Peter Dale Scott

Excerpts from Text

With respect to events in November 1963, the bias and deception of the original Pentagon documents are considerably reinforced in the Pentagon studies commissioned by Robert McNamara. Nowhere is this deception more apparent than in the careful editing and censorship of the Report of a Honolulu Conference on November 20, 1963, and of National Security Action Memorandum 273, which was approved four days later. Study after study is carefully edited so as to create a false illusion of continuity between the last two days of President Kennedys presidency and the first two days of President Johnsons. The narrow division of the studies into topics, as well as periods, allows some studies to focus on the optimism[1] which led to plans for withdrawal on November 20 and 24, 1963; and others on the deterioration and gravity[2] which at the same meetings led to plans for carrying the war north. These incompatible pictures of continuous optimism or deterioration are supported generally by selective censorship, and occasionally by downright misrepresentation.

National Security Action Memorandum 273, approved 26 November 1963. The immediate cause for NSAM 273 was the assassination of President Kennedy four days earlier; newly-installed President Johnson needed to reaffirm or modify the policy lines pursued by his predecessor. President Johnson quickly chose to reaffirm the Kennedy policies

Emphasis should be placed, the document stated, on the Mekong Delta area, but not only in military terms. Political, economic, social, educational, and informational activities must also be pushed: We should seek to turn the tide not only of battle but of belief Military operations should be initiated, under close political control, up to within fifty kilometers inside of Laos. U.S. assistance programs should be maintained at levels at least equal to those under the Diem government so that the new GVN would not be tempted to regard the U.S. as seeking to disengage.

The same document also revalidated the planned phased withdrawal of U.S. forces announced publicly in broad terms by President Kennedy shortly before his death: The objective of the United States with respect to withdrawal of U.S. military personnel remains as stated in the White House statement of October 2, 1963.

No new programs were proposed or endorsed, no increases in the level or nature of U.S. assistance suggested or foreseen. The emphasis was on persuading the new government in Saigon to do well those things which the fallen government was considered to have done poorlyNSAM 273 had, as described above, limited cross-border operations to an area 50 kilometers within Laos.[3]

The reader is invited to check the veracity of this account of NSAM 273 against the text as reproduced below. If the author of this study is not a deliberate and foolish liar, the some superior had denied him access to the second and more important page of NSAM 273, which authorized planning for specific covert operations, graduated in intensity, against the DRV, i.e., North Vietnam.[4] As we shall see, this covert operations planning soon set the stage for a new kind of war, not only through the celebrated 34A Operations which contributed to the Tonkin Gulf incidents, but also through the militarys accompanying observations, as early as December 1963, that only air attacks against North Vietnam would achieve these operations stated objective.[5] Leslie Gelb, the Director of the Pentagon Study Task Force and the author of the various and mutually contradictory Study Summaries notes that, with this planning, A firebreak had been crossed, and the U.S. had embarked on a program that was recognized as holding little promise of achieving its stated objectives, at least in its early stages.[6] We shall argue in a moment that these crucial and controversial stated objectives, proposed in CINCPACs OPLAN 34-63 of September 9, 1963, were rejected by Kennedy in October 1963, and first authorized by the first paragraph of NSAM 273.

The Pentagon studies, supposedly disinterested reports to the Secretary of Defense, systematically mislead with respect to NSAM 273, which McNamara himself had helped to draft. Their lack of bona fides is illustrated by the general phenomenon that (as can be seen from our Appendix A), banal or misleading paragraphs (like 2, 3, and 5) are quoted verbatim, sometimes over and over, whereas those preparing for an expanded war are either omitted or else referred to obliquely. The only study to quote a part of the paragraph dealing with North Vietnam does so from subordinate instructions: it fails to note that this language was authorized in NSAM 273.[7]

