May 1963, the first coordinated Vietnam War protests occur in London and Denmark. These protests are mounted by American pacifists during the annual remembrance of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings.
5/6/1963 Harkins told McNamara that progress was being made in Vietnam; McNamara then directed the military to prepare to withdraw 1000 advisers by year's end. (In Retrospect p49) In the SECDEF conference on Vietnam chaired by Secretary McNamara at Camp Smith, Hawaii, the Pacific Command finally presents President Kennedy's long-sought plan for withdrawal from Vietnam. However, McNamara has to reject the military's overextended time line, which was so slow that U.S. numbers would not even reach a minimum level until fiscal year 1966. He orders that concrete plans be drawn up for withdrawing one thousand U.S. military personnel from South Vietnam by the end of 1963. President Kennedy issues National Security Action Memorandum 239, ordering his principal national security advisers to pursue both a nuclear test ban treaty and a policy of general and complete disarmament.
The Defense Secretary said he wanted the pace revised " to speed up replacement of U.S. units by GVN units as fast as possible. " The May 1963 meeting in Honolulu took place one month before Kennedy would give his American University address. It is in the context of that dawning light of peace in the spring of 1963, when Kennedy and Khrushchev were about to begin their rapprochement, that McNamara again shocked his military hierarchy on Vietnam. He ordered them to begin an actual U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam that fall. As the Pentagon Papers described this change of tide, McNamara " decided that 1 ,000 U.S. military personnel should be withdrawn from South Vietnam by the end of Calendar Year 63 and directed that concrete plans be so drawn Up. "
5/8/1963 Diem's troops fire on thousands of Buddhists protestors gathered in Hue; 9 are killed. They were demonstrating against the government's order banning parades and the display of Buddhist flags on Buddha's birthday. At a protest in Hue, South Vietnam, by Buddhists claiming religious repression by the Diem government, two explosions attributed to government security forces kill eight people, wounding fifteen others. The government accuses the Viet Cong of setting off the explosions. A later, independent investigation identifies the bomber as a U.S. military officer, using CIA-supplied plastic bombs. The Buddhist Crisis touched off by the Hue explosions threatens to topple Ngo Dinh Diem's government, destroying the possibility of a Diem-Kennedy agreement for a U.S. military withdrawal from Vietnam. On May 8, the fateful Buddhist crisis of South Vietnam began to simmer in Hue, as thousands of Buddhists gathered to celebrate the 2507 birthday of Buddha. The South Vietnamese government had just revived a dormant regulation against flying any religious flags publicly. That public honor had been reserved by the Diem government exclusively for the national flag. It was a part of Diem's " uphill struggle to give some sense of nationhood to Vietnamese of all faiths, " as the New York Herald Tribune's Marguerite Higgins wrote. (Marguerite Higgins, Our Vietnam Nightmare (New York: Harper & Row, 1965) , p. 9l.) It was claimed later that the enforcement of Diem's nationalist order was provoked ironically by fellow Catholics who had flown the Vatican flag in Da Nang a few days earlier. In any case, the edict from the Catholic president of South Vietnam was proclaimed in Hue on the eve of the Buddha's birthday, when Buddhist flags were already flying. In response the next morning, the Buddhist monk Thich Tri Quang gave a spirited speech to a crowd at Hue's Tu Dam Pagoda protesting the order. Tri Quang accused the government of religious persecution. The crowd responded enthusiastically. What happened next, as described here, is based on Ellen J. Hammer's A Death in November, Marguerite Higgins's Our Vietnam Nightmare, and testimony received by the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission to South VietNam in October 1963. (Hammer, Death in November, p 112; Higgins, Our Vietnam Nightmare, p. 93 . 180. Report o f the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission to South Viet-Nam (United Nations Document AJ5630, December 7, 1963).
