1964, when the war would enter a new stage. McNamara emphasised:
Plans for Covert Action into North Vietnam were prepared as we had requested and were an excellent job. They present a wide variety of sabotage and psychological operations against North Vietnam from which I believe we should aim to select those that provide maximum pressure with minimum risk.
McNamara's memorandum showed that when writing to each other US politicians have no use for the high-flown rhetoric to which they normally resort on television or on the stump, but call a spade a spade. At the same time (January 1964), General Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recommended a number of measures for escalating the war, including the following:
Advise and support the Government of Vietnam [in Saigon] in its conduct of large-scale commando raids against critical targets in North Vietnam. Conduct aerial bombing of key North Vietnam targets, using US resources under Vietnamese cover, and with the Vietnamese openly assuming responsibility for the actions. Commit additional US forces, as necessary, in support of the combat action within South Vietnam. Commit US forces, as necessary, in direct actions against North Vietnam.
Was all of this in line with President Johnson's own thinking? The answer comes from General Taylor's memorandum, which says:
National Security Action Memorandum No 273 makes clear the resolve of the President to ensure victory over the… communist insurgency in South Vietnam. Joint Chiefs of Staff are of the opinion that the United States must be prepared to put aside many of the self-imposed restrictions which now limit our efforts, and to undertake bolder actions which may embody greater risks.
What were these restrictions that the US sought to be rid of? They were these: not to carry the war beyond the boundaries of South Vietnam, “avoiding the direct use of US combat forces” and to limit US leadership to the action being taken. Furthermore, the recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff contained 10 points on escalating the intervention, which in his aide memoire to the President on 16 March 1964, Defence Secretary McNamara reduced to four main ones:
The analyst of the Pentagon papers in the New York Times wrote:
President Johnson approved Mr McNamara's recommendations at a National Security Council Meeting on March 17, 1964, directing that planning “proceed energetically”.
And so the Johnson Administration, as early as the spring of 1964, had already started to plan overt war against North Vietnam. It had further intensified the “special war”, that is, acts of sabotage on Vietnamese territory. In the White House this was called military “pressure”, although it meant direct military intervention in Vietnam. The Pentagon report said that the main aim of the USA was to safeguard the might, influence and prestige of the United States, which evidently was done by stifling a country's independnence.
The period from the beginning of 1964 to the Gulf of Tonkin provocation in August of that year was a crucial one, when plans for subsequent stages of escalation of the US war in Vietnam were being drawn up. The reporters judged this to be a critical period which laid the foundations for a large-scale war. “An elaborate program of covert military operations against the state of North Vietnam”, as it is designated in the Pentagon papers, was launched on 1 February 1964, under the code name of Operation Plan 34-A.
Throughout 1964, operations under Plan 34-A covered everything, ranging from overflights of North Vietnam by U-2 spy planes and abduction of North-Vietnamese citizens to obtain intelligence data, to the dropping of groups of saboteurs, sea-borne commando raids on the coast for the purpose, the New York Times said (13 June 1971), of blowing up railway and highway bridges and shelling North-Vietnamese coastal installations by torpedo boats. These “destructive undertakings”, as they were described in a report to the President from Major General Victor H Krulak of the Marine Corps, were designed “to result in substantial destruction, economic loss and harassment”. The tempo and magnitude of the strikes were designed to rise in three phases through 1964 to “targets identified with North Vietnam's economic and industrial well-being”. These “covert operations” were directed on behalf of the President by McNamara through a special group under the Joint Chiefs of Staff designated as the Office of the Special Assistant for Counter-insurgency and Special Activities.
These subversive operations, the Pentagon report says, were coordinated with the US State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, including advance monthly schedules of the raids. This inter-departmental coordination was carried out by Assistant Secretary of State for Far East Affairs William Bundy and John McNaughton, Assistant Secretary of Defence for International Security Affairs. In Saigon, operations under Plan 34-A were controlled by General P Harkins.
An important element of this plan of exerting covert military pressure on North Vietnam was the so-called patrols by US warships in the Gulf of Tonkin, this part of the plan being designated by the code name of De Soto Patrols. These were mainly “psychological, as a show of force” but the destroyers collected “intelligence on North Vietnamese warning radars and coastal defences that would be useful to 34-A raiding parties or, in the event of a bombing campaign, to pilots”.
Although commentators on the Pentagon papers said the US Government had not planned “to use the ships as bait for North Vietnamese retaliation” and that “a deliberate provocation was not intended”, the course of operations in the Tonkin Straits belies this conclusion. The papers provide evidence that US intelligence circles and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff felt that the whole 34-A program had little chance of intimidating the North Vietnam and of breaking the Viet Cong's resistance in South Vietnam. Meanwhile, the White House had already considered the following stage in the escalation of the war—“a demand for more was stimulated and an expectation of more was aroused”. The USA was moving to overt armed intervention and escalation of war while keeping it from the public.
