Once upon a distant war by Prochnau William W. 1937-

Author:Prochnau, William W., 1937-
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sheehan, Neil, Halberstam, David, Browne, Malcolm W, Halberstam, David, Vietnam War, 1961-1975, Vietnam War, 1961-1975, Vietnam War, 1961-1975, Vietnam-oorlog, Journalisten, Guerre du Viet-Nam (1961-1975), Guerre du Viet-Nam (1961-1975), Guerre du Viet-Nam (1961-1975), Pressedokumentation, Vietnamkrieg
Publisher: New York : Times Books
Published: 1995-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

William Prochnau

Tokyo for help Hoberecht didn't want to send. But no one in Saigon could help even the odds as much as David Halberstam.

They rarely ran together. To do so would be a waste of resources. Instead, they met each morning, usually with Perry and Rao, often with Charley Mohr now, mapping out their leads and listening to the latest assaults on them from two governments. "He said that?" Halberstam would say. ''Well, piss on him." Then they would deploy in different directions, meeting again at the end of the day to compare notes.

If the Thanksgiving Day episode had inflamed them, the New Year's fiasco at Ap Bac and the raw lies afterward radicalized them. Halberstam and Sheehan became two angry young men determined to get the truth, right the wrongs, and nail the bad guys. That would become a large and controversial agenda. It would mean getting rid of a foreign government and changing an American foreign policy as well as sending an ambassador, a four-star general, and a CIA head of station home in disgrace.

Meanwhile, if the U.S. government stood firm and united in public as Project Beef-Up moved into its second year, quiet rifts began beneath the surface. Kennedy's early foreign-policy setbacks had been so devastating that he and his men had locked in hard on the crisis he considered least important, Vietnam. He could not lose another one, and he made that abundantly clear. "There are limits to the number of defeats I can defend in one twelve-month period," he confided in the privacy of the White House. So bleak did his advisers see the young President's beginning that they had talked of the need to "save" his presidency.

So the first year in Vietnam had a rally-around-the-presidential-seal quality to it. The Diem doubters within the administration, mostly in the State Department, obscured their sentiments in cabled euphemisms and "contingency planning": how to deal in a "post-Diem Vietnam" should he "pass from the scene." After Ap Bac, the words turned more active. After the next crisis—the bizarre Buddhist uprising that would soon blindside everyone, along with Diem's even more bizarre reaction to it—Kennedy's government would split wide open and the cable talk turn blunt: overthrow, coup, even the occasional use of the taboo word, assassination. The plots and intrigues inside the White House would rival those in Gia Long Palace.

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