Countdown to Diem Day, Nov. 2 – "...they were not working for God but for the Kennedy administration."

Quotations are from The Lost Mandate of Heaven: The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem President of Vietnam, by Geoffrey Shaw. This article is excerpted from my review of it.

The Ugly American was a fictional book published in 1958 [movie version in 1963 with Marlon Brando] that depicted the failure of U.S. diplomacy in Southeast Asia due to American arrogance and deliberate insensitivity to local language, culture, and customs. When President Kennedy came into office, he gave copies of the book to every Senator. He should have given them to his Cabinet and spoken about it to the Press. His administration played out the script of the book to tragic effect; a key actor in this was Averell Harriman.

“Son of a railroad baron, Harriman was well established and well known in Elite American society. Having held one important political position after another, including US Secretary of Commerce and ambassador to the Soviet Union. He wielded considerable political power. When in late 1961 President Kennedy made Harriman his assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern affairs, he described him as a man who had held “probably as many important jobs as any American in our history, with the possible exception of John Quincy Adams”.

The combination of Harriman's long, prestigious political career and his financial backing of Kennedy's presidential campaign made him a key figure in the Kennedy administration. As Harriman was reinserting himself into Washington politics, after serving as governor of New York from 1955 to 1958, he saw settling the Laos question as his ticket to influence in the? corridors of American power, and he believed his pals in the Soviet Union would make a deal with him...“

“Harriman became known as ‘the old crocodile’ around Washington. Harriman liked the moniker, and the reputation that went with it, and used it as his code name for some DOS [Department of State] correspondence.”

Through the force of his remarkable will and skills, Harriman forged an agreement on Laotian neutrality.

“Regardless of his triumph in getting the Soviets to sign the Declaration of Neutrality, in his haste to prove himself to Kennedy, Harriman had overlooked the fact that signatures on a piece of paper are one thing while the reality on the ground is quite another… Laotian neutrality was a catastrophe for Southeast Asia. He attributed the failure of the Laos agreement not to its inherent flaws, of which he was the architect, but to unexpected intransigence on the part of the Laotians and North Vietnamese.”

Through his friendship with Robert Kennedy, Harriman was able to convince President Kennedy that ICC oversight, which was opposed by Laos and North Vietnam, could be waived off.

Thus, Harriman proved his clout both inside and outside the Kennedy administration. ''He had a political and social constituency that spanned decades and stretched around the world. when it suited him, he could ignore bureaucratic protocol and use his personal channels into far-flung governments, not to mention the White House and the inner Circles of Kennedy's advisers." In the future, rather than quarrel with Harriman, leading DOS officials accepted that I get on board with his policy initiatives or to look the other way while he proceeded with his course of action, although some of these later dubbed the Ho Chi Minh trail the Averell Harriman Memorial Highway.”

“Before the Declaration of neutrality was signed, the Harriman/Nolting [Ambassador to South Vietnam] dispute spilled into the American Press. In a newspaper interview, Nolting said that he told Harriman he could not support the agreement in good conscience because it was immoral for the US government to break promises it had made to president Diem. According to Nolting, Herriman asserted that “they were not working for God but for the Kennedy administration.”

JFK's inaugural address had claimed, "...And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe--the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God."

Somebody didn't get the message, or somebody didn't mean it.