NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011 TOP SECRET – Sensitive
victory as determination to take some new military commitments such as air strikes against the Viet Cong in the Laos corridor; while Lodge defined victory as willingness to make punitive air strikes against North Vietnam. "The significant fact…was that they [both Westmoreland and Lodge] looked toward some American decision to undertake a commitment which the Vietnamese would interpret as a willingness to raise the military ante and eschew negotiations begun from a position of weakness." Although Khanh had had some success, Vietnamese morale was still not good and needed leadership had not been displayed.
If we can obtain a breakthrough in the mutual commitment of the U.S. in Vietnam to a confident sense of victory, we believe that we can introduce this sort of executive involvement into the Vietnamese structure.… No one…can define with precision just how that breakthrough can be established. It could come from the external actions of the U.S., internal leadership in Vietnam, or from an act of irreversible commitment by the United States. 104/
The "logic" of this seemed to be that Khanh had not been able to provide the necessary leadership, despite all the aid and support the U.S. had given. No level of mere aid, advice, and support short of full participation could be expected to supply this deficiency, because Khanh would remain discouraged and defeated until he was given full assurance of victory. He would not be able to feel that assurance of victory until the U.S. committed itself to full participation in the struggle, even to the extent of co-belligerency. If the U.S. could commit itself in this way, the U.S. determination would somehow be transfused into the GVN. The problem before the assembled U.S. policy-makers, therefore, was to find some means of breakthrough into an irreversible commitment of the U.S.
The actions contemplated in this memorandum were not finally decided upon at this juncture, as we know. But we were gravitating inexorably in that direction in response to forces already at work, and over which we had ceased to have much real control. The situation in Vietnam had so developed, by this time, that by common consent the success of our programs in Vietnam--and indeed of our whole policy there, with which we had publicly and repeatedly associated our national prestige-- depended upon the stability of the GVN. Conditions being what they were, the GVN equated, for the future to which plans and actions applied, with the Khanh regime. We were therefore almost as dependent upon Khanh as he was beholden to us. Circumstances had thus forced us into a situation wherein the most immediate and pressing goal of our programs in Vietnam was recognized to be using our resources and prestige to perpetuate a regime that we knew was only one faction--opposed by other factions--and without any broad base of popular support. We were aware of that weakness, and fully intended, whenever it was expedient, to find ways to broaden that basis of popular support. But that was something that could be--and indeed had