Walt Rostow, who had tremendous influence with President Johnson, assured him:
A credible threat to bomb the industry Hanoi had so painstakingly constructed out of the ruins of the French Indo-china War would be enough to frighten the country's leaders into ordering the Viet Cong to halt their activities in the South.The New York Times, 13 June 1971
Some of the men around President Johnson were coming to realise the hopelessness of supporting the puppet regime in South Vietnam, and of the US intervention in Vietnam's domestic affairs. One document said:
The government of General Khanh [head of the Saigon government] was incapable of competing politically with the Communists.The Pentagon Papers, Bantam Books (1971)
Another document, an intelligence report, says:
…the primary sources of communist strength in South Vietnam are indigenous, arising out of the revolutionary social aims of the Communists and their identification with the nationalist cause during the independence struggle against France in the nineteen-fifties.The Pentagon Papers, Bantam Books (1971)
In a telegram of 20 March 1964, to US Ambassador in Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, President Johnson dealt with some problems arising from the political back-up of the plans for war against North Vietnam. Having said that he shared General Khanh's opinion that strengthening the southern base was the most immediate and important task, Johnson went on:
For this reason our planning for action against the North is on a contingency basis at present, and the immediate problem in this area is to develop the strongest possible military and political base for possible later action. There is additional international reason for avoiding immediate overt action in that we expect a showdown between the Chinese and Soviet communist parties soon and action against the North will be more practicable after than before a showdown. But if at any time you feel that more immediate action is urgent, I count on you to let me know specifically the reasons for such action, together with your recommendations for its size and shape.The Pentagon Papers, Bantam Books (1971)
President Johnson also flatly rejected de Gaulle's proposal for “neutralising South Vietnam”. Johnson wrote to Lodge:
On dealing with de Gaulle, I continue to think it may be valuable for you to go to Paris after Bohlen has made his first try… It ought to be possible to explain in Saigon that your mission is precisely for the purpose of knocking down the idea of neutralization wherever it rears its ugly head, and on this point I think that nothing is more important than to stop neutralist talk wherever we can by whatever means we can.The New York Times, 13 June 1971
Consequently, while continuing steadily to implement the policy mapped out by earlier Administrations for extending the war in Indo-china, the Johnson Administration firmly clung to Dulles's well-known idea that “neutrality was immoral”. Actually, the US rulers were contemptuous of, and were trampling on, every principle of morality and every rule of international law.
The Pentagon reports catalogued the build-up of the mentality of taking over, and escalating war. An illegal government had been set up in the South, and frustration at its failure and inability to control the Viet Cong resistance fed the escalation mentality. It was the mentality of the man who keeps losing at roulette and keeps doubling his stake hoping to win back his losses. Nothing other than outright victory was satisfactory. Anything else was considered to be a communist success and signalled the destruction of the American position in South Vietnam.
The New York Times, describing the stand of the Johnson Administration on the Pentagon's Vietnam gamble, arrived at the conclusion that in the summer of 1964 the President was on the one hand, “pushing his Administration to plan energetically for escalation while, on the other, continually hesitating”. But was this simply hesitation?
The answer comes from McNamara's following remark concerning ways of backing up these operations which he said were of a highly delicate character because “there would be the problem of marshalling the cause to justify such action”. Johnson's Administration was “calculating international and domestic political conditions before making any moves in public”. The whole problem was to vindicate US acts and to deceive the US electorate on whose behalf thousands more lives were to be thrown into the furnace of war. Justification was the “domino theory”, the fall of all Southeast Asia to communism one country at a time, the threat of China, and the fear of loss of prestige and US world dominance.
Senior officials of the State Department and the Pentagon supplied the procedures—William Bundy, John McNaughton and William Sullivan. On 23 May 1964, they proposed a script for stepping up the war within 30 days, which was to culminate in the extensive bombing of the North. The main thing in the script was the measures to provide “moral and political” back-up for the war, including the idea of a joint resolution by both Houses of the US Congress, giving the President the go-ahead for the escalation. The script included these steps, among others:
The Pentagon Papers quoted in the Boston Globe on 22 June 1971, showed that at the next stage of the escalation of the war the US militarists were preparing to go to extremes, including the use of nuclear weapons, in their efforts to break the Vietnamese people's resistance. The Boston Globe quoted the Pentagon papers dealing with the Honolulu Conference on 1-2 June 1964, under the chairmanship of Secretary of' State Dean Rusk. It was attended by Secretary of Defence McNamara, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Taylor, CIA Director McCone, Commander of the US Armed Forces in the Pacific Admiral H Felt, and US Ambassador in Saigon Cabot Lodge.
They discussed aspects of the air war including all the details. The result was a “list of 94 targets”, ranging from bridges to industrial enterprises. The paper quoted this extract from the Pentagon report:
Secretary McNamara then went on to say that the possibility of major ground action also led to a series of questions of having to use nuclear weapons at some point.
Admiral Felt responded emphatically that there was no possible way to hold off the communists on the ground without the use of tactical nuclear weapons and that it was essential that the commanders be given the freedom to use these as had been assumed under various plans.
One of the main questions at the Honolulu Conference was how to get Congress to pass a resolution giving the go- ahead for war. The resolution had already been drafted, apparently by William Bundy, together with the 23 May script. The Pentagon document dates this project 25 May 1964. Following the Honolulu Conference, the President apparently approved continued work for the Congressional resolution, because planning for it continued apace.
In November 1965, 18 months later, the magazine Esquire would be the first to inform US readers that a few weeks before the notorious Tonkin incident, the pretext for escalating the war in Vietnam, President Johnson was carrying in his pocket a draft resolution of Congress, waiting for the right moment.
A closed hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 20 September 1966, heard William Bundy himself admit that the State Department had prepared several draft resolutions, considering that “things might take a more drastic turn at any time” (J Goulden, op cit). The New York Times reported (13 June 1971):
By June 10, there was “firm support” from most of the foreign-policy-making machinery of the government for obtaining the resolution, although the account notes that at an inter-agency meeting that day five basic “disagreeable questions” were identified for which the Administration would have to provide convincing answers to assure public support. These included:
- Does this imply a blank check for the President to go to war in South East Asia?
- What kinds of force could he employ under this authorization?
- What change in the situation (if any) requires the resolution now?
- Can't our objectives be attained by means other than US military force?
- Does South-East Asia mean enough to US national interests?
Nevertheless, in a memorandum for the second inter-departmental conference on June 12, William Bundy wrote that the Administration needed the immediate passage of the resolution by Congress as a continuing demonstration of US firmness and for complete flexibility in the hands of the executive bodies in the coming political months. While the USA did not expect “to move in the near future to military action against North Vietnam” events in South Vietnam or Laos could force it to review its stand.
