- 6/23/2025
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00:00I was assigned a listing post at Contien in the fall, that was like getting a death sentence
00:00:27at a trial, because that's just three marines out there with a radio, and that's the scariest
00:00:33thing I did, you're listening for the enemy, they call you on the radio every hour, Delta
00:00:40Lima Papa 3 Bravo, Delta Lima Papa 3 Bravo is Delta 3, if your set rep is Alpha Sierra
00:00:47key, your handset twice, if your situation report is all secure, brakes squelch twice
00:00:52on the handset, and if it's not, they keep thinking you're asleep, so they keep asking
00:00:58you, if your set rep is Alpha Sierra, and then it finally dawns on them, maybe there's somebody
00:01:02too close for you to say anything, so then they say, if your set rep is negative Alpha Sierra,
00:01:07key your handset once, and you're down here squeezing the handle off the, you know, and
00:01:10two on the radio, because they're so close that you can hear them whispering to one another,
00:01:15and that's scary stuff, that's real scary stuff, and I'm scared of the dark, still, I still
00:01:25got a nightlight, when my kids were growing up, that's the first time they really found out
00:01:34that daddy had been in a war, when they said, well, why do we need to outgrow our nightlights,
00:01:39daddy's still got one, let the word go forth, from this time and place, to friend and foe
00:01:53alike, that the torch has been passed, to a new generation of Americans, born in this century,
00:02:02man, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our country,
00:02:10I still believed very much in this concept of an heroic America, America being a really
00:02:19special country, the best country in the world, the best democracy, all the things that we
00:02:24believe about it, which, and I didn't really see anything wrong with that.
00:02:32I was sure that we were right to be in Vietnam, you know, because it started under Kennedy,
00:02:39and to me, JFK was God, anything that he thought was right, I thought was right.
00:02:47At 43, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the youngest man ever elected President of the United States.
00:02:55He had promised bold new leadership, and to his supporters, his inauguration seemed to signal
00:03:01a new day.
00:03:02To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form
00:03:13of colonial control shall not have passed away, merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny.
00:03:22We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view, but we shall always hope to find them
00:03:31strongly supporting their own freedom.
00:03:35And to remember that in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger
00:03:44ended up inside.
00:03:45The new president gathered around him an extraordinary set of advisers who shared his determination to
00:04:01confront communism, including Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy,
00:04:09his deputy, Walt Rostow, Special Military Advisor General Maxwell Taylor,
00:04:16and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who had given up his post as president of the Ford Motor Company
00:04:24to serve his country.
00:04:26He was a pioneer in the field of systems analysis.
00:04:30Like the president who picked them, all of Kennedy's men had served during World War II.
00:04:39Each had absorbed what they all believed was its central lesson.
00:04:43Ambitious dictatorships needed to be halted in their tracks before they constituted a serious danger
00:04:51to the peace of the world.
00:04:53Meanwhile, in South Vietnam, the National Liberation Front, labeled by its enemies the Viet Cong,
00:05:02was determined to overthrow the anti-communist and increasingly autocratic government of Ngo Dinh Xiem.
00:05:11In North Vietnam, unbeknownst to Washington, Ho Chi Minh, the father of Vietnamese independence,
00:05:18was now sharing power with a more aggressive leader, Lei Zouan,
00:05:23who was even more impatient to reunify his country.
00:05:27as an African-American leader in the Ohio.
00:05:28after they left the American rupture of Vietnam.
00:05:29In those days, he was also the ''faceted''
00:05:31as a foreign country.
00:05:32And the first generation of Vietnam stepped in his country.
00:05:35all of us knew anything about Vietnam.
00:05:38Vietnam, in those days, was a piece on a chess board.
00:05:42A strategic chess board.
00:05:47None of us knew anything about Vietnam.
00:05:52Vietnam in those days was a piece on a chess board,
00:05:56strategic chessboard, not a place with a culture and a history that we would have an impossible
00:06:05time changing, even with the mighty force of the United States.
00:06:12Over the next three years, the United States would struggle to understand the complicated
00:06:17country it had come to save, fail to appreciate the enemy's resolve, and misread how the South
00:06:25Vietnamese people really felt about their government.
00:06:30The new president would find himself caught between the momentum of war and the desire
00:06:36for peace, between humility and hubris, between idealism and expediency, between the truth
00:06:46and the lie.
00:06:55And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can
00:07:17do for your country.
00:07:25I grew up in Missouri, near Kansas City, a little community called Fairmount.
00:07:32I was born in 1948, and there were lots of kids being born in those days from the guys
00:07:37who were lucky enough to come home from World War II.
00:07:40My dad was a pilot in the Army Air Corps.
00:07:44And all of dad's friends were World War II vets, or Korean vets, and all of my male teachers
00:07:51were veterans, and even my pastor had been a chaplain.
00:07:55Well, they were my heroes.
00:07:57And I wanted to be like them.
00:08:08For all of John Kennedy's soaring rhetoric, for all the talent he gathered around him, the
00:08:13first months of his presidency did not go well.
00:08:18He approved a CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs that ended in disaster.
00:08:27He felt he'd been bullied by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at a summit meeting in Vienna.
00:08:33He was unable to keep the Soviets from building the Berlin Wall.
00:08:38And in Southeast Asia, he refused to intervene against a communist insurrection in Laos.
00:08:46Critics accused him of being immature, indecisive, inadequate to the task of combating what seemed
00:08:52to be a mounting communist threat.
00:08:56There are just so many concessions that we can make in one year and survive politically,
00:09:02he confided to an aide in the spring of 1961.
00:09:07In South Vietnam, Kennedy felt he had to act.
00:09:13After the president received reports that the Viet Cong might be in control of more than
00:09:17half the densely populated Mekong Delta.
00:09:21He dispatched General Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow to Vietnam.
00:09:28They urged him to commit American ground troops.
00:09:31Kennedy refused.
00:09:33It would be like taking a first drink, he said.
00:09:37The effect would soon wear off and there would be demands for another and another and another.
00:09:44Instead, in the midst of a cold war, with its constant risk of nuclear confrontation,
00:09:49the president supported a new, flexible way to confront and contain communism.
00:09:57Limited war.
00:09:59This is another type of warfare.
00:10:01New in its intensity, ancient in its origin.
00:10:06War by guerrillas, subversions, insurgents, assassins.
00:10:11War by ambush instead of by combat.
00:10:15By infiltration, instead of aggression.
00:10:20To fight his limited wars, Kennedy hoped to use the elite Green Berets.
00:10:27Special forces trained in guerrilla warfare, counterinsurgency.
00:10:32They were meant to be dispatched to hotspots around the world.
00:10:36Khrushchev said, we're not going to destroy you with nuclear weapons, we're going to destroy
00:10:41you with wars of national liberation.
00:10:45They talked about the fact that communism was spreading and it had to be stopped.
00:10:52You went to command a general staff college and you were playing on maps with nuclear weapons
00:10:57and so forth.
