A CORRESPONDENT IN SAIGON

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00001R000200410007-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 9, 1999
• Sequence Number: 7
• Publication Date: May 15, 1965
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

C
NEW REPUBLIC
MAY .1 5 1965
Approved For Release 1999/09/07 : CIA-R
25X1A9a
CPYRGHT
A Correspondent in. Saigon
by George Eagle
To get the meaning, and to ,learn how i. Lt. Col. John Vann, who could see what
A o read official reports of the war in was going wrong in the paddy war of
Vietnam skeptically, readers need an', the Mekong River Delta, but who
enterprising, driving reporter who will j couldn't get a hearing from above,
go see for himself and who won't settle
for Pentagon or State Department ver-
sions of what's going on. David Hal-
berstam gave this kind of reporting to
The Making of a Quagmire
.by David Halberstam
(Random House; $5.95)
even when he came home and went to
,the Pentagon,'where one would expect
them to be interested in reports from
the field. Vann finally quit the Army,
much as he loved it.
Halberstam admires Henry Cabot
Lodge as an Ambassador in Saigon and
characterizes Lodge's predecessor,. Fred-
erick Nolting, as a good man who
staked too much in a Ngo Dinh Diem
regime that would not return the trust.
Halberstam, who used to be a reporter
in Mississippi and Tennessee, is re-
minded by Nolfing of Southern white
community leaders who, when their
communities were about to explode in
racial disorders, "reassured me that all
was well, that the Negroes were satis-
fied with the status quo., that the prob-
lem was entirely the work of outside
agitators and that writing about .it
would only make the situation worse.
These men had no contact with the
Negro community except for what their
maids or hired people told them...."
Halberstam also sees a parallel to the
The New York Times for 15 months,
and he, along with Malcolm Browne
of the Associated 'Press, got a Pulitzer
Prize for the job. Unfortunately, great
reporting does not a great book,make,
and-The Making c f v Quagmire Is on
the whole dgficicnt as an account, of
the war and how it grew:
One reason is that a war does not
stand still wliilr' a book gets ' written
and published. C,'araying of the war' to
North Vietnam, the consequent diver
g sion of. attention from the guerrilla war
in the South, and shifts in the South
Vietnamese government and its atti-
tudes have taken a good deal of see-
!,it-now zing from a book that depends
on timeliness. , . civil rights movement in the way the
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the Vietnamese agony as history, and .
probably did not mean to. He fully . "Often the government broke up
'supports the US presence in strength their demonstrations with violence
from what he has seen that the Ameri
can effort in South -Vietnam looks like
a failure, indeed may have. been
doomed as long ago as 1951, but -he
implores that the lessons of Vietnam
be learned for national-liberation wars
yet to come: "There is 'something to
the Viet Cong besides the terror, some-
thing more to winning a revolutionary
war than helicopters."
The first half of The Making of a
Quagmire is a patchwork of scraps
from a correspondent's notebook in-
cluding experiences In the, Congo,
and bloodshed, and as Bull Connor
and his police dogs in Birmingham
were to etch indelibly the civil rights
movement in the minds of millions
of Americans, so the Buddhists used
the government's repeated clumsi-
ness to commit their people further
to their cause and to strengthen the
movement."
Halberstam holds the Central Intelli-
gence Agency in generally high regard
for its work in South Vietnam; he sees
John Richardson, former CIA chief in
the coun
ry as an honest and dedicated
t
which Halberstam covered,' at' age a ',,
before r d?PoR~1~dS'e'1999/09%07 CIA-RDP75-000
about midway with a .chapter' about s;
CPYRGHT
man 'who got so close to Ngo Dinh
Nhu and so committed to the policy of',
backing the Ngos at all costs, that the .
CIA leaders became "part of the team"
instead of gatherers and appraisers of
intelligence from all. sources.
The book contains probably the most
thorough accounts yet published of
Nhu's raids on the pagodas-the Statc
Department finally backed down from
its insistence that the South Vietna-
mese Army and not Nhu was respon-
sible - and the coup d'etat that finished
Nhu and Diem. However, Halberstam
brushes over the degree of American
involvement, saying Lodge and the CIA
knew a coup was coming, promised no
id to the plotters and tried to get Diem
to accept a safe-conduct offer.
Taken as a complete work, The Mak-
ing of a Quagmire is choppily con-
structed and written in the nondescript
style of a journeyman journalist. If
othing' else, however, it stands as a
memorial to a'smaIl group of reporters
stationed in Vietnam who bucked pres=sures from the White House on down
to report, at a time of official optimism,
hat South Vietnam and the US 'were
Anniat-