Riding the Tiger (1961-1963) The Vietnam War

The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans,

born in this century,

tempered by war,

disciplined by

a hard and bitter peace.

At 43, John Fitzgerald Kennedy

was the youngest man ever elected President of the United States.

He had promised bold new leadership, and to his supporters,

his inauguration seemed to signal a new day.

To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free,

we pledge our word

that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away

merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny.

We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view,

but we shall always hope to find them

strongly supporting their own freedom.

And to remember that, in the past,

those who foolishly sought power

by riding the back of the tiger,

ended up inside.

This programme contains some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.

The new president gathered around him

an extraordinary set of advisers,

who shared his determination to confront communism.

Including Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara.

Like the president who picked them,

all of Kennedy's men had served during World War II.

Each had absorbed what they all believed was its central lesson,

ambitious dictatorships needed to be halted in their tracks

before they constituted a serious danger to the peace of the world.

Meanwhile, in South Vietnam, the National Liberation Front,

labelled by its enemies the Viet Cong,

was determined to overthrow the

anti-Communist and increasingly autocratic government

of Ngo Dinh Diem.

In North Vietnam, unbeknownst to Washington, Ho Chi Minh,

the father of Vietnamese independence,

was now sharing power with a more aggressive leader, Le Duan,

who was even more impatient to reunify his country.

None of us knew anything about Vietnam.

Vietnam, in those days, was a piece on a chessboard.

A strategic chessboard.

Not a place with a culture and a history

that we would have an impossible time changing.

Even with the mighty force of the United States.

Over the next three years,

the United States would struggle to understand

the complicated country it had come to save,

fail to appreciate the enemy's resolve,

and misread how the South Vietnamese people

really felt about their government.

The new president would find himself caught

between the momentum of war and the desire for peace.

Between humility and hubris.

Between idealism and expediency.

Between the truth and a lie.

For all of John Kennedy's soaring rhetoric,

for all the talent he gathered around him,

the first months of his presidency did not go well.

He approved a CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs

that ended in disaster.

He felt he'd been bullied by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev

at a summit meeting in Vienna.

He was unable to keep the Soviets from building the Berlin Wall.

And in Southeast Asia,

he refused to intervene against a Communist insurrection in Laos.

Critics accused him of being immature, indecisive,

inadequate to the task of combating

what seemed to be a mounting Communist threat.

"There are just so many concessions that we can make in one year,

"and survive politically," he confided to an aide

in the spring of 1961.

In South Vietnam, Kennedy felt he had to act.

After the president received reports

that the Viet Cong might be in control

of more than half the densely populated Mekong Delta,

he dispatched General Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow to Vietnam.

They urged him to commit American ground troops.

Kennedy refused.

"It would be like taking a first drink," he said,

"The effect would soon wear off, and there would be demands for another,

"and another, and another."

Instead, in the midst of a Cold War,

with its constant risk of nuclear confrontation,

the president sported a new,

flexible way to confront and contain communism.

Limited war.

This is another type of warfare.

New in its intensity,

ancient in its origin -

war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins.

War by ambush instead of by combat,

by infiltration instead of aggression.

To fight his limited wars,

Kennedy hoped to use the elite Green Berets,

Special Forces trained in guerrilla warfare -

counterinsurgency.

But Kennedy understood that counterinsurgency alone

would never be enough,

so he doubled funding for South Vietnam's army,

dispatched helicopters and APCs -

armoured personnel carriers.

Kennedy also authorised the use of napalm,

and the spraying of defoliants to deny cover to the Viet Cong,

and destroy the crops that fed them.

A whole array of chemicals was used,

including one named for the colour of the stripes

on the 55 gallon drums in which it came, Agent Orange.

And the president quietly continued to increase

the number of American military advisers.

Within two years,

the number he had inherited

would grow to 11,300,

empowered not only to teach

the Army of the Republic of Vietnam - the ARVN -

to fight a conventional war, but to accompany them into battle,

a violation of the agreement that had divided Vietnam back in 1954.

The administration did its best to hide from the American people

the scale of the build-up that was taking place

on the other side of the world,

fearful that the public would not support

the more active role advisers had begun to play in combat.

Mr President, the Republican National Committee publication has said that you are...

have been, less than candid with the American people as to how deeply we

are involved in Vietnam.

Could you throw any more light on that?

