- 7/7/2025
more documentaries on:
https://realtv.mytvchannel.org
https://realtv.mytvchannel.org
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00:00I was assigned a listing post at Contien in the fall.
00:00:23That was like getting a death sentence at a trial.
00:00:28Because that's just three marines out there with a radio.
00:00:32And that's the scariest thing I did.
00:00:35You're listening for the enemy.
00:00:37They call you on the radio every hour.
00:00:40Delta Lima Papa 3 Bravo, Delta Lima Papa 3 Bravo, Delta 3.
00:00:46If your sit rep is Alpha Sierra, key your handset twice.
00:00:49If your situation report is all secure, brake squelch twice on the handset.
00:00:54And if it's not, they keep thinking you're asleep.
00:00:57So they keep asking you, if your sit rep is Alpha Sierra,
00:01:00and then it finally dawns on them,
00:01:01maybe there's somebody too close for you to say anything.
00:01:04So then they say, if your sit rep is negative Alpha Sierra,
00:01:07key your handset once, and you down here squeeze the handle off the,
00:01:10you know, in two on the radio,
00:01:12because they're so close that you can hear them whispering to one another.
00:01:16And that's scary stuff.
00:01:19That's real scary stuff.
00:01:20And I'm scared of the dark still.
00:01:24I still got a nightlight.
00:01:27When my kids were growing up,
00:01:30that's the first time they really found out that Daddy had been in a war,
00:01:35when they said, well, why do we need to grow our nightlights?
00:01:38Daddy's still got one.
00:01:39Let the word go forth from this time and place to friend and foe alike,
00:01:53that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans,
00:02:00born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter thief.
00:02:10I still believed very much in this concept of an heroic America.
00:02:17America being a really special country,
00:02:20the best country in the world, the best democracy,
00:02:23all the things that we believe about it,
00:02:26which, and I didn't really see anything wrong with that.
00:02:30I was sure that we were right to be in Vietnam,
00:02:35you know, because it started under Kennedy,
00:02:39and to me, JFK was God.
00:02:42Anything that he thought was right, I thought was right.
00:02:47At 43, John Fitzgerald Kennedy
00:02:50was the youngest man ever elected President of the United States.
00:02:55He had promised bold new leadership,
00:02:57and to his supporters, his inauguration seemed to signal a new day.
00:03:04To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free,
00:03:08we pledge our word that one form of colonial control
00:03:15shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny.
00:03:23We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view,
00:03:28but we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom.
00:03:35And to remember that in the past,
00:03:38those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.
00:03:47The new president gathered around him an extraordinary set of advisers
00:03:59who shared his determination to confront communism,
00:04:03including Secretary of State Dean Rusk,
00:04:06National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy,
00:04:10his deputy, Walt Rostow,
00:04:13Special Military Advisor General Maxwell Taylor,
00:04:17and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara,
00:04:21who had given up his post as president of the Ford Motor Company
00:04:25to serve his country.
00:04:27He was a pioneer in the field of systems analysis.
00:04:34Like the president who picked them,
00:04:36all of Kennedy's men had served during World War II.
00:04:40Each had absorbed what they all believed was its central lesson.
00:04:44Ambitious dictatorships needed to be halted in their tracks
00:04:48before they constituted a serious danger to the peace of the world.
00:04:54Meanwhile, in South Vietnam,
00:04:57the National Liberation Front,
00:04:59labeled by its enemies the Viet Cong,
00:05:02was determined to overthrow the anti-communist
00:05:06and increasingly autocratic government of Ngo Dinh Xiem.
00:05:11In North Vietnam, unbeknownst to Washington,
00:05:15Ho Chi Minh, the father of Vietnamese independence,
00:05:19was now sharing power with a more aggressive leader,
00:05:22Le Zhuan,
00:05:23who was even more impatient to reunify his country.
00:05:45in North Vietnam,
00:05:46in North Vietnam.
00:05:48None of us knew anything about Vietnam.
00:05:52Vietnam, in those days,
00:05:54was a piece on a chessboard,
00:05:56a strategic chessboard,
00:05:58not a place with a culture and a history
00:06:01that we would have an impossible time changing,
00:06:07even with the mighty force of the United States.
00:06:11Over the next three years,
00:06:13the United States would struggle to understand
00:06:16the complicated country it had come to save,
00:06:19fail to appreciate the enemy's resolve,
00:06:22and misread how the South Vietnamese people
00:06:26really felt about their government.
00:06:30The new president would find himself
00:06:32caught between the momentum of war
00:06:34and the desire for peace,
00:06:37between humility and hubris,
00:06:40between idealism and expediency,
00:06:43between the truth and the lie.
00:06:47And so, my fellow Americans,
00:06:57ask not what your country can do for you,
00:07:02ask what you can do for your country.
00:07:25I grew up in Missouri, near Kansas City,
00:07:29a little community called Fairmount.
00:07:32I was born in 1948,
00:07:34and there were lots of kids being born in those days
00:07:36from the guys who were lucky enough
00:07:37to 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,
00:07:48or Korean vets,
00:07:49and all of my male teachers were veterans,
00:07:52and even my pastor had been a chaplain.
00:07:55Well, they were my heroes,
00:07:58and I wanted to be like them.
00:08:08For all of John Kennedy's soaring rhetoric,
00:08:11for all the talent he gathered around him,
00:08:13the first months of his presidency did not go well.
00:08:16He approved a CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba
00:08:20at the Bay of Pigs that ended in disaster.
00:08:26He felt he'd been bullied by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev
00:08:30at a summit meeting in Vienna.
00:08:32He was unable to keep the Soviets from building the Berlin Wall.