In the summer of 1964, the electoral campaign in the USA was in full swing and this necessarily had an effect on Johnson's stand. The electoral battles called for the President's increasing attention and skill. A draft of one of his election speeches (delivered in New York on 12 August 1964) created the impression that the President was reasoning with restless military commanders:
Some others are eager to enlarge the conflict. They call upon us to supply American boys to do the job that Asian boys should do. They ask us to take reckless action which might risk the lives of millions and engulf much of Asia and certainly threaten the peace of the entire world. Moreover, such action would offer no solution at all to the real problem of Vietnam.
But this was in no sense a statesman who had finally opted for peace and justice, but a politician who was seeking to present himself as a dove in contrast to the Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, the hawk. It was just another lie behind which lurked a truth that was more unpalatable than that in Goldwater's most sinister calls for war. Goldwater himself following the publication of the secret documents, declared on 14 June 1971, that a month before the Tonkin incident he had been aware of Johnson's plans to extend the war in Vietnam. In a television interview, the Senator said:
I did not know the exact details, but I knew that a scenario was written that would give an excuse for war.The New York Times 15 June 1971
He added that during the election campaign he had known of the plans to bomb North Vietnam and to dispatch US troops for military operations in South Vietnam. He declared:
See, I was being called trigger-happy, warmonger, bomb-happy, and all the time Johnson was saying he'd never send American boys. I knew damn well he would.
For all the zigzagging in Johnson's official statements in the summer of 1964, the escalation machine had been switched on and was running. The Administration had gone so far in its planning of military measures that despite the delay in implementing the May script a number of steps provided by it were taken one by one in the course of June and July.
Almost at the same time, as the Washington script, Operation Plan 37-64 was made up in the Honolulu headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief of the US Armed Forces in the Pacific, Harry Felt.
It tabulated how many planes and what bomb tonnages would be required for each phase of the strikes, listed the targets in North Vietnam with damage to be achieved, and pro grammed the necessary positioning of air forces for the raids.New York Times, June 13, 1971
All that was now required to put the escalation machine into high gear was a decisive pretext, and from the standpoint of those who up on top were seeking the final justifications to prevent loss of face and from the standpoint of those who had primed the fighting machine, there was an extreme and urgent need for such a pretext. Both the “men in uniform” and civilian CIA agents who were in charge of the airborne units, aircraft carriers, destroyers and squadrons of planes, and who directed the secret operations simultaneously in three areas-South Vietnam, in the frontier areas of Vietnam and Laos, and in the demilitarised zone along the border of North Vietnam all had many opportunities for creating a suitable situation.
Some Pentagon Papers related to the Tonkin Gulf incident of August 1964. The Covert War revealed that the United States govemment had an elaborate program of covert military operations, sabotage, commando raids and destroyer patrols in the gulf against the state of North Vietnam for six months prior to the August incident. The aim was to force Hanoi to cease its support of guerrillas in the South through destruction and psychological harassment. The intelligence agencies and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had given this politicians' program little chance of success.
Public statements at the time of the Tonkin Gulf incident by Secretary of State Rusk and Secretary of Defense McNamara obscured United States involvement in previous attacks against North Vietnam. The planning of the bombing strategy and the government's political and psychological maneuvering was worked out in advance. A recommendation of a strategy conference the previous June was to prepare the American public for escalation of the war. That was the propaganda effect of the congressional and public discussions that ensued after the Tonkin event.
Q. Mr. Secretary, can you give us the basic reasons for the Gulf of Tonkin patrol?
A. It is a routine patrol of the type we carry out in international waters all over the world.Secretary of Defence McNamara,
news conference, 5 August 1964
While the purpose of the patrols was mainly psychological, as a show of force, the destroyers collected the kind of intelligence on North Vietnamese warning radars and coastal defences that would be useful to 34-A raiding parties or, in the event of a bombing campaign, to pilots.Pentagon Report
On 23 July 1964, the 2,200 ton US destroyer Maddox sailed from the Japanese port of Yokosuka to take part in Operation De Soto, whose official purpose, the US Naval Command in the Pacific later said, was normal patrolling of the coastal waters of Vietnam. In a Taiwan port, the destroyer took on board a container with electronic equipment and more than 10 specialist operators. On 2 August 1964, carrying out its exercises in the area of Hon Me Island, part of North Vietnam, the destroyer radioed it was forced to open fire on torpedo boats chasing it. President Johnson ordered the Maddox to continue the operation, and dispatched the destroyer Turner Joy as reinforcement, also promising cover from the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga.
On the night of 30 July 1964, the United States and the illegal South Vietnam authorities sent their warships into the territorial waters of North Vietnam, simultaneously shelling, the islands of Hon Ngu and Hon Me. On 1 August 1964, four American T-28 fighter-bombers, flying in from the direction of Laos, bombed and fired rockets at the frontier post of Nam Can which is about 7 kilometres from the Vietnam-Laotian border, and which was clearly seen flying the North Vietnam national flag.
On 2 August 1964, seven American AD-6 and T-28 fighter-bombers, flying in from Laos, once again attacked Nam Can. At the same time, a section of the US Seventh Fleet, constantly patrolling along the Vietnam coast, repeatedly shelled coastal targets and populated localities in North Vietnam. On 2 August, a US destroyer entered the territorial waters of North Vietnam. 4 August 1964, D-day in the US plans, was fast approaching.