We have increased our assistance to the government, its logistics.

We have not sent combat troops there,

though the training missions that we have there have been instructed

if they are fired upon, they are too, of course, fire back

to protect themselves, but we have not sent combat troops

in the generally understood sense of the word.

So, I feel that we are...

..being as frank as we can be.

What I have said to you is a description of our activity there.

I was a child of the Cold War.

When I got off the plane in Saigon

on a humid evening in April 1962,

I really believed in all the

ideology of the Cold War.

That if we lost South Vietnam,

the rest of Southeast Asia would fall to the Communists.

There was an international Communist conspiracy.

We believed fervently in this stuff.

Neil Sheehan was a 25-year-old reporter

for United Press International, UPI.

He had served three years in the Army

in Korea and Japan before deciding to become a newspaperman.

Vietnam was his first, full-time overseas assignment,

and his only worry, he remembered,

was that he would get there too late

and miss out on the big story.

Sheehan and other reporters rode along

as the ARVN mounted a series of helicopter assaults

on enemy strongholds in the Mekong Delta and elsewhere,

and brought terror to the Viet Cong.

American pilots were at the controls.

It was a crusade, and it was thrilling.

And you'd climb aboard the helicopters

with the Vietnamese soldiers who were being taken out to battle,

and you believed in what was happening.

I mean, you had the sense that we're fighting here, and someday,

we'll win, and this country will be a better country for our coming.

The new M113 armoured personnel carriers

were capable of churning across rivers and rice paddies,

and right through the earth and dykes

that separated one field from the next.

The Viet Cong had nothing with which to stop them.

We have some people running along the dykes.

Actually, the canal is perpendicular to the one you're attacking now.

They have on black uniforms,

and I estimate approximately 30.

That's what was causing us to win, you see.

We were winning one after the other.

And we were not meeting a heck of a lot of resistance.

As the ARVN and their advisers pursued the Viet Cong,

the government of Ngo Dinh Diem

had launched an ambitious programme

meant to gain control of the countryside

by concentrating the rural population

into thousands of fortified settlements.

Ringed with barbed wire and moats, and bamboo spikes

meant to keep out the Viet Cong.

They were called strategic hamlets.

Part of the effort to win the hearts and minds,

and loyalty of the Vietnamese people.

The French had tried something like it a decade before.

They had called it pacification.

President Diem's Strategic Hamlet Program

is making substantial progress.

About 1,600 of the some 14,000 hamlets

have been fortified to date.

By the summer of 1962, news from South Vietnam seemed so promising

that Defense Secretary Robert McNamara

made sure the Pentagon was prepared to implement a plan

for a gradual withdrawal of American advisers, to be completed by 1965.

So far as most Americans knew,

the United States was achieving its goal.

A stable, independent, anti-Communist state

in South Vietnam.

"It was a struggle this country cannot shirk,"

The New York Times said,

"And the United States seem to be winning it."

But that same summer,

Ho Chi Minh travelled to Beijing

in search of more help from the Chinese.

The American build-up in South Vietnam had alarmed him

and the other leaders in Hanoi.

Ho told the Chinese that American attacks on North Vietnam itself

now seemed only a matter of time.

The Chinese promised to equip and arm

tens of thousands of Vietnamese soldiers.

Meanwhile, the Politburo in Hanoi

had directed that every able-bodied North Vietnamese man

be required to serve in the Armed Forces.

People used to joke in Vietnam about winning the hearts and minds,

and you hear that expression,

but that should not be a joke.

It's a serious, serious problem.

If you pull off a military operation,

and it may be successful on a military basis,

but you destroy a village,

then you've created a village of resistance.

The important thing was not to alienate the population.

If you got sniper fire from the hamlet,

you send in riflemen to take out the sniper.

You didn't shell the place

because you were going to kill women and kids, and destroy houses,

and you were going to turn the population against you.

Most press coverage of Vietnam was upbeat,

in the tradition of previous wars.

But a handful of young reporters were beginning to see that from the

Vietnamese countryside,

things looked very different than they did from the press offices in

Washington or Saigon.

So it was terribly important that we not only win the war,

but that we as reporters report the truth

that would help to win the war.

We were very fervent in wanting to report the truth

because it was very important to the welfare of our country,

and to the welfare of the world.

