A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam Read Free

achieve, the United States would never relinquish the position. He did not see America as using its power for self-satisfaction. He saw the United States as a stern yet benevolent authority that enforced peace and brought prosperity to the peoples of the non-Communist nations, sharing the bounty of its enterprise and technology with those who had been denied a fruitful life by poverty and social injustice and bad government. He assumed that America’s cause was always just, that while the United States might err, its intentions were always good. He was simplistic in his anti-Communism, because to him all Communists were enemies of America and thus enemies of order and progress.
    He saw much that was wrong about the war in Vietnam, but he could never bring himself to conclude that the war itself was wrong and unwinnable. To admit this would have been to admit the inevitability of defeat, and at a certain point in him intellect stopped and instinct took over. He could not abide defeat, defeat for himself or for his vision of America. He believed that America had staked that vision in Vietnam and he knew that he had made his stake there. That spring, when many around him had despaired at the height of the North Vietnamese Army offensive, he had said no, they would not retreat, they would stand and fight. He had fought and won the battle and then he had died. This was why some of those who had assembled at Arlington on June 16, 1972, wondered if they were burying with him more than the war and the decade of Vietnam. They wondered if they were also burying with him this vision and this faith in an ever-innocent America.
    The man who had been the attending physician at the birth of South Vietnam, Maj. Gen. Edward Lansdale, was standing on the steps beneath the portico, saying hello to friends and acquaintances as they passed him on their way into the chapel. He had retired from government service four years earlier. He was a widower and alone because of the death of his wife that spring. “I’m sorry about your wife, Ed,” one man said, shaking his hand. “Thanks,” Lansdale replied with his habitual smile and a throaty voice that was now tired and old.
    It was difficult to imagine that this ordinary-looking man of sixty-four had been the legendary clandestine operative of the Central Intelligence Agency, the man who had guided Ramón Magsaysay, the pro-American Filipino leader, through the campaign that had crushed the Communist Hukbalahap rebels in the Philippines in the early 1950s; that this unstylish man in a light brown business suit had been the famed missionary of American democracy in the Cold War era, the “Colonel Hillandale” of a best-selling novel of the period,
The Ugly American
. In an ironicplay on its title, the novel told how imaginative Americans filled with the ideals of their own Revolution could get Asians to defeat the dark ideology of Communism in the Orient.
    Lansdale had arrived in Saigon eight years before Vann. He had gone there in 1954 after his triumph in the Philippines, when the United States was tentatively but openly extending its power into Vietnam to replace the French, whose will had been broken by their defeat at Dien Bien Phu. America’s new hope in Saigon, a Catholic mandarin named Ngo Dinh Diem, had faced more enemies than it seemed possible to vanquish. Arrayed against him were rival politicians, pro-French dissidents in the South Vietnamese Army, and two religious sects and a brotherhood of organized criminals. The religious sects and the organized-crime society also had their own private armies. Lansdale had arranged the defeat of them all. He had denied the Vietnamese Communists the chaos that would have permitted them to take over Vietnam south of the 17th Parallel without another war. He had convinced the Eisenhower administration that Diem could govern and that South Vietnam could be built into a nation that would stand with America.
    Waiting just behind Lansdale, a step