00:10:59And I escaped from that by getting into special forces.
00:11:04So that instead of planning what we were going to do if World War III broke out, we were actually
00:11:10doing stuff.
00:11:13Vietnam was a place where we were going to draw the line.
00:11:18Kennedy sent the Green Berets to the central highlands of Vietnam to organize mountain tribes
00:11:24to fight the Viet Cong.
00:11:26And to undertake covert missions to sabotage their supply bases in Laos and Cambodia.
00:11:35But Kennedy understood that counterinsurgency alone would never be enough.
00:11:40So he doubled funding for South Vietnam's army.
00:11:43Kennedy dispatched helicopters and APCs, armored personnel carriers.
00:11:50Kennedy also authorized the use of napalm and the spraying of defoliants to deny cover to
00:11:58the Viet Cong and destroy the crops that fed them.
00:12:02The whole array of chemicals was used, including one named for the color of the stripes on the 55-gallon drums
00:12:12in which it came, Agent Orange.
00:12:15And the President quietly continued to increase the number of American military advisors.
00:12:24Within two years, the number he had inherited would grow to 11,300.
00:12:32The government empowered not only to teach the army of the Republic of Vietnam, the ARVN, to fight a conventional war, but to accompany them into battle.
00:12:42A violation of the agreement that had divided Vietnam back in 1954.
00:12:47The administration did its best to hide from the American people the scale of the build-up that was taking place on the other side of the world.
00:12:58Fearful that the public would not support the more active role advisors had begun to play in combat.
00:13:06Mr. President, our Republican National Committee publication has said that you have been less than candid with the American people as to how deeply we are involved in Vietnam.
00:13:20Could you throw any more light on that?
00:13:22We have increased our assistance to the government, its logistics.
00:13:26We have not sent combat troops there, though the training missions that we have there have been instructed.
00:13:33If they are fired upon, they would, of course, fire back to protect themselves.
00:13:37But we have not sent combat troops in the generally understood sense of the word.
00:13:42So that I feel that we are being as frank as we can be.
00:13:49I think what I have said to you is a description of our activity there.
00:13:59I was a child of the Cold War.
00:14:01When I got off the plane in Saigon in a humid evening in April of 1962, I really believed in all the ideology of the Cold War.
00:14:11That if we lost South Vietnam, the rest of Southeast Asia would fall to the communists.
00:14:18There was an international communist conspiracy.
00:14:21We believed fervently in this stuff.
00:14:24Neil Sheehan was a 25-year-old reporter for United Press International, UPI.
00:14:31He had served three years in the Army, in Korea and Japan, before deciding to become a newspaperman.
00:14:38Vietnam was his first full-time overseas assignment.
00:14:42And his only worry, he remembered, was that he would get there too late and miss out on the big story.
00:14:48Sheehan and other reporters rode along as the ARVN mounted a series of helicopter assaults on enemy strongholds in the Mekong Delta and elsewhere.
00:15:00And brought terror to the Viet Cong.
00:15:03American pilots were at the controls.
00:15:07It was a crusade and it was thrilling.
00:15:10And you'd climb aboard the helicopters with the enemy soldiers who were being taken out to battle.
00:15:17And they'd take off and they'd contour fly.
00:15:19They'd skim across the rice paddies at about three or four feet above the paddies.
00:15:23And then pop up over the tree lines that line the fields.
00:15:27It was thrilling.
00:15:28I mean, it was absolutely thrilling.
00:15:30And you believed in what was happening.
00:15:32I mean, you had the sense that we're fighting here and someday we'll win and this country will be a better country for us.
00:15:39We're a better country for our coming.
00:15:42The new M113 armored personnel carriers were capable of churning across rivers and rice paddies.
00:15:49And right through the earthen dikes that separated one field from the next.
00:15:55The Viet Cong had nothing with which to stop them.
00:16:00We were just overwhelming them with force, with firepower.
00:16:05And the firefights would be over in a pretty short time.
00:16:08Now some people are running along the dikes.
00:16:11Actually, the canal is perpendicular to the one you're attacking now.
00:16:15They have on black uniforms.
00:16:17Now I estimate approximately 3-0.
00:16:19Do you have it inside?
00:16:20Over.
00:16:21That's what was causing us to win, see.
00:16:24We were winning one after the other.
00:16:28And we were not meeting a heck of a lot of resistance.
00:16:32Captain James Scanlon had been stationed in West Germany and had seen for himself the brutality with which the Communist East Germans dealt with anyone who dared try to escape to the West.
00:16:45He was now in the Mekong Delta, an advisor to the 7th Division of the Arvin, and had begun to see evidence of Viet Cong brutality as well.
00:16:58Those of us who talked to the people who fled East Germany, we saw the need to stop the growth of communism, to stop the dominoes from being tumbled.
00:17:10That was a worthy cause.
00:17:13As the Arvin and their advisors pursued the Viet Cong, the government of Ngo Dinh Diem had launched an ambitious program meant to gain control of the countryside by concentrating the rural population into thousands of fortified settlements.
00:17:30Ringed with barbed wire and moats and bamboo spikes meant to keep out the Viet Cong.
00:17:37They were called strategic hamlets, part of the effort to win the hearts and minds and loyalty of the Vietnamese people.
00:17:46The French had tried something like it a decade before.
00:17:51They had called it pacification.
00:17:56President Siem's strategic hamlet program is making substantial progress.
00:18:00About 1,600 of the some 14,000 hamlets have been fortified to date.
00:18:08By the summer of 1962, news from South Vietnam seemed so promising that Defense Secretary Robert McNamara made sure the Pentagon was prepared to implement a plan for a gradual withdrawal of American advisers to be completed by 1965.
00:18:27So far as most Americans knew, the United States was achieving its goal, a stable, independent, anti-communist state in South Vietnam.
00:18:40It was a struggle this country cannot shirk, the New York Times said, and the United States seemed to be winning it.
00:18:53But that same summer, Ho Chi Minh traveled to Beijing in search of more help from the Chinese.
00:19:00The American buildup in South Vietnam had alarmed him and the other leaders in Hanoi.
00:19:06Ho told the Chinese that American attacks on North Vietnam itself now seemed only a matter of time.
00:19:15The Chinese promised to equip and arm tens of thousands of Vietnamese soldiers.
00:19:22Meanwhile, the Politburo in Hanoi had directed that every able-bodied North Vietnamese man be required to serve in the armed forces.
00:19:35Inspired by their president's call, thousands of young Americans would join the Peace Corps and other organizations to help project American ideals and goodwill around the world.
00:19:53We were not only there in Vietnam to stop communism, but there had to be something positive.
00:20:12We're trying to find out what the Vietnamese people want and help them get it.
00:20:19And that was very simple, but if you think about it, also very complex.
00:20:23But it went to the heart, I thought, of what we were trying to do.
00:20:27Pete Hunting, a 22-year-old from Oklahoma City, would go to Vietnam right after college to do what he could to help poor villagers in the countryside.