And study after study suggest (as did press reports at the time) that the effect of NSAM 273, paragraph 2, was to perpetuate what Mr. Gelb ill-advisedly calls the public White House promise in October to withdraw 1,000 U.S. troops.[8] In fact the public White House statement on October 2 was no promise, but a personal estimate attributed to McNamara and Taylor. As we shall see, Kennedys decision on October 5 to implement this withdrawal (a plan authorized by NSAM 263 of October 11), was not made public until November 16, and again at the Honolulu Conference of November 20, when an Accelerated Withdrawal Program (about which Mr. Gelb in silent) was also approved.[9] NSAM 273 was in fact approved on Sunday, November 24, and its misleading opening paragraphs (including the meaningless reaffirmation of the objectives of the October 2 withdrawal statement) were leaked to selected correspondents.[10] Mr. Gelb, who should have known better, pretended that NSAM 273 was intended primarily to endorse the policies pursued by President Kennedy and to ratify provisional decisions reached (on November 20) in Honolulu.[11] In fact the secret effect of NSAM was to annul the NSAM 263 withdrawal decision announced four days earlier at Honolulu, and also the Accelerated Withdrawal Program: both military and economic programs, it was emphasized, should be maintained at levels as high as those in the time of the Diem regime.[12]

The source of this change is not hard to pinpoint. Of the seven people known to have participated in the November 24 reversal of the November 20 withdrawal decisions, five took part in both meetings.[13] Of the three new officials present, the chief was Lyndon Johnson, in his second full day and first business meeting as President of the United States.[14] The importance of this second meeting, like that of the document it approved, is indicated by its deviousness. Once can only conclude that NSAM 273(2)s public reaffirmation of an October 2 withdrawal objective, coupled with 273(6)s secret annulment of an October 5 withdrawal plan, was deliberately deceitful. The result of the misrepresentations in the Pentagon studies and Mr. Gelbs summaries is, in other words, to perpetuate a deception dating back to NSAM 273 itself.

This deception, I suspect, involved far more than the symbolic but highly sensitive issue of the 1,000-man withdrawal. One study, after calling NSAM 273 a generally sanguine dont-rock-the-boat document, concedes that it contained an unusual Presidential exhortation: The President expects that all senior officers of the government will move energetically to insure full unity of support for establishing U.S. policy in South Vietnam.[15] In other words, the same document which covertly changed Kennedys withdrawal plans ordered all senior officials not to contest or criticize this change. This order had a special impact on one senior official: Robert Kennedy, an important member of the National Security Council (under President Kennedy) who was not present when NSAM 273 was rushed through the forty-five minute briefing session on Sunday, November 24. It does not appear that Robert Kennedy, then paralyzed by the shock of his bothers murder, was even invited to the meeting. Chester Cooper records that Lyndon Johnsons first National Security Council meeting was not convened until Thursday, December 5.[16]

While noting that the stated objectives of the new covert operations plan against North Vietnam were unlikely to be fulfilled by the OPLAN itself, Mr. Gelb, like the rest of the Pentagon Study authors, fails to inform us what these stated objectives were. The answer lies in the central object or central objective defined by the first paragraph of NSAM 273:

It remains the central object of the United States in South Vietnam to assist the people and Government of that country to win their contest against the externally directed and supported communist conspiracy. The test of all U.S. decisions and actions in this area should be the effectiveness of their contribution to this purpose.[17]

To understand this bureaucratic prose we must place it in context. Ever since Kennedy came to power, but increasingly since the Diem crisis and assassination, there had arisen serious bureaucratic disagreement as to whether the U.S. commitment in Vietnam was limited and political (to assist) or open-ended and military (to win). By its use of the word win, NSAM 273, among other things, ended a brief period of indecision and division, when indecision itself was favoring the proponents of a limited (and political) strategy, over those whose preference was unlimited (and military).[18]

In this conflict the seemingly innocuous word object or objective had come, in the Aesopian double-talk of bureaucratic politics, to be the test of a commitment. As early as May 1961, when President Kennedy was backing off from a major commitment in Laos, he had willingly agreed with the Pentagon that The U.S. objective and concept of operations was to prevent Communist domination of South Vietnam.[19] In November 1961, however, Taylor, McNamara, and Rusk attempted to strengthen this language, by recommending that We now take the decision to commit ourselves to the objective of preventing the fall of South Vietnam to Communism.[20] McNamara had earlier concluded that this commitmentto the clear objective was the basic issue, adding that it should be accompanied by a warning of punitive retaliation against North Vietnam. Without this commitment, he added, We do not believe major U.S. forces should be introduced in South Vietnam.[21]

