Eight More Characters in Search of Jeff

Paulann Sheets, one time revolutionary

Taking a break on the Mediterranean coast, Paulann Sheets, 1966

          
          Paulann Sheets, nee Hosler, and I first met in an arty town in the Hudson valley north of New York. She was staying at the Morning Glory B+B on Upper Tinker run by an attractive Chinese woman with freckles named Pansy.

          Once an all-American girl, then a student revolutionary, now a counselor of the law with leftward bent, Paulann knew my brother Jeff Sharlet at Indiana University (IU) some 40 years back. She was of good memory.

          Paulann’s life has been an interesting journey. Entering IU as a freshman in ’59, a politically conservative young woman – a Goldwater Republican – within a short time she was an ardent Marxist.

A Nixon supporter in the 1960 presidential campaign, by ’62 Paulann had become a committed Trotskyist. The FBI field office took note, enlisting 11 confidential informants at IU to keep track of her activities. Initially a rah-rah sorority girl, she became a key player in the two most salient events on the left in the history of the university at that time.

Paulann joined the tiny campus chapter of the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), junior affiliate of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party. IU YSA in turn founded a local branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) in support of Castro’s Cuban Revolution.

As the Cuban Missile Crisis heated up in ‘62, YSA and FPCC supported Cuba. When President Kennedy (JFK) blockaded the island to stop Russian missile-carrying freighters, Paulann and comrades announced a protest march against US policy.

Gathering on the steps of the campus auditorium to begin their march, the small band of brothers was stunned to see a sea of angry, shouting students lining their route. Facing the dozen demonstrators were well over a thousand counter-protestors.

The situation was dangerous so the guys decided to defer the protest, but Paulann and Polly Smith, the only women in the group, disagreed and declared their intention to march. With little choice, the young men joined them, and they set off brandishing their colorful signs – Paulann’s, ‘a fierce JFK head on a huge eagle with its talons sunk into the small island of Cuba’.

Within minutes, ugly catcalls began, punches were thrown, and the provocative signs ripped up by enraged young ‘patriots’. Miraculously, the protestors made it to the library and escaped the raging mob.

Several months later the group invited a YSA national officer to speak on campus. Although his remarks were fairly moderate – ‘a sedate, academic affair’ in Paulann’s words – the politically motivated county prosecutor saw it differently.

Partly as payback for their ‘un-American’ pro-Cuban march, he indicted the YSA leaders under Indiana’s anti-communism statute for attempting to overthrow the Government of the United States.

Paulann organized the defense of the ‘Bloomington 3’ (B-3), whose lives would be disrupted for the next two years. She led the ‘Committee to Aid the Bloomington Students’, or CABS, which involved her taking a leave of absence, traveling extensively to publicize the case and raise defense funds. Thanks to her leadership, a prominent radical lawyer joined the case and soon brought to an end the trumped up charges.

Back from the Vietnam War, Jeff returned to IU as the B-3 case was winding down. Paulann well remembered him for his charisma as chair of the campus SDS group. I noted that several others had also referred to Jeff’s charisma. Paulann’s comment—‘How could anyone have missed it’.

Spooks at the rifle range

Specialist-3 John Buquoi (haloed),rifle range, outside Saigon, 1963

 Looks like a picture of regular GIs, doesn’t it? The time late ’63, the place South Vietnam, specifically an Army rifle range. The guy haloed in the middle is John Buquoi, a great friend of brother Jeff.

John and Jeff were soldiers, although in name only, part of the Army Security Agency (ASA)—an autonomous intelligence outfit. ASA’s priorities did not include good marksmanship. The agency prioritized a very different set of skills—training young men, usually college boys, as linguists, cryptographers, and intelligence analysts—a far cry from combat, the heart of the warrior profession.

I too had served in ASA, but in the ‘50s. The setup however was the same John and Jeff experienced—eight weeks of minimal military training before we were sent off for up to a year to acquire specialized skills.

Since John and Jeff looked like regular GIs—ASA was the military arm of the National Security Agency (NSA) in Washington—their superiors occasionally paid lip service to the soldierly calling with a little close-order drill or a tune-up trip to the rifle range.

John Buquoi followed Jeff at the Army Language School where they met. Completing his Vietnamese language course, he was dispatched to Saigon. Jeff met him on arrival and gave John a kind of social introduction to Vietnam, a tour of Saigon’s great bars and cafés.

Taxiing into town, they set off on a whirlwind pub crawl starting at the Papillon and ending many hours later at the Happy Bar. Along the way, they dined at the Peacock where 60 piasters (50 US cents back then) bought them a steak (probably water buffalo), fries, salad, and a Vietnamese beer to wash it down.

On another night out, they were approaching one of Jeff’s favorite places—French style, Vietnamese run—and were stunned by an explosion at the café just ahead on the street.

Two Viet Cong (VC) ‘cowboys’ had sped by on a motor scooter and rolled a grenade into the place. Injuries were fortunately very minor. The guys peeked in and walked on. VC street bombings were not infrequent in the South Vietnamese capital.

Later both John and Jeff were assigned to Phu Bai in the far north of the country. Occasionally they borrowed a jeep and drove down Highway 1 for a weekend in Danang on the coast, staying at a hotel.

Another time driving over the high mountain pass enroute, they turned on to a side road. Down below poking into the South China Sea was a small verdant peninsula. The two young GIs mused, wouldn’t it be a great place to set up a gambling casino after the war.