00:20:40I was a soldier in the fight, and I fought till we won. My uniforms, my dirty overhaul.
00:20:49Dear Margo, I finally finished up my work in Phan Rang last week, and spent a month working on a windmill I'd promised the people of OneHamlet.
00:20:58It cost a lot of money, too, which I paid out of my own pocket.
00:21:05I'm in soaring spirits today, despite all the natural disasters, political intrigues, and subversive activities.
00:21:15Pete Hunting worked for the International Voluntary Services, a non-profit organization committed to improving agriculture, education, and public health.
00:21:27He was one of hundreds of dedicated aid workers in South Vietnam.
00:21:36The latest news on this side of the world is that I'll almost definitely be extending over here for another two years,
00:21:42providing the country stays in one piece that long.
00:21:48Two years after he arrived, Pete Hunting was driving in the Mekong Delta when he ran into a Viet Cong ambush.
00:21:57He was shot five times in the head, the first American civilian volunteer to be killed in Vietnam.
00:22:12Firey, I'll take him out.
00:22:25Just a second.
00:22:31People used to joke in Vietnam about winning the hearts and minds, and you hear that expression.
00:22:40That should not be a joke.
00:22:42It's a serious, serious problem.
00:22:44If you pull off a military operation,
00:22:48and it may be successful on the military basis,
00:22:50but you destroy a village,
00:22:53and then you've created a village of resistance.
00:22:58Few advisors understood the unique challenges
00:23:01of fighting an insurgency in Vietnam
00:23:04better than Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann.
00:23:07A career soldier from Virginia,
00:23:11he was the senior American advisor
00:23:13to the 7th Arvin Division in the Mekong Delta.
00:23:17Small, wiry, and abrasive,
00:23:20John Paul Vann was convinced
00:23:22he knew how to defeat the Viet Cong.
00:23:26John Paul Vann was simply the most remarkable soldier
00:23:31I ever met, period.
00:23:32The biggest challenge of John Paul Vann's life
00:23:38was somehow saving Vietnam, winning.
00:23:44That, to him, was the ultimate challenge.
00:23:49When it became clear to Vann
00:23:51that the tactics the Americans had taught the Arvin
00:23:54were beginning to make more enemies than friends,
00:23:57he sought out newspapermen to spread the word.
00:24:02He was able to explain to us what was going on.
00:24:06The important thing was not to alienate the population,
00:24:10that if you got sniper fire from Hamlet,
00:24:12you sent in riflemen to take out the sniper.
00:24:15You didn't shell the place
00:24:16because you were going to kill women and kids,
00:24:19and destroy houses,
00:24:20and you were going to turn the population against you.
00:24:23Most press coverage of Vietnam was upbeat
00:24:27in the tradition of previous wars.
00:24:30But a handful of young reporters,
00:24:33including Neil Sheehan,
00:24:35David Halberstam of the New York Times,
00:24:38and Malcolm Brown of the Associated Press,
00:24:41who spent time in the field with officers like Vann,
00:24:44were beginning to see that from the Vietnamese countryside,
00:24:49things looked very different than they did
00:24:51from the press offices in Washington or Saigon.
00:24:54So it was terribly important that we not only win the war,
00:24:59but that we as reporters report the truth
00:25:02that would help to win the war.
00:25:04We were very fervent in wanting to report the truth
00:25:08because it was very important to the welfare of our country
00:25:11and to the welfare of the world.
00:25:13Sheehan and his colleagues began asking tough questions
00:25:18about what constituted progress,
00:25:21what victory would look like,
00:25:23and if the people in the countryside,
00:25:25where 80% of South Vietnam's population lived,
00:25:29could ever trust the government in Saigon.
00:25:32I remember going during one of Robert McNamara's visits
00:25:37out to one of these hamlets.
00:25:39The Vietnamese general who commanded the area
00:25:41was telling McNamara what a wonderful thing this was.
00:25:43And some of these farmers were down digging a ditch around the hamlet.
00:25:49And I looked at their faces, and they were really angry.
00:25:53I mean, it was very obvious to me that these people could,
00:25:57they'd cut our throats.
00:25:58Farmers resented being forced to abandon their homes
00:26:08and move to strategic hamlets.
00:26:11Corrupt officials siphoned off funds,
00:26:14and villagers blamed the Ziem regime
00:26:17for failing to protect them from guerrilla attacks.
00:26:21As the people's anger grew,
00:26:23so did the ranks of the Viet Cong.
00:26:27It turned out that the Viet Cong were recruiting men
00:26:31right out of those so-called strategic hamlets.
00:26:34And then the whole program fell apart.
00:26:37The Vietnam government said that they called it
00:26:42to kill the sea.
00:26:44They said that the rescue rescue army
00:26:47is like the sea that is in the sea.
00:26:52So let's kill the sea.
00:26:54Let's kill the sea.
00:26:56It can't be successful.
00:26:59The Viet Cong cadre would come in and talk to them,
00:27:03and their message is usually,
00:27:05biến đau thương thà nh hà nh động,
00:27:07which means turn your grief into action.
00:27:09Do something about it.
00:27:14Join us.
00:27:15We'll fight together.
00:27:16We'll fight together.
00:27:17We'll liberate the country from this corrupt,
00:27:18unjust government.
00:27:19We'll throw out the foreigners.
00:27:20We'll reunify the country.
00:27:21And we'll bring in the people
00:27:22of the Viet Cong.
00:27:23The Viet Cong cadre would come in and talk to them,
00:27:26and their message is usually biến đau thương thà nh hà nh động,
00:27:31which means turn your grief into action.
00:27:34Do something about it.
00:27:36Join us.
00:27:38We'll fight together.
00:27:39We'll liberate the country from this corrupt,
00:27:42unjust government.
00:27:43We'll throw out the foreigners.
00:27:45We'll reunify the country.
00:27:47And we'll bring in this great regime
00:27:50that will take care of you
00:27:52and bring economic and social justice.
00:27:56The Viet Cong ran rival local governments,
00:28:00complete with their own tax collectors and school teachers,
00:28:03spies and propagandists,
00:28:06and province chiefs.
00:28:11To make matters worse, Arvin troops and American advisers
00:28:15now found themselves confronted by a new threat.
00:28:19Battalions of well-armed Viet Cong soldiers,
00:28:23as well as by local guerrillas.
00:28:26We'd armed them.
00:28:28You could hear the arming of the Viet Cong back in early 62.
00:28:33They only had one machine gun per battalion.
00:28:36It was sporadic fire.
00:28:38Then as they captured more and more of these American arms,
00:28:41when you made contact,
00:28:43finally it would build up into a drum fire
00:28:45of automatic and semi-automatic weapons.
00:28:55Secretary McNamara decided that he would draw up some kind of a chart
00:28:59to determine whether we were winning or not.
00:29:02And he was putting things in like numbers of weapons recovered,
00:29:09numbers of Viet Cong killed,
00:29:11very statistical.