Despite this advice, Kennedy, after much thought, accepted all of the recommendations for introducing U.S. units, except for the commitment to the objective which was the first recommendation of all. NSAM 111 of November 22, 1962, which became the basic document for Kennedy Vietnam policy, was issued without this first recommendation.[22] Instead he sent a letter to Diem on December 14, 1961, in which the U.S. officially described the limited and somewhat ambiguous extent of its commitment:our primary purpose is to help your people.We shall seek to persuade the Communists to give up their attempts of force and subversion.[23] One compensatory phrase of this letter (the campaignsupported and directed from the outside) became (as we shall see) a rallying point for the disappointed hawks in the Pentagon; and was elevated to new prominence in NSAM 273(1)s definition of a Communist conspiracy. It would appear that Kennedy, in his basic policy documents after 1961, avoided any used of the word objective that might be equated to a commitment. The issue was not academic: as presented by Taylor in November 1961, this commitment would have been open-ended, to deal with any escalation the communists might choose to impose.[24]

In October 1963, Taylor and McNamara tried once again: by proposing to link the withdrawal announcement about 1,000 men to a clearly defined and public policy objective of defeating communism. Once again Kennedy, by subtle changes of language, declined to go along. His refusal is the more interesting when we see that the word and the sense he rejected in October 1963 (which would have made the military objective the overriding one) are explicitly sanctioned by Johnsons first policy document, NSAM 273. (See table p. 321.)

A paraphrase of NSAM 273s seemingly innocuous first page was leaked at the time by McGeorge Bundy to the Washington Post and the New York Times. As printed in the Times by E.W. Kenworthy this paraphrase went so far as to use the very words, overriding objective, which Kennedy had earlier rejected.[25] This tribute to the words symbolic importance is underlined by the distortion of NSAM 273, paragraph 1, in the Pentagon Papers, so that the controversial words central object hardly ever appear.[26] Yet at least two separate studies understand the object or objective to constitute a commitment: NSAM 273 reaffirms the U.S. commitment to defeat the VC in South Vietnam.[27] This particular clue to the importance of NSAM 273 in generating a policy commitment is all the more interesting, in that the Government edition of the Pentagon Papers has suppressed the page on which it appears.

NSAM 273, Paragraph 10: The Case for Escalation

NSAM 273s suppression of Kennedys political goal (to build a peaceful and free society) is accompanied by its authorization of planning for selected actions of graduated (i.e. escalating) scope and intensity against North Vietnam.[31] This shift from political to military priorities was properly symbolized by NSAM 273s use of the word object or objective: for in November 1961 the rejected word objective had been linked to escalation proposals such as the Rostow plan of applying graduated pressures on North Vietnam,[32] which Kennedy had then also rejected and which Johnson now also revived. Rostow personally was able to submit to the new President a well-reasoned case for a gradual escalation within days of Kennedys assassination;[33] and it is clear that NSAM 273 saw where such escalations might lead. In its last provision, which sounds almost as if it might have been drafted by Rostow personally, State was directed to develop a strong, documented case to demonstrate to the world the degree to which the Viet Cong is controlled, sustained, and supplied from Hanoi, through Laos and other channels.[34]

At the time of this directive it was known, and indeed admitted in the U.S. press, that all the weapons captured by the United Stateswere either homemade or had been previously captured from the GVN/USA.[35] William Jorden, an official directed in January 1963 to get information on Northern infiltration, had already reported on April 5 that he could not: we are unable to document and develop any hard evidence of infiltration after October 1, 1962.[36] In the words of a State Department representative on the Special Group, the great weight of evidence and doctrine proved that the massive aggression theory was completely phony.[37]

But where the January directive was to get information, NSAM 273s was different, to make a case.[38] The evidence for the case seems to have been discovered soon after the directive, but at the price of controversy.