Early on 4 August—night time in the Gulf of Tonkin (according to Secretary of Defence McNamara this was a dark, moonless, unsettled night)—telegrams began to arrive in Washington reporting that the radars of the US destroyers had detected a group of moving targets which were identified as torpedo boats and against which the two destroyers had opened fire. By noon of 4 August, the Pentagon radio station in Washington was receiving a flood of contradictory messages from the Gulf of Tonkin, some reporting torpedo attacks against the destroyers, others casting doubt as to what had occurred, because it was impossible precisely to determine the situation in the darkness of the night and in view of the unreliable sonar evidence.
At noon on 4 August, President Johnson called a meeting of the National Security Council in Washington and there and then ordered the military to take counter-measures and issued instructions to contact the leaders of both parties in Congress for the purpose of coordinating the decisions required by the situation.
But by nightfall of 4 August, three days before the Congress decision, the Ticonderoga sent its bomb-laden planes up into the air. At midnight, US air force planes dropped their bomb-load over North Vietnam, within four hours carrying out 64 sorties over their targets.
While President Johnson was preparing the arguments for Congressmen and the public in favour of his “counter measures”, his military advisers had already launched Plan 37-64, worked out many weeks earlier, for the first airstrikes against the North and for alerting the ground forces and marine units.
At 13.25 hours on 4 August, two and a half hours after the radio report of the clash in the Gulf of Tonkin, and while Rusk, McNamara and McCone were lunching with Johnson, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff telephoned McNamara informing him of a decision to carry out strikes from aircraft carriers against torpedo-boat bases and oil depots in the North as “retaliation”.
The decisive step to extend military operations, the goal towards which the US military-industrial complex had been moving, was being taken. The US war against an independent sovereign state had already begun. The New York Times report (13 June 1971) of this was:
At 4pm, McNamara learned from Admiral Sharp in a telephbne conversation that there was now confusion over whether an attack on the destroyers had actually taken place. The Secretary told Admiral Sharp that the reprisal order would remain in effect.
The talk between McNamara and Sharp was held when the US war machine was going full speed ahead in unfolding the provocation planned by the White House. President Johnson did not wait. He went on television to tell the nation that in view of the “unprovoked” attack on the US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin he had decided to retaliate with air-raids against North Vietnam. He described his actions as a “limited and fitting response”. “We still seek no wider war,” he said. Meanwhile, bombs were being dropped on innocent civilians in Vietnamese towns and villages.
On the morning of 5 August, the telephone rang in the office of Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon. Morse apparently never revealed who it was, but he suggested that Morse do two things (Goulden, op cit):
On 5 August, the Johnson Administration introduced its draft resolution for preliminary consideration by Congressional committees, with Senator Fulbright as the one to put it across. On 7 August, both Houses of Congress voted for the resolution authorising the President to take “all necessary measures… to repel any armed attack” against US forces, and “all necessary steps, including the use of armed force” to help any nation that requested aid “in defence of its freedom under the South-East Asia Collective Defence Treaty” (SEATO). (Facts on File, 1964)
“To take all necessary measures” is double talk for starting a war. Deputy Secretary of State N Katzenbach later said that the resolution was a functional equivalent of the Constitutional obligation expressed in the provision of the Constitution with respect to declaring war. In short, this was sanction to wage unlimited war which, for Americans and their representatives in Congress, was to remain an “undeclared” war, so that the President's acts were beyond the control of Congress.
In the House of Representatives the resolution was passed unanimously, and in the Senate only two men voted against—E Gruening of Alaska, and W Morse of Oregon. Senator Gruening condemned the steps taken in escalating the war as being a reflexion of the one-sided aggressive US policy in South-East Asia, while Morse said the resolution was a historical mistake. It seems only 2 percent of US Seanators have any moral principles.
The Pentagon Papers have a gap in this chronology. The New York Times did not contain any full or textual documents relating to the period between 25 July and 8 August, 1964. The paper admitted the gap and turned to other sources, notably an analysis made by a Pentagon division in 1965, that is, at the height of the chauvinistic hullabaloo in Washington, when the authors of these reports were not at all trying to show the truth about what was going on. Accordingly, they reproduced the official version of the events in the Gulf of Tonkin in early August 1964, with all the omissions and contradictory statements, which were built into this version from the outset.
The New York Times had to admit that the Pentagon Papers lack back-up documents when dealing with the last few days of July 1964, that is, with the action which was then being carried forward under the direction of the Pentagon and the CIA, and whose true nature is apparently only revealed in the papers hidden away at the CIA.
On 6 August, 1964, as the Congressional committees were considering the draft resolution, Senators Morse and Gruening tried to throw doubt on, and draw attention to the contradictions in the Pentagon's “explanations”, but Senator Fuibright cut them short, inducing the Congressmen to take an early decision. Subsequently, Fulbright was to publicly confess. At a hearing held by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the Tonkin incident in February 1968, he said that if he had had the good sense to demand a complete assessment he would never have made the mistake of approving the resolution.
The veil of lies, ambiguities and contradictory statements on the Tonkin incident was already stretched to breaking point under the first few questions put by Senator Morse at a hastily organised inquiry into the situation by Congressional committees on 6 August 1964. These questions bore on the actual assignment the Maddox was fulfilling, the extent to which the Pentagon was sure that the territorial waters of North Vietnam had not been violated, and the connexion between the Maddox's mission and the CIA's commando raids on North Vietnam then being carried out under Plan 34-A and behind a screen of South Vietnamese operations. Finally, his questions bore on the truth of the story about the “unprovoked” attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on US destroyers. Were the military sure that such an attack had actually taken place?
The Pentagon papers' analysts showed how the resolution sanctioning the “undeclared” war was imposed on Congress. McNamara and State Secretary Rusk came out in support of this resolution at the closed hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Relations Committee on 6 August. Meanwhile,
Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon had learned that boats manned by South Vietnamese crews had attacked the two North Vietnamese islands on 30 July. Mr Morse alleged during the secret hearing on 6 August that Mr McNamara had known about the raids and that the destroyers had been associated with it.