On the evening of May 8, encouraged by Tri Quang and other Buddhist leaders, a crowd gathered outside the government radio station in Hue. At about 8 :00 P.M., Tri Quang arrived carrying a tape recording of his morning speech. He and the people demanded that the tape be broadcast that night. When the station director refused, the crowd became insistent, pushing against the station's doors and windows. Firefighters used water hoses to drive them back. The station director put in a call for help to the province security chief, Major Dang Sy. As Dang Sy and his security officers were approaching the area in armored cars about fifty meters away, two powerful explosions blasted the people on the veranda of the station, killing seven on the spot and fatally wounding a child. At least fifteen others were injured. Major Dang Sy claimed later that he thought the explosions were the beginning of a Viet Cong attack. He ordered his men to disperse the crowd with percussion grenades, crowd-control weapons that were described by a U.S. Army Field Manual as nonlethal. However, from the moment the armored cars drove up and the percussion grenades were thrown, Major Dang Sy and the South Vietnamese government were blamed for the night's casualties by Thich Tri Quang and the Buddhist movement. The Buddhists' interpretation of the event was adopted quickly by the U.S. media and government. Dr. Le Khac Quyen, the hospital director at Hue, said after examining the victims' bodies that he had never seen such inj uries. The bodies had been decapitated. He found no metal in the corpses, only holes. There were no wounds below the chest. In his official finding, Dr. Quyen ruled that "the death of the people was caused by an explosion which took place in midair, " (Cited by Higgins, Our Vietnam Nightmare, pp . 90-91.) blowing off their heads and mutilating their bodies. Neither the Buddhists nor the government liked his verdict. Although Dr. Quyen was a disciple of Thich Tri Quang and a government opposition leader, his finding frustrated his Buddhist friends because it tended to exonerate Diem's security police. They were apparently incapable of inflicting the kinds of wounds he described. On the other hand, the government imprisoned Dr. Quyen for refusing to sign a medical certificate it had drawn up that claimed the victims' wounds came from a type of bomb made by the Viet Cong-something Quyen didn't know and wouldn't certify. (UN Report) The absence of any metal in the bodies or on the radio station's veranda pointed to powerful plastic bombs as the source of the explosions. However, the Saigon government's eagerness to identify plastic bombs with its enemy, the Viet Cong, was questionable. As Ellen Hammer pointed out in her investigation of the incident, " In later years, men who had served with the Viet Cong at that time denied they had any plastic that could have produced such destruction. " Who did possess such powerful plastic bombs ? An answer is provided by Graham Greene's prophetic novel The Quiet American, based on historical events that occurred in Saigon eleven years before the bombing in Hue. Greene was in Saigon on January 9, 1952, when two bombs exploded in the city's center, killing ten and inj uring many more. A picture of the scene, showing a man with his legs blown off, appeared in Life magazine as the " Picture of the Week. " The Life caption said the Saigon bombs had been " planted by Viet Minh Communists " and " signaled general intensification of the Viet Minh violence. " In like manner, the New York Times headlined: " Reds' Time Bombs Rip Saigon Center. " ("A Bomb Makes a Shambles of a Sunny Saigon Square," Life (January 28, 1952), p. 19. Tillman Durdin, " Reds' Time Bombs Rip Saigon Center, " New York Times (January 10, 1952) , p. 2 .) In Saigon, Graham Greene knew the bombs had been planted and claimed proudly not by the Viet Minh but by a warlord, General The, whom Greene knew. General The's bombing material, a U.S. plastic, had been supplied to him by his sponsor, the Central Intelligence Agency. Greene observed in his memoir, Ways of Escape, it was no coincidence that " the Life photographer at the moment of the explosion was so well placed that he was able to take an astonishing and horrifying photograph which showed the body of a trishaw driver still upright after his legs had been blown off. " (Graham Greene, Ways of Escape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980) , p. 171.) The CIA had set the scene, alerting the Life photographer and Times reporter so they could convey the terrorist bombing as the work of "Viet Minh Communists" to a mass audience. (H . Bruce Franklin explained the historical events underlying The Quiet American in his article " Our Man in Saigon," The Nation (February 3, 2003) , pp. 43-44.) Horrified and inspired by what he knew, Graham Greene wrote the truth in his novel, portraying a quiet American CIA agent as the primary source of the Saigon bombing. In The Quiet American, Greene used the CIA's plastic as a mysterious motif, specifically mentioned in ten passages, whose deadly meaning was revealed finally in the Saigon explosions blamed falsely on the communists. (In the 2002 Penguin paperback edition of The Quiet American, Greene's references to the CIA's plastic explosive appear on pages 72, 74, 96, 129, 133, 143 (twice) , 154, 160, and 183. At the time of the Saigon bombing in 1952, the CIA was only five years old and virtually unknown. Thus, the novel's narrator, Fowler, at one point asks a well informed Saigon contact what U.S. agency the quiet American, Pyle, is really working for: "What is he? O.S.S.? " [Office of Strategic Services, U . S . predecessor to the CIA] The man responds: "The initial letters are not very important. I think now they are different" ( Penguin edition, p. 173).