By February 1964, apparently, the Administration was firmly convinced from interceptions of cable traffic between North Vietnam and the guerillas in the South that Hanoi controlled and directed the Vietcong. Intelligence analyses of the time [February 12, 1964] stated, however, that The primary sources of Communist strength in South Vietnam are indigenous.[39]

This is interesting, for radio intercepts also supplied firm grounds for escalation during the Tonkin Gulf incidents of August 1964, the Pueblo incident of January 1968, and the Cambodian invasion of May 1970 three escalations which were all preceded by like controversies between intelligence operatives and analysts. And in these three escalations the key intercept evidence later turned out to be highly suspicious if not indeed deliberately falsified or phony.[40] In like manner Congress should learn whether the radio intercepts establishing Hanois external direction and control of the Vietcong emerged before or (as it would appear) after the directive to develop just such a case.

It is clear that at the time the military and CIA understood the novel opportunities afforded them by NSAM 273: within three weeks they had submitted an operations plan (the famous OPLAN 34A memorandum of December 19) which unlike its predecessors included overt as well as covert and nonattributable operations against North Vietnam, up to and including coastal raids.[41] Yet this novelty is denied by all the Pentagon studies which mention NSAM 273; it is admitted by only one Pentagon study (IV.C.2.a), which (as we shall see) discusses NSAM 273 without identifying it.

The full text of NSAM 273 of November 26, 1963, [was still] unknown [in 1971].[42] In all three editions of the Pentagon Papers there are no complete documents between the five cables of October 30 and McNamaras memorandum of December 21; the 600 pages of documents from the Kennedy Administration end on October 30. It is unlikely that this striking lacuna is accidental. We do, however, get an ominous picture of NSAM 273s implications from General Maxwell Taylors memorandum of January 22, 1964:

National Security Action Memorandum No. 273 makes clear the resolve of the President to ensure victory over the externally directed and supported communist insurgency in South Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs of Staff are convinced that, in keeping with the guidance in NSAM 273, the United States must make plain to the enemy our determination to see the Vietnam campaign through to a favorable conclusion. To do this, we must prepare for whatever level of activity may be required and, being prepared, must then proceed to take actions as necessary to achieve our purposes surely and promptly.[43]

The Joint Chiefs urged the President to end self-imposed restrictions, to go beyond planning to the implementation of covert 34A operations against the North and Laos, and in addition to conduct aerial bombing of key North Vietnam targets.

It was not only the military who drew such open-ended conclusions from the apparently limited wording of NSAM 273. As a State Department official told one congressional committee in February 1964, the basic policy is set that we are going to stay in Vietnam in a support function as long as needed to win the war.[44] McNamara himself told another committee that the United States had a commitment to win, rather than support :

The survival of an independent government in South Vietnam is so important that I can conceive of no alternative other than to take all necessary measures within our capability to prevent a Communist victory.[45]

All of this, like the text of NSAM 273 itself, corroborates the first-hand account of the November 24 meeting reported some years ago by Tom Wicker. According to that account Johnsons commitment, a message to the Saigon government, was not made lightly or optimistically. The issue was clearly understood, if not the ultimate consequences:

Lodgegave the President his opinion that hard decisions would be necessary to save South Vietnam. Unfortunately, Mr. President, the Ambassador said, you will have to make them. The new President, as recalled by one who was present, scarcely hesitated. I am not going to lose Vietnam, he said. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.His instructions to Lodge were firm. The Ambassador was to return to Saigon and inform the new government there that the new government in Washington intended to stand by previous commitments and continue its help against the Communists. In effect, he told Lodge to assure Big Minh that Saigon can count on us. That was a pledgeAll that would followhad been determined in that hour of political decision in the old Executive Office Building, whileOswald gasped away his miserable life in Parkland Hospital.[46]