Mr. McNamara replied:
First, our Navy played absolutely no part in, was not associated with, was not aware of, any South Vietnamese actions, if there were any… The Maddox was operating in international waters, was carrying out a routine patrol of the type we carry out all over the world at all times.
I did not have knowledge at the time of the attack on the island. There is no connection between this patrol and any action of South Vietnam.New York Times 13 June 1971
McNamara's story gave something of the gist of the official lie, which had paralysed the Congressmen, or at any rate had supplied them with the arguments in favour of escalation they had wanted to hear, and had enabled the Administration over a period of years to raise the stakes in the escalation with impunity. The material of additional inquiries, notably that carried out by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 1968, makes it possible to reproduce a part of the picture of the military-political provocation, and the untruth that went with it.
Lie—The Maddox was carrying out a routine patrol. This exchange is recorded in the verbatim report of this sitting of the Senate Committee:
FULBRIGHT: The Maddox was authorized in its missions, and I quote from the orders, “to stimulate Chicom-North-Vietnamese electronic reaction”. What does that language mean?
McNAMARA: It means that they turn on certain kind of equipment on board the Maddox which in turn leads the Chicom or the North Vietnamese to turn on the radar frequencies; that was clearly one of their objectives.
FULBRIGHT: That is what I meant. That is what I meant by electronic spy mission.New York Times 25 February 1968
The Pentagon papers published by the New York Times on 13 June, 1971, also admit that patrolling was an element in the overt military pressure on North Vietnam, and that the destroyers collected intelligence information which “would be useful to 34-A raiding parties or, in the event of a bombing campaign, to pilots”. This admission is added truth that the provocative US actions against Vietnam in late July and early August were part of an overall plan.
L i e—The Maddox was operating in international waters.
FULBRIGHT: And the Maddox was given orders to penetrate the territorial waters of North Vietnam and stimulate their electronic networks assuming their territorial water was 12 miles.
McNAMARA: Absolutely not. The Maddox was specifically instructed to stay out, to go no closer than eight miles to the coastal area.
FULBRIGHT: I said assuming their territorial water of 12 miles.New York Times 25 February 1968
Lie—Our Navy played absolutely no part in… was not aware of any South Vietnamese action (the 34-A operations directed by the CIA). Here is an extract from a directive issued by Commander of the US Naval Forces in the Pacific, Admiral Sharp:
US has stepped up assistance to RVN (Republic of Vietnam) including stationing of CVA TG (the task group including the carrier Ticonderoga) at the mouth of Gulf of Tonkin… Activity in 34-A operations has increased (Goulden, op cit).
On 10 July, Admiral Sharp's command authorized his fleet units involved in De Soto patrols to…
contact COMUSMACV (Commander, United States Military Assistance, Vietnam) for any additional intelligence required for prevention of mutual interference with 34-A operations and such communications arrangements as may be desired. (Goulden, op cit)
A message sent by Captain Herrick, commander of Operation De Soto, at 6.30am on 4 August said:
Evaluation of info from various sources indicates that DRV considers patrol directly involved with 34-A ops. (Goulden, op cit)
The verbatim report of the Senate Committee hearings records:
FULBRIGHT: I quote from a cable to the Maddox: “The above patrol will:
- clearly demonstrate our determination to continue these operations;
- possibly draw NVN (North Vietnamese Navy) PGMS (patrol boats) to northward away from area of 34-A operations.”
Lie—We were fully confident that an unprovoked attack on American vessels had taken place. In its report in February 1968, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said that only a few hours before the President ordered the “retaliatory air strike” against North Vietnam, the commander of the US Forces, Pacific, continued to cable his ships to confirm absolutely that they were attacked, and to confirm the sinking of PT boats? The Maddox telegraphed back that it was not certain, and suggested an air reconnaissance. In his testimony, a member of the Maddox crew said:
It seemed like he [sonar operator] was hollering all the time. I said to myself: Aw God, if there are that many torpedoes in the water the whole Seventh Fleet would be blown up by now. I had an idea what was happening. At 30 knots there is a big pie-wedge of dead space behind the ship, with so much noise in it—a rear roar—that an operator can't even keep his phones on it. Also when you are making sharp turns, the effect on the hydrophone is exactly what a torpedo sounds like when it is passing you. I noticed the sequence would never vary: we'd make a turn, and Dave would call “Torpedo” and give a range. So we would turn again, and sure enough, up would come another call, “Torpedo”. (Goulden, op cit)
Captain Herrick cabled:
Maddox scored no known hits and never positively identified a boat as such.
It is not at all surprising that even the censored publication of the Senate inquiry into the Tonkin incident is replete with contradictory evidence by those who were taking part in the US subversive operations against Vietnam in early August 1964. The more aware and critical sections of the public asked: surely, this is a faked incident, used as a provocation. The Pentagon Papers do not frankly answer this question, but the provocative design behind the simultaneous and combined operations on land, in the air and at sea cannot be denied either by critics or defenders of the action.
J Goulden, author of the book already cited several times, concludes that the Johnson Administration anticipated—perhaps even subconsciously desired—one set of facts on 4 August 1964, when a flash report from the Maddox said she was under attack.
The Administration seized upon this report, clung to it despite subsequent cables from the Maddox saying the whole episode could have been a mistake, and proceeded to bomb a foreign country without Congressional authorization… The weight of the evidence presented in these pages is that the Administration acted hastily, upon incomplete and misleading information, and then refused to admit error.
