Washington's War

While Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, surveyed the war in Viet Nam last week (see THE WORLD), a storm was brewing in Washington over the handling of U.S. policy toward that strife-torn little country. It involved most of the Pentagon and an influential clique in the State Department.

At the core of the dispute is an Aug. 24 cable sent to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, newly arrived in Saigon, just after repressive measures had been taken against Vietnamese Buddhists by the government of Roman Catholic President Ngo Dinh Diem. The cable seemed to suggest alternative courses of action the U.S. might pursue to protect its costly stake in the war effort, taking into account the threat of a massive Buddhist uprising against Diem. Lodge was asked for his comments. Importantly, several of the courses of action included the possibility of a U.S.-backed coup to depose President Diem; more importantly, the message was not shown (as it should have been) to a Pentagon official high enough to understand its explosive implications. If it had been, it probably never would have left Washington.

Fight the War. The cable focused attention on a longtime dispute in Washington over policy toward South Viet Nam. The Pentagon is convinced that the U.S.-financed war ($1,500,000 daily, 14,000 military advisers) is being won. On that basis, the military believes that any attempt to overthrow the Diem government, no matter how obnoxious it might seem, would only send more U.S. blood (over 100 Americans have lost their lives in the war) and money down the drain. Thus the Pentagon's position has been: fight against the Communists, not against the Diem regime.

In direct opposition to this is a small but determined core of State Department liberals, known around Washington as the "Gung Ho Boys," who sometimes seem more interested in over throwing the heavy-handed Diem regime than in pushing the war against the Viet Cong. Among the leaders of the State Department clique is Roger Hilsman, Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs. His friends at the State Department admire him as an independent thinker; his Pentagon critics have dubbed him "the field marshal" because, they say, he tries to run the whole military-political war in Viet

Nam. And who was the author of the Aug. 24 cable? Roger Hilsman, of course.

That such an incendiary message should ever have been sent without the approval of the Pentagon seems astonishing. But it did get sent--and Hils man's cable had the O.K. of W. Averell Harriman, State's Under Secretary for Political Affairs. Harriman is an acknowledged expert on Kremlin affairs, but some State Department career men consider him a rank amateur on the sub ject of Southeast Asia.

It also happened that the Hilsman cable was sent on a Saturday. A junior officer was manning the Viet Nam desk when the cable with the Harriman approval came in. The State Department deskman had no one to call but a Pentagon deskman--who apparently did not realize the cable's contents warranted bothering a higher-up. And among the many Pentagon officials enraged by it was the highest-up: Defense Secretary McNamara. Summarizing McNamara's reaction, a Defense official said: "While it lasted, it was an atomic blast."

Lose the War. Hilsman denied that a significant policy cable was sent out Aug. 24--or any other time--without being circulated in the Pentagon; but it seemed to be a matter of interpretation of what was significant. He was shaken by the hue and cry that erupted last week when word of the cable's existence leaked from the Pentagon to the New York Herald Tribune. Said West Pointer Hilsman: "We've never tried to pull strings on puppets or go for a coup d'etat. The U.S. can't do this. If we ever pulled it, the Communists, who charge the Vietnamese with being puppets of the U.S., would be proved right and we would lose the war."

No one was saying that there was a major policy split between Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara over Viet Nam, but neither was anyone denying that underlings in each man's department held widely differing views. And it almost looked as if the war in Washington were worse last week than the savage battle being fought in faraway Viet Nam.

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