That was early ’64, and of course neither could foresee the war would go on for many years.  

John later told me that some of their buddies became Vietophiles while others were Vietophobes, but Jeff was neither. He was a realist, skeptical about the US mission in Vietnam, and critical of the emerging war.

Fred Gardner, antiwar impresario

Fred Gardner in recent times

           Fred Gardner never got the credit he deserved for the rise of the GI movement against the Vietnam War. Trained as an Army reservist, he remembered the sleazy GI town near the base with its grungy bars and dives. With that and his growing opposition to the war in mind, Fred came up with the idea of setting up coffee houses for GIs near major base camps as alternative hangouts.

They’d be pleasant places where a GI could get away from the military milieu – to drink coffee, listen to some music, and, especially, peruse the small but growing number of underground antiwar papers, notable among them brother Jeff’s Vietnam GI.

Start-up capital was needed, so Fred turned to the New Left antiwar movement for help. He got a cold shoulder—the New Left at the time was hostile to GIs, saying they were ‘no better than cops’. Like Jeff, Fred knew differently—there were many GIs with doubts about the war.

With $10,000 of money he raised, he and two friends opened the first GI coffee house near Fort Jackson, SC. In a play on the WWII USO canteens offering troops sandwiches and a little entertainment, they called their place the ‘UFO’. It soon attracted hundreds of off-duty GIs. 

More such venues followed, the next one outside Fort Leonard Wood, MO; then another near the gates of Fort Hood, TX – the lively Oleo Strut. The Army took notice and, in collusion with local authorities, orchestrated a harassment campaign against the new GI gathering places.

Nonetheless, Fred’s idea took off and new GI coffee houses began springing up at bases all over the country. With few exceptions, harassment was the norm, and in some instances anonymous violence— in Idaho the Covered Wagon was firebombed one night, while a grenade was tossed into the coffee house near Fort Dix, NJ.

Fred has had an extensive career as a writer and editor. Starting with the Harvard Crimson, he wrote for the critical magazine of the day, Ramparts; served as an editor at Scientific American; and frequently contributed to other publications.

In 1971, he published a widely read, still definitive book, The Unlawful Concert: An Account of the Presidio Mutiny Case, an account of a major event in antiwar history. Fred dedicated his book to Jeff:

Jeff Sharlet, founder of

Vietnam GI,

dead at 27

Once upon a time in Indianapolis

 (Life is what happens while you’re making other plans, as the saying goes.  That is precisely what happened to Karen Grote Ferb on July 23, 1966.  Here’s the story she related to me.)

Soldiers and Sailors Monument, Indianapolis, IN

In 1966 President Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) made a Midwestern swing for the off-year congressional elections that included Indianapolis (Indy) IN in the heartland.

My old friend Jeff Sharlet was spending the summer there working on the railroad, and I often went up from Indiana University (IU) in Bloomington to spend weekends with him; one of those weekends LBJ spoke at Indy’s downtown Monument Circle. 

The IU New Left planned to welcome the president with a peaceful antiwar protest. I went up to Indy to join them the night before.  Jeff, disappointed that he had to work that sultry Saturday, dropped me off at the rally point early. 

I joined a handful of protesters, parade permit in hand and antiwar signs at the ready.  That’s as close as we got to protesting.  In short order, cops arrived and told us to move. Showing our permit, we refused. Then they returned with Chief Jones, a good-sized man wearing a tan trench coat, a brown fedora, and an annoyed expression.

Unbeknownst to the IU activists, the feds and local law enforcement had worked together to preempt the protest. License numbers of their cars had been relayed ahead, and the Indy police arrested them on arrival.

Each time the paddy wagon filled up, the group was transported to a sheriff’s bus out of sight of the crowd, the press, and especially the president’s podium. LBJ finished speaking and left for a businessmen’s luncheon where he ironically declared, “We will abide civil protest” as the would-be protesters were carted off to jail. 

Chief Jones thought the roundup of the protesters with their “lousy signs” was a good idea, but the Indiana Civil Liberties Union (ICLU) immediately protested: 

It is incredible that responsible public officials would utilize the power of their position in such a flagrant suppression of the efforts of the citizens to exercise their fundamental right of freedom of expression. 

By dark we’d all been released. A small crowd of supporters awaited us outside the jail. Jeff was there, quietly outraged.  He intuitively understood how frightened I’d been and how anxious I was about the pending court case. 

That Sunday’s New York Times gave the story brief coverage in the back pages, saying the president had vigorously defended his Vietnam War policy before a crowd of several thousand at the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Indianapolis.

As for the thwarted protesters, the report included a statement by a sheriff’s deputy that we might be kept overnight and charged with breaking up a public meeting.  Only one arrestee was named, IU Professor James Dinsmoor, charged with interfering with the police.

When I came to trial, the initial charge of Disorderly Conduct had morphed into Resisting Arrest. The arresting officer falsely testified I had struck him with my sign. I was nonplussed and felt little satisfaction with my eventual verdict of not guilty. 

Dan Kaplan, to create a better world

Dan Kaplan, SDS chair (carrying books), leading a demo, Indiana University, 1967

A teenage stalwart, Dan has done it all – civil rights activism, SDS leader, Trotskyist journeyman, antiwar organizer, college professor, and longtime union activist.