00:29:13And he asked Edward Lansdale,
00:29:18who was then in the Pentagon as head of special operations,
00:29:22to come down and look at this.
00:29:24And so Lansdale did, and he said,
00:29:27there's something missing.
00:29:29And McNamara said, what?
00:29:31And Lansdale said,
00:29:33the feelings of the Vietnamese people.
00:29:36You couldn't reduce it to a statistic.
00:29:41Robert McNamara had vowed to make America's military cost-effective.
00:29:46He demanded that everything be quantified.
00:29:50In Saigon, General Paul D. Harkins,
00:29:53head of the Military Assistance Command Vietnam,
00:29:57known as MACV, dutifully complied.
00:30:01He and his staff generated mountains of daily,
00:30:04weekly, monthly, and quarterly data
00:30:07on more than a hundred separate indicators.
00:30:11Far more data than could ever be adequately analyzed.
00:30:15General Harkins had little use
00:30:20for skeptical reporters like Neil Sheehan.
00:30:23Bad news was to be buried.
00:30:26Harkins ignored the alarming after-action reports
00:30:30John Paul Vann and other officers
00:30:32were sending in from the field.
00:30:36I was going to be made head of the Vietnam desk
00:30:39at CIA headquarters,
00:30:41and the first person of importance that I met
00:30:44was General Parkins.
00:30:47And he started out by saying,
00:30:49Mr. Gregg, I don't care what you hear from anybody else,
00:30:51I can tell you without a doubt
00:30:53we're going to be out of here
00:30:54with a military victory in six months.
00:30:56The country's 12 million peasants can scarcely remember
00:31:00what peace was like.
00:31:02They're caught between the predatory guerrillas
00:31:04and the almost equally demanding soldiery.
00:31:06Their lives are lived in a state of permanent uncertainty,
00:31:09punctuated by bouts of violence
00:31:11as government forces come to grips
00:31:13with the black-clad communist rebel forces
00:31:15called the Viet Cong.
00:31:17The North Sea is one battle.
00:31:19The North Sea is one battle against the Vietnam
00:31:20that the U.S. tunnel was the first battle,
00:31:21the North Sea is one battle against the Russians.
00:31:22The North Sea is one battle against the Russians.
00:31:23Vietnam is a war.
00:31:28But if the American people ask
00:31:30how to build the government
00:31:33right on the United States,
00:31:35I think that is a great question.
00:31:38It is clear that the government is better.
00:31:42But in the fight against the two sides,
00:31:48it is clear that the government is better.
00:32:02You don't have the luxury to indulge your fear
00:32:05because other people's lives depend upon you,
00:32:07keeping your head cold.
00:32:18You know, when something goes wrong,
00:32:20they call it emotional numbing.
00:32:22It's not very good in civilian life,
00:32:24but it's pretty useful in combat.
00:32:35On our side, we were not as committed.
00:32:39And we were...
00:32:41Our leaders were corrupt and incompetent.
00:32:44And so, deep down,
00:32:48we always have this fear, this suspicion,
00:32:51that in the end,
00:32:53it would be the communists who won.
00:32:56When John Kennedy assembled
00:32:58what he thinks is the best and the brightest,
00:33:0120 years before that,
00:33:03in a cave in the northern part of Vietnam,
00:33:07Ho Chi Minh also put together his best and the brightest.
00:33:11And these guys are at it for a while.
00:33:14And when we show up,
00:33:16they were far along to consolidating their victory
00:33:21over this inevitable conflict
00:33:24between Ho Chi Minh and John F. Kennedy's vision.
00:33:28The more you think about the American strategy,
00:33:32the more you know
00:33:37know that it was never going to work out particularly well.
00:33:50The troops round up all the young men they can find,
00:33:53since they can't tell who is a communist just by looking.
00:33:56Those who try to run for it are shot,
00:33:58on the assumption they have something to hide.
00:34:03Let's go.
00:34:07Let's go.
00:34:09So, the President,
00:34:10he said the power of the people
00:34:12people should not protect their own.
00:34:15The President said the power of the people
00:34:17that they had a long term to continue to wait a while,
00:34:21for 20 years or for a long run.
00:34:24The people in Vietnam would not be afraid,
00:34:26he would not be that much more.
00:34:28The ability to be right with the freedom even.
00:34:30I was at the top of my game when I was in combat.
00:34:49President Kennedy has staked his reputation in Asia on saving South Vietnam from communism.
00:35:04As the army makes a sweep towards a village suspected of harboring Viet Cong, it can't
00:35:09tell whether it'll meet resistance.
00:35:17To be able to get absolutely very cold about what needs to be done and to stick with it.
00:35:31To me it's a little bit distressing to realize that I was at my best doing something as terrible
00:35:36as war.
00:35:41Hồ Chà Minh is a person who works in the country, in the country, who works in the country.
00:35:53But I know that in Vietnam, they have the tradition that they call the old people.
00:35:59They call the old people, they call the old people.
00:36:01He was raised by the grown-up of the old people.
00:36:07He was raised by the father of the people,
00:36:11and he was the one who was raised.
00:36:16But he said that the language is very easy to understand.
00:36:21This is a people who are very hard.
00:36:25You see, for the Americans who come to Vietnam to fight the war, they look at everyone in
00:36:38the city as a friendly people.
00:36:44But they look at the people in the village as a Vietcong, because the Vietcong have no
00:36:52uniform.
00:36:53How could they win?
00:36:57If they kill one real enemy, they might get only one replacement.
00:37:04If they kill the wrong man, they get ten enemies.
00:37:11And mostly, they kill the wrong man.
00:37:17Each of South Vietnam's 44 provinces had its own chief.
00:37:22Some were simply political appointees, corrupt allies of President Xi'an.
00:37:27Chen Nap Cho, province chief of Qianhua, was different.
00:37:34A privileged judge's son from the old imperial city of Wei, he and two of his brothers had
00:37:40fought against the French with the Viet Minh.
00:37:43But he had refused to join the Communist Party.
00:37:47He admired their dedication, but disliked the way they punished those who dared differ with
00:37:52them.
00:37:53Instead, he left the Viet Minh, became a major in the army fighting against them, and eventually
00:38:00so impressed Xi'an with his insider's knowledge of Communist tactics that he was promoted to
00:38:06colonel and made chief of Qianhua, the Viet Cong stronghold.
00:38:12He was absolutely incorruptible.
00:38:17And people came to really understand that here's a guy who, even though it's not an elected system,
00:38:25who nevertheless really represents us.
00:38:29He said, give me a budget that equals the cost of one American helicopter, Cho liked to say,
00:38:36and I'll give you a pacified province.
00:38:40With that much money, I can raise the standard of living of the rice farmers, and government
00:38:45officials can be paid enough so they won't think it necessary to steal.
00:38:51Rather than hunt down the Viet Cong, he sought to persuade them.
00:38:58And I don't want to kill, I want to convert them.
00:39:03When I locate the real Viet Cong family, I try to win over the family.