When Greene discussed The Quiet American in 1979 in his conversations with French writer Marie-Francoise Allain (published later in English as The Other Man) , he named the CIA as the source of the Saigon bomb: " One could put a finger on a number of operations set in hand by the CIA (the CIA was behind the bomb attack in the Saigon square which I mentioned in the novel, for example). " Marie-Francoise Allain, The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene ( New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983) , p . 96.) A decade later, plastic bombs were still a weapon valued in covert U.S. plots designed to scapegoat an unsuspecting target. In March 1 962, as we have seen, General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, proposed "exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots " in the United States, then arresting and blaming Cuban agents for the terrorist acts. In May 1963, Diem's younger brother, Ngo Dinh Can, who ruled Hue, thought from the beginning that the Viet Cong had nothing to do with the explosions at the radio station. According to an investigation carried out by the Catholic newspaper Hoa Binh, Ngo Dinh Can and his advisers were " convinced the explosions had to be the work of an American agent who wanted to make trouble for Diem. " In 1970 Hoa Binh located such a man, a Captain Scott, who in later years became a U.S. military adviser in the Mekong Delta. Scott had come to Hue from Da Nang on May 7, 1963. He admitted he was the American agent responsible for the bombing at the radio station the next day. He said he used " an explosive that was still secret and known only to certain people in the Central Intelligence Agency, a charge no larger than a matchbox with a timing device." (Hammer on the Catholic newspaper Hoa Binh's reconstruction of the May 8 , 1963, events; Death in November, p.116. Hammer wrote that she had "been unable to prove or disprove the truth of this account. ") Hue's Buddhists were incensed by a massacre they attributed to the Diem government. The U.S. Embassy in Saigon acted quickly in support of the Buddhists. Ambassador Frederick Nolting urged Diem to accept responsibility for the May 8 incident, as the Buddhists demanded. Diem agreed to compensate the victims' families, but said that he would never assume responsibility for a crime his government had not in fact committed.
On May 9, the day after the Hue explosions, Roger Hilsman had been confirmed by the Senate in his new State Department position as the primary officer responsible for Vietnam. During the next month, President Kennedy ordered Hilsman to prepare for the neutralization of Vietnam. Hilsman said later in an interview: " [Kennedy] began to instruct me, as Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, to position ourselves to do in Vietnam what we had done in Laos, i.e., to negotiate the neutralization of Vietnam. He had made a decision on this. He did not make it public of course, but he had certainly communicated it to me as I say, in four-letter words, good earthy anglo-saxon four-letter words, and every time that I failed to do something [in a way] he felt endangered this position, he let me know in very clear language. " (Michael Charlton and Anthony Moncrieff, Many Reasons Why: The American Involvement in Vietnam (New York: Hill & Wang, 1 97 8 ) , p. 84.) When he said that one day to his aides Dave Powers and Kenny O'Donnell, they asked him bluntly: How could he do it? How could he carry out a military withdrawal from Vietnam without losing American prestige in Southeast Asia ? " Easy, " the president said. " Put a government in there that will ask us to leave. " (O'Donnell and Powers, "Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, " p.18 .)
5/1963 Diem publicly calls for a reduction of US military presence in South Vietnam.