On 4 August, the Vietnames announced that they had been attacked by air, and that US warships had invaded their territorial waters on 30 July, 31 July and 2 August, and on 5 August they denied the allegation of the Pentagon that they had attacked two US warships in international waters. The New York Times notes (13 June 1971):
the Pentagon study gives no indication that Mr Johnson informed the Congressional leaders of United States responsibility for and command of the covert 34-A raids on 30 July and 3 August. Nor does the history give any indication that Mr Johnson told the Congressional leaders of what the historian describes as “the broader purpose of the deployments” under Operation Plan 37-64…
Summing up the August 1964 events, the analysts of the Pentagon Papers insist that at the time Johnson managed to stage three important acts from his scenario, which had been drawn up as early as 23 May 1964:
They add that “in the heat of the Tonkin clash, the Administration had also accomplished one of the major recommendations of the June strategy conference in Honolulu—preparing the American public for escalation.” That is what Johnson and his entourage thought in claiming that the new stage in the US war had been a victory. Very soon this victory boomeranged against Johnson himself, against his Administration and the whole of US foreign and domestic policy.
On 14 June 1971, the New York Times revealed that at a White House strategy meeting in September 1964 the consensus that the war had to be escalated, if the situation was to be saved, and the decision was reached to bomb North Vietnam.
Johnson, at the height of the presidential election contest, took a public position against enlarging the war. However, war mentality progressed with the concept of “provocative strategy”—provoking a response that would allow a retaliatory air attack. Alternative options were also eliminated. There could be no “extreme withdrawal” and no “fall back” positions, nor any tactics like a selective bombing campaign, which would lead to negotiations.
In late November a bombing strategy of “progressively more serious air strikes” was designed, yet the president was reassuring the press at a news conference that “speculating and taking positions” about expansion of the war were premature. Both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the intelligence agencies dissented from this decision, the former advocating a willingness to apply unlimited force, the latter pessimistically not giving the plan “very strong chances for breaking the will of Hanoi”. Reluctant to even hint at the existence of the plans as late as 3 January 1965, Secretary Rusk ruled out “either a US withdrawal or a major expansion of the war”. Two reprisal air strikes occurred on 8 and 11 February. The order to begin sustained bombing was given on 13 February.
We have taken the actions that we think are hest calculated to protect the national interest of this country, freedom in the world and humanity everywhere.Statement by President Johnson
on 27 February 1967
Of the nearly 6 million tons of bombs used in Indo-china, nearly half have fallen during the last two years alone—a tonnage equal to the explosive force of more than 100 Hiroshima-type atomic bomhs.Senator Edward M Kennedy
The Nation 28 June 1971
President Johnson decided to celebrate his 56th birthday at his ranch in Texas. Aside from serving two tons of beef to the guests, Johnson repeated his popular electoral decision to get the “Asian boys” not the “American boys” fighting:
I have had advice to load our planes with bombs and to drop them on certain areas that I think would enlarge the war and escalate the war, and result in our committing a good many American boys to fighting a war that I think ought to be fought by the boys of Asia to help protect their own land.
That was on 29 August 1964, at the height of the electoral campaign, when Johnson was trying hard to prove that he was the candidate epitomising the “forces of reason and restraint” in contrast to his rival, Barry Goldwater, who was clamouring for blanket bombings of North Vietnam.
What was going on behind the scenes? On 26 August, three days before the President's birthday party in Texas, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent Defence Secretary McNamara a memorandum, entitled, Recommended Courses of Action-South-East Asia. It stated that the air war against North Vietnam was necessary to “prevent a complete collapse of the US position in South-East Asia”. It added that it did not agree…
that we should be slow to get deeply involved until we have a better feel for the quality of our ally. The United States is already deeply involved. The Joint Chiefs of Staff consider that only significantly stronger military pressures on the DRV are likely to provide the relief and psychological boost necessary for attainment of the requisite governmental stability and viability [in Saigon]… We should therefore maintain our prompt readiness to execute a range of selected responses, tailored to the developing circumstances and reflecting the principles in the Gulf of Tonkin actions, that such counter-operations will result in clear military disadvantage to the DRV. These responses, therefore, must be greater than the provocation in degree, and not necessarily limited to response in hind against similar targets. Air strikes in response might be purely VNAF; VNAF with US escort to provide protection from possible employment of MIGs; VNAF with US escort support in the offensive as well as the defensive role; or entirely US. The precise combination should be determined by the effect we wish to produce and the assets avail able. Targets for attack by air or other forces may be selected from appropriate plans including the Target Study for North Vietnam consisting of 94 targets, recently forwarded to you by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.New York Times 14 June 1971
In short, the memorandum recommended to the President and the Secretary of Defence that bombings should be carried out and military operations against the North sharply extended as a means of preventing the collapse of the Saigon puppet regime. The Joint Chiefs of Staff recommendations are also characteristic in another sense—they contain a direct recommendation once again to resort to the principles of the Tonkin provocation as a pretext for escalating the war in Indo-china.
Another important document was drawn up in that period on orders from President Johnson. It was called Plan of Action for South Vietnam and was authored by Assistant Secretary of Defence McNaughton. Here are some extracts from this long document, which is dated 3 September 1964:
So, the Pentagon invited the US President to consider several ways of staging provocations against the North, all of which could lead to a big war. The saving clause at the end left a loophole for putting off any decision on further escalation of the war until November or December 1964, that is, until the outcome of the Presidential election early in November. At the same time, the memorandum quite explicitly stressed the need “to provoke a military DRV response”, to justify the planned escalation of the war for US and world opinion.
A memorandum which Assistant Secretary of State for Far-Eastern Affairs, William Bundy, sent to President Johnson on 8 September goes even further in dotting all the i's. It says:
We should be prepared to respond on a tit for-tat basis against the DRV in the event of any attack on US units or any special DRV/VC action against SVN. The response for an attack on US units should be along the lines of the Gulf of Tonkin attacks, against specific and related tar gets. The response to special action against SVN should likewise be aimed at specific and comparable targets.