At a New Left reunion in 2013, Dan, conceding that their side hadn’t been winning the battle for fundamental social change, said he still remained committed to engaging in the struggle ‘to create a better world’.

Dan knew Jeff at their alma mater, Indiana University (IU), succeeding him as president of the campus SDS chapter. Dan remembered him well.

They first met at an SDS meeting. Both were following the discussion with interest when someone remarked that since Jeff was an ex-Vietnam GI, he should be asked his opinion on the matter.

Dan, a freshman, recalled being amazed that the activist next to him had been in the war. Turning to Jeff, he asked, ‘Are you really a Vietnam veteran?’‘Yes, I am’, Jeff said, ‘but this is where I really belong.’

Later that year, Jeff as SDS leader gave a speech at a rally Dan has always remembered, a demo outside the residence of the university president. Jeff opened, saying ‘This is the second time in my life that I’ve belonged to an organization run by Elvis Stahr’.

He explained that he had served in Vietnam under Stahr as Secretary of the Army, and was now again under his aegis as President of IU. Rhetorically, Jeff asked why a man of the ‘war machine’ was qualified to be president of an institution of higher learning, then answered that in various ways the American university system served the military-industrial complex, hence senior personnel of the two organizations had become interchangeable.

Jeff went on to grad school at University of Chicago with a prestigious national fellowship. Dan’s memory of their last encounter had an elegiac tone.

Jeff told Dan he had decided to drop out of Chicago, instead using his fellowship funds to launch a much needed GI antiwar paper, Vietnam GI.  Dan expressed surprise that Jeff was throwing away a coveted fellowship at a distinguished university. Jeff replied– and presciently, given his short but interesting life:

He told me that this was what he wanted to do at this time in his
life.  And that he thought this would be the most important thing he had ever done. 

Anti-hero of GI protest

Grave marker, Pvt James Richard 'Rusty' Bunch, 1949-1968

High above San Francisco Bay sat a nondescript white stone building, the Army stockade at the Presidio of San Francisco. The majority of the prisoners there were maladjusted soldiers serving short-term sentences, mostly for AWOL  (absent without leave).

In the fall of ’68, conditions at the stockade were seriously wanting – it was badly over-crowded with insufficient sanitation facilities and sometimes short rations. Many of the GI prisoners were a disorderly bunch–some had gone AWOL during their first days and weeks in the Army, others multiple times.

A number of them came from unstable homes, were poorly educated, and generally unable to adapt to military life. Mental illness was not uncommon among the prisoners, some of whom repeatedly attempted suicide.

Among this odd lot, one young prisoner stood out as truly bizarre. From his arrival at the stockade barracks, it was apparent to all that Private James Richard ‘Rusty’ Bunch was a very strange bird. He often conducted two-way conversations with himself; fantasized about space ships; believed he had been reincarnated; and claimed he could walk through walls.

He was clearly suicidal, asking a bunk mate the best way to do it–slashing wrists, drinking a toxic fluid, or trying to escape while under guard. The guards had standing orders to shoot fleeing prisoners. Rusty chose to run, and died of a shotgun blast.

The next day 27 prisoners protested his death and prison conditions generally with a sit-down. Refusing an order to disperse, they were arrested. The 27 were charged not with ‘Willful disobedience to orders’ entailing a light sentence, but the extreme charge of ‘Mutiny’ calling for death or life imprisonment.

None of the offenders had expressed any interest in the war–Vietnam was not their issue, stockade conditions were – but the Army prosecutor construed their actions as antiwar and anti-military. The alleged ringleaders were court-martialed first and got 14 and 15 year sentences.

The heavy sentences for a peaceful protest immediately ignited press and public reaction in the San Francisco Bay area. Jeff’s Vietnam GI got on the story as outrage spread quickly throughout the broad antiwar community.

The Presidio case soon took on national dimensions, reaching the halls of Congress. The Pentagon hastily reduced the sentences, but it was too late; and GI protest, heretofore buried in the back pages, became national news.

No matter that not one of the Presidio 27 was protesting the war; in the public mind the late Pvt Rusty Bunch went from a tragic figure to an unintended martyr to the GI cause, or, as a GI antiwar activist later put it.

The Presidio 27 was the best thing that ever happened to the GI movement – it put us on the front page.

Dave Komatsu, keeper of memories

Header for Dave Komatsu's obituary for Jeff, Vietnam GI, 1969

Perhaps no one knew Jeff in his last years as well as Dave Komatsu of Chicago. Jeff harbored a big vision of how to stop the war; Dave helped him realize it. The two first met through a mutual friend in New York, summer, ’67. The rest is antiwar history.

Dave, an exceptionally bright and insightful individual, skeptical of all certainties, had long been a left activist. He led a breakaway faction of the American Socialist Party that became the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL).

Dave and Kit, his wife, set up a newspaper for YPSL, American Socialist, a briskly written, well-edited tabloid Jeff happened to read and admire.

Returning from the Vietnam War, Jeff planned to organize GIs to oppose the war from within the military, a formidable undertaking. Dave suggested an interim step, a newsletter or bulletin reflecting GI opinion.

Thus was born Jeff’s antiwar underground paper, Vietnam GI (VGI), which soon became a platform for raising GI political consciousness and encouraging self-organizing against the war. An instant success from the initial issue, VGI ultimately inspired dozens of antiwar papers created by serving GIs.