00:39:11And through them, to win over the guy who left the family.
00:39:16And only after you fail, after you fail those steps, then you will kill him.
00:39:28And after I leave the program, not only the CIA, the Vietnamese as well, they are more interested
00:39:38in the last part.
00:39:41That is a real program.
00:39:43Back home, Americans were paying little attention to what was happening in Vietnam.
00:39:58They were watching the Beverly Hillbillies and Gunsmoke on TV, were interested in whether
00:40:05the Yankees would win the World Series again.
00:40:08And the recent death of Marilyn Monroe.
00:40:15But some Americans had been growing impatient with the slow pace of social change.
00:40:21We were told in the 50s that we lived in the best country in the world.
00:40:25In the middle of trying to figure out what it meant to be a citizen of this best country
00:40:32in the world, suddenly the civil rights movement exploded into our consciousness.
00:40:39We didn't think we had any power.
00:40:46We didn't think we could be actors in history.
00:40:49That we could affect things.
00:40:59And suddenly, you know, these young black students in the South were doing exactly that.
00:41:05And it just blew the tops of our heads off.
00:41:28Other Americans were concerned about the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the world.
00:41:35Perhaps it would be a good thing to put Khrushchev and Kennedy on an island and not let either
00:41:41one of them off until they came to an agreement.
00:41:47And if you were in a cafe when Ziem was giving a speech, somebody would get up and shut the radio off.
00:42:13He was not connected to his own population.
00:42:22Ziem was simply the opposite of what democracy was.
00:42:29South Vietnam in the competition against the dog, that should have been a golden opportunity
00:42:38to have that society open with the free press and free expression.
00:42:46But there was not much choice if the two systems are structurally dictatorial and oppressive systems.
00:42:55One under the Communist Party, one under a family.
00:42:59I see him. I know him. He didn't lead the government.
00:43:09The one who have the control over the government, he's a brother.
00:43:14Probably new.
00:43:16Ziem's brother, No Ding Yu, had been the architect of the Strategic Hamlet Program.
00:43:24Ran a personal political party that mirrored the techniques and the ruthlessness of the communists.
00:43:31And supervised a host of internal security units that spied on and seized enemies of the regime.
00:43:38Some reporters who probed too deeply into what Ziem and Yu were doing were ordered out of the country.
00:43:47When an American journalist objected, New's sharp-tongued wife told him Vietnam had no use for your crazy freedoms.
00:43:57Meanwhile, out in the countryside, John Paul Van and other advisers had begun to notice that the corruption within Ziem's regime had filtered down to the commanders in the field.
00:44:12Troops, who had once been willing to engage the enemy, now seemed strangely reluctant.
00:44:20God, I was told so many times, Di Wee, you know, Scanlon, Di Wee, very dangerous, you know, going out there.
00:44:33John Van would go out with them at night, and he noticed that somebody would always cough or make some other slight noise when it turned out that the Viet Cong were heading into the ambush site.
00:44:47They did not want to get in a fight.
00:44:50South Vietnamese officers were chosen less for their combat skill than for their loyalty to President Ziem.
00:44:58And their men knew it.
00:45:00What we should have done is either forced the Vietnamese, I mean, really forced them to clean up their act.
00:45:09And if they wouldn't clean up their act to say, we're out of here, because we don't bet on losing horses.
00:45:17This is a losing horse.
00:45:19You are not going to win this insurgency.
00:45:22We as Americans should have understood the desire of the Vietnamese people to have their own country.
00:45:27I mean, we did the same thing to the Brits.
00:45:31In October of 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union came closer than they would ever come again to mutually assured destruction.
00:45:47Good evening, my fellow citizens.
00:45:51This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba.
00:46:02Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island.
00:46:16The Soviets had secretly placed nuclear missiles 90 miles from the United States.
00:46:22The Joint Chiefs of Staff urged President Kennedy to bomb Cuba.
00:46:28He resisted and instead ordered a naval blockade to stop Soviet ships from resupplying the island.
00:46:37For 13 excruciating days, the world held its breath.
00:46:46Finally, in exchange for a private pledge to remove American missiles from Turkey, Khrushchev agreed to remove his missiles from Cuba.
00:46:58Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union wanted so direct a confrontation ever again.
00:47:05From now on, limited wars, like the growing conflict in Vietnam, would assume still greater importance.
00:47:17I'd grown up in the shadow of a mushroom cloud.
00:47:22And I remember watching President Kennedy speak during the Cuban Missile Crisis and wondering if I was ever going to kiss a girl.
00:47:31And so this was just continuing that battle against the Russians, only we were fighting, you know, their proxies, the Vietnamese there.
00:47:41But it was monolithic communism.
00:47:44It didn't matter to me where it was.
00:47:46I was going to go if my government said we needed to be there.
00:47:51We were probably the last kids of any generation that actually believed our government would never lie to us.
00:47:58We had been writing stories about all the flaws on the Saigon side, about how they wouldn't fight, the corruption, they wouldn't obey orders, the disorganization.
00:48:15And then all of a sudden, the Viet Cong for the first time, the raggedy ass little bastards, as the Harkinsons people in Saigon called them, stood and fought.
00:48:25And suddenly, all the flaws on the Saigon side were illuminated by this.
00:48:30Like a star shell, it illuminated the battlefield.
00:48:34Everything came out.
00:48:36A few days after Christmas 1962, the 7th Arvind Division got orders to capture a Viet Cong radio transmitter, broadcasting from a spot some 40 miles southwest of Saigon, in a village called Thun Thuy.
00:48:53The village was surrounded by rice paddies.
00:48:56An irrigation dike linked it to a neighboring hamlet, Ap Back.
00:49:02Intelligence suggested no more than 120 guerrillas were guarding the transmitter.
00:49:08John Paul Vann helped draw up what seemed to be a foolproof plan of attack.
00:49:15Supported by helicopters and armored personnel carriers, some 1,200 South Vietnamese troops would attack the village from three sides.
00:49:24When the surviving Viet Cong tried to flee through the gap left open for them,
00:49:29as they always had whenever outnumbered and confronted by modern weapons,
00:49:34artillery and airstrikes would destroy them.
00:49:37Vann would observe the fighting from a spotter plane.
00:49:41But the intelligence underlying it all turned out to be wrong.
00:49:47There were more than 340 Viet Cong, not 120 in the area.
00:49:53Communist spies had tipped them off that they were soon to be attacked.
00:49:59And this time, they would not flee without a fight.
00:50:03Among them was Le Kwon Kom, who had been a guerrilla fighter since 1951, when he was 12.
00:50:12He was the one who had been in the area.
00:50:13And he was in the area.
00:50:14We had a gun.
00:50:15We had a gun.
00:50:16We were in the area.
00:50:17We had a gun.
00:50:18We had a gun.
00:50:19We had a gun.
00:50:20We had a gun.
00:50:21We had a gun.
00:50:22We had a gun.
00:50:23We had a gun.