The main further question is the extent to which we should add elements to the above actions that would tend deliberately to provoke a DRV reaction, and consequent retaliation by us. Example of actions to be considered would be running US naval patrols increasingly close to the North-Vietnamese coast and/or associating them with 34-A operations.New York Times 14 June 1971
A meeting at the White House on 7 September, chaired by President Johnson, was attended by Secretary of State Rusk, Secretary of Defence McNamara, General Wheeler, the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, CIA Director McCone, and US Ambassador to South Vietnam Taylor, and also Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy, the author of the above-mentioned memorandum to the President. The official minutes of the meeting registered the decision to resume De Soto Patrols in the Gulf of Tonkin by US destroyers. It added:
By early October, however, we may recommend such actions depending on GVN progress and communist reaction in the meantime, especially to US naval patrols.New York Times 14 June 1971
The Pentagon report drew the conclusion, on the strength of the discussions at the White House on 7 September, 1964, that in view of the weakness of the Khanh regime, the strategy of provocations in the form of an air war against North Vietnam was unacceptable.
There is an entry in the Pentagon Papers made by one of the participants in the 7 September meeting which says that the President put this question: “Can we really strengthen the GVN?” Elsewhere we find McNamara's answer. He urged that “the way be kept open for stronger actions even if the GVN did not improve”.
On 10 September, therefore, the President ordered a number of “interim” measures in National Security Action Memorandum 314, which included resumption of US naval patrols in the Gulf of Tonkin, and a build-up of 34-A commando operations with inclusion of South Vietnamese groups. The Pentagon report explained this as follows:
It was believed that this step would be useful in establishing a climate of opinion more receptive to expanded [air] operations against North Vietnam when they became necessary.
The President also ordered that the USA should be prepared to launch punitive operations—“reprisal air strikes like those during the Tonkin Gulf incident as appropriate against the DRV in the event of any attack on US units”.
Washington's tactics were clear—deliberate provocations, including commando raids, while presenting any self-defence as being attacks against US military units allegedly giving the US Government the right to take “retaliatory measures”.
Two days after Johnson's order (12 September) two US destroyers, the Morton and the Edwards, resumed their patrols of the Gulf of Tonkin, thereby provoking what the US press called the “third Tonkin incident”, which was, to be more exact, a fresh dangerous act of war.
On 4 October 1964, Johnson issued a secret order to resume commando raids on coastal installations in the DRV, each such operation being “approved in advance” by Deputy Secretary of Defence Cyrus R Vance for Secretary McNamara, Llewellyn A Thompson, Acting Deputy Under-secretary of State for Political Affairs, for Secretary Rusk, and McGeorge Bundy at the White House for the President.
At the same time, the US air operations in Laos were stepped up. “A Laotian cease-fire was not compatible with current perceptions of US interest”. The analysis in The New York Times brings out what the President feared in this respect.
The Administration also believed that even the convening of a conference on Laos might create the impression in Saigon that Washington was going to seek a negotiated withdrawal from South Vietnam and set off a political collapse there and the emergence of a neutralist coalition regime that would ask the United States to leave.New York Times 14 June 1971
Secret raids were being carried out against Laos by planes of the US Air Force and the Navy, under the code name of Yankee Team. The Pentagon Papers show that a decision was taken at the time to have Saigon troops, accompanied by US advisers, “also make ground forays into Laos up to a depth of 20 kilometres”.
On 6 October, the State Department cabled the US Embassy in Vientiane (with a copy to the Commander of the US Armed Forces in the Pacific), virtually ordering extensive air strikes against a part of the territory of Laos “as soon as possible”. This is evidence that the overt intervention in Laos, launched by the Nixon Administration in 1970, had its roots in 1964, when the Democrats were in office.
The USA was suffering one defeat after another in its military gamble in South Vietnam, and the Pentagon was working overtime to extend military operations to the neighbouring countries, including Laos. At the same time, US diplomacy was trying hard to involve as many of its allies in the gamble as possible. This was the outline of a dangerous scheme to fan the flames of war throughout the entire Indo-china Peninsula.
The powerful political campaign in defence of the Vietnamese people which swept across the world, and the numerous exposures of the US war forced the White House hastily to work out fresh propaganda measures in an effort to whitewash the policy of the Johnson Administration. One document by Assistant Secretary of State, William Bundy, is characteristic in this respect. It is dated 5 November, 1964:
The President is clearly thinking in terms of maximum use of a Gulf of Tonkin rationale, either for an action that would show toughness and hold the line till we can decide the big issue, or as a basis for starting a clear course of action under the broad options.
The Pentagon and Washington politicians hankered for new provocations and, as one of their documents said, expected the new year to provide the opportunity for launching overt military operations against North Vietnam.
The projected air war against Vietnam was code-named Operation Rolling Thunder. The Pentagon Papers show that a memorandum from President Johnson's special assistant for national security, McGeorge Bundy, greatly influenced President Johnson's decision to carry out these aggressive operations. Returning from Saigon on the President's personal Boeing 707, Air Force One, Bundy drafted a letter to the President under the impression of the vigorous and large-scale action by the patriotic forces of South Vietnam. He wrote:
The political values of reprisal require a continuous operation… Episodic responses geared on a one-for-one basis to “spectacular” outrages would lack the persuasive force of sustained pressure.New York Times 15 June 1971
Even a Pentagon specialist said that Bundy's memorandum of 7 February 1965, was a “unique articulation of a rationale for the Rolling Thunder policy”. In summary conclusions to his memorandum, Bundy wrote:
Once such a policy is put in force we shall be able to speak in Vietnam on many topics and in many ways, with growing force and effectiveness.
