This book has great chapter titles, and 80 pages of notes.There are a lot of questions in this book are about death. While President Kennedy was alive, it was not obvious that Vietnam was going to be part of the world in which so many Americans would die. The insignificance of the problem at the time Kennedy took office might be guessed from such assessments as, "Interrogations of captured Vietcong cadres showed them to be well trained and brought in, across the seventeenth parallel, or through Laos and Cambodia. The total Vietcong in central Vietnam had grown from a thousand at the end of 1959 to five times that number by mid-1961." (p. 102). President Kennedy had authorized an increase in American troops that jumped from hundreds to thousands as the years went by, but with little sign that, merely seven years after JFK took office, more than a thousand troops per week on each side might be losing their lives in Nam early in 1968.
As a professor in history with a year off from teaching, Howard Jones had the opportunity to examine documentary sources and the Oral History Interviews at presidential libraries, and he even talked to a few of the remaining participants. Daniel Ellsberg is not a major characterin this book, though Jones talked to him on March 27, 2002, concerning a meeting in which President Kennedy asked Lansdale about getting rid of The Nhus, "But if that didn't work out--or I changed my mind and decided to get rid of Diem--would you be able to go along with that?" Lansdale ended up in a limousine with Robert McNamara after the meeting, where McNamara told him, "When he asks you to do something, you don't tell him you won't do it." (p. 365). Actually, the source of this story is a book by A. J. Langguth, a New York Times correspondent in South Vietnam who claimed "Ellsberg's unpublished memoir, Langguth asserted, contained this account of Lansdale's clandestine meeting with the president." (p. 365). "Ellsberg likewise considers the story valid. But in an interview of McNamara conducted by Langguth years afterward, the former secretary alleged that he did not recall the meeting." (pp. 365-366). I checked the index of SECRETS by Daniel Ellsberg, finally published in October, 2002, and found no mention of President Kennedy on the pages of the only entry for "Lansdale, Edward G.: McNamara's meeting with," though it included a page on which "high Vietnamese officials who met with General Lansdale regarded him warily but with awe because of his reputation as a kingmaker. They assumed he was there to pick the next Diem." By the time Ellsberg was on the Lansdale team, LBJ was president, Diem and Nhu were dead, and the Vietnamese could only hope that another government like Diem's would be better than a bunch of generals.
America clearly considered a coup against Diem at a time when it was trying to be as neutral as possible, because Diem could have asked American diplomats to leave Nam if he had any evidence that the Americans were actively engaging in plots against a government that it was supposed to be supporting. The index is good at sorting out who was involved, though it isn't until page 280 that Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., a brigadier general in the Army Reserves who spent 1962 writing policy papers on Vietnam, was given the opportunity to become the American ambassador to Saigon. In the photo section, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson's trip to Saigon on May 12, 1961, established that Frederick Nolting was ambassador then. President Kennedy is shown talking with Henry Cabot Lodge on August 15, 1963, just a few weeks before JFK's CBS television broadcast with Walter Cronkite on September 2, 1963. As usual, "Lodge's appointment, the Kennedy administration insisted, ensured bipartisan support for its Vietnam policy. These statements were true, but they did not reflect reality. The White House believed that Nolting had become too close to Diem," (p. 281). The note supporting this information adds, "Nolting learned of his removal over radio while on vacation." (p. 501).
While this is a history of policy that led to the Vietnam war, there is little sense that any possibility, other than a result which might be considered a victory for American policy, was ever considered. The only use that the Vietnamese had for the Americans was for creating the illusion that somehow America could win a war there. By September 18, 1963, Lodge was trying to get Nhu to leave the country, and reporting back to Washington, "one feels sorry for him. He is wound up as tight as a wire. He appears to be a lost soul, a haunted man who is caught in a vicious circle. The Furies are after him." (p. 371).
This is history on an emotional level. I have no doubt that Jack Ruby pulled the trigger of the pistol that shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the stomach, resulting in Oswald's death, and it might have been because of a cancer that would take the life of Jack Ruby before the end of the 1960s, when we had learned enough from Lenny Bruce to let just about anybody swear, if they felt like it. For President Kennedy to remain on good relations with the C.I.A., after news started coming in on how bad the situation in Nam really was, is like expecting Americans to believe that Ruby and Oswald were friends, or even knew each other. Oswald and Ruby do not appear in this book. For that side of the story, see OSWALD TALKED by La Fontaine. This book has no news on who took part in the JFK assassination, which is officially still more of a mystery than anything that happened in Nam.