00:50:24And we had a gun.
00:50:25Because the gun was in.
00:50:26At 6.35 in the morning, on January 2nd, 1963,
00:50:3110 American helicopters ferried an Arvin company to a spot just north of Ton Toi.
00:50:42They met no resistance.
00:50:45Meanwhile, two South Vietnamese Civil Guard battalions approached Ap Back from the south on foot.
00:50:54The Viet Cong commander let the Civil Guards get within 100 feet before giving the order to fire.
00:51:03Several South Vietnamese soldiers were killed.
00:51:10Survivors hid behind a dike.
00:51:16Ten more helicopters, filled with troops and escorted by five helicopter gunships, roared in to help.
00:51:24The Viet Cong machine guns hit 14 of the 15 aircraft.
00:51:28It went down and down to the ground, and it started to hit the ground and it started to hit the ground.
00:51:50Viet Cong machine guns hit 14 of the 15 aircraft.
00:51:54Five would be destroyed, killing and wounding American crewmen.
00:52:09The enemy concentrated their fire on the Arvinds struggling to get out of the downed helicopters.
00:52:15It was like shooting ducks for the Viet Cong, an American crewman remembered.
00:52:21Colonel Vann circled helplessly overhead.
00:52:25He radioed the Arvind commander, urging him to send an APC unit to rescue the men.
00:52:32I got the word from John Vann that American helicopters were down.
00:52:38They were right in front of the Viet Cong positions.
00:52:41We had Americans killed and wounded, and we had to get over there right away.
00:52:47Like Vann, Captain Scanlon was only an adviser.
00:52:51Captain Lee Taumbah, his Arvind counterpart, would have to give the order to advance.
00:52:57Scanlon liked and admired him.
00:53:00I turned to Vann and said, hey, you know, you got to get over there right away.
00:53:05And Vann said to me, I'm not going.
00:53:10Vann's superiors within the Arvind, far from the battlefield, had told him to stay put.
00:53:17And John Vann, my boss, was screaming at me over the radio to get them over there.
00:53:25It took Scanlon an hour to convince Captain Vann to move.
00:53:28Another two hours were lost before the APCs could make their way through the paddies toward the trapped men.
00:53:38The firing had died down.
00:53:41Everything was quiet.
00:53:43You could see the open expanse of rice fields.
00:53:46And my reaction was, hey, it was all over.
00:53:50The first two APCs dropped their ramps.
00:53:52Infantry squad stepped out, prepared to spray the tree line with automatic fire as they advance.
00:54:00In the past, that had been enough to make the Viet Cong scurry away.
00:54:05This time was different.
00:54:10Eight of the APCs came under attack.
00:54:14Within minutes, six of their gunners had been killed, shot through the head.
00:54:18And, boy, we got raked.
00:54:22So it was like a pool table.
00:54:24We were on the green, and they were in the pocket.
00:54:27Chief matters.
00:54:29When Captain Vann managed to convince a few more APCs to advance,
00:54:34guerrillas leapt from their foxholes and hurled hand grenades at them.
00:54:38None did any real damage, but the drivers were so demoralized that they halted, turned around, and withdrew behind the wrecked helicopters.
00:54:55From his spotter plane, Vann begged the Arvin to make a simultaneous assault on the enemy by all the remaining ground forces.
00:55:03Arvin commanders refused.
00:55:07That night, the Viet Cong melted away, carrying most of their dead and wounded with them.
00:55:17At least 80 South Vietnamese soldiers had been killed.
00:55:22So had three American advisers, including Captain Ken Good, a friend of Scanlon's.
00:55:29We stacked the armored personnel carriers with bodies, stacked them up on top till we couldn't stack anymore.
00:55:41And, um, I wouldn't let the Vietnamese touch Americans.
00:55:48So I carried, uh, Americans out.
00:55:51And, um, and I was, I was exhausted.
00:55:56And he, uh, told me about, uh, Ken Good getting killed.
00:56:00And Ken and I had worked so hard with our two battalions.
00:56:05And, uh, to hear that, uh, he got killed, hurt.
00:56:12Great guy.
00:56:15Reporters arrived from Saigon before all of the Arvin dead could be removed.
00:56:20They were horrified at what they saw and tried to find out what had really happened.
00:56:28John Paul Vann took Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam aside and told them.
00:56:34The Battle of Apbac had been a miserable goddamn performance.
00:56:39The Arvin won't listen, he said.
00:56:41They make the same mistakes over and over again in the same way.
00:56:46But back in Saigon, General Harkins immediately declared victory.
00:56:53The Arvin forces had an objective, he said.
00:56:57We took that objective.
00:56:59The VC left and their casualties were greater than those of the government forces.
00:57:05What more do you want?
00:57:07When Halberstam and Sheehan reported that Apbac had in fact been a defeat,
00:57:12the U.S. commander in the Pacific denied it all and urged the reporters to get on the team.
00:57:23Apbac was terribly important.
00:57:25They'd shot down five helicopters, which they'd previously been terrified of.
00:57:30They'd stopped the armored personnel carriers.
00:57:33They demonstrated to their own people that you could resist the Americans and win.
00:57:42In Hanoi, the Battle of Apbac was seen by the U.S.
00:57:47In Hanoi, the Battle of APBAC was seen by Party First Secretary Lei Zouan and his Politburo allies
00:58:07as evidence of the inherent weakness of the South Vietnamese regime.
00:58:13Even when faced with American advisors and weaponry,
00:58:16the Viet Cong had learned how to inflict heavy casualties on Saigon's forces and get away again.
00:58:25In Saigon, President Xiem claimed the Arvin were winning, not losing.
00:58:31APBAC had only been a momentary setback,
00:58:34and he resented Americans telling him how to fight his battles or run his country.
00:58:41The President's sister-in-law, Madame Niu, went further.
00:58:45She denounced the Americans as false brothers.
00:58:50We don't have a prayer of staying in Vietnam, President Kennedy privately told a friend that spring.
00:58:57These people hate us.
00:58:59But I can't give up a piece of territory like that to the communists and then get the people to re-elect me.
00:59:08Buddhist monks and nuns are joined by thousands of sympathizers to protest the government's restrictions on the practice of their religion in South Vietnam.
00:59:23Vietnam began by alienating the rural population.
00:59:28And that started the Viet Cong.
00:59:30Now he was alienating the urban population.
00:59:3370% of the population is Buddhist.
00:59:35And the demonstrators clashed with the police during the week-long series of incidents like this.
00:59:40In the months that followed the Battle of APBAC, South Vietnam plunged into civil strife that had little to do with the Viet Cong.
00:59:53Religion and nationalism were at its heart.
00:59:57A Catholic minority had for years dominated the government of an overwhelmingly Buddhist country.
01:00:04That spring, in the city of Wei, Christian flags had been flown to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the ordination of Diem's older brother as a Catholic bishop.
01:00:18But when the Buddhists of the city flew their flags to celebrate the 2527th birthday of Lord Buddha, police tore them down.