Jeff’s aim was to mobilize GIs to bring the war to a halt, but unfortunately his time was cut short. An illness he first experienced in the Vietnam bush resurfaced and took his life.
 Dave had known my brother much better than I. For me Jeff was a much younger sibling, while Dave remembered him as a man he greatly admired. He compared Jeff’s tightly wound power and self-containment to Steve McQueen's racing car driver in the film Le Mans.

 Many obits on Jeff appeared in the underground press, but Dave’s, in a posthumous edition of Vietnam GI, was the most eloquent, the most poetic, as reflected in the opening and closing lines:

 Many good men never came back from Nam. Some came back disabled in mind. Jeff Sharlet came back a pretty together cat – and he came back angry. Jeff started VGI and, for almost two years poured his life into it, in an endless succession of 18-hour days, trying to organize men to fight for their rights.

                                          …

[At the end] he said he had many new ideas
for our fight, but was just too exhausted to talk about them.

Tran Van Don, coup-maker

Major General Tran Van Don, South Vietnam, 1963

The Vietnam War was not going well in ’63; the Viet Cong controlled much of the rural countryside. South Vietnam’s President Diem was a generally benign but inept leader. There was much dissatisfaction among the populace as well as the elites.

Minority Catholics, Diem and his brother Nhu, the secret police chief, ordered a violent assault on the Buddhist clergy. For the army generals, mostly Buddhists, who long felt that both the war and the country itself were being badly mismanaged, that was the last straw.

General Don was delegated to find out what the US would think of a coup. He contacted an old friend, a CIA officer at the embassy. The US was secretly supportive – Washington was fed up with Diem’s ineffective leadership.

Born in France of Vietnamese parents, educated in Paris before WWII, Tran Van Don had been a senior officer in the South Vietnamese Army since the establishment of the republic in the mid-‘50s. He held the trust of both the general staff and the presidential palace.

Late summer/early fall ‘63, Don and Lucien Conein (US liaison to the plotters) maintained surreptitious contact. Although Jeff never met Conein, he and fellow Vietnamese linguists were part of his operation. From a secret location outside the capital, they clandestinely monitored the generals’ communications as backup to Conein’s meetings with General Don.

The day before the planned coup, Don tried again to persuade Diem to change his policies asking, ‘Can you make some changes to your domestic policy by reopening the pagodas, freeing the monks and nuns, and bringing about a more flexible government?’

       His plea was to no avail, the president replied, ‘No, there is nothing to do … the situation is fine.’ The next day the generals carried out the coup. Diem and Nhu were executed. General Don was distressed; they were supposed to have been sent into exile.

A Voyage of Discovery – From Bloomington to Saigon

[On this the 4^th anniversary of Searching for Jeff, the present post has been written by my collaborator on this blog, Karen Grote Ferb. Karen knew my brother Jeff well during their university days. In 2013 she and her husband Tom traveled to Vietnam where Karen retraced Jeff’s steps as a Vietnam GI during 1963-64.]

I first met Jeff Sharlet at a house party in early January 1966, a little over a year after he returned to Indiana University (IU) from his tour as a US military advisor in Vietnam.  It was a chance meeting.  One of my house mates had been invited, but did not want to go alone; she begged me to go with her.  I really didn’t want to, but she pleaded so long I finally gave in.  Jeff was there, sitting in a dark corner alone.  I’d seen him once before on campus, standing with a group of guys in front of Ballantine Hall.

I introduced myself, and we began a lengthy conversation in that corner, then got away from the general din to continue talking student style sitting on a pile of winter coats in the bathtub.  We talked about socioeconomics, racism, and the war in Vietnam. The war had been building dramatically since the Tonkin Gulf incident in August ’64 shortly after Jeff had returned stateside – culminating in the launching of a major bombing campaign over North Vietnam followed by the landing of the Marines at Danang in early ‘65. 

Our conversation continued over the next eight months until I left for graduate school, and more and more it turned toward the war, as was happening all over the country.  Why were we fighting in Vietnam was the question many were asking, and how could we stop it.

____________________________________________

Fast forward to the digital age and 2004 when I finally

 learned of Jeff’s tragically early death in ‘69.

____________________________________________

Although Jeff was clear that he had done something in Vietnam he couldn’t bring himself to speak of, he didn’t talk much at all about his experiences there that had soured him on our involvement in the war. At the same time, he had developed an admiration for the Vietnamese people, although not for their oppressive regimes beginning with Diem and his cruel brother Nhu, so he joined the IU chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during fall of ‘65; I too joined around that time.          

Antiwar protests grew exponentially from the mid-‘60s, not only at home, but abroad, and even in Vietnam itself.  The Buddhist crisis, in particular, had drawn worldwide attention as clergy began to set themselves afire in public places as a protest against the Diem regime.

Jeff at Indiana University, 1965

Fast forward to the digital age and 2004 when I finally learned of Jeff’s tragically early death in ‘69.  I had come across his namesake nephew, at the time beginning his illustrious career as a writer.  At first I thought he was the Jeff I’d known, but a little exploration proved it not so; the namesake was too young and did not resemble his uncle.  The truth was a shock.  Jeff had died of cancer at age 27.  I knew he had an older brother, Bob, so I set out to offer much-belated condolences.