5/22/1963 JFK said in a press conference: "We are hopeful that the situation in Vietnam would permit some withdrawal in any case by the end of the year, but we can't possibly make that judgement at the present time. There is a long hard struggle to go." The only person in the administration who seems to have welcomed Nhu's encouragement of a U.S. withdrawal was President Kennedy. Asked about it at his May 22 press conference, JFK said all the Ngo brothers had to do was make their request official, then the process of withdrawal would begin: "we would withdraw the troops, any number of troops, any time the Government of South Viet-Nam would suggest it. The day after it was suggested, we would have some troops on their way home. That is number one. " Kennedy then took advantage of the opportunity to introduce the public gingerly to his own closely held withdrawal plan: "Number two is: we are hopeful that the situation in South Viet-Nam would permit some withdrawal in any case by the end of the year, but we can't possibly make that judgment at the present time . . . I couldn't say that today the situation is such that we could look for a brightening in the skies that would permit us to withdraw troops or begin to by the end of this year. But I would say, if requested to, we will do it immediately. "
6/12/1963 Kennedy's advisers were running ahead of him. Rusk's instructions to the Saigon Embassy led Acting Ambassador William Trueheart to convey an ultimatum to Diem on June 12 that the president had not authorized. JFK found out by reading a CIA Intelligence Checklist on June 14. A White House memorandum that day emphasized: " The President noticed that Diem has been threatened with a formal statement of disassociation. He wants to be absolutely sure that no further threats are made and no formal statement is made without his own personal authorization. "
In the early summer, Kennedy had kept his military and CIA advisers out of his discussions on Vietnam. This significant fact was mentioned years later by his Assistant Secretary of Defense William P. Bundy in an unpublished manuscript. According to Bundy, during the early part of Kennedy's final summer in office, he consulted on Vietnam with j ust a few advisers in the State Department and White House, thereby leaving out representatives of the Defense Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the CIA. (William P. Bundy, unpublished manuscript on the Vietnam War Decisions, chapter 9, "The Decline and Fall of Diem (May to November 1963) , " p. 8; Papers of William P. Bundy, Box Number 1, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library.)
Aug 1963 Time's Charles Mohr and Merton Perry wrote a story from Saigon saying that "the war in Vietnam is being lost." When the story appeared in Time, this line was deleted. (The First Casualty p379)
9/2/1963 Kennedy said in a prime-time interview with Walter Cronkite: "I don't think that unless a greater effort is made by the Government [of South Vietnam] to win popular support that the war can be won out there. In the final analysis it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it, the people of Vietnam against the Communists. We are prepared to continue to assist them, but I don't think that the war can be won unless the people support the effort and, in my opinion, in the last two months, the government has gotten out of touch with the people." Kennedy also added, "I don't agree with those who say we should withdraw. That would be a great mistake. We must be patient. We must persist...These people who say we ought to withdraw from Vietnam are wholly wrong because if we withdrew from Vietnam, the Communists would control Vietnam, pretty soon Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Malaya would go, and all of Southeast Asia would be under the control of the Communists, under the domination of the Chinese." At no time did he give an indication of sending in US combat troops. Asked about De Gaulle's proposal for a united, neutral Vietnam, he said, "we are glad to get counsel but we would like a little more assitance, real assistance...It doesn't do us any good to say: 'Well, why don't we all just go home and leave the world to those who are our enemies.'"
9/6/1963 In a NSC meeting, RFK urged a fundamental reassessment of what the US was doing in Vietnam and even suggested the idea of withdrawing from Vietnam; Rusk and Taylor disagreed vigorously with him. (In Retrospect 63; RFK and his Times 770)
9/9/1963 JFK told David Brinkley and Chet Huntley on NBC-TV that he believed in the domino theory: "China is so large, looms so high just beyond the frontiers, that if South Vietnam went, it would not only give them an improved geographic position for a guerilla assault on Malaya, but would also give the impression that the wave of the future in Southeast Asia was China and the Communists...we can't expect these countries to do everything the way we want to do them...We can't make everyone in our image, and there are a good many people who don't want to go in our image...We would like to have Cambodia, Thailand and South Vietnam all in harmony, but there are ancient differences there. We can't make the world over, but we can influence the world...What I am concerned about is that Americans will get impatient and say because they don't like events in Southeast Asia, or they don't like the government in Saigon, that we should withdraw. That only makes it easy for the Communists. I think we should stay."