Sheehan and his colleagues began asking tough questions

about what constituted progress,

what victory would look like, and if the people in the countryside,

where 80% of South Vietnam's population lived,

could ever trust the Government in Saigon.

I remember going, during one of Robert McNamara's visits,

out to one of these hamlets.

The Vietnamese general command of the area

was telling McNamara what a wonderful thing this was,

and some of these farmers were down,

digging a ditch around the hamlet.

I looked at their faces, and they were really angry.

I mean, it was very obvious to me

that if these people could, they'd cut our throats.

Farmers resented being forced to abandon their homes

and move to strategic hamlets.

Corrupt officials siphoned off funds,

and villagers blamed the Diem regime

for failing to protect them from guerrilla attacks.

As the people's anger grew,

so did the ranks of the Viet Cong.

It turned out that the Viet Cong were recruiting men

right out of those so-called strategic hamlets.

And then the whole programme fell apart.

Nguyen Ngoc's father was a postal clerk south of Da Nang.

His brothers and sisters taught in South Vietnamese schools,

but he joined the revolution,

and as a political officer, wrote poems,

songs and slogans to inspire the people in the countryside

to support the Viet Cong.

The Viet Cong cavalry would come in and talk to them,

and their message is usually, "Bien dau buon cua minh thanh hanh dong,"

which means, "Turn your grief into action.

"Do something about it.

"Join us.

"We'll fight together. We'll liberate the country

"from this corrupt, unjust government.

"We'll throw out the foreigners.

"We'll reunify the country,

"and we'll bring in this great regime that will take care of you,

"and bring economic and social justice."

Secretary McNamara decided that he would draw up some kind of a chart

to determine whether we were winning or not.

And he was putting things in,

like numbers of weapons recovered,

numbers of Viet Cong killed...

Very statistical.

And he asked head of Special Operations, Edward Lansdale,

to come down and look at this.

And so Lansdale did, and he said,

"There's something missing.

"The feelings of the Vietnamese people."

You couldn't reduce this to a statistic.

Robert McNamara had vowed to make America's military cost-effective.

He demanded that everything be quantified.

In Saigon, General Paul D Harkins,

head of the Military Assistance Command Vietnam, known as MACV,

dutifully complied.

He and his staff generated mountains of daily, weekly,

monthly and quarterly data,

on more than 100 separate indicators.

Far more data than could ever be adequately analysed.

Punctuated by bouts of violence,

as government forces come to grips with the black clad Communist

rebel forces called the Viet Cong.

The country's 12 million peasants

can scarcely remember what peace was like.

On our side, we were not as committed, and we were, um...

Our leaders were corrupt and incompetent.

And so, deep down, we always had this fear,

this suspicion that,

in the end, it would be the Communists that would win.

When John Kennedy assembled what he thinks is

the best and the brightest,

20 years before that,

in a cave in the northern part of Vietnam,

Ho Chi Minh also put together his best and brightest.

And these guys are at it for a while.

And when we show up, they were far along to consolidating their victory

over this inevitable conflict

between Ho Chi Minh and John F Kennedy's vision.

The more you think about the American strategy...

..the more you...

..know that it was never going to work out particularly well.

I was at my top of my game when I was in combat.

You don't have the luxury to indulge your fear,

because other people's lives depend upon you keeping your head cold.

You know, when something goes wrong,

they call it emotional numbing,

it's not very good in civilian life,

but it's pretty useful in combat.

HEAVY BREATHING

To be able to get absolutely very cold about what needs to be done.

And to stick with it.

To me, it's a little bit distressing to realise that I was at my best,

doing something as terrible as war.

President Kennedy has staked his reputation in Asia

on saving South Vietnam from communism.

As the army makes the sweep towards

a village suspected of harbouring Viet Cong,

it can't tell whether it will meet resistance.

The troops round up all the young men they can find,

since they can't tell who is a Communist just by looking.

Those who try to run for it are shot

on the assumption they've something to hide.

Back home, Americans were paying little attention

to what was happening in Vietnam.

They were watching The Beverly Hillbillies and Gunsmoke on TV.

They were interested in whether

the Yankees would win the World Series again,

and in the recent death of Marilyn Monroe.

But some Americans had been growing impatient

with the slow pace of social change.

We were told in the '50s

that we lived in the best country in the world.

In the middle of, you know,

trying to figure out what it meant to be

a citizen of this best country in the world,

suddenly, the civil rights movement exploded

into our consciousness.

