Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume IV, Vietnam, 1966

60. Telegram From the Embassy in Vietnam to the Department of State¹

Saigon, February 1, 1966.

2761. For the President from Lodge. Herewith my weekly telegram:

1. Bombing resumption.

Resumption of bombing renewed confidence in Vietnam. The govt understood why we had to have the “peace offensive,” but they were relieved when it was over.

I agree that the 37 day pause has indeed “made a record”; and that we should rub this in and make the most of it, as we plan to do at the U.N. Also I am gratified by the way in which Secretary Rusk took my views into account. I believe our U.N. resolution is in good shape.

Undoubtedly the fact that we are for peace and they are not is helpful with the U.S. public, with people in the United Kingdom and some other Western countries.

I doubt if it does us much good with the so-called non-aligned countries—in which I include France. I donʼt believe there is a greater waste of time than to try to carry out literally what the non-aligned countries advise. Even when we do precisely what they specify, they will for many reasons never applaud us and rarely approve. As was once said of a certain American politician, they are no help to their friends and no threat to their enemies. Obviously, we must consider their interests and our interests, but we should not give too much attention to their whims and attitudes.

The bombing pause, however, has created a much bigger opportunity than simply making a showing that we are for peace and they are not. I wonder if it does not create an opportunity to bring about additional enthusiastic popular support for your policy in Vietnam. To do this, we need something more than to prove that we are for peace and they are not. A colorful, somewhat emotion-stirring showing is needed to dramatize the fact that the Communists are in truth flagrant aggressors and not the moralistic, patriotic civil war fighters which Communist propaganda has, with considerable success, made them out to be.

The Security Council meeting provides a great chance for this, and, as I have reported, we have dramatic materials here in the way of NVN uniforms, Chinese firearms, etc. with which to document a strong speech by Amb Goldberg that this is a clear case of aggression—and that suppression of aggression is the rock on which the United Nations is founded.

In 1956, at the time of the Suez incident, Dag Hammarskjold said to me that the United Nations must always condemn the use of force except in self-defense if “it is to be a respectable organization—and I use the word respectable in the literal sense as meaning worthy of respect.”

We face two kinds of aggression here: the Viet Cong with its rank and file recruited by terrorism in the South, but officered and directed from the North. This is the old aggression which has been with us for five years. And then we face a new and even more obvious aggression in the form of the Army of North Vietnam, which wear NVN uniforms, carry NVN identity cards, speak Vietnamese with northern accents and have Chinese firearms. This second aggression is absolutely flagrant, classic and conventional, and I donʼt believe we should be gingerly or apologetic about saying so.

Since writing the above, I have learned of Zorthianʼs wire to Marks,² which, of course, he has the right to send, since I hold that Zorthian, like all U.S. Agency Chiefs here, has and should have an open channel to his agency. It is a statement of Zorithianʼs opinion which, of course, was sent without my approval or direction. I want to assure you that I am in no sense a candidate to do this, that I have a great deal to do here and that I believe Amb Goldberg would handle this whole thing beautifully.

I believe that the bombing pause also has created other opportunities to educate U.S. public opinion so that Americans will not make utterly unreasonable judgments, using such asinine phrases as “a no-win” policy and expecting neat, gaudily packaged solutions. In most of the world today, there are no solutions, but there is the question of whether these tough problems will be well-managed or not. You should be judged on the extent to which you enable the United States to have some choice and not be pushed into a corner with a choice of being “Red”or “dead,” which is no choice at all. Your decision to move into the seaports and your decision to bomb the North has given the United States some real choices.

It would also be well to accustom the public to the idea that in the modern world you work through a balance of defense and diplomacy or of military and civil, and that while occasionally a decisive action at the right time is possible and desirable, there are some things which we must simply weather out.

In his biography of the late President Kennedy, Sorensen cites the case of the British statesman William Pitt, who was asked in the House of Commons in 1805 what had been gained by the war against France. He said: “We have gained everything that we would have lost if we had not fought this war.” This is even truer of our war in Vietnam than it was of the British war against France, and, as far as Vietnam is concerned, what we would have lost had not we fought it is nothing less than a climate in which we as a free nation can exist at all.

2. Basic political.

We now have the figures for the number of returnees into TTA Chieu Hoi camps for the month of January. It is 1,426. This compares with a figure of 406 for January 1965 and 446 for January 1964—a three-fold increase.

Of possibly even greater interest is the fact that since Tet, which fell on January 24, the daily rate of returnees is 84. The daily rate of returnees in December was 36. If, as some people think, the Tet campaign should be regarded as a start of a new trend rather than the culmination of a campaign, this figure of 84 per day could be tremendously significant.

Many of the returnees are coming in with Tet campaign leaflets, but we cannot tell how many.

There appears to have been a significant increase during the past three months of popular willingness to provide information on the Viet Cong to the GVN. While difficult to ascertain in terms of numbers of reports, the volume of usable information emanating from the police informant effort has increased 50–75 per cent since approximately October 1, 1965.

3. Current political.

The reporters spent a lot of time listening to coup rumors and some of them filed stories based on these rumors. The most extreme story of this sort was a UPI item of January 7 suggesting that Prime Minister Ky had mysteriously disappeared. Ky knocked this down by strolling through the streets of downtown Saigon the next day.

Ky has told me that he knows about what plotting has been going on and that a few people have been arrested including one Nguyen Bao Kim who was involved in the February 1965 coup which Ky suppressed. They were aiming either to kidnap or assassinate him—and myself.

The Directorate is expected to meet on February 2 to pass on the membership of the “Democracy Building Council” whose formation Prime Minister Ky announced in his January 15 speech.³

Lodge

1. Source: Department of State, Central Files, POL 27 VIET S. Secret; Priority; Nodis. The source text does not indicate the time of transmission; the telegram was received at 3:21 a.m. McGeorge Bundy forwarded the telegram to the President at 11:30 a.m. (Memorandum to the President, February 1; Johnson Library, National Security File, Memos to the President—McGeorge Bundy, vol. 19)
2. Not further identified.
3. See Document 24.