The new Presidents decisions to expand the war by bombing and to send U.S. troops would come many months later. But he had already satisfied the military factions demand for an unambiguous commitment, and ordered their opponents to silence.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff had consistently and persistently advised their civilian overseers (e.g., on May 10, 1961 and January 13, 1962) that for what they construed as the unalterable objectives of victory a decision should be made to deploy additional U.S. forces, including combat troops if necessary.[47] They were opposed from the outset by the proponents of a more political counterinsurgency concept, such as Roger Hilsman. But in April 1962 Ambassador Galbraith in New Delhi proposed to President Kennedy a different kind of (in his words) political solution. Harriman, he suggested, should tell the Russians

of our determination not to let the Viet Cong overthrow the present governmentThe Soviets should be asked to ascertain whether Hanoi can and will call off the Viet Cong activity in return for phased American withdrawal, liberalization in the trade relations between the two parts of the country and general and non-specific agreement to talk about reunification after some period of tranquility.[48]

It is of course highly unusual for ambassadors to report directly to presidents outside of channels. Contrary to usual practice the memorandum did not come up through Secretary Rusks office; the White House later referred the memorandum for the comments of the Secretary of Defense (and the Joint Chiefs), but not of the Secretary of State. The very existence of such an unusual memorandum and procedure demonstrated that President Kennedy was personally interested in at least keeping his political options open. This was the second occasion on which Kennedy had used the former Harvard professor as an independent watchdog to evaluate skeptically the Rusk-McNamara consensus of his own bureaucracy; and there are rumors that Professor Galbraith continued to play this role in late 1963, after his return to Harvard. Another such independent watchdog was Kennedys White House assistant, Michael Forrestal.

The response of the Joint Chiefs to Galbraiths political solution was predictably chilly. They argued that it would constitute disengagement from what is by now a well-known commitment, and recalled that in the published letter of December 14, 1961 to Diem, President Kennedy had written that we are prepared to help against a campaign supported and directed from outside.[49] In their view this language affirmed supportto whatever extent may be necessary, but their particular exegesis, which Kennedy declined to endorse in October 1963, did not become official until Johnsons NSAM 273(1).

On the contrary, for one reason or another, the Defense Department began in [May] 1962 a formal planning and budgetary process for precisely what Galbraith had contemplated, a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam.[50] Pentagon Paper IV.B.4, which studies this process, ignores the Galbraith memorandum entirely; and refers instead to what Leslie Gelb calls the euphoria and optimism of July 1962.[51] Assuredly there were military professions of optimism, in secret as well as public documents.[52] These professions of optimism do not, however, explain why in 1963 the actual level of U.S. military personnel continued to rise, from 9,865 at New Years[53] (with projected highs at that time of 11,600 in Fiscal Year 1963, 12,200 in February 1964, and 12,200 in February 1965) to unanticipated levels of 14,000 in June and 16,500 on October.[54] About these troop increases, which Diem apparently opposed, [55] the Pentagon Papers are silent.

By mid-1963, with the aggravating political crisis in Vietnam, the pressure to move ahead with withdrawal plans was increasing. This increased pressure was motivated not by military euphoria (if indeed it ever had been) but by political dissatisfaction. A State Department telegram from Rusk to Lodge on August 29, 1963, expresses the opinion that U.S. political pressures on Diem would otherwise be futile:

Unless such talk included a real sanction such as a threatened withdrawal of our support, it is unlikely that it would be taken seriously by a man who may feel that we are inescapably committed to an anti-Communist Vietnam.[56]

Pentagon Paper IV.B.4 ignores this telegram as well; yet even it (in marked contrast to Leslie Gelbs Summary and Analysis of it) admits that

Part of the motivation behind the stress placed on U.S. force withdrawal, and particular the seemingly arbitrary desire to effect the 1,000-man withdrawal by the end of 1963, apparently was as a signal to influence both the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese and set the stage for possible later steps that would help bring the insurgency to an end.[57]