We didn't think we had any power.

We didn't think we could be actors in history.

That we could affect things.

And suddenly, you know,

these young, black students in the south were doing exactly that.

And it just blew the tops of our heads off.

MUSIC: Stand By Me By Ben E King

Diem was simply the opposite of what democracy was.

South Vietnam in the competition against the North,

that should have been

the golden opportunity to have that society open

with the free press, and free expression.

But there was not much choice

if the two systems are structurally dictator and oppressive systems,

one under the Communist Party, one under a family.

Diem's brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu,

ran a personal political party that mirrored

the techniques and the ruthlessness of the Communists

and supervised a host of internal security units

that spied on, and seized,

enemies of the regime.

Some reporters who probed too deeply into what Diem and Nhu were doing

were ordered out of the country.

When an American journalist objected,

Nhu's sharp-tongued wife told him,

"Vietnam had no use for your crazy freedoms."

What we should have done is either forced the Vietnamese,

I mean, really forced them to clean up their act,

and if they wouldn't clean up their act,

to say, "We're out of here."

Because we don't bet on losing horses.

This is a losing horse.

You are not going to win this insurgency.

We, as Americans,

should have understood the desire of the Vietnamese people

to have their own country.

I mean... We did the same thing to the Brits.

In a few days after Christmas 1962,

the seventh ARVN division got orders

to capture a Viet Cong radio transmitter

broadcasting from a spot some 40 miles south-west of Saigon,

in a village called Tan Thoi.

The village was surrounded by rice paddies,

an irrigation dyke linked it to a neighbouring hamlet, Ap Bac.

At 6:35 in the morning, on January second, 1963,

ten American helicopters ferried an ARVN company

to a spot just north of Tan Thoi.

They met no resistance.

Meanwhile, two South Vietnamese civil guard battalions

approached Ap Bac from the South on foot.

Facing them was Le Quan Cong,

who had been a guerrilla fighter since 1951, when he was 12.

The Viet Cong Commander let the civil guards get within 100 feet,

before giving the order to fire.

Several South Vietnamese soldiers were killed.

Survivors hid behind a dyke.

Ten more helicopters filled with troops,

and escorted by five helicopter gunships, roared in to help.

Viet Cong machine guns hit 14 of the 15 aircraft.

Five would be destroyed, killing and wounding American crewmen.

The enemy concentrated their fire on the ARVN

struggling to get out of the downed helicopters.

It was like shooting ducks for the Viet Cong,

and American crewmen remember.

Captain James Scanlon was an adviser to the seventh division of the ARVN.

It would take him an hour to convince his ARVN counterpart

to mount a rescue using a unit of APCs.

Another two hours were lost before the APCs

could make their way through the paddies towards the trapped men.

By that time, the firing had died down.

Everything was quiet.

You could see the open expanse of rice fields,

and my reaction was, "Hey, it was all over."

The first two APCs drop their ramps.

Infantry squad stepped out,

prepared to spray the tree line with automatic fire as they advanced.

In the past, that had been enough to make the Viet Cong scurry away.

This time was different.

Eight of the APCs came under attack.

Within minutes, six of their gunners had been killed,

shot through the head.

And, boy, we got wrecked.

So it was like a pool table, we were on the green

and they were in the pocket, shooting at us.

That night, the Viet Cong melted away.

In the end, at least 80

South Vietnamese soldiers had been killed.

So had three American advisers, including captain Ken Good.

We stacked the bomber personnel carriers with bodies,

stacked them up on top until we couldn't stack any more.

And I wouldn't let the Vietnamese touch the Americans.

So I carried the Americans out

and, um, and I was exhausted.

They told me about Ken Good getting killed.

And Ken and I had worked so hard with our two battalions,

and to hear that he got killed hurt.

Great guy.

Back in Saigon, General Harkins immediately declared victory.

"The ARVN forces had an objective," he said.

"We took that objective, the VC left,

"and their casualties were greater than those of the government forces.

"What more do you want?"

Ap Bac was terribly important.

They shot down five helicopters

which they previously were terrified of.

They'd stopped the armoured personnel carriers.

They demonstrated to their own people

that you could resist the Americans and win.

In Hanoi, the Battle of Ap Bac was seen by

party First Secretary Le Duan

and his Politburo allies,

as evidence of the inherent weakness of the South Vietnamese regime.

