NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011 TOP SECRET – Sensitive
served, by reporting to us or to their superiors within the GVN what we or the GVN high officials wanted to hear.) As December and January and February passed, the situation reports trended consistently downward, the accumulating evidence seemed to indicate quite clearly that appreciation of setbacks and of adverse developments was regularly belated. The result was that programs tended commonly to be premised upon a more optimistic appraisal of the situation than was valid for the time when they were adopted, whether or not they were valid for an earlier period.
Judgments of the trend of events in Vietnam and of the progress of our program had long been a subject of controversy, both public and within the councils of government. That there had been an undercurrent of pessimism concerning the situation in Vietnam was no secret to the responsible officials who visited Vietnam in September and who reported to the President on 2 October, or to the larger group that convened at CINCPAC HQ on 20 November. Most of the qualifications in their minds related to imponderables of the political situation, which it was always hoped and assumed would be successfully resolved. The focus of the disagreement had generally been the policies of Diem and Nhu especially with respect to the Buddhists. During the summer of 1963, disagreement over the state of affairs in Vietnam had not only been aired in closed official councils, but had flared into open controversy in the public press in a manner that seemed to many to be detrimental to the U.S. It was possible to get directly conflicting views from the experts. One of the better known illustrations of this bewildering diversity of opinions among those with some claim to know is the instance recounted by both Schlesinger and Hilsman of the reports to President Kennedy on 10 September 1963 by General Victor Krulak and Mr. Joseph A. Mendenhall upon their return from their special mission to Vietnam. General Krulak was a specialist in counterinsurgency and Mr. Mendenhall had, not long before, completed a tour of duty in Saigon as Deputy Chief of Mission under Ambassador Durbrow. After hearing them both out (with Krulak painting the rosy picture and Mendenhall the gloomy one), the President, in the words of the Hilsman account, "looked quizzically from one to the other. You two did visit the same country, didn't you?" 14/
Much of the disagreement concerning the progress of the anti-Viet Cong effort during the middle of 1963 was related intimately to issues posed by the Buddhist revolt. Where there was pessimism or scepticism about the progress of the war in general or the success of the pacification program, the attitude was generally associated with the judgment that Diem and Nhu were not administering affairs right and were alienating rather than winning the support of the masses of South Vietnamese people. Aside from Diem and Nhu and the Buddhist revolt, the major center of controversy was the situation in the Delta. The fact that NSAM 273 called for priority effort in the Delta reflected official recognition that the situation in the Delta demanded it. The ground work for this was laid during the McNamara-Taylor visit, but recognition of the serious problem there had come slowly and not without controversy.