01:00:32Protesters took to the streets.
01:00:35The Catholic deputy province chief sent security forces to suppress the demonstration.
01:00:43The soldiers opened fire.
01:00:46Eight protesters died.
01:00:49The youngest was 12.
01:00:52The oldest was 20.
01:00:55The Diem regime blamed the Viet Cong.
01:01:01Monks throughout the country demanded an apology.
01:01:05They also called for an end to discrimination by Catholic officials.
01:01:18Many Buddhists had come to see Diem's policies as a direct threat to their religious beliefs.
01:01:24My family was against what Diem was doing.
01:01:31My mother was convinced that Diem was destroying the Buddhist faith.
01:01:37She would go to the pagodas and listen to the monks' speeches, and she was just extremely upset.
01:01:46She was not alone.
01:01:47There was a lot of people like her.
01:01:52American officials urged Diem and his brother Niu to make meaningful concessions to the Buddhists for the sake of maintaining unity in the struggle against communism.
01:02:03They refused.
01:02:04On June 10th, 1963, Malcolm Brown of the Associated Press received an anonymous tip.
01:02:16Something important was going to happen the next day at a major intersection in Saigon.
01:02:22He took his camera.
01:02:33To protest the Diem regime's repression, a 73-year-old monk named Quang Duc set himself on fire.
01:02:52As a large, hushed crowd watched him burn to death, another monk repeated over and over again in English and Vietnamese,
01:03:11a Buddhist monk becomes a martyr.
01:03:14A Buddhist monk becomes a martyr.
01:03:17I remember they held the ashes of a monk who burned himself to death, or was kept in one of the main pagodas.
01:03:33And lines of people came to pass by, and I saw these women, not rich women, ordinary Vietnamese women,
01:03:42take off the one piece of gold they had on their wedding ring, and drop it in the bottle to contribute to the struggle.
01:03:49And I thought to myself, this regime is over.
01:03:54It's the end.
01:03:59Soon, other monks would become martyrs.
01:04:02Fresh outbursts by Madame Niu only made things worse.
01:04:11Burning monks made her clap her hands, she said.
01:04:14If more monks wanted to burn themselves, she would provide the matches.
01:04:19The only thing they have done, they have barbecued one of their monks, whom they have intoxicated, whom they have abused the confidence.
01:04:32And even that barbecuing was done not even with self-sufficient means, because they used imported gasoline.
01:04:44They thought she was arrogant, she was power-hungry.
01:04:49They suspected her and her husband of being corrupt.
01:04:52Niu ran the secret police, which arrested and tortured people.
01:04:59People feared the Xi'an regime perhaps more than they feared.
01:05:04They really hated it.
01:05:07Students, including many Catholics, rallied to the Buddhist cause.
01:05:13So did some army officers.
01:05:16People among the military had to ask the question,
01:05:21can we continue with this kind of situation like that,
01:05:24when the whole country was almost burning with the kind of protest from the Buddhists?
01:05:30You see?
01:05:31I first became aware of Vietnam because of a burning monk.
01:05:41We had watched the civil rights movement in the South, and it had set the standard for us to stand up against injustice.
01:05:52Allow yourself to be beaten up, allow yourself to be attacked by a dog or hit by a police truncheon.
01:06:00And we had enormous respect for people who were willing to go that far.
01:06:05And then one day in 1963, we saw on television a picture of a monk in Saigon.
01:06:18This was an extraordinary act.
01:06:23Why was a Buddhist monk burning himself on the streets of Saigon?
01:06:28The protests continued.
01:06:34Tensions between Washington and Saigon steadily worsened.
01:06:39The more the Kennedy administration demanded change, the more Diem and his brother New seemed to resist.
01:06:48The White House announced that a new American ambassador, former Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, was being sent to Saigon.
01:06:56A man eminent enough, the President hoped, to make Diem listen more closely to American advice.
01:07:03Diem professed to be unimpressed.
01:07:08They can send ten lodges, he said, but I will not let myself or my country be humiliated, not if they train their artillery on this palace.
01:07:19He did promise the outgoing ambassador, Frederick Knowlting, that he would take no further repressive steps against the Buddhists.
01:07:29Then, a few minutes after midnight on August 21, 1963, with Knowlting gone and Henry Cabot Lodge's arrival still one day away, Diem cut the phone lines of all the senior American officials in Saigon.
01:07:45And sent hundreds of his special forces storming into Buddhist pagodas in Saigon, Hue and several other South Vietnamese cities.
01:07:55Some 1400 monks and nuns, students and ordinary citizens were rounded up and taken away.
01:08:04Martial law was imposed.
01:08:14Public meetings were forbidden.
01:08:17Troops were authorized to shoot anyone found on the streets after nine o'clock.
01:08:23Tanks guard a pagoda in Saigon during South Vietnam's bafflingly complicated crisis that has the government of President Knowlting Diem, students and Buddhists and the United States government all trying to guess one another's next move.
01:08:41When college students protested in support of the monks, Diem closed Vietnam's universities.
01:08:48High school students then poured into the streets.
01:08:51He shut down all the high schools and the grammar schools too, and arrested thousands of school children, including the sons and daughters of officials in his own government.
01:09:03I participated in the demonstrations.
01:09:07I strongly believe that the government has to be overturned, because it's a dictator government.
01:09:16We couldn't stand it anymore, and this is an opportunity to rise against it.
01:09:22Thanh Quang Tui was a law student that summer.
01:09:26His father was a prominent nationalist whom Diem had jailed for calling for greater democracy.
01:09:33I was and I'm still a Catholic.
01:09:37Not a very good Catholic.
01:09:39I don't practice religiously, but I'm a Catholic.
01:09:43I was rightly arrested because I did participate in the demonstration.
01:09:49And I was interrogated and briefly tortured, beaten a little bit.
01:09:59Henry Cavett Lodge took over as U.S. ambassador in the midst of the turmoil,
01:10:03and he is reported to have demanded that President Diem's brother, Nu, be ousted, or U.S. aid to Vietnam will be cut.
01:10:12In the wake of the Pagoda raids, a small group of South Vietnamese generals
01:10:17contacted the CIA in Saigon.
01:10:21Diem's brother, Nu, was now largely in control of the government, they said.
01:10:26What would Washington's reaction be if they mounted a coup?
01:10:32President Kennedy and his senior advisers happened to be out of town.
01:10:36So Roger Hilsman, Jr., Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs and a critic of the Diem regime,
01:10:45took it upon himself to draft a cable with new instructions for Ambassador Lodge.
01:10:52The U.S. government could no longer tolerate a situation in which power lay in Nu's hands, it said.
01:10:59Diem should be given a chance to rid himself of his brother.
01:11:04If he refused, Lodge was to tell the generals,
01:11:09then we must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved.
01:11:16The President was vacationing at Hyannisport, Massachusetts.
01:11:19Under Secretary of State George Ball read part of the cable to him over the phone.