As it happened, Bob, an academic approaching retirement, was determined to give his brother his rightful place in the history of the GI Movement against the Vietnam War by writing a memoir of him.  Jeff too had intended to pursue an academic career. He had begun grad school at the University of Chicago, but dropped out and used his Woodrow Wilson Fellowship funds to create the first GI-led antiwar, underground newspaper. Vietnam GI was aimed at GIs serving in Vietnam as well as on US bases in the States and abroad. 

Contacting Bob at that time was serendipitous because he had little idea of how to reach out and find Jeff’s friends and comrades from his IU days. We determined that, although I’d lost touch with my fellow IU antiwar activists, I could find them for him.

 ___________________________________________________________

I began a voyage of discovery I could not have imagined when I last spoke

with Jeff just a few months before the first issue of Vietnam GI appeared.

____________________________________________________________

Over time I did find many of those people as well as others from Jeff’s high school years, his Army days, and the time he spent in Chicago as an underground editor, which also took him across the country and abroad. Bob eventually interviewed over 150 people who had known Jeff to one degree or another, and I began a voyage of discovery I could not have imagined back in late 1967 when I last spoke with Jeff just a few months before the first issue of Vietnam GI appeared. 

In my wildest dreams I couldn’t have foreseen the depth of knowledge and understanding I would achieve about Vietnam and the war, nor that I would visit Vietnam, now unified, and walk in Jeff’s footsteps, seeing the places he had seen.

I found myself in Saigon’s cavernous Bến Thành Market, in front of which a massive nonviolent Buddhist protest had taken place on August 25, 1963, the very day Jeff arrived in Saigon for the first time. South Vietnamese government troops had opened fire, killing several people, including Quách Thị Trang, a 15-year old student. 

Bến Thành Market Protest and Quách Thị Trang, 1963

The traffic circle was subsequently renamed in her memory and now holds a statue of her in a space shared with a mid-15^th century general, Trần Nguyên Hãn, a great poet, talented politician and strategist under Emperor Lê Lợi, and a hero revered for his role in liberating Vietnam from China’s Ming Dynasty.

Quách Thị Trang & General Han, 2014

No longer there to see were street-side execution posts as well as the trenches which Jeff could not have failed to notice; they surely would have added to soldiers’ anxieties about the dangers that too often erupted.

Trenches in front of Saigon City Hall, mid-‘60s

 

Nor were the famously well-known Buddhist self-immolations the only evidence of a profound cultural conflict and repression in the cities of South Vietnam.  Widely reported, the images of monks engulfed in flames stunned the world, although the root cause was not widely known. 

The Catholic Diem regime had retained a French colonial rule that Buddhism was not a religion, but an association, which severely limited the rights of Buddhists as opposed to those of the Catholic minority. A request to fly Buddhist flags on the occasion of Buddha’s 2,507^th birthday in 1963 had been turned down while the Vatican flag flew on the occasion of the consecration of Diem's older brother as the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Hue.

A protest in the ancient capital of Hue of about 3,000 Buddhists was fired on by government troops.  The regime, attempting to minimize the damage and even pin the blame on its civil war adversary, the Viet Cong, was hotly contested by a huge protest march the next day of more than 10,000 demonstrators.

 

The protests and self-immolations—six in all, including a Buddhist nun—continued throughout the summer of ’63, resulting in several clashes between Buddhists and troops, as well as hunger strikes—over 10,000 participated in Saigon alone—sit-ins, and street fighting between Buddhist and Catholic civilians.  All during the summer the great gong at Saigon’s Xa Loi Pagoda’s tolled, while in Hue the violence had left the main pagoda, Tu Dam, nearly a complete ruin.

Although President Diem had insisted he was pursuing a policy of conciliation, the tragedy in the streets of Saigon in August of ’63 would discredit any notion of it.  Having declared martial law, the president had given the police under his brother Nhu free rein starting that August.

_________________________________________________

Nhu’s police plundered, looted, beat, and brutally murdered 

Buddhists with abandon, killing no fewer than 100 in Hue alone.

___________________________________________________

Nhu’s police plundered, looted, beat, and brutally murdered Buddhists with abandon, killing no fewer than 100 in Hue alone. The overall number murdered or ‘disappeared’ was in the hundreds.  Thousands of Buddhists across the country were arrested and tortured by forces under Nhu, Diem’s brother, who also headed the special forces.  On August 25^th, 6,000 monks, nuns, civilians, and students were arrested followed by many thousands more over the course of the following month. 

A war that had had not yet received much attention back in the States suddenly had many Americans asking questions that before long would result in massive demonstrations against it. The rest of the world began to wonder what our objectives in Vietnam actually were.  In the end, Washington declared, “… it appears that the government of the Republic of Vietnam, has instituted serious repressive measures against the Vietnamese Buddhist leaders…The US deplores repressive actions of this nature.” 

In spite of this, the American media were not quick to pick up on extent of the underlying conflict between Buddhists and the Catholic regime; that is, within the overarching civil war between Communist North and non-Communist South Vietnam, a religious civil war was raging in South Vietnam between Buddhists and Catholics.

Soon after the police attacks against Buddhists and their pagodas, the commander of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) announced military control over Saigon, instituted censorship of the press, and cancelled all commercial flights into the city.  As the US Government began to lose confidence in its client Diem, Jeff and fellow Vietnamese linguists were quickly rushed to Saigon.

