Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume I, Vietnam, 1961

326. Letter From the Political Adviser (Martin) of the Commander in Chief, Pacific, to the Director of the Viet-Nam Task Force (Cottrell)¹

Honolulu, December 18, 1961.

Dear Cot: By the time you receive this letter you will probably have received information on the Secretary of Defense conference here last Saturday² from one or more of the participants from Washington, e.g., Bill Bundy, Joe Wellings, “Pickles” Heinz. If you can get a copy of the agenda which was prepared at this headquarters, and of the record of the conference prepared here,³ you will have a thorough coverage of the topics discussed, decisions made, and actions to be taken. In your capacity as Director of Task Force-Viet Nam I would think it important for you to have access to these documents.

The purpose of this letter is to sort out what seemed to me significant aspects of the conference from the policy viewpoint. First I might say that thanks to a great deal of hard and careful work by Admiral Felt and members of his staff the conference moved along rapidly, covering a great deal of ground during the nine hours of meetings. As far as I know Washington and Saigon participants, as well as those of us here, feel that the conference was well worthwhile; it produced not only greater mutual understanding of the problems facing us in South Viet Nam but also a number of important decisions by the Secretary of Defense.

The Secretary and General Lemnitzer brought a sense of immediacy to the conference, emphasizing they wanted concrete actions that would begin to show results in 30 days. They were not interested in projects to be completed in 1963. The Secretary at the outset stressed that the primary effort of the U.S. military establishment was behind South Viet Nam and that we could have practically anything we wanted short of combat troops. In closing the conference he said our job was to win in South Viet Nam, and if we weren’t winning to tell him what was needed to win. The Secretary was interested in specifics such as the number and types of personnel, kinds and amounts of equipment, the costs and specific plans to accomplish specific objectives. The Secretary clearly had little faith in gimmicks such as defoliants. He was leery of overemphasizing naval and air actions, although he recognized their importance as supporting elements. He warned against the danger of sitting in Washington and checking off lists of junks, aircraft delivered, etc., figuring we were winning the war by this process.

During the course of a discussion on how to get Diem to follow U.S. advice Ambassador Nolting observed that we are unlikely to get Diem to carry out his recent commitments to us to the degree or as rapidly as we would expect or like. There would be no automatic fruition of these agreements from the Vietnamese side. This is something we had to live with. The Secretary commented that Diem was the only man we had, that he had some basis for being suspicious because of all the coup talk, and that if we concentrated on fundamental military specifics he thought we could get Diem to cooperate. We had to work with him; we couldn’t expect to change people. He felt that while reforms were necessary, they take a long time and we need some specific action within the next 30 days. Ambassador Nolting agreed with the “specifics approach”, saying that we couldn’t remodel the overall structure of the GVN or change characters.

The Secretary evinced strong interest in building up the Civil Guard and self-defense corps. He reasoned that past experience has shown that after the ARVN sweeps through an area the Viet Cong filters back in and there is nothing to show for it. He guaranteed the money and equipment to strengthen the Civil Guard provided a specific plan was worked out. He suggested as a starter, taking one province, doubling or tripling the Civil Guard as necessary, sweeping the province with the ARVN and consolidating control with the Civil Guard. The Secretary did not object to increasing the ARVN ceiling above 200,000 provided good justification could be furnished him, but he raised the question whether the resources couldn’t better be used to increase the Civil Guard. He tended to brush aside Ambassador Nolting’s worries about raising the necessary piastres to meet the costs of expanding force levels.⁴

One subject on the agenda but not discussed in the meetings was command relationships in the event U.S. forces Viet Nam (USFV) were established. However, Ambassador Nolting discussed this subject with Admiral Felt and Secretary McNamara separately, indicating his lack of agreement with the JCS-CINCPAC concept. In general his thinking coincided with that contained in the draft message from Ball to Rusk,⁵ a copy of which Joe Wellings had brought with him. Nolting feels that the eradication of the Viet Cong is not simply a military problem but one involving economic, psychological, political and social actions. Although in the next six months the military might need an overriding priority, if ultimate success is to be obtained, there must be a parallel action in these other fields. We must beef them up as we are now beefing up the military. He also feels that creation of a USFV command would encourage the GVN in its present tendency to overemphasize military action and regard it as a cure-all. He fears, too, that it would tempt the GVN to play off the commander USFV and the Ambassador against each other. He therefore wants to stick to a task force concept. As far as I am aware this is the only agenda subject upon which there was a significant divergence of views between the Ambassador and the military side.

There were three more subjects of broad policy interest which I will just mention briefly: 1) U.S. transport aircraft such as the C-123’s and the helicopter companies are being sent to SVN for combat support activities, not for “taxi service.” 2) No seabee or Army Engineer battalions are to be used in SVN for construction projects since use of U.S. combat troops for their protection is ruled out at this time; use civilian contractors instead. 3) U.S. manned ships or boats are not to be used in SVN inland waters despite the apparent offer in paragraph 1(c) Deptel 619 to Saigon.⁶ Ambassador Nolting will have to try to straighten this out with Diem.

The foregoing is, of course, highly restricted information. Moreover, it is frankly a subjective interpretation of what is important. I hope you can see the “agenda” and the “record” for a complete fill in.

With every good wish for you and your family for the coming year.⁷

Sincerely,

Ed

1. Source: Department of State, Central Files, 751K.5-MSP/12-1861. Top Secret; Official-Informal.
2. December 16.
3. See Document 324.
4. This sentence is underlined on the source text, apparently by Cottrell, and an exclamation point is written in the margin.
5. See Document 317.
6. See footnote 2, Document 287.
7. Written in the top margin of the first page by Cottrell was the following draft reply: “Dear Ed: Many thanks for your letter of Dec. 18. I’ve seen the ‘record’ made up here, but not the agenda. Mele Kolekekoma. Cot. P.S. I drafted the Ball-Rusk telegram.” No copy of Cottrell’s reply as actually sent has been found.