"We don't have a prayer of staying in Vietnam,"

President Kennedy privately told a friend that spring.

"These people hate us.

"But I can't give up a piece of territory

"like that to the Communists

"and then get the people to re-elect me".

Buddhist monks and nuns are joined by thousands of sympathisers

to protest the government's restrictions

on the practice of their religion in South Vietnam.

Diem began by alienating the rural population,

and that started the Viet Cong.

Now he was alienating the urban population.

In the months that followed the Battle of Ap Bac,

South Vietnam plunged into civil strife

that had little to do with the Viet Cong.

Religion and nationalism where at its heart.

The Catholic minority had for years

dominated the government of an overwhelmingly Buddhist country.

That spring, in the city of Hue,

Christian flags had been flown to celebrate

the 25th anniversary of the ordination of Diem's older brother

as a Catholic bishop.

But when the Buddhists of the city flew their flags

to celebrate the 2,527th birthday of Lord Buddha,

police tore them down.

Protesters took to the streets.

The Catholic Deputy Province Chief

sent security forces to suppress the demonstration.

The soldiers opened fire.

Eight protesters died.

The youngest was 12.

The oldest was 20.

My mother was convinced that Diem was destroying the Buddhist faith.

She would go to the pagodas and listen to the monks' speeches,

and she was just extremely upset.

She was not alone, there was a lot of people like her.

American officials urged Diem and his brother Nhu

to make meaningful concessions to the Buddhists

for the sake of maintaining unity

in the struggle against communism.

They refused.

On June 10th, 1963,

Malcolm Browne of the Associated Press

received an anonymous tip -

something important was going to happen the next day

at a major intersection in Saigon.

He took his camera.

To protest the Diem regime's repression,

a 73-year-old monk named Quang Duc set himself on fire.

As a large, hushed crowd watched him burn to death,

another monk repeated, over and over again

in English and Vietnamese,

"A Buddhist monk becomes a martyr.

"A Buddhist monk becomes a martyr."

I remember they held the ashes of

the monk who burned himself to death,

or it was kept in one of the main pagodas.

And lines of people came to pass by it.

And I saw these women, not rich women,

ordinary Vietnamese women,

take off the one piece of gold they had on them, their wedding ring,

and drop it in the bottle to contribute to the struggle.

And I thought to myself, "This regime is over.

"It's the end."

Soon, other monks would become martyrs.

Fresh outbursts by Madame Nhu only made things worse.

Burning monks made her clap her hands, she said,

if more monks wanted to burn themselves,

she would provide the matches.

The only thing they have done, they have barbecued

one of their monks

whom they have intoxicated, whom they have abused the confidence.

Even that barbecuing was done not even with self-sufficient means

because they use imported gasoline.

They felt she was arrogant, she was power hungry,

they suspected her and her husband of being corrupt.

Nhu ran the secret police, which arrested and tortured people.

People feared the Diem regime,

perhaps more than they feared it, they really hated it.

Students, including many Catholics,

rallied to the Buddhist cause.

So did some army officers.

People among the military had to ask the question,

"Can we continue with this kind of situation like that

"when the whole country was almost burning

"with the protests from the Buddhists?"

I first became aware of Vietnam because of a burning monk.

We had watched the

civil rights movement in the south,

and it had set the standard for us,

to stand up against injustice.

To allow yourself to be beaten up,

to allow yourself to be attacked by a dog, or hit by a police truncheon.

And we had enormous respect for people

who were willing to go that far.

And then, one day in 1963, we saw on television

a picture of a monk in Saigon.

This was an extraordinary act.

Why was a Buddhist monk burning himself on the streets of Saigon?

The protests continued.

Tensions between Washington and Saigon steadily worsened.

The more the Kennedy administration demanded change,

the more Diem and his brother Nhu seemed to resist.

Martial law was imposed.

Public meetings were forbidden.

Troops were authorised to shoot anyone

found on the streets after nine o'clock.

When college students protested in support of the monks,

Diem closed Vietnam's universities.

High school students then poured into the streets.

He shut down all the high schools,

and the grammar schools too.

And arrested thousands of schoolchildren,

including the sons and daughters of officials in his own government.

Henry Cabot Lodge took over as US Ambassador

in the midst of the turmoil,

and he is reported to have demanded that President Diem's brother, Nhu,

be ousted, or US aid to Vietnam will be cut.