00:08:37And in Southeast Asia,
00:08:40he refused to intervene against a communist insurrection in Laos.
00:08:45Critics accused him of being immature,
00:08:48indecisive, inadequate to the task
00:08:51of combating what seemed to be a mounting communist threat.
00:08:56There are just so many concessions that we can make in one year
00:09:00and 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.
00:09:12After the president received reports
00:09:14that the Viet Cong might be in control
00:09:17of more than half the densely populated Mekong Delta,
00:09:21he dispatched General Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow to Vietnam.
00:09:27They urged him to commit American ground troops.
00:09:31Kennedy refused.
00:09:33It would be like taking a first drink, he said.
00:09:36The effect would soon wear off,
00:09:38and there would be demands for another and another and another.
00:09:43Instead, in the midst of a cold war,
00:09:46with its constant risk of nuclear confrontation,
00:09:49the president supported a new, flexible way
00:09:53to confront and contain communism.
00:09:56Limited war.
00:09:58This 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,
00:10:22Kennedy hoped to use the elite Green Berets,
00:10:25special forces trained in guerrilla warfare,
00:10:29counterinsurgency.
00:10:32They were meant to be dispatched to hotspots around the world.
00:10:36Khrushchev said,
00:10:38we're not going to destroy you with nuclear weapons,
00:10:40we're going to destroy you with wars of national liberation.
00:10:43Everybody talked about the fact that,
00:10:46that communism was spreading and it had to be stopped.
00:10:51You went to command at General Staff College
00:10:53and you were playing on maps with nuclear weapons and so forth.
00:10:58And I escaped from that by getting into special forces.
00:11:02So that instead of planning what we were going to do
00:11:06if World War III broke out,
00:11:08we were actually doing stuff.
00:11:11And Vietnam was a place where we were going to draw the line.
00:11:17Kennedy sent the Green Berets to the central highlands of Vietnam
00:11:22to organize mountain tribes to fight the Viet Cong,
00:11:26and to undertake covert missions
00:11:28to sabotage their supply bases in Laos and Cambodia.
00:11:33But Kennedy understood that counterinsurgency alone
00:11:38would never be enough.
00:11:40So he doubled funding for South Vietnam's army,
00:11:43dispatched helicopters and APCs,
00:11:46armored personnel carriers.
00:11:51Kennedy also authorized the use of napalm,
00:11:55and the spraying of defoliants to deny cover to the Viet Cong,
00:12:00and destroy the crops that fed them.
00:12:04A whole array of chemicals was used,
00:12:07including one named for the color of the stripes
00:12:10on the 55-gallon drums in which it came, Agent Orange.
00:12:17And the president quietly continued to increase
00:12:20the number of American military advisors.
00:12:23Within two years, the number he had inherited would grow to 11,300.
00:12:32Empowered not only to teach the Army of the Republic of Vietnam,
00:12:36the Arvin, to fight a conventional war,
00:12:39but 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
00:12:54the scale of the build-up that was taking place
00:12:56on the other side of the world,
00:12:58fearful that the public would not support
00:13:01the more active role advisors had begun to play in combat.
00:13:06Mr. President, our Republican National Committee publication
00:13:11has said that you have been less than candid
00:13:14with 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,
00:13:25its logistics.
00:13:26We have not sent combat troops there,
00:13:28though the training missions that we have there
00:13:31have been instructed if they are fired upon to,
00:13:34they would, of course, fire back to protect themselves,
00:13:37but we have not sent combat troops
00:13:39in the generally understood sense of the word,
00:13:42so that I feel that we are being as frank as we can be.
00:13:48I think what I have said to you is a description of our activity there.
00:13:52I was a child of the Cold War.
00:14:01When I got off the plane in Saigon in a humid evening in April 1962,
00:14:07I really believed in all the ideology of the Cold War,
00:14:11that if we lost South Vietnam,
00:14:15the 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.
00:14:25Neil Sheehan was a 25-year-old reporter
00:14:28for United Press International, UPI.
00:14:32He had served three years in the Army, in Korea and Japan,
00:14:36before deciding to become a newspaperman.
00:14:39Vietnam was his first full-time overseas assignment,
00:14:43and his only worry, he remembered,
00:14:45was that he would get there too late
00:14:47and miss out on the big story.
00:14:50Sheehan and other reporters rode along
00:14:52as the Arvin mounted a series of helicopter assaults
00:14:55on 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 Vietnamese soldiers
00:15:14who 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,
00:15:21and 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. I mean, it was absolutely thrilling.
00:15:30And you believed in what was happening.
00:15:33I mean, you had the sense that we're fighting here,
00:15:35and someday we'll win,
00:15:37and this country will be a better country for our coming.
00:15:41The new M113 armored personnel carriers
00:15:45were capable of churning across rivers and rice paddies,
00:15:49and right through the earthen dikes
00:15:50that separated one field from the next.
00:15:53The 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.
00:16:09Some people are running along the dikes.
00:16:12Actually, the canal is perpendicular to the one you're attacking now.
00:16:16They have all black uniforms,
00:16:18and I estimate approximately 3-0.
00:16:20Do you have me to decide, over.
00:16:22That's what was causing us to win, see?
00:16:25We 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
00:16:36and had seen for himself the brutality
00:16:38with which the communist East Germans
00:16:40dealt with anyone who dared try to escape to the West.
00:16:45He was now in the Mekong Delta,
00:16:47an advisor to the 7th Division of the ARVN,
00:16:50and had begun to see evidence of Viet Cong brutality as well.
00:16:56Those of us who talked to the people who fled East Germany,
00:17:02we saw the need to stop the growth of communism,
00:17:06to stop the dominoes from being tumbled.