_____________________________________________________

As the US Government began to lose confidence in its client Diem, 

Jeff and fellow Vietnamese linguists were quickly rushed to Saigon.

______________________________________________________

Washington had finally recognized that the Diem regime was behind the attacks and had no intention of reconciliation with the Buddhists, a direct violation of a promise made. President Kennedy was also aware that a group of South Vietnamese generals were planning a coup.

 

The ensuing events in September and early October ‘63, to which Jeff was privy in his position of clandestinely eavesdropping on the ARVN General Staff, led on November 1st to a successful military coup and the execution of Diem and Nhu. 

Coincidentally, a year later in ‘64 – also on August 25 – a group of 10,000 Buddhists attacked and burned to the ground a Catholic village near Danang, after which horrendous bloody clashes erupted between Buddhists and Catholics killing and mutilating each other in the streets.  The violence soon spread to Saigon and other urban centers, creating an atmosphere of anarchy in the entire country.*

Violent clashes between Buddhists and Catholics, August, 1963

Contemporary Vietnam: Now a single unified country under Communist rule, the situation from the early-mid ‘60s has been reversed – the officially atheist Communist government now persecutes Christians, but allows Buddhists to practice their religion, although only a single sect, the Buddhist Church of Vietnam, intended to encompass any and all Buddhist sects firmly under state control.

______________________________________________________

* R J Topmiller, The Lotus Unleashed:  The Buddhist Peace Movement in South Vietnam 1964-1966 (2002), 19

Death in Saigon, Camelot in Disarray

The story began on a steamy day in Foggy Bottom, late August, Washington, ’63, and played out with all the elements of a fictional spy thriller. Thanks to the passage of time and declassification, we can now eavesdrop on the highly secret daily moves within the US government (USG) that led to the coup in Saigon. A year earlier, JFK had installed a taping system, and recently the audio tapes and follow-on memoranda as well as a lengthy, detailed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) history of events have all been made public.

Foggy Bottom was a local name for the State Department complex along the Potomac River. Everyone of importance was out of town, Jack Kennedy (JFK) up on Cape Cod at the family compound, the Secretary of State at the United Nations (UN) in New York, the CIA chief at his California get-away, the Defense Secretary and others out of reach on that end-of-summer weekend.

Three senior diplomats remaining in the capital kept an eye on US-South Vietnam (SVN) policy. Recent news had not been good, and cables from Saigon indicated conditions in SVN were getting much worse. President Diem’s brother Nhu, the de facto secret police chief, had just sent squads of Special Forces and combat police into three major Buddhist pagodas, and over a thousand priests and nuns had been roughed up and arrested. Reportedly, several hundred were killed.

Since spring, the predominantly Catholic government of Diem had been in sharp conflict with the Buddhist religious establishment, which represented the predominantly Buddhist population. It had started on a minor note to which the regime had reacted violently, killing nine unarmed civilians. In reaction, saffron-robed Buddhist monks called bonzes had begun martyring themselves in public squares – gasoline and a match – creating shocking photos on the front pages of the world press and embarrassing the regime’s patron, the United States.

The US, present when SVN was established and Diem installed in the mid-‘50s, by then had much political capital invested. The escalating Buddhist crisis was distracting attention from the government’s flagging fight against Communist North Vietnam’s insurgency, and Washington became concerned. Things weren’t going well with the US client state anyway – endemic corruption and resistance to reforms to engender popular support had become the norm.

On July 4th 1963, the US Embassy in Saigon threw its annual Independence Day party. A number of senior South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) generals, including General Tran Van Don, ran into an ex-comrade in arms, Lou Conein. French by birth, American by citizenship, a long serving hand in the Saigon CIA Station. Conein had first arrived in Vietnam in ‘45 as a WWII OSS* operative, and had fought alongside some of officers now generals in driving the Japanese occupation forces out of Indochina. His old friends invited him to join them for drinks at the nightclub at the Hotel Caravelle where they revealed they were planning a coup against Diem, and asked Conein to find out what Washington’s attitude would be.

 

General Don, coup plotters’ contact with Conein for US Embassy

Conein reported back to them that the US was non-committal, but would not stand in the way – what the conspirators hoped to hear. Planning began, then on August 21st the raid on the pagodas occurred, and Nhu falsely implicated the generals. They were furious, it was the final straw.

The next day, they sent word to the American Embassy asking the USG for a signal. It was the very day the new ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, arrived. He’d been briefed earlier and was disposed toward regime change. He cabled State for instructions and ordered Conein to liaise with the cabal. In addition, a team of Army Security Agency (ASA) linguists (lingys), including brother Jeff Sharlet, were quickly flown into Saigon from Clark Air Base in the Philippines (PI). Set up at an out of the way base, their classified mission was to tap into the conspirators’ communications.† 

Lodge’s urgent cable reached Washington that humid Saturday morning, instantly setting in motion a flurry of activity. Since spring the President himself and most of his senior advisers had become disenchanted with Diem’s leadership, especially his brother’s actions. It had become clear that the war against the insurgents would not be won without a regime change.

The ambassador needed immediate guidance, so the key officer, Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East Hilsman, and his superior, the Deputy Secretary of State, began urgently drafting strong, unambiguous instructions for regime change in Saigon – at the very least, the removal of Nhu.