01:11:27Since the early 1950s, the United States government had encouraged and even orchestrated other Cold War coups in Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, and elsewhere.
01:11:40Kennedy decided to approve Hilsman's cable, in part because he thought his top advisers had already endorsed it.
01:11:51They had not.
01:11:53And somehow, because of a cable that came out from Washington, Lodge decided that the only solution was to get rid of not just Noten Nu, the bad brother, but also of Diem himself.
01:12:08And that started us on this whole business of promoting a coup.
01:12:14And it was not a good idea.
01:12:17I just had a feeling of impending disaster.
01:12:21On September 2nd, 1963, Labor Day, Walter Cronkite of CBS News interviewed President Kennedy.
01:12:31The President used the opportunity to deliver a message to President Diem.
01:12:36Mr. President, the only hot war we've got running at the moment is, of course, the one in Vietnam.
01:12:43And we've got our difficulties there, quite obviously.
01:12:47I don't think that unless a greater effort is made by the government to win popular support that the war can be won out there.
01:12:55In the final analysis, it's their war.
01:12:56Hasn't every indication from Saigon been that President Diem has no intention of changing his pattern?
01:13:03If he doesn't change it, of course, that's his decision.
01:13:06He's been there 10 years.
01:13:07And as I say, he has carried this burden when he's been counted out on a number of occasions.
01:13:11Our best judgment is that he can't be successful on this basis.
01:13:14But I don't agree with those who say we should withdraw.
01:13:17That'd be a great mistake. That'd be a great mistake.
01:13:20I know people don't like Americans to be engaged in this kind of an effort.
01:13:2347 Americans have been killed.
01:13:26We're in a very desperate struggle against the Communist system.
01:13:31And I don't want Asia to pass into the control of the Chinese.
01:13:33Do you think that this government still has time to regain the support of the people?
01:13:40With changes in policy and perhaps in personnel, I think it can.
01:13:46If it doesn't make those changes, I would think the chances of winning it would not be very good.
01:13:54Despite the cable, Kennedy and his advisers were sharply divided about a coup.
01:14:00Robert McNamara, Maxwell Taylor, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, and the head of the CIA all cautioned against it.
01:14:11Because while none of them especially admired Xi'an, they did not believe there was any viable alternative.
01:14:19Fritz Nolting was called in and he said,
01:14:22As difficult as they are to deal with, there is nobody with the guts and sang foie in Vietnam of Diem and his brother Nu.
01:14:32And if we let them go, we will be saddled by a descending cycle of mediocre generals.
01:14:39And he was absolutely correct.
01:14:41But several State Department officials believed that without fresh leadership, South Vietnam could not survive.
01:14:51The debate intensified.
01:14:54My God, the President said, my administration is coming apart.
01:14:59In the end, Kennedy instructed Lodge to tell the renegade generals that while the United States does not wish to stimulate a coup, it would not thwart one either.
01:15:13The generals laid their plans.
01:15:16On November 1st, 1963, troops loyal to the plotters seized key installations in Saigon and demanded Diem and Yu surrender.
01:15:34The battle for the city went on for 18 hours, and most of it was centered on the presidential palace.
01:15:43Just after 6.30 in the morning Saturday, the shooting ceased.
01:15:55Diem and Yu escaped, took sanctuary in a church,
01:16:00and agreed to surrender to the rebels in exchange for the promise of safe passage out of the country.
01:16:07They were picked up in an armored personnel carrier.
01:16:13And murdered soon after they climbed inside.
01:16:22Madame Nu survived the coup.
01:16:25She was on a goodwill tour in the United States.
01:16:28The system was overturned on November 1st.
01:16:37I was released November 4th.
01:16:39And it was the most exciting moment in the life of Saigon.
01:16:46The excitement, you could feel it in the air.
01:16:51I was thinking that, yeah, it's a good thing.
01:16:56Diem was making it impossible to win the war because people were so against him that the war would be lost if he stayed in power.
01:17:10My father was a bit worried because he didn't know who was going to replace Diem.
01:17:15Ambassador Lodge reported to Washington that every Vietnamese has a smile on his face today.
01:17:24The prospects are now for a shorter war, he said, provided the generals stay together.
01:17:32Certainly officers and soldiers who can pull off an operation like this, he continued, should be able to do very well on the battlefield if their hearts are in it.
01:17:42President Kennedy was not so sure.
01:17:49He was appalled that Diem and Yu had been killed.
01:17:53Three days later, he dictated his own rueful account of the coup and his concerns for the future.
01:18:00Monday, November 4th, 1963.
01:18:07Over the weekend, the coup in Saigon took place.
01:18:10It culminated three months of conversation which divided the government here and in Saigon.
01:18:17I feel that we must bear a good deal of responsibility for it, beginning with our cable of August in which we suggested the coup.
01:18:30I should not have given my consent to it without a round table conference.
01:18:35I was shocked by the death of Diem and Yu. The way he was killed made it particularly abhorrent.
01:18:46The question now is whether the generals can stay together and build a stable government,
01:18:51or whether public opinion in Saigon will turn on this government as repressive and undemocratic in the not-too-distant future.
01:18:58Kennedy would not live to see the answer to the question he had asked.
01:19:09He was murdered in Dallas 18 days later.
01:19:13There were now 16,000 American advisors in South Vietnam.
01:19:19Their fate, and the fate of that embattled country, rested with another American president,
01:19:25Lyndon Baines Johnson.
01:19:46We thought we were the exceptions to history, we Americans.
01:19:50History didn't apply to us.
01:19:52We could never fight a bad war.
01:19:55We could never represent the wrong cause.
01:19:58We were Americans.
01:20:00While in Vietnam it proved that we were not an exception to history.
01:20:03This is a mean old world to live in.
01:20:04All by yourself.
01:20:06This is a mean old world to live in.
01:20:11All by yourself.
01:20:25This is a mean old world to live in.
01:20:27live in all by yourself this is a mean old world to live in all by yourself
01:20:47this is a mean world to be alone without someone to call you this is a mean old world
01:21:05to try and live in all by yourself i wish i had someone someone who'd love me too
01:21:23i wish i had someone who loved me too
01:21:41if i had someone who loved me too
01:21:46then i'd know i wouldn't be so blue this is a mean old world to try and live in all by yourself
01:22:02oh i find myself dreaming
01:22:14i found the love
01:22:20sometimes i find myself dreaming i found the love
01:22:33sometime i dream i've really
01:22:37found the love
01:22:40someone who loved me too have the stars above
01:22:47oh this is a mean old world to try and live in all by yourself
01:23:02my
01:23:07my
01:23:07my
01:23:09my
01:23:12my
01:23:12my
01:23:12You
Recommended
1:54:22
|
Up next
1:24:44
1:54:53
1:25:15
1:49:07
1:47:53
1:47:52
1:49:30
1:25:53
2:18
45:26
42:39
44:51
58:38
29:08
1:58:21
45:58
58:59
52:11
52:53