These words of Bundy's are shot through with the nostalgia the US militarists have felt all along for Dulles's “positions of strength” policy. The swift strike by the patriotic forces against the US base at Pleiku on 7 February, when Bundy and McNaughton were in Saigon, appears to have rocked them.
On 8 February 1965, the US bomber force carried out another raid on North Vietnam. While issuing the order for this raid, the White House presented it to the public as a “separate retaliatory measure”, actually, “the drastic US action, long on the military planners' drawing boards under the operational code name Flaming Dart, precipitated a rapidly moving sequence of events…” (New York Times 14 June 1971).
On 13 February, Johnson cabled Ambassador Taylor his decision to carry out Operation Rolling Thunder. His message said:
Our current expectation is that these attacks might come about once or twice a week and involve two or three targets on each day of operation.
In that period, the US State Department cabled London and eight US Embassies in the Far East instructing them to “inform head of government or state (as appropriate) of above in strictest confidence and report reactions”.
The President ordered the first of the approved large raids to be staged on 20 February. But, says the New York Times, five hours after the State Department transmitted this order to the men responsible in Saigon, another coup was staged against General Khanh, and the situation became more complicated. Ambassador Taylor, who was delighted at President Johnson's order to start air operations, was forced to request permission to cancel the air raids set for 20 February. Somehow the Americans managed to calm down the squabbling puppets.
Operation Rolling Thunder, repeatedly put off, was started on 2 March, 1965, when dozens of US jet planes struck at several targets in the North. On 9 March, the White House took another monstrous decision. President Johnson gave the US Air Force permission to use napalm to destroy non-military targets—villages and towns—in North Vietnam. The heaviest bombings in the air war so far were carried out on 14 and 15 March. The Pentagon Papers say that over 100 US planes took part. Subsequently, the raids were to be extended, using heavy B-52 bombers. Johnson and McNamara personally selected the targets for these bombings.
Ambassador Taylor demanded that the White House should draw up a more dynamic time table for these strikes, a program for steadily extending the action to the North. He cabled the President as follows:
It appears to me evident that to date DRV leaders believe air strikes at present levels on their territory are meaningless and that we are more susceptible to international pressure for negotiations than they are.New York Times 15 June 1971
And so, the massive bombings of the North were started on 2 March 1965. The Johnson Administration expected that the systematic air attacks on DRV territory would break the Vietnamese people's will to resist the US war. An important aspect of this operation was the hoped-for psychological effect on the puppet army of South Vietnam, its generals above all for the Americans realised that they were unable to withstand the independence movement in the country. The squabbles in Saigon are well illustrated by one document in the Pentagon Papers. It is a radiogram sent from Saigon to the US State Department on 24 December, 1964 about a meeting Ambassador Taylor and his Deputy, Alexis Johnson, had with those who now constitute South Vietnam's rulers (Generals Nguyen Cao Ky, Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Chanh Thi). This verbatim report is here quoted in part.
TAYLOR: Do all of you understand English? (Vietnamese officers indicated they did, although the understanding of General Thi was known to be weak.) I told you all clearly at General Westmoreland's dinner we Americans were tired of coups. Apparently I wasted my words. Maybe this is because something is wrong with my French because you evidently didn't understand. I made it clear that all the military plans which I know you would like to carry out are dependent on governmental stability. Now you have made a real mess. We cannot carry you for ever if you do things like this. Who speaks for this group: Do you have a spokesman?
GENERAL KY: I am not the spokesman for the group but I do speak English. I will explain why the Armed Forces took this action last night. We understand English very well. We are aware of our responsibilities… We know you want stability, but you cannot have stability until you have unity… But still there are rumors of coups and doubts among groups. We think these rumors come from the HNC, not as an organisation but from some of its members. Both military and civilian leaders regard the presence of these people in the HNC as divisive of the Armed Forces due to their influence. Recently the Prime Minister showed us a letter he had received from the Chairman of the HNC. This letter told the Prime Minister to beware of the military, and said that maybe the military would want to come back to power. Also the HNC illegally sought to block the retirement of the generals that the Armed Forces Council unanimously recommended be retired in order to improve unity in the Armed Forces.
GENERAL THIEU: The HNC cannot be bosses because of the Constitution. Its members must prove that they want to fight.
GENERAL KY. It looks as though the HNC does not want unity. It does not want to fight the Communists. It has been rumored that our action of last night was an intrigue of Khanh against Minh, who must be retired. Why do we seek to retire these generals? Because they had their chance and did badly… Yesterday we met, twenty of us, from 14.30 to 20.30. We reached agreement that we must take some action. We decided to arrest the bad members of the HNC, bad politicians, bad student leaders, and the leaders of the Committee of National Salvation, which is a communist organization…
AMBASSADOR TAYLOR: …Now I would like to talk to you about the consequences of what you have done… Who commands the Armed Forces? General Khanh?
GENERAL THIEU: Yes, sir…
AMBASSADOR TAYLOR: You have destroyed the Charter. The Chief of State will still have to prepare for elections. Nobody believes that the Chief of State has either the power or the ability to do this without the HNC or some other advisory body. If I were the Prime Minister, I would simply overlook the destruction of the HNC. But we are preserving the HNC itself. You need a legislative branch and you need this particular step in the formation of a government with National Assembly…
GENERAL THIEU: After all, we did not arrest all the members of the HNC. Of nine members we detained only five. These people are not under arrest. They are simply under controlled residence…
AMBASSADOR TAYLOR: Our problent now, gentlemen, is to organise our work for the rest of the day. For one thing, the government will have to issue a communique.
GENERAL THIEU: We will still have a press conference this afternoon but only to say why we acted as we did…
AMBASSADOR TAYLOR: …You people have broken a lot of dishes and now we have to see how we can straighten out this mess.New York Times 14 June 1971
This conversation shows that the military rulers of Saigon were taken severly to task, but th