00:17:10That was a worthy cause.
00:17:12As the ARVN and their advisors pursued the Viet Cong,
00:17:18the government of Ngo Dinh Diem had launched an ambitious program
00:17:22meant to gain control of the countryside
00:17:25by concentrating the rural population
00:17:27into thousands of fortified settlements,
00:17:30ringed with barbed wire and moats and bamboo spikes,
00:17:35meant to keep out the Viet Cong.
00:17:37They were called strategic hamlets,
00:17:41part of the effort to win the hearts and minds
00:17:44and loyalty of the Vietnamese people.
00:17:47The French had tried something like it a decade before.
00:17:51They had called it pacification.
00:17:55President Siem's strategic hamlet program
00:17:58is making substantial progress.
00:18:01About 1,600 of the some 14,000 hamlets
00:18:05have been fortified to date.
00:18:08By the summer of 1962,
00:18:11news from South Vietnam seemed so promising
00:18:14that Defense Secretary Robert McNamara made sure
00:18:18the Pentagon was prepared to implement a plan
00:18:21for a gradual withdrawal of American advisors
00:18:25to be completed by 1965.
00:18:29So far as most Americans knew,
00:18:31the United States was achieving its goal,
00:18:34a stable, independent, anti-communist state in South Vietnam.
00:18:39It was a struggle this country cannot shirk,
00:18:44the New York Times said,
00:18:46and the United States seemed to be winning it.
00:18:49But that same summer, Ho Chi Minh traveled to Beijing
00:18:56in search of more help from the Chinese.
00:18:59The American buildup in South Vietnam had alarmed him
00:19:03and the other leaders in Hanoi.
00:19:07Ho told the Chinese that American attacks
00:19:09on North Vietnam itself
00:19:11now seemed only a matter of time.
00:19:15The Chinese promised to equip and arm
00:19:18tens of thousands of Vietnamese soldiers.
00:19:22Meanwhile, the Politburo in Hanoi had directed
00:19:26that every able-bodied North Vietnamese man
00:19:29be required to serve in the armed forces.
00:19:41Inspired by their president's call,
00:19:44thousands of young Americans would join the Peace Corps
00:19:47and other organizations to help project American ideals
00:19:51and goodwill around the world.
00:19:59We were not only there in Vietnam to stop communism,
00:20:10but there had to be something positive.
00:20:14We're trying to find out what the Vietnamese people want
00:20:17and to help them get it.
00:20:19And that was very simple,
00:20:21but if you think about it, also very complex.
00:20:24But it went to the heart, I thought,
00:20:26that was part of what we were trying to do.
00:20:29Pete Hunting, a 22-year-old from Oklahoma City,
00:20:33would go to Vietnam right after college
00:20:36to do what he could to help poor villagers in the countryside.
00:20:40I was a soldier in the fight,
00:20:43and I fought till we won.
00:20:45My uniform's my dirty overhaul.
00:20:49Dear Marga,
00:20:51I finally finished up my work in Phan Rang last week
00:20:54and spent a month working on a windmill
00:20:56I'd promised the people of One Handler.
00:20:58It cost a lot of money, too,
00:21:00which I paid out of my own pocket.
00:21:02Well, I'll give you my sweat.
00:21:04I'll give you my blood.
00:21:07I'm in soaring spirits today,
00:21:09despite all the natural disasters,
00:21:11political intrigues, and subversive activities.
00:21:14Pete Hunting worked for the International Voluntary Services,
00:21:19a non-profit organization committed to improving agriculture,
00:21:24education, and public health.
00:21:26He was one of hundreds of dedicated aid workers in South Vietnam.
00:21:31My plow and my hoe is my gun.
00:21:36The latest news on this side of the world
00:21:38is that I'll almost definitely be extending over here
00:21:40for another two years,
00:21:42providing the country stays in one piece that long.
00:21:48Two years after he arrived,
00:21:50Pete Hunting was driving in the Mekong Delta
00:21:53when he ran into a Viet Cong ambush.
00:21:57He was shot five times in the head,
00:22:00the first American civilian volunteer to be killed in Vietnam.
00:22:10All right.
00:22:12Sorry, I'm not talking about.
00:22:34People used to joke in Vietnam
00:22:36about winning the hearts and minds
00:22:38and you hear that expression.
00:22:40But that should not be a joke.
00:22:42It's a serious, serious problem.
00:22:44If you pull off a military operation,
00:22:47and 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 advisers understood the unique challenges
00:23:01of fighting an insurgency in Vietnam
00:23:04better than Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann.
00:23:08A career soldier from Virginia,
00:23:10he was the senior American advisor
00:23:12to the 7th Arvin Division in the Mekong Delta.
00:23:16Small, wiry, and abrasive,
00:23:19John Paul Vann was convinced
00:23:21he knew how to defeat the Viet Cong.
00:23:25John Paul Vann was simply the most remarkable soldier
00:23:30I ever met, period.
00:23:34The biggest challenge of John Paul Vann's life
00:23:38was somehow saving Vietnam, winning.
00:23:44That, to him, was the ultimate challenge.
00:23:48When it became clear to Vann that the tactics
00:23:52the 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,
00:24:09that if you got sniper fired from Hamlet,
00:24:12you sent in riflemen to take out the sniper.
00:24:15You didn't shell the place,
00:24:17because 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.
00:24:25Most press coverage of Vietnam was upbeat
00:24:28in the tradition of previous wars.
00:24:31But a handful of young reporters,
00:24:34including Neil Sheehan,
00:24:36David 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,
00:24:45were beginning to see
00:24:46that from the Vietnamese countryside,
00:24:48things looked very different
00:24:50than they did from the press offices
00:24:52in Washington or Saigon.
