Mc Namara Taylor Mission - Expedition

Expedition

The timing of the mission was crucial due to the pessimistic military forecasts and the widespread rumours of an imminent coup. Diem's Presidential military adviser Duong Van Minh had recently informed Lodge that 80 percent of Vietnamese people had no motive for supporting Diem and that the recent lifting of martial law was "eyewash for Americans". Despite his title, Minh had no command power and was confined to primarily ceremonial duties. Diem feared that Minh had become too popular after his success in the Battle for Saigon against the criminal Binh Xuyen and his campaigns to quell the private armies of the Hoa Hao and Cao Dai religious sects in the 1950s and had removed him from commanding troops. The two guardhouses outside Minh's headquarters at Tan Son Nhut Air Base were filled with political prisoners, many of them student protestors. Minh was widely believed to be seeking a coup against Diem. He frequently railed against Diem in his meeting with Lodge, decrying the police state that was being created by the Can Lao Party of the Ngo family. Harkins reported that Minh "has done nothing but complain to me about the government and the way it is handled since I have been here". Harkins also put scepticism onto Minh's claims of widespread public disenchantment. The differing views of the members of the U.S. mission about the progress of the war against the Vietcong, and how it was affected by the Buddhist crisis were immediately manifested in the first session that McNamara and Taylor held in Saigon with embassy officials on September 25. General Paul D. Harkins and his MACV staff generally presented a favourable picture of military progress, emphasizing the progress of the Strategic Hamlet Program, and the improved ARVN position. This was in spite of a recent surge in communist initiated incidents and a decline in ARVN operation due to the increased number of troops used to quell dissidents. McNamara and Taylor prompted the presenters with questions in an attempt to get comparative indicators of the evolution of the situation over the last two years. McNamara in particular probed for details about the military situation in the Mekong Delta. American civilian officials sharply disagreed with the assessment of their military colleagues in their reading of the situation. Lodge and John Mecklin of the United States Information Service viewed things more grimly. Lodge stressed the more political and intangible aspects of the war and cast doubt on the "hardness" of the statistical data provided by the MACV. With the Mission's division of opinion exposed, McNamara left to tour the countryside.

McNamara met for two hours with John H. Richardson, head of the CIA's mission in Saigon. Richardson argued that the situation was quickly deteriorating and stated that the country was engulfed in a "climate of suspicion." Richardson felt that there was a Catch 22 situation in that there was nobody who commanded Diem's respect yet Diem's continual hold on power would ensure disaster. Richardson felt Diem's loyalty to family was handicapping him. Richardson reported that many cabinet ministers had wanted to resign in the wake of the pagoda raids but were afraid of being jailed or unwilling to go into exile.

McNamara's itinerary took him throughout the country, interviewing Americans and Vietnamese at both headquarters and in the field. In Saigon, during the last few days of the trip, he was given extensive briefings by the civilian side of the mission and. Since he stayed at Lodge's residence, McNamara had ample opportunity for discussions with the Ambassador.

McNamara was shown first hand accounts of negative diagnoses of the military progress which contradicted the optimistic statements that he had been accustomed to giving. At one point during a military inspection tour, he visited a government "open arms" camp near Tam Ky. He pointed to a weapon from a pile of arms captured from Vietcong insurgents and triumphantly asked "Is this Chinese?" only to be told by his embarrassed Vietnamese guide that it was an American rifle which had been earlier captured by the communists. Following a briefing from senior army officers which glossed over the capture of two towns in An Xuyen Province by the communists, Taylor and McNamara asked a major stationed at Can Tho to assess the situation. The young officer did not toe the line of his senior officers and gave a detailed and gloomy account of the situation before encouraging his colleagues to comment. According to Forrestal, "all hell broke loose." By the end of the trip, Bundy conceded that the evidence was eye opening, commenting that "I was left, as I think McNamara was, with a lasting skepticism of the ability of any man, however honest, to interpret accurately what was going on." Negative reports continued to reach the American delegation through a variety of Vietnamese civilian figures. A group of university professors complained to McNamara that Diem had transformed the country into a police state with widespread use of torture. They asserted that this had prompted people to turn to the Vietcong. The mission was also informed by the French embassy and the Canadian and Indian members of the International Control Commission that was charged with enforcing the Geneva Accords that Nhu was pursuing a peace agreement with North Vietnam and that an agreement would be reached in the next three or four months.