Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
1. It is another reminder of the prevailing (although not universal) over-optimism of U.S. appraisals of the Vietnam problem.
2. One of the follow-on actions to the report was supposed to be a Vietnamese announcement of a program of social reform. Producing this piece of paper (and in the end it was not much more than a piece of paper) took months. It was experiences such as this that gave questions about the viability of the Diem regime greater prominence in the fall review than they had received during April and May.
3. The U.S. was still continuing to deal with Diem most gently. Nothing more was asked of Diem as a quid pro quo than that he finally work up a plan for the counterinsurgency. The President explicitly accepted the assumptions of the Joint Plan worked out by the Staley Mission and their Vietnamese counterparts.
This is from the formal record of decision:
Joint Program of Action
With the Government of
Vietnam (Staley Report)August 4, 1961
The President agrees with the three basic tenets on which the recommendations contained in the Joint Action Program are based, namely:
a. Security requirements must, for the present, be given first priority.
b. Military operations will not achieve lasting results unless economic and social programs are continued and accelerated.
c. It is in our joint Interest to accelerate measures to achieve a self-sustaining economy and a free and peaceful society in Viet-Nam. 7/
Similar language was used at the time of the May decisions. So it is not new. It is only that, in the light of Diem's inactivity, the phrases implying that non-military efforts are also important had come to sound a little hollow.
IV. U.S. COMBAT TROOPS
From the time of the Laos Annex to the original Gilpatric/Lansdale draft of the Task Force Report (April 28), the record shows persistent activity on some level or other on the issue of sending U.S. combat troops to Vietnam.