00:24:56So it was terribly important
00:24:57that 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
00:25:09to the welfare of our country
00:25:11and to the welfare of the world.
00:25:15Sheehan and his colleagues
00:25:16began 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.
00:25:35I remember going during one
00:25:36of Robert McNamara's visits
00:25:38out to one of these hamlets.
00:25:40The Vietnamese general who commanded the area
00:25:42was telling McNamara
00:25:43what a wonderful thing this was.
00:25:44And some of these farmers
00:25:46were down digging a ditch around the hamlet.
00:25:50And I looked at their faces,
00:25:52and they were really angry.
00:25:55I mean, it was very obvious to me
00:25:57that if these people could,
00:25:58they'd cut our throats.
00:26:05Farmers resented being forced
00:26:07to 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.
00:26:22As the people's anger grew,
00:26:24so 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 strategic,
00:26:32so-called strategic hamlets.
00:26:34And then the whole program fell apart.
00:26:37The Vietnamese government also said
00:26:41that it was called
00:26:42to kill the water to kill the fish.
00:26:44That means they said that
00:26:46the security guard,
00:26:48the security guard,
00:26:49is like the fish
00:26:51that is in the water.
00:26:52So, kill the water.
00:26:55To kill the water to kill the fish.
00:26:57It could not be successful.
00:26:59to kill the water to kill the fish.
00:27:00It would not be the water to kill the water.
00:27:01That is what they would call it.
00:27:02When Ngaap's father was a postal clerk
00:27:03south of Da Nang.
00:27:05His brothers and sisters taught
00:27:06in South Vietnamese schools.
00:27:09But he joined the revolution,
00:27:11and as a political officer,
00:27:13wrote poems, songs, and slogans
00:27:14songs, and slogans to inspire the people in the countryside
00:27:18to support the Viet Cong.
00:27:22The Viet Cong cadre would come in and talk to them,
00:27:26and their message is usually ,
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.
00:27:44We'll throw out the foreigners.
00:27:45We'll reunify the country.
00:27:48And we'll bring in this great regime that 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 schoolteachers,
00:28:04spies and propagandists, and province chiefs.
00:28:07To 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.
00:28:27We'd armed them.
00:28:29You 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.
00:28:39Then as they captured more and more of these American arms,
00:28:42when you made contact,
00:28:44finally it would build up into a drum fire of automatic
00:28:46and semi-automatic weapons.
00:28:55Secretary McNamara decided that he would draw up some kind of a chart
00:29:00to determine whether we were winning or not.
00:29:04And he was putting things in, like numbers of weapons recovered,
00:29:09numbers of Viet Cong killed, very statistical.
00:29:17And he asked Edward Lansdale, who was then in the Pentagon
00:29:20as head of special operations, to come down and look at this.
00:29:25And so Lansdale did, and he said, there's something missing.
00:29:29And McNamara said, what?
00:29:32And Lansdale said, the 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.
00:29:51In Saigon, General Paul D. Harkins,
00:29:54head of the Military Assistance Command Vietnam,
00:29:57known as MACV, dutifully complied.
00:30:01He and his staff generated mountains of daily, weekly, monthly,
00:30:06and quarterly data on more than a hundred separate indicators.
00:30:11Far more data than could ever be adequately analyzed.
00:30:15General Harkins had little use for 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 were sending in from the field.
00:30:36I was going to be made head of the Vietnam desk at CIA headquarters,
00:30:41and the first person of importance that I met was General Parkins.
00:30:47And he started out by saying,
00:30:49Mr. Gregg, I don't care what you hear from anybody else.
00:30:52I can tell you without a doubt,
00:30:53we're going to be out of here with a military victory in six months.
00:30:58The country's 12 million peasants
00:31:00can scarcely remember what peace was like.
00:31:02They're caught between the predatory guerrillas
00:31:04and the almost equally demanding soldiering.
00:31:07Their 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,
00:31:16called the Viet Cong.
00:31:17The Viet Cong.
00:31:22Out of the Vietnam,
00:31:24the Vietnam is a military militant.
00:31:28If the US asked to put out the government
00:31:31where they could build the government
00:31:33on the ground of the neutral window,
00:31:34but I think it would be a relevancy.
00:31:38It's clear that the Vietnam is better by the government,
00:31:43But in the fight, with the weapon of the two sides,
00:31:47when the weapon of the weapon is more focused,
00:31:52more focused on the question of the other side,
00:31:54then the weapon of the other side will win.
00:32:03Hồ Chà Minh is a person who works in the people, in the community, very well.
00:32:09But he knew that in Vietnam they have a tradition that is called the old man.
00:32:18So he gave the old man to the old man.
00:32:21He gave the old man to the old man.
00:32:24He gave the old man to the old man to the old man.
00:32:29He was trying to create a life that was very difficult.
00:32:34But he said that it was very difficult to understand.
00:32:38But he was trying to create a life for the old man.
00:32:41He was a difficult person.
00:32:48The Chiefs called the people to protect the people.
00:32:53He said that the Chiefs would be a long time for 10, 20 or longer.
00:33:02The people of Vietnam were not afraid.
00:33:06On our side, we were not as committed and we were, our leaders were corrupt and incompetent.
00:33:24And so, deep down, we will always have this fear, this suspicion that in the end, it will be the communists who won.
00:33:36When John Kennedy assembled what he thinks is the best and the brightest, 20 years before that, in a cave in the northern part of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh also put together his best and the brightest.
00:33:51And these guys are at it for a while.
00:33:54And when we show up, they were far along to consolidating their victory over this inevitable conflict between Ho Chi Minh and John F. Kennedy's vision.