A small group of South Vietnamese generals

contacted the CIA in Saigon.

Diem's brother, Nhu,

was now largely in control of the government, they said.

What would Washington's reaction be if they mounted a coup?

President Kennedy and his senior advisers happened to be out of town.

So Roger Hilsman Jnr,

Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs,

and a critic of the Diem regime,

took it upon himself to draft a cable

with new instructions for Ambassador Lodge.

The US Government could no longer tolerate a situation

in which power lay in Nhu's hands, it said.

Diem should be given a chance to rid himself of his brother.

If he refused,

Lodge was to tell the generals,

"Then we must face the possibility that Diem himself

"cannot be preserved."

The president was vacationing at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.

Under Secretary of State George Ball

read part of the cable to him over the phone.

Since the early 1950s, the United States Government had encouraged,

and even orchestrated, other Cold War coups in Iran, Guatemala,

The Congo and elsewhere.

Kennedy decided to approve Hilsman's cable.

In part, because he thought his top advisers had already endorsed it.

They had not.

And, somehow, because of a cable

that came out from Washington, Lodge decided,

that the only solution was to get rid of not just Ngo Dinh Nhu,

the bad brother, but also of Diem himself,

and that started us on this whole business of promoting a coup.

And it was not a good idea.

I just had a feeling of impending disaster.

On September 2nd, 1963, Labor Day,

Walter Cronkite of CBS News

interviewed President Kennedy.

The president used the opportunity

to deliver a message to President Diem.

President, hasn't every indication from Saigon been

that President Diem has no intention of changing his pattern?

If he doesn't change it, of course, that's his decision.

He's been there ten years. As I say, he has carried this burden when

he's been counted on a number of occasions.

Our best judgement is that can't be successful on this basis.

But I don't agree with those who say we should withdraw.

That would be a great mistake. That would be a great mistake.

I know people don't like

Americans to be engaged in this kind of an effort,

47 Americans have been killed.

We are in a very desperate struggle against the Communist system

and I don't want Asia to pass into the control of the Chinese.

Do you think this government still has time to

regain the support of the people?

Yes, I do. With changes in policy, and perhaps in personnel,

I think it can. If it doesn't

make those changes,

I would think the chances of winning it would not be very good.

Despite the cable,

Kennedy and his advisers were sharply divided about a coup.

Robert McNamara, Maxwell Taylor, Vice President Lyndon Johnson,

and the head of the CIA all cautioned against it.

Because, while none of them especially admired Diem,

they did not believe there was any viable alternative.

In the end, Kennedy instructed Lodge

to tell the renegade generals that

while the United States does not wish to stimulate a coup,

it would not thwart one either.

The generals laid their plans.

On November 1st, 1963,

troops loyal to the plotters

seized key installations in Saigon

and demanded Diem and Nhu surrender.

The battle for the city went on for 18 hours,

and most of it was centred on the presidential palace.

Just after 6.30 in the morning, Saturday, the shootings ceased.

Diem and Nhu escaped, took sanctuary in a church,

and agreed to surrender to the rebels

in exchange for the promise of safe passage out of the country.

They were picked up in an armoured personnel carrier.

GUNSHOT

And murdered soon after they climbed inside.

GUNSHOT

Madame Nhu survived the coup.

She was on a goodwill tour in the United States.

Monday, November 4th, 1963.

Over the weekend, the coup in Saigon took place,

culminated three months of conversation

which divided the Government here and in Saigon.

I feel that...

..for it,

beginning with our cable of August, in which we suggested a coup.

..to it,

without a round table conference.

I was shocked by the death of Diem and Nhu.

The way he was killed made it particularly abhorrent.

The question now is whether the generals can stay together

and build a stable government,

or whether public opinion in Saigon will turn on this government

as repressive and undemocratic, in the not-too-distant future.

Kennedy would not live to see the answer to the question he had asked.

He was murdered in Dallas 18 days later.

There were now 16,000 American advisers in South Vietnam.

Their fate, and the fate of that embattled country,

rested with another American president, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

We thought we were the exceptions to history, the Americans.

History didn't apply to us.

We could never fight a bad war.

We could never represent the wrong cause.

We were Americans.

Well, in Vietnam, it proved that we were not an exception to history.

MUSIC: Mean Old World By Sam Cooke