Protocol required that the communication be approved by the Under Secretary of State who was in town, but at the golf course. With the cable in hand, the draftsmen rushed out to Burning Tree Golf Course where they caught up with Secretary Ball at the ninth hole. Ball insisted on calling JFK at his Hyannisport retreat. The President suggested circulating the draft for more approvals.

By Saturday evening, Rusk had been reached at the UN, as well as the acting chiefs at the Pentagon and CIA, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Shortly after 9 PM, JFK’s White House Vietnam adviser telephoned him at the Cape and secured final approval. At 9:36 PM, the cable that would irreversibly transform America’s commitment in Southeast Asia went off.

Marked ‘Top Secret’ and ‘Eyes Only – Ambassador Lodge’, the text was as direct as diplomatic language permitted. The ambassador was to see Diem forthwith to say that the USG could no longer tolerate Nhu, but if Lodge’s efforts were to no avail, then, in the delicate phrasing of high diplomacy, “we must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved.” The key generals were to be told that if Diem proved obdurate about his brother, then the USG is “prepared to accept the obvious implication that we can no longer support Diem” himself. The ambassador was assured that Washington would back him “to the hilt.” As history has recorded, a ‘green light’ had been given.

Ambassador Lodge and President Diem

On Monday, August 26th, with all the foreign policy principals back in town, there was alarm that the cable had been too strong, even incendiary. The President’s advisers were divided – McNamara at the Pentagon, McCone of CIA, and General Taylor of the Chiefs all felt that Hilsman, Harriman, and Ball had gone too far. Concerned over the divide among his inner circle, JFK quickly convened the National Security Council.

At that first of many meetings, the President served as moderator, generally questioning rather than expressing his views. However, at the outset when several inner circle people proposed withdrawing the cable, JFK rejected that course of action.

Despite the concern over the tone of the cable, Hilsman led off the initial session, expressing the broad consensus that Nhu had to go. He added that the two key generals who had sent word to Lodge told their US contacts “you have got to make up your mind.” From where the generals stood, things had reached a critical point, and the USG could no longer sit on the fence. JFK called another meeting for Tuesday and asked that Ambassador Nolting, the outgoing Saigon envoy be present. McNamara suggested designating the policy group an Executive Committee or ExComm.

As the ExComm went through a series of meetings that last week of August, no clear agreement on what to do about the situation in Saigon had been reached, and the President was beset by indecision.

On August 28th, domestic politics momentarily intruded on the ExComm deliberations. That was the day of the great march on Washington, 250,000 strong, culminating in Martin Luther King’s (MLK) iconic ‘I Have a Dream’ speech at the Lincoln Memorial.  JFK broke off a late afternoon session to receive MLK and a delegation from the historic event.

 

MLK (l) leading a delegation to meet with JFK (r), August 28, 1963

Although JFK was deeply skeptical about its likelihood of success, he decided at the next day’s ExComm on one more attempt to get Diem to oust Nhu. If it failed, the ambassador was to learn of the generals’ plans, but without committing the USG. Ruefully, JFK observed that America was “hip-deep in mud in Vietnam” and if he let the country go “down the drain,” Congress would be madder than hell.

JFK remained distressed that his closest advisers disagreed, not only in Washington, but at the Saigon embassy where Lodge was an enthusiastic coup proponent while the general commanding the military advisors, essentially a career staff officer an old cavalry officer with no knowledge of guerrilla warfare, was doubtful and the CIA station chief less than keen. However, as the leading authority on the secret history of the Vietnam War has concluded: “In effect the President rejected an immediate coup, but accepted that one would eventually take place.”**

By the end of that hectic week in August, JFK directed a cable be sent leaving the initial green light signal on the table, but expressing his second thoughts. No doubt divining Washington’s hesitation and ambivalence, the generals, who were risking their lives and feared possible betrayal either by one of their own or even the Embassy, abruptly suspended planning for a near-term coup. The diplomatic reason given – they didn’t feel ready.

The pressure was off at the embassy, but Jeff and the ASA team continued their covert assignment on a 24/7 basis, recording and translating the intercepted communications of the target generals, and no doubt highlighting key words that turned up. Their ‘product’, destined for the National Security Agency, was so politically sensitive that it was rigged to explode should the guards be stopped enroute to the airport for the flight to Washington by South Vietnamese police or military personnel.

Decades later Jeff’s buddy, the late Ed Smith††, told me that at the time they had no idea why they were listening in on US allies. Despite their top secret and cryptographic security clearances, the ‘big picture’ was well above their pay grade. Jeff and the intercept team did not have ‘Need to Know’, a concept I understood well from my own ASA experience in Cold War Europe where  the translator working next to me and I were not permitted to discuss our respective work – compartmentalization was the name of the game.

September arrived, and nothing had changed in Saigon. The bumbling Diem remained blissfully unaware of the real state of affairs in the country, having long encouraged overly optimistic reports. Even his brother Nhu privately referred to the regime as ‘mandarin’ and ‘feudal’. Washington’s dilemma was that while the war was unwinnable with Diem in power, they foresaw political instability and a lost cause in the long run without him.

Meanwhile, Saigon was awash in rumors; an observer commented that the “city seemed as taut as a piano wire.”***  The senior conspirator of the summer plotters, General Minh, known as ‘Big Minh’, asked the CIA contacts to keep the lines of communication open, so Conein, under orders from the ambassador, listened and reported through channels.