00:34:08The more you think about the American strategy, the more you know that it was never going to work out particularly well.
00:34:20I was at the top of my game when I was in combat.
00:34:39You don't have the luxury to indulge your fear because other people's lives depend upon you keeping your head cold.
00:34:52You know, when something goes wrong, they call it emotional numbing.
00:35:06It's not very good in civilian life, but it's pretty useful in combat.
00:35:10To be able to get absolutely very cold about what needs to be done and to stick with it.
00:35:28To me, it's a little bit distressing to realize that I was at my best doing something as terrible as war.
00:35:43President Kennedy has staked his reputation in Asia on saving South Vietnam from communism.
00:35:58As the army makes a sweep towards a village suspected of harboring Viet Cong, it can't tell whether it'll meet resistance.
00:36:05The troops round up all the young men they can find since they can't tell who is a communist just by looking.
00:36:20Those who try to run for it are shot on the assumption they have something to hide.
00:36:29You see, for the Americans who come to Vietnam to fight the war, they look at everyone in the city as a friendly people.
00:36:43But they look at the people in the village as a Viet Cong.
00:36:49Because the Viet Cong have no uniform, how could they win?
00:36:56If they kill one real enemy, they might get only one replacement.
00:37:04If they kill the wrong man, they get ten enemies.
00:37:09And mostly, they kill the wrong man.
00:37:16Each of South Vietnam's 44 provinces had its own chief.
00:37:21Some were simply political appointees, corrupt allies of President Xi'an.
00:37:27Chen Nhat Cho, province chief of Qianhua, was different.
00:37:32A privileged judge's son from the old imperial city of Wei,
00:37:37he and two of his brothers had fought against the French with the Viet Minh.
00:37:42But he had refused to join the Communist Party.
00:37:46He admired their dedication, but disliked the way they punished those who dared differ with them.
00:37:53Instead, he left the Viet Minh, became a major in the army fighting against them,
00:37:59and eventually so impressed Xi'an with his insider's knowledge of communist tactics,
00:38:04that he was promoted to colonel and made chief of Qianhua, a Viet Cong stronghold.
00:38:12He was absolutely incorruptible.
00:38:16And people came to really understand that here's a guy who's,
00:38:21even though it's not an elected system, who nevertheless really represents us.
00:38:27Give me a budget that equals the cost of one American helicopter, Cho liked to say,
00:38:34and I'll give you a pacified province.
00:38:38With that much money, I can raise the standard of living of the rice farmers,
00:38:43and government officials can be paid enough so they won't think it necessary to steal.
00:38:49Rather than hunt down the Viet Cong, he sought to persuade them.
00:38:57And I don't want to kill, I want to convert them.
00:39:02When I locate the real Viet Cong family, I try to win over the family,
00:39:10and through them to win over the guy who left the family.
00:39:15And only after you fail, after you fail those steps, then you will kill him.
00:39:26And after I leave the program, not only the CIA, the Vietnamese are well,
00:39:35they are more interested in the last part.
00:39:40That is a real program.
00:39:45Back home, Americans were paying little attention to what was happening in Vietnam.
00:39:57They were watching the Beverly Hillbillies and Gunsmoke on TV,
00:40:02were interested in whether the Yankees would win the World Series again,
00:40:07and in the recent death of Marilyn Monroe.
00:40:10But some Americans had been growing impatient with the slow pace of social change.
00:40:19We were told in the 50s that we lived in the best country in the world.
00:40:23In the middle of, you know, trying to figure out what it meant to be a citizen of this best country in the world,
00:40:32suddenly the civil rights movement exploded into our consciousness.
00:40:37When the night has come
00:40:43We didn't think we had any power.
00:40:45We didn't think we could be actors in history, that we could affect things.
00:40:50And suddenly, you know, these young black students in the South were doing exactly that.
00:41:03And it just blew the tops of our heads off.
00:41:07So, darling, darling, stand by me. Oh, stand by me. Oh, stand. Stand by me. Stand by me. With the sky.
00:41:27Other 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
00:41:40and not let either one of them off until they came to an agreement.
00:41:46And if you were in a cafe when Ziem was giving a speech, somebody would get up and shut the radio off.
00:42:13I mean, he was not connected to his own population.
00:42:23Ziem was simply the opposite of what democracy was.
00:42:28South Vietnam in the competition against the dog,
00:42:32that 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,
00:42:54one 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, Brother Nhu.
00:43:15Ziem's brother, Nhu Teng Nhu, 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 Nhu were doing were ordered out of the country.
00:43:48When an American journalist objected, Nhu's sharp-tongued wife told him Vietnam had no use for your crazy freedoms.
00:43:59Meanwhile, out in the countryside, John Paul Vann and other advisers had begun to notice that the corruption within Ziem's regime
00:44:08had 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, Diwi, you know, Scanlan, Diwi, very dangerous, you know, going out there.
00:44:33John Vann would go out with them at night, and he noticed that somebody would always cough
00:44:41or make some other slight noise when it turned out that the Viet Cong were heading into the ambush site.
00:44:48They 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.
00:45:01What 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.
00:45:14Because we don't bet on losing horses, this 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.
00:45:32In October of 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union came closer than they would ever come again to mutually assured destruction.
00:45:48Good 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.
00:46:01Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island.
00:46:15The 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.
00:46:27He resisted and instead ordered a naval blockade to stop Soviet ships from resupplying the island.
00:46:36For 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 the mushroom cloud.
00:47:23And I remember watching President Kennedy speak during the Cuban Missile Crisis and wondering if I was ever going to kiss a girl.