At the time of Galbraiths proposal for talks about phased U.S. withdrawal between Harriman and the Russians, Harriman was Chairman of the American delegation to the then deadlocked Geneva Conference on Laos, which very shortly afterwards reconvened for the rapid conclusion of the 1962 Geneva Agreements. Relevant events in that development include sudden U.S. troop buildup in Thailand in May, the agreement among the three Laotian factions to form a coalition government on June 11, and Khrushchevs message the next day hailing the coalition agreement as a pivotal event in Southeast Asian and good augury for the solution of other international problems which now divide states and create tension.[58] The signing of the Geneva Accords on July 23 was accompanied by a partial withdrawal of U.S. troops in Thailand, as well as by a considerable exacerbation of Thai-U.S. relations, to the extent that Thailand, infuriated by lack of support in its border dispute with Cambodia, declared a temporary boycott of SEATO.[59]

The 1962 Geneva Agreements on Laos were marked by an unusual American willingness to trust the other side.[60] Chester Cooper confirms that their value lay in

a private deal worked out between the leaders of the American and Soviet delegationsthe Harriman-Pushkin Agreement. In essence the Russians agreed to use their influence on the Pathet Lao, Peking, and Hanoi to assure compliance with the terms agreed on at the Conference. In exchange for this, the British agreed to assure compliance by the non-Communists.[61]

He also confirms that, before Harriman and Kennedy could terminate U.S. support for the CIAs protg in Laos, Phoumi Nosavan, some key officials in our Mission therehad to be replaced.[62] The U.S. Foreign Service List shows that the officials recalled from Vientiane in the summer of 1962 include both of the resident military attachs and also the CIA Station Chief, Gordon L. Jorgensen.[63] In late 1964 Jorgensen returned to Saigon, to become, as the Pentagon Papers reveal, the Saigon CIA Station Chief [Gravel ed., II:539].

This purge of right-wing elements in the U.S. Mission failed to prevent immediate and conspicuous violation of the Agreements by Thai-based elements of the U.S. Air Force through jet overflights of Laos. These same overflights, according to Hilsman, had been prohibited by Kennedy, on Harrimans urging, at a National Security Council meeting. In late October 1963 Pathet Lao Radio began to complain of stepped-up intrusions by U.S. jet aircraft, as well as of a new military offensive by Phoumis troops (about which we shall say more later).[64]

According to Kenneth ODonnell, President Kennedy had himself (like Galbraith) abandoned hopes for a military solution as early as the spring of 1963. ODonnell allegedly heard from Kennedy then that he had made up his mind that after his re-election he would take the risk of unpopularity and make a complete withdrawal of American forces from Vietnamin 1965.[65] Whether the President had so unreservedly and so early adopted the Galbraith perspective is debatable; there is, however, no questioning that after the Buddhist crisis in August the prospect of accelerated or total withdrawal was openly contemplated by members of the bureaucracys political faction, including the Presidents brother.

How profoundly this issue had come to divide political and military interpreters of Administration policy is indicated by General Krulaks minutes of a meeting in the State Department on August 31, 1963:

Mr. Kattenburg statedit was the belief of Ambassador Lodge that, if we undertake to live with this repressive regime we are going to be thrown out of the country in six months. He stated that at this juncture it would be better for us to make a decision to get out honorablySecretary Rusk commented that Kattenburgs recital was largely speculative; that it would be far better for us to start on the firm basis of two thingsthat we will not pull out of Vietnam until the war is won, and that we will not run a coup. Mr. McNamara expressed agreement with this view. Mr. Ruskthen asked the Vice President if he had any contribution to make. The Vice President stated that he agreed with Secretary Rusks conclusions completely; that he had great reservations himself with respect to a coup, particularly so because he had never really seen a genuine alternative to Diem. He stated that from both a practical and a political viewpoint, it would be a disaster to pull out; that we should stop playing cops and robbers andonce again go about winning the war.[66]

At this meeting (which the President did not attend) the only opposition to this powerful Rusk-McNamara-Johnson consensus was expressed by two more junior State Department officials with OSS and CIA backgrounds: Paul Kattenburg (whom Rusk interrupted at one heated point) and Roger Hilsman. One week later, however, Robert Kennedy, who was the Presidents chief troubleshooter in CIA, Vietnam, and counterinsurgency affairs, himself questioned Secretary Rusks firm basis and entertained the solution which Johnson had called a disaster:

The first and fundamental questions, he felt, was what we were doing in Vietnam. As he understood it, we were there to help the people resisting a Communist take-over. The first question was whether a Communist take-over could be successfully resisted with any government. If it could not, now was the time to get out of Vietnam entirely, rather than waiting. If the answer was that it could, but not with a Diem-Nhu government as it was now constituted, we owed it to the people resisting Communism in Vietnam to give Lodge enough sanctions to bring changes that would permit successful resistance.[67]

One way or another, in other words, withdrawal was the key to a political solution.

These reports show Robert Kennedy virtually isolated (save for the support of middle-echelon State officials like Hilsman and Kattenburg) against a strong Rusk-McNamara bureaucratic consensus (supported by Lyndon Johnson). Yet in October and November both points of Mr. Rusks firm basis were undermined by the White House: unconditional plans for an initial troop withdrawal were announced on November 16 and 20; and the United States, by carefully meditated personnel changes and selective aid cuts, gave signals to dissident generals in Saigon that it would tolerate a coup. The first clear signal was the unusually publicized removal on October 5 of the CIA station chief in Saigon, John Richardson, because of his close identification with Diems brother Ngo Dinh Nhu. And, as Leslie Gelb notes, In October we cut off aid to Diem in a direct rebuff, giving a green light to the generals.[68]

But this brief political trend, publicly announced as late as November 20, was checked and reversed by the new President at his first substantive policy meeting on November 24. As he himself reports,

I told Lodge and the others that I had serious misgivingsConventional demands for our withdrawal from Vietnam were becoming louder and more insistent. I thought we had been mistaken in our failure to support DiemI told Lodge that I had not been happy with what I read about our Missions operations in Vietnam earlier in the year. There had been too much internal dissension. I wanted him to develop a strong team In the next few months we sent Lodge a new deputy, a new CIA chief, a new director of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) operations, and replacements for other key posts in the U.S. Embassy.[69]

In other words, Richardsons replacement [presumably David Smith] was himself replaced (by Peer de Silva, an Army Intelligence veteran). Others who were purged included the number two Embassy official, William Trueheart, a former State intelligence officer, and John W. Mecklin, the USIA director: both Trueheart and Mecklin were prominent, along with Kattenburg and Hilsman, in the get Diem faction. This purge of the Embassy was accompanied by the replacement, on January 7, 1964, of Paul Kattenburg as Chairman of the Vietnam Inter-Department Working Group, and soon after by the resignation of Robert Hilsman.[70] The State Departments Foreign Service List failed to reflect the rapidity with which this secret purge was effected.[71]

Above all NSAM 273 sent a new signal to the confused Saigon generals, to replace the political signals of October and November. For the first time (as we shall see) they were told to go ahead with a graduated or escalating program of clandestine military operations against North Vietnam.[72] On January 16 these 34A Operations were authorized to begin on February 1. In Saigon as in Washington, a brief interlude of government by politically minded moderates gave way to a new military phase. On January 30, Nguyen Khanh ousted the Saigon junta headed by Duong van Minh, on the grounds that some of its members were paving the way for neutralism and thus selling out the country.[73] According to the Pentagon Papers Khanh notified his American adviser, Col. Jasper Wilson, of the forthcoming coup; but in a recent interview Khanh has claimed Wilson told him of the American-organized coup less than twenty-four hours in advance.[74]

Lyndon Johnson, like other observers, discounts the novelty of NSAM 273, by referring back to President Kennedys firm statements in two TV interviews of early September. In one of these Kennedy had said, I dont agree with those who say we should withdraw. In the other, he had argued against any cut in U.S. aid to South Vietnam: I dont think we think that would be helpful at this time.You might have a situation which could bring about a collapse.[75] From these two statements Ralph Stavins has also concluded that had John F. Kennedy lived, he would not have pulled out of Southeast Asia and would h