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

above him, was Lt. Col. Lucien Conein, the best-known member of the team Lansdale had employed to help him preside over the creation of South Vietnam. Conein was a rough and sentimental man, an adventurer born in Paris and raised in Kansas. He had enlisted in the French Army at the beginning of World War II. After the fall of France and the entry of the United States into the war, he had joined the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II forerunner of the CIA. He had first landed in Indochina by parachute in 1945, under the pseudonym Lieutenant Laurent, to conduct raids against the Japanese Imperial Army. He had been of considerable assistance to Lansdale ten years later because of his felicity for what the intelligence trade calls “dirty tricks.” When Lansdale had returned to the United States in 1956, Conein had stayed on in South Vietnam, and in 1963 he had accomplished the act that is one of the highest professional aspirations for a man of Conein’s calling—setting up a successful coup d’état. He had been the liaison agent to the South Vietnamese generals who had been encouraged to overthrow the man whose position Lansdale had taken such pains to consolidate. Ngo Dinh Diem had outlasted his usefulness to the United States in the intervening years. He and his family had been getting in the way of the Kennedy administration’s campaign to suppress the Communist-led rebellion. Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, had been assassinated in the coup.
    Joseph Alsop, the newspaper columnist and journalist of the AmericanEstablishment, was already inside the chapel. He was sitting in one of the center pews on the left, dressed in a sober blue suit made by his English tailor, with a matching polka-dot bow tie and a white shirt. John Kennedy had once displayed his esteem for Alsop’s advice and friendship by stopping at Alsop’s Georgetown home for a bowl of turtle soup on the night of his inauguration in 1961. It was fitting that Alsop should attend Vann’s funeral. He was a grandnephew of Theodore Roosevelt, an instigator and captain in battle in the Spanish-American War at the turn of the century. That “splendid little war,” as a friend and collaborator of Roosevelt had pronounced it at the time, had gained the United States the Philippines, made America a power in the Pacific, and started the nation on the course to Vietnam. Alsop was a faithful scion of the Anglo-Saxon elite of the Northeast that had determined the standards of taste, morality, and intellectual respectability for the rest of the country. He had given his professional life to public battle for the expansionist foreign policy his forebears had conceived. He regarded Vietnam as a test of the will and ability of the United States to sustain that policy and had been undeviating in his advocacy of the war. At sixty-one he remained the man of contrasts he had always been. A bulldoggish face belied his slight frame, and the many lines and wrinkles of his face were exaggerated by large, round, dark horn-rimmed glasses. He was an aesthete who collected French furniture and antique Chinese porcelain and Japanese lacquer; an accomplished amateur historian of art and archaeology and the ancient civilizations of Greece and the Middle East; a man of kindness, loyalty, and consideration to his friends and relatives—the godfather of nearly thirty of their children. In his professional life, however, he was the ferocious combatant his granduncle had been. He did not see those who disagreed with him as merely incorrect or misguided. He depicted them as stupid men who acted from petty or selfish motives. In the final years of Vann’s life, Alsop had been his principal champion in the press. Alsop had come to have a singular affection for this Virginia cracker who so differed from him in background and personality. He had felt toward Vann a sense of comradeship.
    Beside Alsop, wearing the three silver stars of a lieutenant general on the epaulets of his