00:47:30And so this was just continuing that battle against the Russians, only we were fighting their proxies, the Vietnamese there.
00:47:40But 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.
00:48:13And then all of a sudden, the Viet Cong, for the first time, the raggedy-ass little bastards, as the Harkinses people in Saigon called them, stood and fought.
00:48:24And suddenly, all the flaws on the Saigon side were illuminated by this.
00:48:29Like a star shell, it illuminated the battlefield.
00:48:33Everything came out.
00:48:35A few days after Christmas 1962, the 7th Arvin 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.
00:48:52The village was surrounded by rice paddies.
00:48:55An irrigation dike linked it to a neighboring hamlet, at back.
00:49:01Intelligence suggested no more than 120 guerrillas were guarding the transmitter.
00:49:08John Paul Van 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, as they always had whenever outnumbered and confronted by modern weapons, artillery and airstrikes would destroy them.
00:49:37Van would observe the fighting from a spotter plane.
00:49:41But the intelligence underlying it all turned out to be wrong.
00:49:48There were more than 340 Viet Cong, not 120 in the area.
00:49:54Communist spies had tipped them off that they were soon to be attacked.
00:49:59And this time, they would not flee without a fight.
00:50:04Among them was Le Kwon Kom, who had been a guerrilla fighter since 1951, when he was 12.
00:50:12At 6.35 in the morning, on January 2, 1963, ten American helicopters ferried an Arvin company to a spot just north of Thanh Toi.
00:50:38They met no resistance.
00:50:45Meanwhile, two South Vietnamese civil guard battalions
00:50:49approached up back from the south on foot.
00:50:55The Viet Cong commander let the civil guards
00:50:57get within 100 feet before giving the order to fire.
00:51:04Several South Vietnamese soldiers were killed.
00:51:08Survivors hid behind a dike.
00:51:13Ten more helicopters, filled with troops and escorted by five helicopter gunships,
00:51:21roared in to help.
00:51:24In this field, we have to hit five to ten.
00:51:27When it hit the ground and hit the ground,
00:51:30we hit the ground and hit the ground.
00:51:35The Viet Cong machine guns hit 14 of the 15 aircraft.
00:51:41Five would be destroyed, killing and wounding American crewmen.
00:51:48The enemy concentrated their fire on the Arvin struggling to get out of the downed helicopters.
00:51:55It was like shooting ducks for the Viet Cong, an American crewman remembered.
00:52:08Colonel Vann circled helplessly overhead.
00:52:11He radioed the Arvin commander, urging him to send an APC unit to rescue the men.
00:52:21I got the word from John Vann that American helicopters were down.
00:52:38They were right in front of the Viet Cong positions.
00:52:40We had Americans killed and wounded.
00:52:44And we had to get over there right away.
00:52:47Like Vann, Captain Scanlon was only an advisor.
00:52:51Captain Lee Taung Ba, his Arvin counterpart, would have to give the order to advance.
00:52:57Scanlon liked and admired him.
00:53:00I turned to Ba and said, hey, you know, you got to get over there right away.
00:53:06And Ba said to me, I'm not going.
00:53:09Ba's superiors within the Arvin, far from the battlefield, had told him to stay put.
00:53:16And 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 Ba to move.
00:53:29Another 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.
00:53:49The first two APCs dropped their ramps.
00:53:52Infantry squad stepped out, prepared to spray the tree line with automatic fire as they advanced.
00:53:59In the past, that had been enough to make the Viet Cong scurry away.
00:54:05This time was different.
00:54:07Eight of the APCs came under attack.
00:54:13Within minutes, six of their gunners had been killed, shot through the head.
00:54:19And, 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.
00:54:26Sheep matters.
00:54:28When Captain Ba managed to convince a few more APCs to advance,
00:54:33guerrillas 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,
00:54:50and withdrew behind the wrecked helicopters.
00:54:55From his spotter plane, Van begged the Arvin to make a simultaneous assault on the enemy
00:55:01by all the remaining ground forces.
00:55:05Arvin commanders refused.
00:55:10That 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.
00:55:23So had three American advisors, including Captain Ken Good, a friend of Scanlon's.
00:55:34We stacked the armored personnel carriers with bodies.
00:55:38Stacked them up on top till, like, we couldn't stack anymore.
00:55:42And, 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.
00:56:01And Ken and I had worked so hard with our two battalions,
00:56:05and, uh, to hear that, uh, he got killed hurt.
00:56:11Great guy.
00:56:14Reporters arrived from Saigon before all of the Arvin dead could be removed.
00:56:21They were horrified at what they saw,
00:56:24and tried to find out what had really happened.
00:56:28John Paul Van 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.
00:56:42They make the same mistakes over and over again in the same way.
00:56:48But back in Saigon, General Harkins immediately declared victory.
00:56:53The Arvin forces had an objective, he said.
00:56:56We took that objective.
00:56:58The VC left, and their casualties were greater than those of the government forces.
00:57:04What more do you want?
00:57:07When Halberstam and Sheehan reported that Apbac had, in fact, been a defeat,
00:57:13the U.S. commander in the Pacific denied it all and urged the reporters to get on the team.
00:57:22Apbac 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.
00:57:34They'd demonstrated to their own people that you could resist the Americans and win.
00:57:39And they'd Twin forces over the people that they were afraid of.
00:57:50When the army smashed up, they'd lose their buscar.
00:57:54And they'd laugh every day.
00:57:55And in a hurry.
00:57:56I'd forget the enemy's feelings.
00:57:58In Hanoi, the Battle of Ap Bạc was seen by Party First Secretary Lê Xuân and his Politburo
00:58:07allies as evidence of the inherent weakness of the South Vietnamese regime.