Lodge himself remained committed, but like JFK in Washington, he presided over a divided house. By all reliable accounts, things were not going well in South Vietnam, but his CIA chief, Jocko Richardson, tended to minimize the political crisis while his military adviser, General Harkins, written off by history as a “compelling mediocrity,”**** kept unrealistically insisting the war was going well. To reduce the dissonance, the ambassador engineered Richardson’s recall to Washington while JFK, anxious to gain more clarity, dispatched General Taylor and State’s Walt Rostow to Saigon on a fact-finding mission.



JFK,  Gen Taylor, and Sec McNamara conferring, September 24,1963

Then in early October, the USG learned the Saigon generals had resumed coup-planning. All indications were that they were in earnest. General Don, now liaison for the plotters, ran into Agent Conein and invited him to his office to learn the latest developments. Don passed on that Big Minh wanted to meet with Conein; they met for an hour, and Minh expressly asked Washington’s stance on a coup. He stressed that they were not seeking assistance, just assurance that the USG would recognize the post-coup government.

That promise came back quickly from JFK who directed the Embassy not to encourage a coup, but not to discourage one either. Essentially it was a repetition of the ambiguous signal of August, but satisfactory to the generals. They just wanted to be sure as they proceeded that the Americans would not betray them to Diem and Nhu.

 

Washington now became uneasy relying on Conein as its sole conduit to the conspirators. More a man of action than reflection, he wasn’t the ideal person to convey and negotiate USG positions. For the generals, however, there was no question of any other liaison – they knew Conein well and trusted him. So he remained Washington’s ‘man in the middle’. To throw off any possible surveillance by Nhu’s people, Conein and Don would meet seemingly by chance in nightclubs, at the airport, and even at the dentist they coincidentally shared, or use cut-outs, intermediaries, since both men were well-known around Saigon.

Conversely, from their side the generals wanted to be certain Conein was speaking with authority. An unobtrusive meeting was arranged at the airport between General Don and Ambassador Lodge as the ambassador awaited a flight. Don asked him in French for whom Conein spoke. Lodge replied unequivocally, “Il parle pour moi. Il me représente." (He speaks for me. He is my representative.)

Unexpectedly a ‘monkey wrench’ was thrown into the works when Harkins, a protégé of General Taylor, who opposed a coup, on his own initiative told General Don to cease and desist the plotting. Alarmed that the Americans had changed their collective position, the generals sought clarification. Conein told Don that the general had been out of line, and the ambassador, although an old Boston friend of Harkins, quickly set him straight. Meanwhile covering all bets back in Washington, the CIA director assured JFK that if the coup went awry, the Agency would disavow Conein as a rogue agent.

 

By mid-October, Jeff, Ed Smith, Fred Baumann, and their team finished their stint and headed back to the PI, but the surveillance mission continued with another group of lingys sent out from Clark Air Base. Meanwhile, Conein was instructed to ask Big Minh and the generals for their operational plans so the USG could evaluate the odds of success, but the plotters dithered and promised only to give the embassy 48-hour advance warning. Back in Washington, confidence in the outcome waxed and waned as the ExComm constantly reviewed the order of battle of rebel and loyalist forces.

The President, already quite uneasy, was getting mixed messages from his people. Ambassador Lodge came on strong while General Harkins via a backchannel was feeding Taylor dissent. Near the end of October, JFK signaled Lodge to slow things down, but the ambassador cabled back it was too late. The US was implicated, and at that point events in Saigon were beyond its influence.

 

On November 1st 1963, the conspirators’ promise of two days’ warning dissolved into four hours when they summoned Conein. Arranging for a Green Beret team to guard his family should the coup fail, Conein rushed off with a radio and his sidearm to coup headquarters from where he radioed the embassy a stream of reports for the next 18 hours.

 

The generals had planned well; loyalist forces were neutralized, but Diem and Nhu remained at large. Finally promised safe passage out of the country, the brothers surrendered, but soon after were assassinated by a special unit loyal to General Minh.

 

The unexpected news of the killings shocked official Washington. It was front page news around the world – I read about it in Izvestiia in Moscow†††. When the President received the news, he turned ashen, jumped up, and rushed out of the room. His close adviser, Arthur Schlesinger, later said he had never seen JFK so distraught since the Bay of Pigs fiasco in ’61.

 

Whatever his intentions for Vietnam might have been, JFK was too shrewd not to instantly grasp that the United States was complicit in the death of a head of state, and, absent a successor to ensure political stability, America would be stuck in Vietnam.

 

Camelot, the aura of style, grace, and, above all, effectiveness in the world at large, was in disarray. Then a mere three weeks later with the assassination of the young president, the Camelot on the Potomac passed into history as a brief moment of unbridled optimism, the romance of great power, and, yes, unchecked hubris.

________________________________________________

 

*The Office of Strategic Services or OSS was the United States’ clandestine military arm during WWII, and precursor of the CIA established in 1947.

**J Prados, Kennedy Considered Supporting Coup in South Vietnam, August 1963, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 302 (2009), 15. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB302/index.htm

***R Phillips, Why Vietnam Matters (2008), 200.

****D Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (1972), 183.

† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/06/conein-lawrence-of-vietnam.html

†† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/05/vietnam-coup-capers.html
 

††† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/10/surveilling-and-surveilled.html