00:58:14Even when faced with American advisers and weaponry, the Viet Cong had learned how to
00:58:19inflict heavy casualties on Saigon's forces and get away again.
00:58:26In Saigon, President Xiem claimed the Arvin were winning, not losing.
00:58:32Ap Bạc had only been a momentary setback, and he resented Americans telling him how to
00:58:37fight his battles or run his country.
00:58:42The President's sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, went further.
00:58:46She denounced the Americans as false brothers.
00:58:52We don't have a prayer of staying in Vietnam, President Kennedy privately told a friend
00:58:57that spring.
00:58:59These people hate us.
00:59:01But I can't give up a piece of territory like that to the communists and then get the people
00:59:07to re-elect me.
00:59:08Buddhist monks and nuns are joined by thousands of sympathizers to protest the government's
00:59:20restrictions on the practice of their religion in South Vietnam.
00:59:24Vietnam began by alienating the rural population, and that started the Viet Cong.
00:59:32Now he was alienating the urban population.
00:59:3470% of the population is Buddhist, and the demonstrators clashed with the police during the week-long
00:59:40series of incidents like this.
00:59:44In the months that followed the Battle of Ap Bạc, South Vietnam plunged into civil strife
00:59:50that had little to do with the Viet Cong.
00:59:55Religion and nationalism were at its heart.
00:59:58A Catholic minority had for years dominated the government of an overwhelmingly Buddhist country.
01:00:07That spring in the city of Wei, Christian flags had been flown to celebrate the 25th anniversary
01:00:14of the ordination of Diem's older brother as a Catholic bishop.
01:00:22But when the Buddhists of the city flew their flags to celebrate the 2,527th birthday of Lord
01:00:30Buddha, police tore them down.
01:00:34Protesters took to the streets.
01:00:38The Catholic deputy province chief sent security forces to suppress the demonstration.
01:00:45The soldiers opened fire.
01:00:48Eight protesters died.
01:00:51The youngest was 12.
01:00:53The oldest was 20.
01:00:56The Diem regime blamed the Viet Cong.
01:01:02Monks throughout the country demanded an apology.
01:01:09They also called for an end to discrimination by Catholic officials.
01:01:19Many Buddhists had come to see Diem's policies as a direct threat to their religious beliefs.
01:01:29My family was against what Diem was doing.
01:01:33My mother was convinced that Diem was destroying the Buddhist faith.
01:01:39She would go to the pagodas and listen to the monks' speeches and she was just extremely upset.
01:01:48She was not alone.
01:01:49There was a lot of people like her.
01:01:53American officials urged Diem and his brother Niu to make meaningful concessions to the Buddhists
01:02:00for the sake of maintaining unity in the struggle against communism.
01:02:05They refused.
01:02:08On June 10, 1963, Malcolm Brown of the Associated Press received an anonymous tip.
01:02:17Something important was going to happen the next day at a major intersection in Saigon.
01:02:23He took his camera.
01:02:33To protest the Diem regime's repression, a 73-year-old monk named Quang Duc set himself on fire.
01:02:42As 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.
01:03:18I remember they held the ashes of the monk who burned himself to death or was kept in one of the main pagodas.
01:03:32And lines of people came to pass by and I saw these women, not rich women, ordinary Vietnamese women, take 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, it's the end.
01:03:59Soon, other monks would become martyrs.
01:04:06Fresh 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.
01:04:21The only thing they have done, they have barbecued one of their monks whom they have intoxicated, whom they have abused the confidence.
01:04:34And even that barbecuing was done, even with self-sufficient means, because they used imported gasoline.
01:04:45They thought she was arrogant, she was power hungry, they suspected her and her husband of being corrupt.
01:04:53Niu ran the secret police, which arrested and tortured people.
01:05:00People feared the Xi'an regime, perhaps more than they feared, they really hated it.
01:05:08Students, including many Catholics, rallied to the Buddhist cause.
01:05:14So did some army officers.
01:05:17People among the military had to ask the question, can we continue with this kind of situation like that,
01:05:25when the whole country was almost burning with the kind of protest from the Buddhists, you see?
01:05:35I first became aware of Vietnam because of a burning monk.
01:05:39We 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.
01:05:58And 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.
01:06:17This was an extraordinary act.
01:06:23Why was a Buddhist monk burning himself on the streets of Saigon?
01:06:28The protests continued.
01:06:33Tensions between Washington and Saigon steadily worsened.
01:06:39The more the Kennedy administration demanded change, the more Xi'an and his brother New seemed to resist.
01:06:47The White House announced that a new American ambassador, former Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, was being sent to Saigon.
01:06:57A man eminent enough, the president hoped, to make Xi'an listen more closely to American advice.
01:07:06Xi'an 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 Nolting, that he would take no further repressive steps against the Buddhists.
01:07:28Then, a few minutes after midnight on August 21, 1963, with Nolting gone and Henry Cabot Lodge's arrival still one day away,
01:07:41Xi'an cut the phone lines of all the senior American officials in Saigon.
01:07:47And sent hundreds of his special forces storming into Buddhist pagodas in Saigon, Hue, and several other South Vietnamese cities.
01:07:56Some 1,400 monks and nuns, students and ordinary citizens, were rounded up and taken away.
01:08:13Martial law was imposed.
01:08:16Public meetings were forbidden.
01:08:19Troops were authorized to shoot anyone found on the streets after 9 o'clock.
01:08:24Tanks guard a pagoda in Saigon during South Vietnam's bafflingly complicated crisis that has the government of President Ngo Dinh Diem,
01:08:34students and Buddhists, and the United States government, all trying to guess one another's next move.
01:08:39When college students protested in support of the monks, Diem closed Vietnam's universities.
01:08:49High school students then poured into the streets.
01:08:52He 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.
01:09:08I strongly believe that the government has to be overturned, because it's a dictator government.
01:09:17We couldn't stand it anymore, and this is an opportunity to rise again.
01:09:22Fawn Kwong Tui was a law student that summer.
01:09:27His father was a prominent nationalist whom Diem had jailed for calling for greater democracy.
01:09:33I was and I'm still a Catholic, not a very good Catholic.
01:09:40I don't practice religiously, but I'm a Catholic.
01:09:44I was rightly arrested because I did participate in the demonstration.
01:09:50And I was interrogated and briefly tortured, beaten a little bit.
01:09:56Henry Cavett Lodge took over as U.S. ambassador in the midst of the turmoil, and he is reported to have demanded that President Diem's brother, Nhu, be ousted, or U.S. aid of Vietnam will be cut.
01:10:13In the wake of the Pagoda raids, a small group of South Vietnamese generals contacted the CIA in Saigon.
01:10:20Diem's brother, Nhu, was now largely in control of the government, they said.
01:10:27What would Washington's reaction be if they mounted a coup?
01:10:31President Kennedy and his senior advisers happened to be out of town.
01:10:37So 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.
01:10:53The U.S. government could no longer tolerate a situation in which power lay in Nhu's hands, it said.
01:11:01Diem should be given a chance to rid himself of his brother.
01:11:05If 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.
01:11:21Under Secretary of State George Ball read part of the cable to him over the phone.
01:11:26Since the early 1950s, the United States government had encouraged and even orchestrated other Cold War coups in Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, and elsewhere.
01:11:43Kennedy decided to approve Hilsman's cable, in part because he thought his top advisers had already endorsed it.
01:11:52They 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 Nhu the bad brother, but also of Zim himself.
01:12:10And that started us on this whole business of promoting a coup.
01:12:14And it was not a good idea.
01:12:18I 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, and we've got our difficulties there, quite obviously.
01:12:46I 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.
01:12:56Well, hasn'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 ten years, and as I say, he has carried this burden when he's been counted out on a number of occasions.
01:13:12Our best judgment is that he can't be successful on this basis.
01:13:15But I don't agree with those who say we should withdraw.
01:13:18That'd be a great mistake. That'd be a great mistake.
01:13:21I know people don't like Americans to be engaged in this kind of an effort.
01:13:24Forty-seven Americans have been killed.
01:13:25We're in a very desperate struggle against the Communist system, and I don't want Asia to pass into the control of the Chinese.
01:13:34Do you think that this government still has time to regain the support of the people?
01:13:40With changes in policy and perhaps with 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.
01:13:55Despite the cable, Kennedy and his advisers were sharply divided about a coup.
01:14:01Robert 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.
01:14:20Fritz 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 froid 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.
01:14:53My God, the President said, my administration is coming apart.
01:15:00In 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.
01:15:12The generals laid their plans.
01:15:23On 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.
01:15:44Just after 6.30 in the morning Saturday, the shooting ceased.
01:15:47Ziem and Yu escaped, took sanctuary in a church, and 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.
01:16:14And murdered soon after they climbed inside.
01:16:23Madame Yu survived the coup.
01:16:26She was on a goodwill tour in the United States.
01:16:29The system was on November 1st.
01:16:38I was released November 4th.
01:16:40And it was the most exciting moment in the life of Saigon.
01:16:48The excitement, you could feel it in the air.
01:16:54I was thinking that, yeah, it's a good thing.
01:16:57Diem 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.
01:17:11My father was a bit worried because he didn't know who was going to replace Diem.
01:17:18Ambassador 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, over the weekend the coup in Saigon took place, culminated three months of conversation which divided the government here and in Saigon.
01:18:18I feel that we must bear a good deal of responsibility for it, beginning with our cable of August in which we suggested the coup.
01:18:29I should not have given my consent to it without a round table conference.
01:18:36I was shocked by the death of Diem and Yu.
01:18:42The way he was killed made it particularly abhorrent.
01:18:45The question now is whether the generals can stay together and build a stable government or whether public opinion in Saigon will turn on this government as repressive and undemocratic in the not-too-distant future.
01:19:04Kennedy would not live to see the answer to the question he had asked.
01:19:08He 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, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
01:19:38We thought we were the exceptions to history, we Americans.
01:19:50History didn't apply to us.
01:19:53We 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 all by yourself.
01:20:29This is a mean old world to live in all by yourself.
01:20:36This is a mean old world to live in all by yourself.
01:20:49This is a mean world to be alone without someone.
01:20:57This is a mean world to call your own.
01:20:58This is a mean world to call your own.
01:21:00This is a mean world to try and live in all by yourself.
01:21:04This is a mean world to try and live in all by yourself.
01:21:11I wish I had someone, someone who'd love me too.
01:21:23I wish I had someone who loved me, too.
01:21:38If I had someone who loved me, too, then I'd know I wouldn't be so blue.
01:21:55This is a mean old world to try and live in all by yourself.
01:22:06Oh, I find myself dreaming. I found the love.
01:22:20Sometimes I find myself dreaming. I found the love.
01:22:33Sometimes I dream I've really found the love.
01:22:41Someone who loved me, too, had the stars above.
01:22:47Oh, this is a mean old world to try and live in all by yourself.
01:22:57Oh, this is a mean old world to try and live in all by yourself.
01:23:07Oh, this is a mean old world to try and live in all I see.
01:23:09What's up?
01:23:13You
Recommended
1:22:18
1:23:24
41:12
58:38
44:02
44:02
44:02
44:02
44:02